فرصت ها و بروز اشتباه برای تجزیه و تحلیل اخلاقی در تحقیق در عملیات و علوم مدیریت

Operations research (OR) is basically concerned with the relationship between scientific modelling and the application of models in social contexts and social practice. This problematic is also central in core domains of the management sciences (MS). At the level of the relevance criteria for models, and insofar as the specification of goals belongs to the OR/MS domains (which is at least partially the case), these research fields inherit some of the basic, enduring questions concerning prudence, art and science. New ethical challenges must be addressed to promote the understanding of the interplay between social science, institutional design, and expertise. It will be argued that efficiency questions—which lie at the heart of the OR/MS problematic—are best understood against a background of ethical questions. The specificities of the field of ethics, it will also be argued, result in a number of pitfalls.

In social contexts, efficiency norms are mingling with other kinds of norms: institutional and legal rules, ethical demands, as well as various implicit codes which determine mutual expectations. Thus, there is no hope for purely exogenous “efficiency” criteria to circumscribe optimal decisions without taking such dimensions into account. This has consequences for the nature of expertise or applied analysis about social interaction: we cannot dispense with the connection between the goals of collective action and the individuals's beliefs, normative systems and desires. Rather, we must theorize this connection in an explicit manner, whatever the field of expertise. But ethical research is not necessarily congenial to the methodology of operational research (OR) and the management sciences (MS). While the OR/MS field has amply demonstrated its concern for plural evaluative criteria and its permeability to contextual social demands, the classical norm in OR/MS is widely felt to be efficiency, not ethical adequacy, although there has been a marked move in the discipline in recent years toward defining the goodness of results and processes in terms of overall optimality, which normally involves ethical tests. We may note that in OR, efficiency is not usually viewed as something which conflicts with ethics. Quite simply, it does not refer to the same category of problems, and many researchers think that we should alternatively endorse one viewpoint or the other one. The same remark applies to a large part of economics and applied social mathematics. But ethics, just like OR, deals with the relationship between evaluative criteria and actions. Expertise generally speaking is the theatre of conflicting aims and even, in some cases, conflicting rationality claims.1 This is a good reason for experts to enter the field of ethics, because the following question naturally comes up: what are the criteria which can be useful to strike the good balance between the claims or preferences of the different actors? This is a typical ethical question. Indeed, it is the general form of many ethical problems in pluralistic contexts where all existing criteria for evaluation (each of them entertained by one individual at least) cannot be satisfied simultaneously. I will consider the reasons to believe that specialized ethics can be relevant in a field such as OR/MS (Section 2). Then I will try to identify the level at which ethics can and should be brought in (section 3).

The complexity of the relationship between ethical values and the identification of collective goals helps understand why the problems of efficiency and expertise have come to the forefront of ethical analysis, as evidenced by many research endeavours at the crossroads of ethics, politics and OR/MS research. We can safely predict that some elements of these debates could be instilled in the practice of ethical evaluation in applied contexts. At a more detailed level, the conceptual problems involved in the choice of methods can be intimidating. Ethics is not just a matter of justifying one's own practice by reference to ready-made values. This is the limit of the “internal ethics” point of view in OR/MS. At the very least, ethics involves research on the adequate way to take into account a plurality of individual values in the definition of common objectives and partly chosen constraints. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to discuss and apply in a systematic manner actual research in ethical theory rather than trying to develop a new and special ethical field—a strategy which has already proved counterproductive in other domains, such as bioethics.