Beyond Evaluation Standards?

Abstract

It has now become a truism to suggest that evaluation is a highly respected, appreciated and venerated enterprise. This article is based on three central claims. First, evaluation standards and ethical principles are useful only to the extent that one recognizes what they can and cannot do. Secondly, they can never be applied in algorithmic fashion, but must always be interpreted in the evaluation ‘case’ at hand. And thirdly, they are, at least to some extent, shaped by cultural norms and understandings. It appears, as this article concludes, that morally correct action does not become certified on the basis of an order or a norm, because even one counter-example is enough to conclude that dependency between a morally correct action and a norm is not logically valid. Morality should also express an individual's own freedom and the motives of action related to it. Standards do not have any causal consequences as such.