Examination of Basic Ethical Values in Turkish Administrative Culture: “Al-Madinatul Fazila (The Excellent City)” as an Example of Political Treatise


When the Turkish administrative culture and the formation of the State tradition are examined, it is seen that ethical values as well as moral values are very important. When the administrative process is assessed in terms of moral and ethical values, the fact that the basic values such as justice, meritocracy, and goodness are considered as necessary conditions for good administration is informative about the State tradition. Because, ethics values and principles are emphasized also in the political treatises, which are accepted as one of the basic building blocks of administrative culture, these ethical values and principles are often mentioned as administrative principles, and the attention is drawn to the importance of these values in terms of the stability of administration/administrator and the survival of the state. Nowadays, although the ethical phenomenon is evaluated with new acceptable concepts such as accountability, transparency, openness, and professionalism as well as the principles stated in the political treatises, the origin is based on the old as seen in the example of political treatise. The content of Farabi’s Al-Madinatul Fazila (The Excellent City), which is accepted as one of the first examples of political treatise, shows that the importance of ethical values and principles is emphasized in the discourses on how administration and administrator should be. In the study conducted theoretically in this framework, an evaluation of how the ethical values and principles, whose origins date back to very old times, and which gained clear statements in the early 2000s, were handled in Farabi’s Al-Madinatul Fazila (The Excellent City), and Farabi’s ethical understanding is tried to be put forward accordingly.


Keywords


Ethics, Ethical Values, Political Treatise, Farabi, Al-Madinatul Fazila

Author : Vasfiye ÇELİK -Zeynep DUYAR
Number of pages: 187-206
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.29228/TurkishStudies.40227
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Turkish Studies-Social Sciences
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