Rethinking Regulation

Rethinking Regulation at the Kenan Institute for Ethics provides a forum for leading scholars to explore better conceptual frameworks for regulatory decision-making, inform smarter design of regulatory institutions, guide more effective formulation of regulatory policy, and better align regulatory governance with the requirements of democratic legitimacy.

In the fall of 2010, the Kenan Institute for Ethics launched Rethinking Regulation, a three-year faculty working group, to reconsider the purposes and strategies of regulatory governance, both in the United States and the wider world. Participants come from Duke’s professional schools, social science departments, and moral and political philosophy.

Bridging disciplinary divides, Rethinking Regulation brings together academics who study a wide range of regulatory domains (healthcare, finance, labor relations, environmental protection, antitrust, consumer protection), various jurisdictions (the United States, the European Union, developing economies), and a multiplicity of regulatory protagonists (classic public regulatory agencies, mechanisms of corporate governance, self-regulatory organizations, watchdog NGOs).

Ethics questions are central. All the issues Rethinking Regulation considers have normative dimensions. How, for example, can one sensibly settle conflicts between regulatory aspirations without a theory of the common good? To what extent can an ethos of professionalism sustain regulatory missions? What are the social and moral ramifications of predicating regulatory decision-making only on an economic calculus?

Context and approach
The still dominant conceptual approaches to regulatory policy are rooted in a powerful set of concepts that emerged out of American academia in the 1960s and 1970s, especially from economists at the University of Chicago and economists and political scientists at the University of Virginia. These ideas have various labels – public choice, rational choice, the economic theory of politics. Based on assumptions about the pervasiveness of selfish motivations, they counseled great skepticism about the capacities of public institutions to achieve the common good, generated an enormous literature about the dynamics of government failure, and powerfully shaped regulatory policy in America and abroad.

The participants in Rethinking Regulation wish to reconsider basic questions about the bases of human motivation, the organizational culture of public institutions, and the role of moral judgment in governance, and in so doing, develop explanations for instances of governmental success as well as governmental failure.