Autonomy And Compromise: Chinese Administrators' Ethical Dilemmas And Ethical Choices

The administrative activity is not a moral-free, value-neutral domain, but the one that needs moral judgment and ethical choice all the time. Administrators, as other people, live in a society that full of complex social relationship and play different roles, and each role involves with the stipulation of supplementing duties and interests. The ethical dilemmas which results from the conflicts that come from different roles, interests and moral, make the administrators in a dilemma situation. Accordingly, administrators are facing such problems as firstly, in the public department, can they maintain individual ethical autonomy and how? Secondly, can they permit ethical compromise and how?This paper starts from studying the present situation of Chinese administrative culture and the ethical dilemmas of administrators, takes the conflicts that the administrators are facing as the realistic beginning of the research, studies the background and the different forms of these conflicts, inspects the two difficult problems of the administrators'ethical choices - - ethical autonomy and ethical compromise, probes into their existences and operation spaces in reality. It also provides the guidance plan to resolve the conflicts on this base, and supplies theoretical guidance to release the conflicts and settles down the conflicts in order to make the administrators have the entity of moral.This paper is divided into four parts. The first part: Chinese administrative culture and administrators'ethical dilemmas. Defines"administrators", by studying the present situation of Chinese administrative culture and the emergence of administrators'ethical dilemmas, provides the theoretical foundation for the chapters followed. The second part: Administrators'ethical autonomy. In this part, it has analyzed the administrative choice as well as the responsibility and the limitation of the responsibility, studies the necessity and possibility of the administrators'ethical autonomy. The third part: Administrators'ethical compromise. Summaries the dissimilate phenomenon of the ethical compromise, primary studies its rationality. The fourth part: Ways to resolve the administrators'ethical dilemmas. Proposes five aspect suggestions, such as: enhance the construction of administrative culture, carry on the administrative ethical legislation and the construction of institutionalized morality, take the administrative ethics as indispensable for evaluation, carry on intervention and supervisory for the administrative activities, etc., attempts to alleviate the conflicts.