“Objectivity” as a bureaucratic virtue: Cultivating unemotionality in an Israeli medical committee

Across bureaucratic contexts, “objectivity” is a dominant conception of appropriate conduct. But what does it mean for bureaucrats to work “objectively”? For staffers of the Israeli government's Committee for Health Care Services, objectivity is understood as a key bureaucratic virtue, one that promotes the ethical goal of fair resource allocation. To them, objective decision-making is based on adopting an “unemotional” attitude. Aware of the life-and-death implications of committee decisions, they attempt to work “unemotionally” by engaging what I term a moral sensibility for unemotionality, a tendency to avoid exposure to patients’ subjective experience. Cultivating this sensibility has concrete effects on the committee's decisions and on patients’ place in medical decision-making. Examining “objectivity” as a morally desired disposition, rather than as a static construct, yields its reconceptualization as an enduring intersubjective achievement. This approach offers another way to examine the workings of power and politics in state bureaucracies. [objectivity, bureaucracy, virtue ethics, morality, emotion, social welfare, health care, Israel].