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The authors use a novel, The Cider House Rules, as a framework to examine legitimate administrative action when execution of a law will result in harm. Four political values that have informed administrative dissent are reviewed: publicity, utility, democracy, and liberty. The authors identify questions to serve as guidelines for front-line administrators when deciding to exercise discretion in opposition to a political mandate. The questions offer checkpoints for considering whether administrative action in opposition to mandate is ethical. The authors extend the logic of the new public service by arguing that administrators are responsible for protecting liberty because liberty is constitutionally fundamental and particularly at risk in the case of citizens peripheral to political processes. The authors argue that administrative discretion in opposition to mandate requiring secrecy or misrepresentation may be exercised under particular circumstances, for the protection of individual liberty, given its elevated status among the regime values.

Americans are committed by Constitutional ideals to political equality. On the other hand, our economic ideals are libertarian and permit inequalities. Court decisions and federal legislation in the 1950's and '60's created a strong commitment to the practical realization of political and social equality. Yet we have come to see in the 1970's that economic inequalities make this achievement very difficult. The pressures for economic equality are relatively recent, because both poor and rich in Amerjca have in the past assumed the plight of the poor can be relieved most quickly through increases in total production rather than through a change in the distribution of what is produced. The prospect of limited economic growth in the future, or even no growth, dramatically shifts the pressures for economic improvement of the poor away from increased production toward greater equality in distribution.