Public policy for agriculture and natural resources must change as farming and the use of resources change, but policy also changes to reflect new understandings. The new understandings that will shape future agricultural policy may not come from food producers or agricultural scientists, and may not assume that expanding production is the primary goal. Undoubtedly, the knowledge, experience, and perceptions of consumer advocates, environmentalists, and minority groups will become more influential in the future. Consequently, public policy educators are bound, by ethics and concern for the common good, to balance the diversity of viewpoints involved in policy formation. The old idea that technical models and data are sufficient for policy analysis must be broadened to include goals and viewpoints held by diverse sectors of the population. The public choice model of policy analysis adapts industrial organization theory into a framework for public choice by analyzing policies in terms of situation, structure, concept, and performance (SSCP). Situation refers to unmodifiable facts of nature. Structure refers to the rights, resources, and other rules that, with the situation, determine the opportunity sets of interacting parties. Conduct is the self-interest that leads people to satisfy their preferences, or end states. Performance is evaluation of end states (outcomes or consequences). The ethics-oriented adaptation of SSCP facilitates both better policy and better accommodation of multiple interests by making opposing viewpoints easier to understand. It uses technical data to formulate consequence-predicting models where appropriate, but also draws on longstanding traditions of legal, historical, and philosophical analysis in formulating appeals to rights and virtue. Contains nine references. (JAT)