9 - Evaluating Governance

Summary

An additional role the virtues can play involves helping to evaluate (and thereby possibly even guide) conduct. It is here in particular that responsibility or accountability mechanisms often come up short or can at least be said to be naturally limited. Typically, such mechanisms focus on single instances of conduct, divorced from what preceded or inspired them, or then conduct might be such that it can hardly be caught by rules. Some have pleaded strongly for “intelligent accountability,” but the combination of having rules and organs or agents to apply and enforce them as they relate to particular facts makes such an idea well-nigh impossible. In the typical accountability scheme, the act under review usually gets simplified and stylized. This has heuristic benefits in that it simplifies what actually goes on, but these benefits may come at the cost of proper understanding.