DISCRETION AND JUSTICE IN EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION: TOWARDS A NORMATIVE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWOR

This study is a philosophical inquiry. An attempt is made to develop a normative conceptual framework which could help school administrators resolve ethical and moral issues when they must exercise discretion. The conceptual framework classifies and interrelates the moral terms and judgements needed to resolve ethical and moral problems. The framework is normative not only because it classifies and interrelates moral terms and judgements but because it leads to some specific moral conclusions. First and foremost, it leads to the conclusion that moral judgements must be made on the principle of justice. To do so, the framework points out that the person who makes moral judgement must establish the duties, rights, moral motives, and deserts which make a judgement just. Secondly, the framework points out that the rules governing the application of judgements must meet two conditions: they must be just and as unrepressive as possible. Finally, the framework claims that moral judgements are made on an objective basis of approval and a subjective basis of approval. The objective basis is a person's knowledge or belief about an object. The subjective basis is a person's sense of fellow-feeling. Indeed, it is argued that without this special subjective basis (i.e., sense of fellow-feeling), there could be no moral judgements but only some other forms of judgements such as pragmatic, prudential, or aesthetic.;The application of the normative conceptual framework to the exercise of discretion by school administrators is unique to this study. In making this application, the unnecessary and necessary use of discretion is analyzed with the assistance of a framework developed by K. C. Davis. The purpose of the application is to show how the normative conceptual framework can help to confine, structure and check the use of discretion so as to reduce injustice and improve the quality of justice in schools.;The final chapter explores what a school might be like where the normative conceptual framework is used to control the use of discretion so as to reduce injustice and improve the quality of justice. Several features are highlighted. Such a school would be characterized by a liberal view of authority, a plurality of authorities, the use of rational and moral persuasion as well as the use of just rules. The merits of each of these characteristics for school organization and management are discussed.;The philosophical inquiry conducted in this study is pursued in the tradition of what Frankena refers to as normative and meta-ethical thinking. He describes this kind of thinking as "providing the general outlines of a normative theory to help . . . answer problems about what is right or ought to be done, and as being interested in meta-ethical questions mainly because it seems necessary to answer such questions before one can be entirely satisfied with one's normative theory". A third kind of thinking, which is also necessary to deal with actual moral issues, is called descriptive empirical enquiry. The study does not pursue this line of thinking. The use of normative and meta-ethical thinking to develop a normative conceptual framework should be followed by descriptive empirical thinking to establish the applicability of the framework. This is a large task and is therefore left for further study.