Politics and Morality

Susan Mendus

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745629681, 9780745629674
• eBook ISBN: 9780745654454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

1

Integrity

There would be no use for the notion [of integrity] unless there were a value to be recognised in a particular person’s sticking by what that person regards as ethically necessary or worthwhile.

Williams, 1995, p. 213

The central concern of this book is the alleged tension between politics and morality. In the Introduction I noted that this tension is almost as old as politics itself: Plato tells us that politics will require deceit even in an ideal society where the rulers are chosen precisely for their willingness to put the interests of the state before all other interests; and Aristotle reminds us that where rulers are elected rather than chosen, they will not always be inclined to put the interests of the state before all other interests, and, in that case, the tension between politics and morality will be even more stark. Moreover, a number of modern commentators have emphasized what they see as the growth of duplicity in contemporary political life, and some have gone so far as to suggest that mendacity and deception have now become entrenched features of politics. ‘Dissimulation’, Peter Oborne claims, ‘has become a defining feature of modern British political culture’ (Oborne, 2005, p. 7).

However, the existence of widespread lying and deception in politics is not, in itself, enough to justify the conclusion that there is a conflict between morality and politics, or that politicians are morally worse than the rest of us, and one reason for this is that, when politicians lie, it may not be in order to further their own ends; it may be in order to secure important, and morally desirable, political ends. Walzer’s example of the politician who orders a man to be tortured in order to secure political peace is central here. Although this man believes torture to be morally wrong, and although he has gained public office by giving assurances that he will never authorize torture, it may nonetheless happen that his responsibilities as a politician force him to at least consider doing this. In his discussion of the case Walzer raises two questions about the politician: first, ‘How should we regard him?’, and second, ‘How should he regard himself?’ It is the second question which is of paramount importance here, because it draws attention to the possibility that, in demanding morally wrong acts, politics may undermine the integrity of the politician. Put differently, individuals who pursue a career in politics may find it difficult – even impossible – to retain the moral principles which are important to them and on the basis of which they entered politics in the first place. Indeed, this seems to be the possibility that is offered by Walzer’s example.

So the tension between politics and morality may be best explained not by emphasizing the rise of political lying, or the growth of mendacity. These are, of course, important considerations, but the possibility I want to consider in this book is that politics is in tension with morality because politics makes adherence to moral principles extremely difficult. Cases such as the one introduced by Walzer are cases in which, whatever we may think of the politician, he himself may feel both that he has sacrificed his integrity and that it is politics that has demanded that sacrifice of him. However, in order to establish whether it is true that politics undermines integrity in this way, we need first to know what integrity is, both for politicians and for the rest of us. In this chapter, therefore, the focus will be on the question ‘What is integrity?’ and in the next chapter the focus will be on the question of whether and why integrity, so understood, is more difficult for politicians than for the rest of us.

What Is Integrity?

In an article called ‘Standing for Something’ (1995), Cheshire Calhoun identifies three ‘pictures’ of integrity that she says are familiar in the philosophical literature. They are: the integrated-self picture, the identity picture, and the clean hands picture. I will discuss each in turn before suggesting a further, and slightly different, understanding of integrity which I will adopt as the central understanding in this book.

Integrated Self

The integrated-self picture construes integrity as a matter of wholeness. It emphasizes the fact that people of integrity know who they are, and what they stand for. They have settled reasons for taking the stand they do, and those reasons are their own reasons. Such people are not crowd-followers, nor are they shallow or fickle. Their lives form a coherent whole and their lives are led for their own reasons.

Calhoun points out that this integrated-self picture of integrity has considerable intuitive appeal and indeed it identifies some important characteristics of integrity: for example, it emphasizes the fact that people of integrity stand by their beliefs even when those beliefs are unpopular with others; they do not change their principles simply in order to please others or to secure approval. So, in the example taken from Walzer and cited earlier, the politician who promises never to condone or license torture can be said to be a man of integrity if he makes that promise because he himself sincerely and steadfastly believes torture to be wrong. If, that is to say, opposition to torture comes from deep within him and is consonant with other values of his and with his own sense of who he is and what he stands for. By contrast, if he promises never to torture because he thinks that others expect him to make that promise, or because he sees opposition to torture as the right game-plan during an electoral campaign, or because everyone else is opposing it, then he is not a man of integrity. On this integrated-self picture, integrity is a matter of knowing ‘who one is’ and what one stands for. It involves being one’s own person, and being that same person reliably over time and despite countervailing pressure from other people or changing fashion in the moral commitments of others.

However, this picture of integrity gives rise to several problems: one problem is that it makes it difficult to distinguish between integrity (which we normally think of as a virtue) and bloody-mindedness or stubbornness (which are defects). A refusal to be in thrall to the opinions of others is usually admirable, but it can also signal a disregard of others’ views which may be close to arrogance. Additionally, and very importantly, the integrated-self picture of integrity, by emphasizing the importance of acting on one’s own reasons, neglects the question of whether those reasons are morally good ones and thus again makes it difficult to explain why we normally think of integrity as a virtue. To see the problem here, consider the case of Heinrich Himmler, who, during World War II, became leader of the SS and, in that capacity, commanded the entire concentration-camp system and was responsible for the execution of the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem’. In a speech made to some SS generals, Himmler said:

What happens to a Russian, a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death like cattle interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves to our Kultur; otherwise it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only in so far as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished. (as quoted in Shirer, 1991, pp. 937–8)

On this, and other, evidence, there is no denying that Himmler was a man who knew what he stood for and had settled reasons for taking the stand he did. He was not a crowd-follower, nor was he whimsical or capricious. In short, he satisfied the conditions for integrity as they are specified in the integrated-self picture. However, it is hard to see why integrity, so understood, is a good thing, and it is even harder to see why we should be troubled by the possibility that politics undermines integrity. We might well think that, although Himmler certainly was a man of integrity, the world would have been a better place had he lacked integrity. So, the conviction that integrity is a virtue and that we should be concerned about the way in which it is undermined by politics cannot adequately be explained by the integrated-self account of integrity, which focuses on the agent’s steadfastness and fidelity to his own principles but is indifferent as to whether those principles are morally good ones.

Identity

Similar problems surface, though in a rather different guise, with the second picture of integrity – the identity picture. On this account, integrity is a matter of having a character and being true to it. Like the integrated-self picture, this picture emphasizes the fact that a person of integrity will have principles which are his own and which he resolutely adheres to. However, the identity picture goes beyond the integrated-self picture in its insistence that loss of integrity is, in some part, loss of oneself. On this account, it is not simply one’s principles that are lost when integrity is sacrificed; it is one’s self, one’s understanding of who one is. To see what is at stake here, consider the following example taken from Bernard Williams’ ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’:

George, who has just taken his PhD in Chemistry, finds it extremely difficult to get a job. He is not very robust in health, which cuts down the number of jobs he might be able to do satisfactorily. His wife has to go out to work to keep them, which itself causes a great deal of strain, since they have small children and there are severe problems about looking after them. … An older chemist, who knows about this situation, says that he can get George a decently paid job in a certain laboratory, which pursues research into chemical and biological warfare. George says that he cannot accept this, since he is opposed to chemical and biological warfare. The older man replies that he is not too keen on it himself, come to that, but after all George’s refusal is not going to make the job or the laboratory go away; what is more, he happens to know that if George refuses the job, it will certainly go to a contemporary of George’s who is not inhibited by any such scruples and who is likely if appointed to push along the research with greater zeal than George would. Indeed, it is not merely concern for George but … some alarm about this other man’s excess of zeal, which has led the older man to offer to use his influence to get George the job. … George’s wife, to whom he is deeply attached, has views (the details of which need not concern us) from which it follows that at least there is nothing particularly wrong with research into CBW. What should he do? (Williams, 1973, pp. 97–8)

Williams’ example is offered as part of his critique of utilitarianism and it is intended to show that utilitarianism makes integrity as a value unintelligible. I will discuss this aspect of the example in Chapter 3. For now, however, I invoke it simply in order to explain what the identity picture of integrity is and how it differs from the integrated-self picture. Having offered the example, Williams goes on to comment:

The point is that he [George] is identified with his actions as flowing from projects and attitudes which in some cases he takes seriously at the deepest level, as what his life is about … it is absurd to demand of such a man, when the sums come in from the utility network which the projects of others have in part determined, that he should just step aside from his own project and decision and acknowledge the decision which utilitarian calculation requires. It is to alienate him in a real sense from his actions and the source of his actions in his own commitments. It is to make him into a channel between the input of everyone’s projects, including his own, and an output of optimific decision; but this is to neglect the extent to which his actions and his decisions have to be seen as the actions and decisions which flow from the projects and attitudes with which he is most closely identified. It is thus, in the most literal sense, an attack on his integrity. (Williams, 1973, pp. 116–17)

Whereas the integrated-self picture of integrity emphasizes the fact that a person of integrity has his own settled and considered principles, and that he acts on those principles for his own reasons, the identity picture goes further and construes integrity as a matter of acting on principles which are not merely one’s own, but which define who one is. Hence Williams’ insistence that, in the example given, it will not be merely disagreeable for George to abandon his principles; it will be an attack on his own sense of himself.

As with the integrated-self picture, so here we should note that there is no requirement that the principles or commitments that go to make up a person’s integrity shall be morally admirable. We may or may not share George’s disapproval of chemical and biological warfare, but the crucial point is not whether we think that George’s projects are morally worthy projects; the crucial point is that they are George’s projects and, for better or worse, if he were to abandon them he would (in the example given) lose his sense of who he is. He would lose his integrity, understood in the identity-conferring sense. So, to return to the example of Himmler given earlier, we might think that it would be a thoroughly good thing were Himmler to abandon his deep commitment to the ‘final solution’ and thus to sacrifice his integrity either in the integrated-self or in the identity sense. In neither case do integrity and moral goodness go hand-in-hand. But the fact that they do not go hand in hand makes it difficult to understand why the possibility that politics undermines integrity must be problematic.

Moreover, the identity picture of integrity gives rise to a further problem above and beyond the problems identified with the integrated-self picture of integrity. This is that, by placing so much emphasis on the agent’s sense of himself and on the significance of his own projects, the identity picture can appear to be simply a defence of narcissism. Even if we allow that George’s hatred of CBW is wholly admirable, we might nonetheless wonder whether his identity is destroyed through involvement with it and we may also think that, even if it is, that is not necessarily the worst thing in the world. We might, for instance, note that, in the example given, his sense of self can be retained only by sacrificing the well-being of his wife and children, and we might feel that, so understood, integrity is not necessarily an admirable quality to have.

Clean Hands

The problems associated with the integrated-self picture and the identity picture of integrity prompt the move to a third picture – the clean hands picture of integrity. On this picture, and to quote Calhoun, ‘a person has integrity when there are some things she will not do regardless of the consequences of refusal. In bottom-line situations, she places the importance of principle and the purity of her own agency above consequentialist concerns’ (Calhoun, 1995, p. 246). Thus, to return again to Walzer’s initial example, for the politician to be a person of integrity is for him to refuse to co-operate with the evil that is torture, and to refuse to do so even when the consequences of refusing are very bad indeed. It is because, in advance of the election, the politician has given an assurance that he will have no truck with torture that he now feels his condonation of it constitutes a sacrifice of integrity. It is a case in which he has said that there are some things which are absolutely wrong and which he will never do, but politics forces him to do (or at least to consider doing) those things. It forces him to associate with what he believes to be evil. Calhoun argues that the clean hands account of integrity is superior to the other two just because and insofar as it enables us to see how a person’s integrity is not merely tied up with his principles, his commitments, or his sense of himself; it is also tied up with what he believes to be morally wrong. She says, ‘It captures … the kind of thinking we expect behind principled refusals – not, “I couldn’t go on as the same person if I did this” but “I would be doing a wrong” ’ (Calhoun, 1995, p. 246). Of course, different people have different moral beliefs and, as has been noted, Himmler’s moral beliefs are not ones which many share. Nonetheless, there is an important difference between accounts of integrity which trace it to the agent’s sense of himself, and accounts of integrity which trace it to moral convictions – convictions about the way the world should be rather than convictions about how the agent should be.

The differences between these three pictures of integrity can be most clearly understood if we consider what, under each account, a loss of integrity amounts to. On the integrated-self view, loss of integrity consists (in part) in yielding to the opinions of others and thus allowing myself to become less of a coherent whole. Crudely put, when I lose integrity on this account I cease to act on my own values and substitute the values of others. On the identity picture, loss of integrity is tantamount to loss of oneself: it arises in circumstances in which I abandon my ground projects and thereby cease to exist as the same person. Finally, the clean hands picture construes loss of integrity as a matter of allowing myself to be implicated in what I consider to be evil. It is only this last conception that introduces the notion of moral wrongness, and it is for this reason that Calhoun finds it more satisfactory than the other two accounts. However, even here it must be stressed that the connection between integrity and moral goodness is not straightforward: on this account, we can see quite clearly why Himmler might feel that he would have sacrificed his integrity had he abandoned the project of exterminating the Jews. He would, by his own lights, have associated with evil. Indeed, his own language makes this clear. He says:

I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. … I mean … the extermination of the Jewish race. … Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time – apart from exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written. (as quoted in Bennett, 1974, p. 128)

It is clear, then, that Himmler believed he would have associated with evil had he abandoned the attempt to exterminate the Jews, and his claim to be a man of integrity rests, in no small part, on his refusal to ‘associate with evil’ – as he saw it. His case draws our attention to the complex relationship between integrity and morality. Integrity appeals to the agent’s sense of what is morally right (to lose integrity is to do what one believes to be morally wrong), but integrity is not thereby a matter of doing what is, in fact, morally right, since a person’s sense of moral rightness may be mistaken or perverted. I will discuss this conundrum later in the chapter, but before doing that I want to mention one, further, account of integrity – the account favoured by Calhoun herself.

Having explained and discussed these three familiar ‘pictures’ of integrity, Calhoun concludes that, in the end, they are all unsatisfactory because they all treat integrity as an exclusively personal virtue and deny its status as a social virtue. While emphasizing the importance of standing for something, they ignore the importance of standing for something before others, and this, Calhoun argues, is what is needed in order to show that integrity is an important social virtue and is distinct from mere self-indulgence. She writes:

If integrity is the virtue of having a proper regard for one’s own judgement as a deliberator among deliberators, it would seem that integrity is not just a matter of sticking to one’s guns. Arrogance, pomposity, bullying, haranguing, defensiveness, incivility, close-mindedness, deafness to criticism … all seem incompatible with integrity. All reflect a basic unwillingness or inability to acknowledge the singularity of one’s own best judgement and to accept the burden of standing for it in the face of conflict. (Calhoun, 1995, p. 260)

Calhoun is surely correct to note that loss of integrity is closely associated with wrongdoing, but it is not clear to me that her insistence on integrity as a matter of standing for something before others is wholly satisfactory. To see why this is so I will discuss an example she uses herself – the example of President Clinton’s capitulation to members of Congress and to military chiefs when he refused to lift the ban on gays and lesbians in the American military despite the fact that, when campaigning for the Presidency, he had given assurances that he would allow all citizens to serve openly in the military regardless of their sexual orientation. Clinton’s ‘compromise’ prompted the gay and lesbian communities, in particular, to accuse him of lacking integrity, and, commenting on this, Calhoun writes:

The force of that charge was not that he had failed to sustain (or had misrepresented) the boundaries of his self. The force of the charge was that he had treated as a mat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• THEMES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Integrity
• 2 Political Integrity
• 3 Integrity and Utilitarianism
• 4 Integrity and Pluralism
• 5 Integrity and Social Roles
• References
• Index