Ethics in

Politics
Define Ethics?

• moral principles that govern a person's

behavior or the conducting of an activity.
• the branch of knowledge that deals with
moral principles.
• Ethics are the things and actions that an
individual believes to be right or wrong.
Define politics?
• the activities associated with the governance of a country or area, especially the debate between
parties having power.
• Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms
of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.
Ethics and politics
• Ethics and politics are complex concepts, and there is a close relationship between them.
• Hannah Arendt (2011, 2012) discuss how one can think of politics and freedom in a community
that seeks to be ethical.
• Ethics is a dimension that is inseparable from the daily life of men and women.
• Both the Greek term ethos, from which ethics is derived, as well as the Latin term mos., the source
of the word moral, refer to the same reality: the customs that are established in daily relations
between the people of a community.
• Paulo Freire (1997), in an interview given a few days before he died, testified to this in a deeply
experiential manner by affirming that it is impossible to think of or do something without being
touched and incorporated by this ethical dimension: “we are ethical beings, ethics pervades our
entire existence”.
• There are two principal ones. A first is called naturalism: something is good or bad if it is adequate
and responds to the laws of nature. Natural law is the great ethical law. While a second,
contractualism, argues that what guarantees whether something is good or bad is positive law,
which is created by humans: if there is law, it is presumed that it is good and must be followed.
• Arendt sought in the Greek polis and in the Roman civitas
arguments to not only understand, but also to suggest, a
new understanding of politics that is compatible and can
propitiate a new ethics. Politics was not only a “means” to
allow freedom.
“The meaning of politics here, but not its objective, is
that men have relations between themselves in freedom,
beyond force, coercion and domination [...] [they]
regulate all the affairs by means of mutual conversation
and reciprocal persuasion”
• Thus, it will be possible to establish a new foundation for
ethics, an ethics of discourse, where people “regulate all
issues by means of mutual conversation and reciprocal
convincing”: a space = freedom, made propitious by ethics
and politics.
Politics in ethics

• Political ethics is the practice of making

moral judgments about political action and
political agents. It covers two areas.
• The first is the ethics of process, which
deals with public officials and their
methods.
• The second area is the ethics of policy,
which concerns judgments surrounding
policies and laws.
Relationship between ethics and politics ?
 Ethics of process

• Niccolò Machiavelli is one of the

most famous political theorists who
spoke on, and later subverted, the
matters of political ethics.
• Unlike Aristotle, he believed that a
political leader may be required to
behave in evil ways if necessary to
maintain his authority.
Ethics of policy

• In the area of political ethics, the key issues are not

the conflict between means and ends but the
conflicts among the ends themselves.
• For example, in the question of global justice, the
conflict is between the claims of the nation state
and citizens on one side and the claims of all
citizens of the world.
• Political ethics deals not mainly with ideal justice,
however, but with realizing moral values in
democratic societies where citizens (and
philosophers) disagree about what ideal justice is.
• Each citizen has their own belief and morals
toward a particularly controversial topic,
nonetheless, it is the political authorities'
duty to respect others' beliefs and advocate
for the beliefs of their constituents while
following the law and constitution.
 Foundations of (political) morality
• According to Graham et al. (2009),there are
two broad classes of moral foundations:
individualizing foundations and binding
foundations.
Individualizing foundations
• The two individualizing foundations to
morality are the fairness/reciprocity foundation
(ethic of justice), and the harm/care foundation
(ethic of care). The former represents a person's
desire for fairness and reciprocity. The latter
concerns the caring attitude of a person towards
another.
Binding foundations
• The three binding foundations are in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. The first two
correspond to ethic of community, and represent a person's belonging and attachment to a group dynamic and
is concerned with feelings like patriotism, obedience, etc. The last foundation corresponds to the ethic of
divinity and represents a person's desire to suppress/control humanity's nature of lust, selfishness, etc, usually
via spirituality.
 Moral foundations, political identity and
moral political judgments
• Graham et al. (2009) conducted a study to determine
whether moral judgments about politics are affected
a certain way by explicit or implicit political
identities.
• Explicit political identity is the identity supplied by
the study participant explicitly during the study.
• Implicit political identity is the participant's identity
determined by the scientists based on an IAT test.
• However, they note that this distinction is not
necessarily true across time and space
 Criticisms

• Some critics (so-called political realists) argue that ethics has no place in politics.
• If politicians are to be effective in the real world, they cannot be bound by moral rules. They have to pursue
the national interest.
• However, Walzer points out that if the realists are asked to justify their claims, they will almost always appeal
to moral principles of their own (for example, to show that ethics is harmful or counterproductive).
• Another kind of criticism comes from those who argue that we[who?] should not pay so much attention to
politicians and policies but should instead look more closely at the larger structures of society where the most
serious ethical problems lie.
• Advocates of political ethics respond that while structural injustice should not be ignored, too much emphasis
on structures neglects the human agents who are responsible for changing them.