Moral Competence in the Practice of Democratic Governance

At KSG, we are asking whether the skills and capacities--and therefore training--of public officials must be reconceived as governance responsibilities migrate away from the central state to other locations. The question itself assumes that we have a settled understanding of which skills and capacities are currently required. But in ethics, at least, such agreement cannot be presupposed. This paper addresses the issue of moral competence by describing five generic virtues of "the good practitioner." The elaboration of these virtues, it is argued, depends crucially on a specific conception of democracy, which forces us to attend to the moral foundations, moral structures, and moral ends of governance.