"The post-traditional practitioner should be motivated as a regulative ideal by love rather than mere efficiency. It should embrace the unengineering ideal...Love in governance should include a focus on the individual."
David John Farmer (2005) To Kill the King: Post-Traditional Governance and Bureaucracy. Routledge pp 177, 179
"Efficient: performing or functioning in the best possible manner with the least waste of time and effort."
Here we have the conflict between a moral imperative of treating people as ends in themselves and a pragmatic imperative of treating people as means to an end. But what if the pragmatic end is also a moral good?
Think about the trolley problem.* If you went with "love" as the operating principle, you'd save the here-and-now fat man rather than the five people further on. Love prevails but five people die.
Think about bureaucracy. Bureaucrats serve not just one person but many. Time and energy are scarce resources. Shower one customer with loving kindness and others wait longer to be served. I would imagine most customers would prefer friendly efficiency over an I-Thou moment with a stranger.
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* "A trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?"
- Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Fat Man version of the Trolley Problem