How We Analyze Decisions: Two Questions and Five Lenses

Every important City decision changes people’s lives for better or worse. Decision-makers with that kind of power have a responsibility to do everything they can to make sure their decisions do the greatest good and the least harm. It is critically important that cities give the ethics questions that are part of every important City decision the same attention that we give to the legal, financial, operational, or political questions.

Public Trust Now examines Santa Clara city government through an ethics and public trust lens. This page explains what that means in practice, so readers can follow our reasoning, test it, disagree with it, and use the same tools themselves.

We Start With Two Questions

Two questions should be added to every public decision, at any stage, and answered clearly, honestly, and publicly:

• The Ethics Question: Why, if at all, is this decision the right thing to do for the people of Santa Clara?
• The Public Trust Question: How, if at all, will this decision build the public’s trust that their government puts the people’s best interests above all others?

The words if at all carry weight. They permit the honest answer that a decision is not the right thing to do, or that it does nothing to build public trust. Without if at all you are signalling what kind of answer you want.

Asked early, while options are still open, these questions clarify the real values behind a decision, surface conflicts and weak reasoning, and keep attention on the people the decision affects. Asked only afterward, they become a report card instead of a decision-making tool.

Then We Look Through Five Lenses

Ethics is about relationships: how people ought to treat one another. Over centuries, several distinct traditions have developed for testing whether an action is right. Each one catches something the others can miss. We use five, and we ask, “If we choose this option, what do we reasonably expect its impact to be on:

1. The City’s Character

Did we practice our core values? Were we truthful, respectful, fair, and trustworthy? Did the organization act like the ethical, competent, impartial city it says it is? When a government does not follow its own stated values, it teaches the public what those values actually mean.

2. Consequences

What are the results, in the short term and the long term? What good does this do, and for whom? What harm, and to whom? If some harm is unavoidable, has everything possible been done to reduce it?

3. Rights and Duties

Are people’s rights respected? Residents have a right to know, to be heard, and to participate. Underlying all of them is the fundamental moral right to be treated as a free, equal, capable person able to make one’s own decisions. Where the public holds legitimate rights, public officials hold corresponding duties to protect them, especially the duty to be good stewards of the people’s money.

4. Fairness

Are equals treated equally? People in similar circumstances should be treated similarly unless there is a good public reason to treat them differently. That relevant ethical reason should be stated openly, not assumed.

5. The Common Good

Does this strengthen the community as a whole? A healthy city depends on trust, transparency, participation, and strong ethical systems. Some goods belong to everyone or to no one, and a decision that quietly draws them down costs more than it appears to.

How We Use Them

These five perspectives allow us to talk about the ethics quality of the decision. Ethics quality rises as a decision meets the requirements of each perspective. When that is not possible, the honest course is to say which lenses you used, why, and what was gained or given up. Naming the tradeoff is part of the analysis, not an admission of failure.

Ethics is also not only about choosing among the options on the table. It is about improving them. Some of the best public decisions come from an option nobody had thought of when the discussion started, and they often come from the public. We call this ethical imagination. When we develop new options that meet more of our ethics principles the options are stronger and the decisions better.

Ethics Is a Practice, Not a Verdict

Public ethics is a set of skills: identifying who has the most to gain or lose, recognizing an ethics issue when it appears, testing options against guiding principles before deciding, acting with courage, and explaining the ethical reasons behind a decision.

Skills improve with practice and erode without it. No city gets every decision right. What matters is whether it gets better, learns from the stumbles, and does not keep making the same mistake. We apply these tools the same way to decisions we criticize and to decisions we praise.

Where This Comes From

These lenses are drawn from the Framework for Ethical Decision Making developed at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, building on the work of Drs. Manuel Velasquez and Claire André. Public Trust Now’s founder, Dr. Tom Shanks, led the collaborative development of that framework while serving as the Center’s Executive Director, and later worked with Santa Clara’s officials, staff, and residents to put it into practice in city government from 1998 to 2015.

Public Trust Now operates independently of the Markkula Center and Santa Clara University. The framework is used here for educational analysis. The conclusions we draw are our own, and should not be attributed to the Center, the University, or the City of Santa Clara.