Politics and Morality E-Book

Susan Mendus

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Themes for the 21st Century Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 196

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Public disenchantment with politics has become a key feature of the world in which we live. Politicians are increasingly viewed with suspicion and distrust, and electoral turnout in many modern democracies continues to fall. But are we right to display such contempt towards our elected representatives? Can politicians be morally good or is politics destined to involve dirty hands or the loss of integrity, as many modern philosophers claim? In this book, Susan Mendus seeks to address these important questions to assess whether this apparent tension between morality and politics is real and, if so, why.

Beginning with an account of integrity as involving a willingness to stand by ones most fundamental moral commitments, the author discusses three reasons for thinking that politics undermines integrity and is incompatible with morality. These are: the relationship between politics and utilitarian calculation; the possibility that the realm of politics is a separate realm of value; and the difficulty of reconciling the demands of different social roles. She concludes that, in the modern world, we all risk losing our integrity. To that extent, we are all politicians. Moreover, we have reason to be glad that politicians are not always morally good.

Written with verve and clarity, this book provides students and general readers an accessible guide to the philosophical debates about the complex relationship between politics and morality in the contemporary world.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

THEMES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Integrity

What is integrity?

Integrity and morality

Conclusion

2 Political Integrity

The duties of office

The duties of politics

The character of politicians

Conclusion

3 Integrity and Utilitarianism

From consequentialism to utilitarianism

Varieties of utilitarianism

Utilitarianism and character

Conclusion

4 Integrity and Pluralism

Pluralism

Politics and pluralism

Consequences of pluralism

Conclusion

5 Integrity and Social Roles

Billy Budd, sailor

Duties of office

Demands of conscience

Duty and diversity

Conclusion

References

Index

THEMES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Published

Akbar Ahmed, Islam under Siege

Zygmunt Bauman, Community

Zygmunt Bauman, Europe

Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization

Zygmunt Bauman, Identity

Richard Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil

Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right

Alex Callinicos, Equality

Diane Coyle, Governing the World Economy

Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy

David Crystal, The Language Revolution

Andrew Gamble, Politics and Fate

Conor Gearty, Liberty and Security

Paul Hirst, War and Power in the 21st Century

Bill Jordan and Franck Düvell, Migration

David Lyon, Surveillance after September 11

James Mayall, World Politics

Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism

Ray Pahl, On Friendship

Robert Reiner, Law and Order

Christian Reus-Smit, American Power and World Order

Shaun Riordan, The New Diplomacy

Copyright © Susan Mendus 2009

The right of Susan Mendus to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2009 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-2967-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-2968-1(pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5446-1(Single-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5445-4(Multi-user ebook)

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For the Class of 2008

With thanks

Acknowledgements

For over thirty years it has been my privilege to teach at the University of York. In that time I have given hundreds of lectures to thousands of students. I have examined dozens of doctoral theses, supervised scores of dissertations and marked millions of essays. I have never been bored, and the thanks for that go in equal measure to my students and my colleagues. I thank them all most warmly.

In the academic year 2007–8 I ran a course called ‘Political Integrity’ for final-year undergraduate students at York and I circulated draft chapters of this book for discussion each week. The discussions gave me a much clearer idea of what I wanted to say and the students on the course made the business of writing and revising a real pleasure. This book is for all my students – past, present, and future – but it is especially for the Class of 2008. It is for Heidi, Jenny, Bianca, Carly, Rachel, Clare, Ashwath, Joe, Daniel, Nick, Chris, Davide, Sam (and all the others). It is for Tom, who came late and brought malt whisky. They were terrific students and it was a joy to teach them.

This book is years late, and Emma Hutchinson of Polity has exhibited the patience of a saint in waiting for it. I am not sure what she did to deserve me on her list, but I am genuinely sorry for the unconscionable delay, and genuinely grateful for her patience and understanding. I am also grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose generous funding enabled me to complete the penultimate draft of the book, and to Richard Bellamy and Cecile Fabre, who read the entire manuscript and made immensely helpful suggestions which I have tried to incorporate in the final version.

Susan Mendus

University of York

February 2009

Introduction

Let me begin, then, with a piece of conventional wisdom to the effect that politicians are a good deal worse, morally worse, than the rest of us (it is the wisdom of the rest of us).

Walzer, 1974, p. 64

Are politicians morally worse than the rest of us? That is the central question of this book and I begin with a case which seems to suggest an affirmative answer – the case of the disgraced British politician Jonathan Aitken. Aitken’s political career began in 1974 when he was elected Member of Parliament for Thanet East. In 1994, he was appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and in April 1995 the Guardian newspaper alleged that, during his time as Minister of State for Defence Procurement, Aitken had violated Ministerial rules by accepting substantial payments from Saudi businessmen. At the same time, Granada television screened a documentary which alleged, amongst other things, that Aitken had pimped for Saudi friends at a health farm. Indignant at these allegations, Aitken resigned his ministerial post in order to fight a libel action against the Guardian and Granada Television, and, on resigning, he made a notorious speech which concluded with the following words: ‘If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it. I am ready for the fight. The fight against falsehood and those who peddle it’ (Guardian, 11 April 1995). Aitken’s resounding, and public, defence of his own integrity almost succeeded, but in the end it became clear that an Arab businessman had indeed paid for Aitken and his wife to stay in the Paris Ritz, and that Aitken had lied when he said that his wife had paid the bill. The exposure of this lie led to the exposure of other lies and in 1999 Aitken was found guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice. He was gaoled for eighteen months.

Jonathan Aitken is only one of a number of Conservative politicians who, in the late 1980s and 1990s, were implicated in the rise of ‘sleaze’ and the concomitant demise of John Major’s Conservative Government. Other notorious figures of the period were Lord (Jeffrey) Archer, Alan Clark, and Neil Hamilton, all of whom were found guilty of deceit and one of whom (Archer) also spent time in prison. Indeed, the Labour victory in the 1997 General Election can be traced, in no small part, to the fact that the Conservative Government had become closely identified with lying and duplicity.

However, it does not follow from this that politicians are worse than the rest of us, and one reason is that there are different kinds of lying and different varieties of duplicity. Aitken lied in order to gain advantage for himself and, in pursuit of that end, he was willing to lie not only to his political adversaries, but also to his wife and his colleagues. Indeed, it was even alleged that he planned to persuade his daughter to lie under oath in order to obtain an acquittal for himself. By contrast, other prominent figures of the period lied, not for self-serving reasons, but in an attempt to secure what they saw as morally important political outcomes. For example, after the October 1993 IRA bombing on the Shankill Road, in which ten people, including the bomber, were killed, the then Prime Minister, John Major, told Parliament that face-to-face talks with the IRA would ‘turn my stomach’, but it later emerged that, for three years prior to 1993, there had been a channel of communication between the British Government and the IRA, and that from as early as February 1993 the two sides had been in regular contact. Against this background, Major’s statement was, to put it mildly, misleading, but it is arguable that had he lived up (or down) to his public statement of disgust there would have been no IRA ceasefire and no Good Friday Agreement. John Major, it has been said, misled the British public, but he did so for reasons of public good, not for reasons of personal advantage (The Observer, 28 November 1993).

As described, the case of John Major is very different from the case of Jonathan Aitken. It is true that both deceived the public (and indeed Parliament), but Aitken did so to secure his own ends, whereas Major did so to secure outcomes which were politically important and morally desirable. So, whether politicians are indeed morally worse than the rest of us will depend not only on whether they lie, or deceive, or mislead, but also on the reasons for which they lie, or deceive, or mislead.

To see the significance of this, consider Book III of Republic, in which Plato discusses the selection and education of the rulers (the guardians). He argues that those who are entrusted with the responsibility of ruling must love their country more than anything else and must see their own interests as intimately connected to the interests of the country they serve. He says that ‘we must choose from among our guardians those who appear to us on observation to be most likely to devote their lives to doing what they judge to be in the interest of the community, and who are never prepared to act against it’ (412d–e). However, he goes on to note that, even under these conditions, the best interests of the community will only be secured if the rulers are willing to lie and, in particular, to deceive the populace into thinking that they (the guardians) were born to rule. He writes:

We shall tell our citizens the following tale: You are all of you, in this community, brothers, but when god fashioned you, he added gold in the composition of those of you who are qualified to be rulers (which is why their prestige is greatest); he put silver in the Auxiliaries, and iron and bronze in the farmers and other workers. (415aff)

Of course, the lie which is told in Plato’s Republic is a ‘noble lie’ – it is a lie that is necessary in order to further the best interests of the state, not in order to secure personal gain or advancement for the rulers themselves. It is, we might say, the kind of lie that John Major told in the examples given above, not the kind of lie that Jonathan Aitken told.

However, if Plato believed that, even in an ideal world, the noble ends of politics would require a willingness to lie, Aristotle took the matter further and reflected on the fact that, in the real – non-ideal – world, politicians might lie in order to secure private gain. As Arlene Saxonhouse puts it, ‘The Athenians were not innocent about the honey-tasting public official. Relying on a lottery system to fill virtually all of their public offices, the Athenian democrats recognized that not all citizens filling those offices would be motivated by a disinterested love of country’ (Saxonhouse, 2004, p. 29).

It is clear, then, that questions about the relationship between politics and morality have a long history. They arise both in ideal circumstances and in the circumstances of the real world. Moreover, they arise in democratic societies as well as in non-democratic ones. When we elect our rulers we have no guarantee that they will always put the interests of the state before their personal interests and, if they do not, then politics and morality come apart. But even if we follow Plato and select as our rulers those whom we trust to put the interests of the state above all other considerations, we may still find that social stability and political security require deception, albeit in the form of a ‘noble’ lie. Either way, it seems, politics and morality are uneasy bedfellows, and this was something that was recognized as far back as the fourth century BC.

It is, however, the sixteenth-century Florentine writer Niccolò Machiavelli who is most closely associated with the belief that politicians are morally worse than the rest of us. In his essay The Prince, Machiavelli offers advice to a new ruler and he urges that, if the new ruler wishes to maintain the power that he has won, then he must ‘learn how not to be good’. He writes:

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief amongst so many who are not virtuous. Therefore, if a prince wants to maintain his rule he must be prepared not to be virtuous, and to make use of this or not according to need … this is because, taking everything into account, he will find that some of the things that appear to be virtues will, if he practises them, ruin him, and some of the things that appear to be vices will bring him security and prosperity. (Machiavelli, 1961, p. 91)

Machiavelli’s views are notoriously difficult to interpret, but what is striking about this quotation is the way in which it traces the need for political lying to the fact that the world is evil. If people were good, Machiavelli implies, the politician would not need to lie or deceive, but since the world contains so many who are wicked, the politician must be ready to pit himself against them and to do whatever is necessary in order to defeat them and retain power for himself. In making this claim, Machiavelli appeals to the ‘realities’ of political life. He says:

Everyone realizes how praiseworthy it is for a prince to honour his word and to be straightforward rather than crafty in his dealings; none the less contemporary experience shows that princes who have achieved great things have been those who have given their word lightly, who have known how to trick men with their cunning, and who, in the end, have overcome those abiding by honest principles. (p. 99)

Taken together, these two quotations draw attention to Machiavelli’s status as a ‘realist’: that is to say, they highlight the emphasis he gives to the ways in which the facts of the real world influence the behaviour of the politician and may require him to act duplicitously even when he would prefer to do what is morally right.

Aristotle, Plato, and Machiavelli suggest three reasons why lying might be common in politics: for Aristotle, political lying is predictable because those who are elected to public office cannot be relied upon to put the interests of the state before their own personal interests; for Plato, political lying is necessary in order to secure stability even when the rulers are chosen because they do put the interests of the state before their own interests; and for Machiavelli, political lying is an unavoidable consequence of the fact that the politician – even the good politician – must rule in a world that is not itself morally good. On all three accounts, politics and morality are in tension one with another, and the person who embarks on a political career cannot reasonably expect to be able to sustain that career while also remaining morally virtuous. Moreover, it is worth noting that this tension between politics and morality persists whether we are speaking of ideal conditions or actual ones, and whether we are thinking of democratic societies or non-democratic ones. It is also worth noting that the tension includes cases in which politicians act morally badly in pursuit of ‘noble’ ends as well as cases in which they act morally badly in pursuit of their own self-interest. Aristotle notes that, since politicians have power, they will be tempted to use that power for their own purposes. But Machiavelli notes that even the apparently simple business of staying in power may demand deception and wrongdoing. And of course, if the politician loses power, then he will be unable to do the good things that he wishes to do, and the things that are for the benefit of the community as a whole. So, it may be said, politics as a profession demands a willingness to depart from moral goodness: to lie, deceive, cheat, and act ruthlessly. What is meant by this claim, and in what sense, if any, is it true?

Politics as a profession

It is no news that politicians may be, as Saxonhouse puts it, ‘honey-tasting’. Politics brings power, and those who have power may be corrupted by it and tempted to use it to their own advantage. In recent years much has been written on the topic of self-serving political behaviour, and there is a tendency (especially amongst journalists and media commentators) to believe that this kind of immorality has become especially problematic, even epidemic, in modern democratic societies. In his book The Rise of Political Lying (2005), Peter Oborne argues that, in Britain, the first years of the twenty-first century have been distinguished by an explosion of immorality and duplicity amongst politicians, and similar concerns about the politics of the United States can be found in a large number of publications, of which Eric Alterman’s When Presidents Lie: A History of Political Deception and Its Consequences (2005) and Larry Flynt’s Sex, Lies and Politics: The Naked Truth about Bush, Democracy and the War on Terror (2005) are just two. It is, I think, questionable whether the rise of political lying has been quite as meteoric as these writers claim. As we have seen, the fact that politicians can be self-serving was well known, and guarded against, even in Aristotle’s day. Beyond that, however, the claim that modern-day politicians do, as a matter of fact, lie in order to further their own interests can serve to disguise a deeper and more important question – the question which is central to this book – namely, whether the very structure of politics itself is such as to demand lying.1

There are in fact two questions here: first, whether politicians are especially likely to be called upon to act immorally (to lie, to deceive, to mislead); second, whether we can reasonably expect that those who are willing to lie in order to further the interests of the state will be able to refrain from lying when it is in their own interest to do so. Much modern commentary on the relationship between morality and politics takes as central the proposition that politics as a profession regularly and reliably calls for morally disreputable behaviour. In doing so, it does not focus on self-serving lying, or on what has come to be known as ‘sleaze’. Rather, it focuses on cases in which there are, or seem to be, important political reasons for lying and where, therefore, a politician’s refusal or inability to lie might be tantamount to an inability to perform his2 duties as a politician. An example may serve to highlight the precise nature of the problem.

In 1959, Fidel Castro overthrew General Batista to become President of Cuba. Initially, Castro had hoped to obtain support for his regime from the United States, which had been opposed to Batista’s rule. However, as businesses and industries in Cuba were nationalized, and thus taken away from their private owners (who were often American), the USA imposed trade embargoes on Cuba and finally cut off diplomatic relations. Faced with the withdrawal of US support, Castro looked elsewhere and found a willing ally in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev. The USSR was willing to buy the Cuban sugar no longer wanted by the United States and Cuba’s economic position improved dramatically through the relationship with the USSR. In 1962, Castro sanctioned the installation of forty Soviet missiles on Cuba, and the USA retaliated by making ready nuclear weapons for launch on the island. This was what came to be known as the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’, which ended in late October when Khrushchev agreed to withdraw Soviet weapons from Cuba on condition that the USA undertook not to invade the island. It subsequently came to light that in discussions with Khrushchev, President Kennedy not only promised that the USA would not invade Cuba, but also promised that the USA would remove its missiles from Turkey. Strictly speaking, this was not a deal because well before the crisis Kennedy had ordered the removal of missiles from Turkey anyway. However, Khrushchev needed to present it as part of a deal in order to win over his hard-line colleagues in the USSR, and Kennedy needed to say nothing about it in order to deflect the possibility that it would be seen as yielding to pressure from the USSR.3 On the face of it, this was a case in which political security could be attained only by deception on the part of both Khrushchev and Kennedy. And both did deceive. Of course, their deception served to keep them in power but, beyond that, deception was necessary in order to secure peace between the two great political powers of the Cold War period and to avert war.

As told, this story is one in which politics itself demanded deceit and duplicity: it is a case in which politicians were required to lie in order to preserve the political order which it was their duty, as politicians, to preserve. So, Khrushchev and Kennedy may have had a moral duty, as human beings, to refrain from lying, but in this case they also had a duty, as politicians, to deceive or mislead. It is this kind of conflict between the demands of morality (ordinarily understood) and the demands of politics that is the central focus of this book. More precisely, my central question is whether the kind of conflict manifest in the Cuban Missile Crisis is predictable in and characteristic of politics. Bernard Williams offers an affirmative answer when he says: ‘[I]t is a predictable and probable hazard of public life that there will be situations in which something morally disagreeable is clearly required. To refuse on moral grounds ever to do anything of that sort is more than likely to mean that one cannot seriously pursue even the moral ends of politics’ (Williams, 1981, p. 60).

Why might this be so? Why might politics itself call for deceit? One answer, an answer suggested by the Cuban example, is that what matters in politics is getting the right result, where getting the right result may involve doing something which is usually considered wrong. This thought is often expressed via the slogan ‘the end justifies the means’. If politics is indeed an area in which the end justifies the means, then those who elect to become politicians are thereby indicating their willingness to do whatever is necessary to secure the ends of politics and thus to disregard, or at least marginalize, questions about the morality of the means they use in order to attain those results.

There is, however, a complication to this story: even if we accept that politics is a matter of getting results, and even if we also accept that getting results may, from time to time, mean adopting morally dubious means, we may also be reluctant to elect those who announce in advance their disregard for the morality of means. Here is an example, taken from Michael Walzer: