Politicians as paragons of virtue: liberalism and ethical exemplification in public life

Abstract

It is often claimed that liberals today advocate a politics which, as far as possible, eschews support for any particular ethical ideals of character. Among the considerations that may be adduced in support of this commitment is an ostensibly powerful resistance to any notion that politicians have a special responsibility to set ethical standards for those they represent. This article argues, however, that the idea of politicians as ‘ethical exemplars’ can be presented in a form to which liberals could in fact be consistently sympathetic. Minor though the idea's role in a liberal conception of politics may be, the argument in support of it highlights a little-noticed way in which the ethical-impartialist reading of ‘liberalism’ is impoverished.

Notes

The affair was effectively disclosed in Currie's Diaries 1987–1992 (2002, London: Little, Brown).

Contrast the attitudes towards two of Tony Blair's Cabinet ministers who voiced opposition to war against Iraq in 2003 before it broke out: Robin Cook, who resigned before hostilities began and who has retained a significant degree of public credibility, and Clare Short, who resigned sometime after the end of full-scale conflict and who is widely thought to have lost significant credibility as a result.

See G. Marshall (ed.) Ministerial Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

‘Summary of the Nolan Committee’s First Report on Standards in Public Life', http://www.official-documents.co.uk/document/parlment/nolan/nolan.htm, p. 1–2.

J. Kane, The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), especially chapter 5.

J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London, J.M. Dent, 1972), p. 144.

This is therefore an instance in which liberalism grants people a right to say something that is wrong or bad, which is not a contradiction in the terms of liberal toleration. It is ipso facto not contradictory for liberals to say that it is wrong or bad and justify censure for the utterance accordingly.

It is important to note that ‘hypocrisy’, which is a vice of which politicians are very frequently accused, is far from being the only relevant ethical issue here. We have already observed how unproblematic it is generally thought to be to condemn a politician who manifests it. Yet, in a climate in which to be labelled ‘hypocrite’ often seems to be the most devastating of charges, it is easy to overlook the point that the hypocrisy of an utterance or act is typically not the prime determinant of its ethical worth. The outwardly egalitarian liberal who is actually a racist in private is rightfully condemned—but not primarily because of the disjunction between profession and practice: the person would hardly gain much ethical credit by dropping the public pretence even though that would end the hypocrisy. The condemnation of the person largely depends, then, on the ethical negativity of racism, not the hypocrisy (racists do not become any more acceptable if they are unashamedly open and consistent in their views). We can now see that hypocrisy is a somewhat over-rated vice and should not be thought of as the governing consideration in this context.

The use of the word ‘comprehensive’ in this context is in line with Rawls's conception of a ‘comprehensive doctrine’: see J. Rawls, Political Liberalism 2nd edition, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 13.

For critical analysis of Rawlsian liberalism and its rather strange relationship to the wider liberal ideological tradition, see M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

S. Collini, ‘The idea of “character” in Victorian political thought’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 35 (1985), pp. 29–50.

For representatives from the debate, see M. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), E. Robert Statham Jr., The Constitution of Public Philosophy: Towards a Synthesis of Freedom and Responsibility in Postmodern America (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), R. Goodin, Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). In American political thinking, Walter Lippmann's Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston MA: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1955) is another oft-cited contribution to the debate.

P. Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals, (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 9.

Devlin, ibid., p. 15.

H. L. A. Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 47–48.

Mill, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 167.

Mill, ibid., p. 167.

A commentator on an earlier version of this article remarked that ‘decency’ has too much of a twee or prim and prudish ‘Victorian’ ring to it for the concept to look anything other than anachronistic in a modern ethical and political theory. I agree that the concept is strikingly unfamiliar to such theory, but I take that to reflect badly on the latter and not the concept itself. This article can be read as a plea to shed what embarrassment some may exhibit on using the concept and to reinstate it in a suitable form for contemporary ethics. One author who does use the concept, but not in quite the personal-ethical way intended here, is Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

P. Johnson, The Philosophy of Manners (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999).

D. Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), Book III Part III, esp. pp. 574–606.

• See the following National Curriculum documents:

• www.qca.org.uk/ca/subjects/citizenship/QCA_PHSE_CzaKS1_2.pdf

• www.qca.org.uk/ca/subjects/citizenship/QCA_PHSE_KS3_4.pdf

• www.qca.org.uk/ca/subjects/citizenship/QCA_PHSE_CzaKS3_4.pdf

See P. Johnson, Politics, Innocence and the Limits of Goodness (London: Routledge, 1988) and Frames of Deceit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) for extended discussion of this issue.

We might add that politicians are not the only people to face moral dilemmas that may prove unresolvable without acquiring dirty hands; we should guard against depicting political life as being so thoroughly and uniquely problematic ethically that it can be excused conduct which is intolerable in other forms of life.

J. Paxman, The Political Animal: An Anatomy (London: Michael Joseph, 2002), p. 115.

We might, for example, agree that the Clinton-Lewinsky affair generates serious ethical problems but disagree over what they might be given our divergent ideological outlooks. I will not here presume to state what liberals must necessarily say in this or any other example, not least because I doubt that they necessarily all proceed from identical personal-ethical views. The public political discourse I recommend on such matters is to be conducted within liberalism as well as between it and its ideological rivals. As noted above, this article is designed merely to open up the field for liberal debate; exploration of these specifics must await another occasion.

Thus, liberals are not a priori committed to an indulgent toleration of reactionary views that wish to stigmatise, say, homosexual relationships, for such opinions could be coherently treated by them as falling outside of acceptable ethical views as determined by their account of fundamental equal liberties.

Having said this, given that President Bush's candidacy was crippled by the significant support given to the third-party campaign of Ross Perot, the fact that Clinton garnered only 43% of the vote might damage the idea that ‘policy not personality’ actually won.