Framing Human Values and Ethical Behavior in the European Union Participatory Governance (2009-2017)

Abstract

The present paper aims at monitoring the meanings of the “human values” and the “ethical behavior” in the European Union (EU) official documentation. In a time of complex researches in the field of the participatory governance, the EU legal database of EUR-Lex provides various conceptions, meanings and uses of both terms. A reviewing of this documentation was completed framing the EU stated criteria of: (i) the domain of the document (EU Law and related documents, Official Journal, the national law, the legislative procedures); (ii) the subdomain of the act (all documents, all EU law, preparatory acts, legislation, consolidated acts, parliamentary questions, international agreements, treaties); (iii) the year of the document (from 2009 to 2017) and (iv) the institution (European Commission, Council of the European Union, European Parliament). The study scrutinizes both the social and legal arguments using the content analysis of the EU official resources published from 2009 to 2017 and identified via the EU official electronic database of EUR-Lex. The research also leads to exploring the post-modern trends of the European Union by defining and framing the target concepts and attributes of the “social values” and “ethical behavior” in the EU law and related documents such as: (a) “human dignity”; (b) “human rights”; (c) “freedom”; (d) “democracy”; (e) “equality”; (f) “rule of law”; (g) “security”; (h) “privacy”; (i) “ethical behavior” (“ethics”); (j) “social values”. The research thus postulates the framing of the “human values” and the “ethical behaviour” considering three requirements: (1) the social needs; (2) the legal demands and (3) the institutional governance.