Chapter 2: The Last Frontier of Evaluation: Ethics

The first part of this essay sets out the general reasons why evaluators should commit themselves to a considerable increase in their concern with studying and implementing ethics. This means paying more attention to the ethical aspects of an evaluation, which should be explicitly considered in almost all evaluations, and will often prove to be decisive, particularly in a summative evaluation, and particularly when the evaluand is a multimillion dollar effort, whose significant effects often reach a billion people. Many evaluators think they already do this, and it’s true they usually do something in this direction, but the examples and the argument here will attempt to demonstrate a need for a considerable expansion of the present norm. It is not enough to try to follow the Guiding Principles or the Professional Standards that our associations have conscientiously assembled: We must do a specifically ethical analysis of each evaluand in the relevant contexts, because—it’s argued here—doing that is part of our professional responsibility, as is the requirement that we give scientifically acceptable reasons for our stance, including its ethical assumptions. Of course, that does not mean that the reasons must meet the scientific standards that the positivists laid down. Those are largely fictitious, applicable only to an allegedly “ideal science” to whose standards they wrongly thought real science should aspire.