Political Morality: a Realist Standard for the Judgement of Political Conduct

Political Morality

A Realist Standard for the Judgement of Political Conduct

Paul Folten

A Master Thesis in Philosophy 14 July 2017

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ONTENTS

Introduction 4

1. The Realist Tradition 8

1.1 What is political realism? 9

1.2 The realist tradition 10

1.3 Analytical or historical 12

2. Arguments against Moralism 15

2.1 “Politics first” 15

2.2 The pervasiveness of conflict 17

2.3 Motivational realism 19

2.4 The nature of politics 20

2.5 Anti-universalism 21

2.6 Realism’s alleged anti-utopian stance 22

2.7 Political conduct 24

3. Politics and Morality 26

3.1 The consequentialist approach 26

3.2 The idealist approach 27

3.3 The nature of political conduct 29

3.4 The trade-off approach 32

3.5 A more realist conception of Dirty Hands 35

3.6 The Machiavellian approach 39

4. Political Morality 42 4.1 Responsibility 43 4.2 Instrumental rationality 47 4.3 Integrity 49 4.4 Competence 55 Conclusion 58 Bibliography 61

I

NTRODUCTION

In the evening of 14 November 1940 operation Moonlight Sonata broke loose in the skies above Coventry. 515 German bombers had been ordered to bomb the city’s industrial buildings but at the end of the night more than 4.300 residential homes were destroyed. During the raid, over 500 tons of high explosive were dropped on the city, including more than 36.000 incendiary bombs that were meant to create a firestorm to set the city ablaze. It is estimated that 568 civilians were killed that night.1

The story goes that Winston Churchill had, around 3pm that day, gotten word that the air raid was going to hit Coventry after British cryptanalysts at Ultra had decoded a German radio message. Churchill now faced an impossible choice. If he decided to send word to Coventry to have it evacuated, he would save hundreds of lives but the Germans would most likely find out about the fact that their Enigma code had been broken. If he decided against this, he would have the advantage of being able to decode most of the German radio messages without them knowing. This could potentially win him the war, but hundreds of citizens would perish for it. Churchill did not send his warning.2

How are we to judge such a political decision? Churchill had to decide between two very undesirable options, both of which consisted of good as well as evil. Did he make the right choice? Churchill’s dilemma is an exceptionally dramatic example of a situation politicians find themselves in quite often: the choice between using morally bad means to achieve desirable results or restricting oneself to morally good means even though this might lead to undesirable results. It is, in other words, a choice between acting in a more consequentialist manner focusing on the results of one’s actions or in a more absolutist manner focusing on moral principles that guide one’s actions. But, as Churchill’s example shows, the complexity of the political dilemma lies in much more than merely the choice between two ethics of conduct. Other difficulties arise as well, such as whether there is a difference between actively using bad means and not intervening when others do, like Churchill did; which ends could justify which means, if they can do so at all; whether the

1 John Ray (1996) The Night Blitz. London: Cassell, 155.

2 F.W. Winterbotham (1974) The Ultra Secret. London: Harper & Row, 60-61. Group Captain Winterbotham was a high-ranking MI6 official with access to Ultra. However, this story is not undisputed. Peter Calvoceressi, head of the Air Section of Ultra which translated all Luftwaffe messages, has later written that Ultra had never mentioned anything about Coventry in particular and that, even though operation Moonlight Sonata had been mentioned, no dates were given and Churchill was under the impression that it would be directed at London. Calvoceressi states that, almost at the time of the Coventry raid, a German prisoner had mentioned that Birmingham and Coventry would soon be bombed, but that that was the only time Coventry was named. Peter Calvocoressi (1980) Top Secret Ultra. London: Cassell, 75-76. For the sake of the argument, however, let us assume that the situation occurred the way Winterbotham has claimed.

moral character of a person – and therefore the moral principles that guide his conduct – changes when he enters politics or whether it essentially still is the moral character of a private person; whether the politician could have possibly predicted the final consequences when he chose certain means, and so forth. All these considerations make the judgement of political conduct a very complicated activity.

The judgement of political conduct is often done in moral terms. This is not merely a philosophical point: most will judge a politician’s actions at least partially based on his moral behavior. Michael Walzer therefore made a good point stating that it is “conventional wisdom” that “politicians are a good deal worse, morally worse, than the rest of us.”3

Politicians might claim that the outcome of their actions was completely unforeseeable, that they are being held responsible for things they had no control over, or that they thought they had acted responsibly because they had made the decision they thought would be the lesser evil, yet it is very often their moral character that is criticized after bad results: “bad outcomes must reflect the stupidity, greed, and/or malevolence of those in power.”4

In this thesis I will argue that private morality is not an adequate standard by which we can judge political conduct. Using it as a standard, I will claim, shows a serious lack of interest in and understanding of the nature of political action. Instead, the assessment of political conduct can only appropriately and adequately be done using a more realist political theory. Mark Philp, one of the leading realist philosophers in the field of the judgement of political conduct, has argued that “we cannot judge people in politics solely in terms of the states of affairs that result from their actions or from the principles upon which they act.”5 _It

is neither merely consequentialism nor individual morality that can provide proper standards – instead, he claims in his book Political Conduct,6 _{we should for instance take into account}

what was possible at the time, what the costs and gains were of a policy, what the politician’s actual influence was and what he had to do to gain enough support. Philp argues that the only way we can properly judge political conduct is by acknowledging the realist argument that these standards must not be concerned with how politics should be but with how it really is: a grubby domain in which sketchy deals and compromises have to be made and a large part of the agents’ daily business is gaining power. Politicians move people, inspire, persuade – and sometimes they have to do morally bad things in order to gain power and to maintain it.

3 Michael Walzer (1973) Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands. Philosophy & Public Affairs 2(2), 162. 4 Nick O’Donovan (2011) Causes and Consequences: Responsibility in the Political Thought of Max Weber.

Polity 43(1), 85-105.

5 Mark Philp (2008) Political Theory and the Evaluation of Political Conduct. Social Theory and Practice 34(4), 389.

In the following pages I will propose a realist account of a standard that is most appropriate for the judgement of political conduct. Political realism, however, is a rather confused and confusing philosophical position, so before I can provide any actual arguments I will have to explain what realism is. In the first chapter I will describe the different ways in which the position has been traced back in Western history. A realist “tradition” of sorts has been created in the last decades and I will defend a certain version of it in order to justify my own use of historical writers. Afterwards, I will clarify the five most common arguments used by realists, with which I will shape the rest of my thesis. Realism is a very diverse philosophical position and this list is not meant to be exhaustive – not all realists will agree with it – yet I do think it is one of the more coherent accounts of realism available at this moment. The first half of this thesis is therefore meant to explain my own position within realism and in the second half I will adhere to the realist demands to political philosophy that I have set out. I move to the discussion surrounding the judgement of political conduct in the third chapter. This discussion consists, essentially, of the different approaches to the relation of politics and morality. As I will explain, according to the idealist approach morality always trumps politics in the cases in which they conflict, while according to the consequentialist approach politics always trumps morality. Philp has convincingly argued against these two approaches, since they demonstrate a lack of understanding of the nature of real politics. His more Weberian approach is the idea that neither of the two always trumps the other, but that the relation looks more like a trade-off. At the end of the chapter I will, however, argue that his approach still does not take seriously the nature of politics and will propose a fourth, Machiavellian, approach: the judgement of political conduct can only be adequately done using a typically political morality. In the final chapter of this thesis I will illustrate what such a morality could look like, by opposing it to Philp’s idea of a political morality.

First, however, several brief remarks have to be made. First of all, “political conduct” should be understood in a very broad sense. It includes anything from speech acts, to political decisions and judgements, and the implementation of laws and policies. Second, the term “politics” is both very broad and quite vague, but I do not wish to provide an all-embracing definition of it. For our current purposes we are not concerned with political actors in the broadest sense of the word but with a specific group: professional politicians who wish to gain power and influence by running for the higher offices of the state on a national level through general elections. Our considerations therefore do not include, for example, trade unions, lobby groups, NGOs, or politics on a sub-national level. Excluded too are “occasional”

pursuing the same aims as professional politicians but only when called upon or in case of need.7 _{This does not mean that my argument necessarily does not apply to them, but merely}

that I am not concerned with them in this thesis. If my political morality applies to them as well, it is up to the person doing the judgement to argue that it does. Lastly, the theory I will propound is only meant to be applicable for the actions of political agents in the here and now. It is derived from our own political democratic systems and would therefore most likely look different for political systems in the past or in different areas in the world that have a different political system

7 This distinction between professional and occasional politicians is borrowed from Max Weber (1968a) Politics as a Vocation, in: From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 83.

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RADITION

Realism is a term with a great many different, sometimes antagonistic, meanings. One can find realist branches and trends in literature and art, epistemology and metaphysics, as well as in jurisprudence and political philosophy. In this chapter we will be looking at the rise of realist political thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the way it has grown over the preceding centuries.

Self-proclaimed realists have only recently emerged in two distinct yet often intersecting branches of political philosophy. The first emergence took place in the field of International Relations (IR) with the so-called “classical realists” after the Second World War.

This is a group led by E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, and Reinhold Niebuhr, whose project can be seen as an attempt to understand and explain the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.8 _{The second was more recent. Led by Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss,}

political realism9 _{consists of a vast array of thinkers with a similar approach to politics and}

political philosophy, even though they use different arguments and endorse different political ideologies.

Despite the fact that this thesis is only concerned with political realism, I will, in this chapter, look at the history of political realism in the broadest sense – namely, by including IR

realism. Classical realists like Carr and Morgenthau have had a direct influence on modern political realism and an account of this realist tradition would therefore be incomplete without them. “Both revivals,” William Scheuerman has accurately remarked, “rely on analogous conceptual tropes and vocabularies” and “seem to have been inspired by the same founding fathers.”10 _{Carr and Morgenthau wrote before the emergence of political realism,}

and IR realists nowadays largely tend to ignore it; political realists, on the other hand, do

discuss the works of especially Carr – a writer who is “underappreciated nowadays,”11

according to Geuss – and Morgenthau, although the latter is sometimes linked to the amoral and “hard-edged” Realpolitik.12

8 Duncan Bell (2009) Introduction: Under an Empty Sky – Realism and Political Theory, in: Political Thought

and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme, ed. D. Bell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2.

9 I will use the terms “political realism” and “realism” interchangeably for this type of realism, the type of realism associated with International Relations will henceforth be called “IR realism.”

10 William E. Scheuerman (2013) The Realist Revival in Political Theory, or: Why New Is Not Always Better.

International Politics 50(6), 798-799.

11 Raymond Geuss (2015) Realism and the Relativity of Judgement. International Relations 29(1), 3. 12 Raymond Geuss (2001) History and Illusion in Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 55.

1.1

W

?

Before we look at the history of realism in the broader sense, we should understand the basic characteristics of political realism in the narrow sense. It has only emerged as a self-conscious philosophical position in the last two decades or so. Inspired by Williams and Geuss, numerous thinkers have contributed to the rapidly increasing realist literature from varying political viewpoints. It is this theoretical diversity that makes it very difficult to identify the main features of the position.

The best way to start describing it is by describing what it is not. Realism is not a “fully fledged political ideology, with coherent and determinate positions on a wide range of moral and political issues.”13 _{It is not, in other words, an alternative to for instance liberalism,}

socialism, or conservatism, and because of that a philosopher’s commitment to political realism is no indicator of his ideological stance. Instead, there seems to be more truth in the claims that realism is a “countermovement”14 _{or an “intellectual moment of resistance”}15

against the way mainstream political philosophy has been conducted since the 1970s. Since the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971, political theorizing has often taken the form of what Williams called “political moralism.” Moralists, so the argument goes, show a lack of understanding of the nature and purpose of politics by basing their entire theory on abstract moral concept. Realists do not deny the role of morality in our political or social life, but stress that beginning a theory with a moral principle “seems to ascribe to it too much of the wrong kind of weight or effectiveness.”16

There are several arguments that realists tend to use in their opposition to moralism, which will be analyzed in the next chapter. Despite this overlap, however, realists pursue their respective projects from very different perspectives. They usually focus their critique on the dominant liberal theory, but while Bernard Williams tries to save it, Raymond Geuss aims to bury it. The philosophical commitments of the various realist writers diverge so much, in fact, that Scheuerman has called the term realism – a term implying some sort of coherence – itself a “misnomer.”17 _{I do not wish to go that far; it is Alison McQueen’s characterization of}

realism as a “distinctive family of approaches” that seems to me to be more precise. It is

distinctive, she argues, because there are other positions that reject the one taken by realism

13 Bell (2009), 12.

14 William Galston (2010) Realism in Political Theory. European Journal of Political Theory 9(4), 385. 15 Mark Philp (2012) Realism Without Illusions. Political Theory 40(5), 631.

16 Raymond Geuss (2016) Reality and Its Dreams. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 96.

17 William E. Scheuerman (2009), A Theoretical Missed Opportunity? Hans J. Morgenthau as Critical Realist, in: Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme, ed. D. Bell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 57.

and it is a family because the various realist undertakings are still developed along similar lines.18

One of the clear areas of overlap is the emphasis many realists place on intellectual history. Over the years, a canon of sorts has been creating that links historical thinkers as diverse as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Weber, and Schmitt to the realist scheme. It is a project, Bernard Williams tell us, with the aim of “confirming the continuing validity of ‘Realist’ principles throughout history, and appropriating the authority of classical figures in political theory in their support.”19

1.2

T

In the following section I will outline this realist tradition, building on Duncan Bell’s observant analysis of three interrelating narratives.20 _{It is important to note that none of the}

aspects of this tradition are undisputed. Indeed, a lot of arguments have already been made to support or reject the canon. After analyzing these narratives critically, I will still, however, argue for the existence of a realist tradition. The relevance of these narratives to my thesis will present itself at the end of this chapter, when I will use this section to justify my own use of the arguments made by philosophers in the past.

The first narrative traces realism back to the ancient world. It is often thought, especially by realists themselves, that their family of thought embodies “timeless wisdom” about politics,21 _{and the first name in the canon is usually the Greek historian Thucydides.}

The Melian Dialogue in his History of the Peloponnesian War is said to show the realist notions of the limited motivational force of morality and the major influence power and the pursuit thereof have in political life. The following paragraph, in which the Athenians address the Melians, is evidence of the truth of this claim.

For our part, we will not make a long speech no one would believe, full of fine moral arguments … or that we are coming against you for an injustice you have done to us … Instead, let’s work out what we can do on the basis of what both sides truly accept: we both know that decisions about justice are made in human discussions only when both sides are under equal compulsion; but when one side is stronger, it gets as much as it can, and the weak must accept that. … Nature always compels gods (we believe) and men (we are certain) to rule over anyone they can control. We did not make this law, and we were not the first to

18 Alison McQueen (2017) Political Realism and the Realist “Tradition”. Critical Review of International

Social and Political Philosophy 20(3), 297.

19 Bernard Williams (2005) In The Beginning Was The Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. G. Hawthorn. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 3.

20 Bell (2009), 3-5. 21 Ibid., 3.

follow it … we know that you would do the same if you had our power, and so would anyone else.22

The Melian Dialogue has led Hans Morgenthau to point out that Thucydides recognized “the nature of international politics as an unending struggle for survival and power” as well as the inability of morality and law to accommodate the anarchical nature of international relations.23 _{Brian Leiter has even named Thucydides the “paradigmatic Realist” as opposed to}

Plato, the “paradigmatic Idealist.” According to Leiter, the dispute between these two thinkers extends throughout history through the opposition of Kant and Nietzsche, Hegel and Marx, and Dworkin and Geuss in the present.24 _{His dramatic characterization of the debate}

might give it a bit too much weight in the history of philosophy, but his association of Thucydides with Nietzsche and Geuss is justified. Nietzsche himself once wrote that it was in Thucydides that “the culture of the realists, reaches its perfect expression” and that the historian was his “cure from all Platonism.”25 _{Geuss has written – in an article on}

Thucydides, Nietzsche, and Williams – that the former expressed an “attitude toward the world which is realistic, values truthfulness, and is lacking in the shallow ‘optimism’ of later philosophy.”26

A second narrative traces the origins of realism back to the Renaissance. The archetypical figures in this narrative are Hobbes and Machiavelli. Enzo Rossi has claimed that Hobbes’s Leviathan “may be considered one of the founding texts of the realist political tradition”27 _{and it is evident that Hobbes has had a major influence on realist thought.}

Hobbes, writing during the English Civil War, had a pessimistic view on the pervasiveness of conflict and thought that order could only be restored through laws that were issued by a fully sovereign authority – these laws, in turn, “without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.”28 _{Just like Thucydides and Morgenthau, Hobbes understood}

the relatively limited motivational force of morality and law, and thought that citizens sometimes needed to be forced to comply. Machiavelli similarly argued that since “the law

22 Thucydides (1993) The Melian Dialogue, in: On Justice, Power, and Human Nature: Selections from The

History of the Peloponnesian War, ed. & trans. P. Woodruff, 103, 106.

23 Hans J. Morgenthau (1946) Scientific Man vs. Power Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 42. 24 Brian Leiter (2012) In Praise of Realism (and Against “Nonsense” Jurisprudence). Georgetown Law Journal 100(3), 867.

25 Friedrich Nietzsche (1997) Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. Polt. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 87-88. Emphasis in original.

26 Raymond Geuss (2005) Outside Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 225.

27 Enzo Rossi (2010) Reality and Imagination in Political Theory and Practice: On Raymond Geuss’s Realism.

European Journal of Political Theory 9(4), 506.

28 Thomas Hobbes (1651) Leviathan or the Matter, Forme & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and

often proves inadequate, it makes sense to resort to force as well.”29 _{It is in a similar vein that}

Max Weber centuries later identified the modern state as “a compulsory association which organizes domination” through “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.”30

Geuss has similarly argued that “rules without power – the power of someone who might enforce them – are empty.”31 _{Furthermore, Hobbes’s and Machiavelli’s emphasis on the need}

for order before anything else is brought into modern political realism by Bernard Williams. For him, the “first” political question – the requirement any political organization needs to fulfil continuously before they can look at any other political question – is to secure “order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation.”32 _{Indeed, for the majority of}

realists, civil order is “the sine qua non for every other political good.”33 _{The idea that there}

will always be some sort of conflict and disagreement within any given society and that our objective is not to hope for harmony but to prepare for enforced order (if needed), is an idea we will see very often in the next chapters.

The last narrative we will discuss here is the one Bell calls the modernist narrative. In this reading it was a combination of the thinkers of the previous two narratives with the horrors of the twentieth century that gave rise to the classical realists of IR theory. Realism in

this sense was a response to the monstrosities of the two World Wars and the geopolitical situation in the Cold War, as well as to the combination of the threat of nuclear weapons, nationalism, industrial genocide, and global capitalism. Key figures for this narrative include Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, and Schmitt.34 _{It is crucial to include this narrative in the realist}

tradition because this is the first one the key figures of which identified themselves as realists. 1.3

A

The narratives mentioned above are often blended together when an attempt is made to create a realist tradition and, indeed, to some extent I have done the same thing. The relatedness of all these thinkers might be seen as quite self-evident now, but to understand the conflict surrounding this tradition, it is helpful to look at Bell’s distinction between expansive and restrictive conceptions of a historical tradition.35

29 Niccolò Machiavelli (2011) The Prince, trans. Tim Parks. New York: Penguin, Chapter 19. 30 Weber (1968a), 82, 78

31 Raymond Geuss (2008) Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 93. Emphasis in original.

32 Williams (2005), 3.

33 Galston (2010), 408. Emphasis in original. 34 Bell (2009), 5.

An expansive conception of a tradition can be characterized by three features. First, a high level of abstraction is used to connect elements of thought across time and space. Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Weber, for instance, wrote different things in different times and countries for different reasons, but in abstract terms they are all concerned with the creation of order through the (threat of) physical force. Second, an expansive tradition is very selective in its choice of texts and arguments. The claim that Thucydides is a realist, for instance, is only based on the quite short Melian Dialogue and the rest of his writings are mostly ignored. A third feature of expansive traditions is that they are uninterested in the self-understanding of the author. Apart from the thinkers in the modernist narrative – and perhaps Nietzsche – none of the philosophers we have discussed called themselves realists. They can therefore only be called realists in retrospect. The use of abstraction, selectiveness, and a lack of self-understanding is especially problematic for realists, because one of their main points of criticism against moralists is that the latter tend to ignore sociopolitical and historical contexts.

Quentin Skinner has argued that the creation of any tradition of thought is bound to happen under the assumption that “its author must have had some doctrine, or a ‘message,’ which can be readily abstracted and more simply put.”36 _{According to Skinner, this}

assumption is unwarranted because it underestimates the confusing and complex nature of most works of political thought and ignores the fact that the opinions of most authors change in different stages of their lives. If an attempt is made to create a somewhat coherent doctrine using this many authors, the selectiveness needed often creates a false sense of coherence, since it depicts “doctrines more abstract than any which the writer in question might seem to have held, in order to dispose of inconsistencies in his opinions which would otherwise remain.”37

In the case of the realist tradition it is true that some inconsistencies are glossed over38

and it is a bit ironic that the only narrative that could truly be called restrictive – the modernist narrative – is by far the least dominant one. Because of all this, McQueen has suggested that the realist tradition is not historical but analytical: “a set of structural and conceptual similarities among arguments, texts, and ideas rather than a history of actual

36 Quentin Skinner (1966) The Limits of Historical Explanations. Philosophy 41(157), 209 37 Ibid., 210.

38 E.g., Robin Douglass has argued that Hobbes is misrepresented by many realists because, even though he acknowledges the problems that result from conflict in society, his solution “required overcoming these problems, rather than simply working out how to coexist in spite of them.” Douglass therefore concludes that Hobbes did not think conflict is ineradicable but that it can be overcome by a strong Sovereign.

discourse or conscious continuity.”39 _{Although I do appreciate her argument, I think she}

underestimates the overlap and discourse between the thinkers mentioned above. We have seen that Nietzsche has acknowledged Thucydides as one of his influencers, just like Geuss has done for both of them. It would moreover be a drastic understatement to say that the argument that Hobbes, Machiavelli, Weber, and Geuss share merely shows “conceptual similarities.” The context in which they wrote was different, just like several elements in their arguments and the goal they pursued; yet the argument was the same in more than just an abstracted essence. All the writers commonly thought to be part of the realist tradition have a certain way of looking at the political world around us: they demand it to be taken seriously, however grubby and dark it may be.

If we acknowledge that the realist tradition is only historical in an expansive rather than a restrictive manner, labelling the different authors involved as realists in retrospect, as modern realists often do, is both an overstatement and an unnecessary course of action. Many of the arguments modern realists use can be traced back directly to the philosophers in the canon; whether or not the latter would be realists themselves is not important. Especially because not even the relation between the various modern realists is always self-evident, it would be imprudent to pretend the historical road that led to this family of thought is.

Leiter’s claim that Dworkin and Geuss are “merely reenacting a version of the dispute between the paradigmatic philosophical moralist Plato and the paradigmatic historical realist Thucydides,”40 _{is much stronger than any claim I wish to make here. My use of historical}

texts by these canonical authors in the following chapters will be a result of the relevance of their arguments for the realist position, not a result of the authors being realists themselves.41

Whether there truly is a long line of realists avant la lettre or whether the realist tradition should be seen as a collection of arguments that had a direct historical influence on realism as it is today is irrelevant for the question whether the position of modern realism yields worthwhile and important considerations. In the next chapter I will argue that it does.

39 McQueen (2017), 305. 40 Leiter (2012), 867.

41 I think a good case could in fact be made in favor of the identification of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Weber as realists but that would require an extensive analysis of their works – something I will not do here. Most realists that identify these authors as realists avant la lettre do so without giving any such analysis broader than the analysis given in this chapter, which, I think, is not enough to be used as conclusive evidence. Before a convincing argument has been made these claims are too strong and, to my knowledge, no such work has been done so far. Their relation to modern realism is evident, but being a historical influence on a philosophical position is not the same as being part of that philosophical position. I will therefore merely use their arguments to support my own, without making any claims concerning the originators.

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It is not a straightforward task to outline the general line of argument within realist thought and there have been various attempts at this with widely differing results.42 _{I will limit myself}

to five broad elements that, I think, are the most common points of overlap in ideas of the different realist strands.

A few things mentioned in the previous chapter should be remembered. First of all, realism is a family of approaches, and like most families there is bound to be some in-fighting. It is therefore not the aim of this chapter to provide an exhaustive and complete list of arguments all realists always use or even endorse. They are, however, the arguments I take to be most widespread and they illustrate the realist position I will take in the following chapters. Second, realism is politically indeterminate, which means that it is possible for philosophers to use realist arguments for radically different political aims. Third, realism is mostly a negative stance. Its political indeterminacy makes attempts at positive contributions a complicated thing and the true overlap lies in its opposition to moralism. The arguments in this chapter should therefore not be seen as independent ideas, but as different arguments in favor of the same thesis. It will become clear that these arguments share a common core.

Realism is diverse and confusing and with this chapter I attempt to create a somewhat coherent line of argument. It is for this aim that I, moreover, will debunk the idea that realism is “resolutely anti-utopian.”43 _{I will show that this is not the case and that stating this only}

complicates things. After all this, I will place my own topic inside the larger debate. 2.1

“P

”

The most important argument realists make against political moralism is, as we have seen, the idea that it represents the “priority of the moral over the political.”44 _{Moralist theories start}

with the establishment of one or more principles that can, supposedly, be found using only the philosophical field of ethics. These principles usually take the form of highly abstract,

42 E.g., William Galston focused on anti-utopianism, the ubiquity of conflict, and motivational realism; Hall and Sleat on feasibility, the autonomy of politics, contextualism, and concerns about the role of ethics in political life; Rossi and Sleat on the dichotomy of politics and morality in political life, the fact that ethics itself is determined by politics, and the idea that the focus on justice is distorting our understanding of political problems. See Galston (2010); Edward Hall and Matt Sleat (2017) Ethics, Morality and the Case for Realist Political Theory. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20(3) 278-295; Enzo Rossi and Matt Sleat (2014) Realism in Normative Political Theory. Philosophy Compass 9(10), 689-701.

43 Galston (2010), 398. 44 Williams (2005), 2.

universal “truths” – concepts, that is, without any notion of the social, political, and historical context in which or for which they were created.

Bernard Williams has distinguished two models of moralist political philosophy. The enactment model first formulates a moral concept, principle, or value that people ought to desire under all circumstances. When the theorist has found such a principle it is the job of politics to implement it in the real world. This effectively reduces politics to the mere application of predetermined concepts. G.A. Cohen has, for instance, argued that a fully understood principle would be applicable to any possible world. Political philosophy, according to Cohen, should only be interested in principles that are devoid of any fact about the social, political or historical context in which they were developed, since its main objective is not to prescribe “what we should do but what we should think, even when what we should think makes no practical difference.”45 _{Philosophers need not busy themselves}

with the practical improvement of the current world, but only with the identification of the perfect one. The second model is the structural model, which lays down moral rules and conditions for peaceful cooperation under the power of the state. This theory does not present a program or course of action but mostly a desired structure of a society, such as fully just institutions or laws.46 _{“In both cases,” Williams points out, “political theory is something like}

applied morality.”47

One of the major assumptions these moralist theorists make by starting with a supposedly purely moral conception is, as Geuss puts it, “that there is, or could be, such a thing as a separate discipline called Ethics.”48 _{This implies that it is possible for humans to}

use their rationality in a “pure” way without being influenced by the actual context in which they use it; that it is possible to form a theory that “prescribes how humans should act toward one another without constantly locating it within the rest of human life, and without unceasingly reflecting on the relation one’s claims have to history, ethnology, psychology and economics.”49 _{We will look at this idea in more detail later.}

45 G.A. Cohen (2008) Rescuing Justice and Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 268. Emphasis added.

46 Williams argues that John Rawls’s theory is the archetype for this model. Recently, however, a debate has arisen on the question whether or not Rawls truly is a moralist. I am not completely convinced that he is either of the two and the debate is far beyond the scope of this chapter, so I will try to focus on other writers. Rawls is arguably the most influential political philosopher of our time and it will not always be possible to exclude him, but my use of him should be seen as an illustration of an argument I make rather than an accusation towards Rawls. For the characterization of Rawls as a moralist, see Williams (2005) or any book by Geuss; for a quite convincing refusal of this characterization, see James Gledhill (2012) Rawls and Realism. Social Theory and

Practice 38(1), 55-82.

47 Williams (2005), 2. 48 Geuss (2008), 7. 49 Ibid.

Bernard Williams has tried to do the exact opposite. His first question of politics is, as we know, not concerned with the implementation of any moral principle but with the securing of order and peace within a society. Any further political question, he argues, presupposes the existence of order and a regime therefore has to have an answer to the first question “all the time.”50 _{Furthermore, what sets political rule apart from mere domination}

and oppression is that the claim to authority has to involve some claim to legitimacy. Legitimacy is therefore, for Williams, a purely political concept “inherent in there being such a thing as politics” and the moral dimension of this concept does “not represent a morality which is prior to politics.”51 _{In order to be able to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate}

forms of government, Williams introduces the Basic Legitimation Demand (BLD): any

legitimate government has to provide an acceptable answer to the first political question. An answer is only acceptable if a regime is able to “offer a justification of its power to each

subject” that “makes sense” as a legitimation of the state’s power to them all.52 _{There are}

inconsistencies and flaws in Williams’s BLD and it has failed to convince even most realists,53

yet it is a useful illustration of the way realists approach political philosophy. Morality does have a major role to play in any theory and realists can accept this as long as it is not a form of morality derived “purely” from the field of Ethics and therefore purportedly prior to politics.

2.2

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Instead, realists argue, political philosophy should always start with a clear understanding of the way our political life really works. To be fair, if a theory wants to change anything in our present society – or any society for that matter – it needs to make at least some counterfactual claims. If all the facts of our real world needed to be incorporated, the only thing the theory could do was describe the status quo, not change it. But realists claim that there are some facts about the real world that should never be left out.

50 Williams (2005), 3. Emphasis in original. 51 Ibid., 8, 5. Emphasis added.

52 Ibid., 4, 11. Emphasis in original. For Williams’s characterization of what “makes sense,” see Ibid., 11-12. 53 E.g., Matt Sleat pointed at Wiliams’s odd decision “to develop a consensus-based theory of politics while also agreeing with other realists that political disagreement is a feature of the political itself.” Matt Sleat (2010) Bernard Williams and a Realist Political Theory. European Journal of Political Theory 9(4), 503. Alex Bavister-Gould argued that some of the limitations and restrictions Williams has claimed as inherent to his specifically political account of legitimacy are actually presupposed by his wider ethical beliefs. Alex Bavister-Gould (2013) Bernard Williams: Political Realism and the Limits of Legitimacy. European Journal of Philosophy 21(4), 593. Raymond Geuss has even rejected the idea of legitimacy altogether, arguing it is “often as confused, potentially contradictory, incomplete, and pliable as anything else.” Geuss (2008), 7.

One of the things moralists wrongfully leave out of their theories is the pervasiveness of conflict. A classical liberal solution to the problem of social coordination is the idea of willed consent: the idea that certain rules and rights can be accepted by all members of society without any need for the use of coercion through force, effectively creating harmony instead of order. But the idea of harmony, realists argue, shows a serious lack of appreciation of the role of political conflict. Human beings will always disagree with one another to some extent, especially in a liberal democracy, and if we take this seriously the idea of complete and voluntary acceptance of any principle becomes not much more than wishful thinking.

Williams therefore states that “the idea of the political is to an important degree focused on the idea of political disagreement … political difference is the essence of ‘politics.’”54 _{Even Rawls, for many the archetypal moralist, acknowledges the chronic social}

fact of, what he calls, reasonable pluralism: “the circumstances that reflect the fact that in a modern democratic society citizens affirm different, and indeed incommensurable and irreconcilable, though reasonable, comprehensive doctrines in the light of which they understand their conceptions of the good.”55 _{Even if all citizens were to act reasonably and}

rationally, that is, there would still be a high degree of intellectual and moral disagreement among them. However, as opposed to realists, Rawls seeks to show that an overlapping consensus on the principles of justice is possible despite these differences, and therefore that harmony, at least to some extent, is achievable.

Realists refute this. They often maintain that political rule “is centrally concerned with the creation of order and the subordination of conflict.”56 _{In democratic societies this}

requires a system of laws that the majority of a society can endorse, but Weber’s monopoly of physical force is sometimes needed to enforce those laws on those who do not wish to comply. Harmony, on the other hand, means that all citizens willingly comply with the laws of society. However just or good a theory is, realists argue that it will never be accepted by

everyone and that as a result the theory has to have some idea about what to do with people

who do not comply. “If anything,” Runciman has suggested, “[Rawls] does not worry enough about the ways that politics might disrupt or undermine the conclusions of moral philosophy.”57

54 Williams (2005), 77-78.

55 John Rawls (2001) Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. E. Kelly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 84. This makes his idea that we can achieve a harmonious society highly suspect.

56 Philp (2007), 65.

57 David Runciman (2012) What Is Realistic Political Philosophy? Metaphilosophy 43(1-2), 61. Emphasis in original.

2.3

M

A further element of the real world that realists say moralists leave out for the wrong reasons is the way human nature works. This is the argument that William Galston has called “psychological and motivational realism.”58 _{It is connected with the previous argument and}

breaks down in the ideas that morality and rationality have less of a motivational force than many moralists ascribe to them.

The idea that morality does not tend to motivate people decisively was already acknowledged by Thucydides. Raymond Geuss has convincingly argued that the mere fact that some moral principles “look good” or “seem plausible” tells us nothing about what will actually happen or how those principles will work in practice.59 _{Especially moralists that use}

the enactment model, like Cohen, tend to underappreciate this fact. It is common knowledge that human beings do not always do the things they morally should but instead act in ways that morality forbids. We usually have an intuitive idea of what would be the right thing to

do, but in many cases indifference, laziness, or simply “really not feeling like it” are enough

to motivate us to do something else entirely. Morality does not automatically trump any other consideration. A theory that merely looks at how people should act and leaves too much out about the way people actually act therefore shows a lack of understanding of the real world. Note that the realists are not merely complaining that such a theory is not feasible but that it has a distorted view of the nature of political life as a sphere that needs to motivate and enforce.60

The other element focuses on the predominance of reason and self-interest as the two motivational forces in the human mind. In this scenario, it is the job and ability of our reason to constrain our urge to pursue our own interest at the expense of the interests of others, in order to be able to live together in society. Even though Rawls does not focus on individual conduct but instead on the overall institutional framework of society, his notion of consensus revolves around the idea that “all citizens as reasonable and rational can endorse” certain principles of justice.61 _{Aside from the question whether reason is indeed able to do this, the}

problem with this view is that it leaves out an entire dimension of the human mind that is very influential in our behavior – namely, our emotions and passions. These are often not

58 Galston (2010), 398. 59 Geuss (2008), 10.

60 This is the distinction between realism and non-ideal theory. It is in many cases only a difference in nuance, but it is a difference nonetheless and will be further explained below. For an attempt at this project, see Matt Sleat (2014) Realism, Liberalism and Non-Ideal Theory Or, Are There Two Ways to do Realistic Political Theory? Political Studies 64(1), 27-41.

reasonable or rational, nor do they really reflect our interests. We do not have to go as far as Hume’s famous idea that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them,”62 _{but it is only if we}

overestimate the motivational force of rationality and morality that we can believe in the possibility of harmony.

2.4

T

Moralists, as we have seen, often assume that morality and rationality can and should determine the realm of politics. “If philosophy and morality could be relied on to give us unequivocal and widely legitimate answers to our problems”, however, “we would not have much need for politics.”63 _{The very existence of politics is symptomatic of our need for it to}

establish and enforce rules that govern the way humans interact with each other, since they do not rationally agree on moral principles – or any principle for that matter.

It is difficult to define politics exhaustively and I will not attempt to do so. Still, we have already seen some aspects of it, such as the interpretation of principles and the enforcement of laws. An additional aspect of politics that moralists often fail to understand is the nature of political disagreement. Because, for instance, Cohen assumes that a moral principle can be universally true, he takes political disagreement to be a rival interpretation of such a principle – someone must have misunderstood it and is therefore wrong. However, as Williams has pointed out, political rivals are not merely arguers, they are opponents. When a political decision is made it “does not in itself announce that the other party was morally wrong or, indeed, wrong at all. What it immediately announces is that they have lost.”64 _The

main job a politician therefore has is not to figure out that one universal truth but to use his skills in order to persuade others to support his own specific views on the good of society.

What’s more, politics is not simply the realization of predetermined moral principles, at least partially because it is the politician’s job to interpret such principles in the first place. A principle like justice can mean very different things in different places and times and according to different political parties. Even if it would mean the same thing, there is no guarantee what the implementation of such a principle would actually do once it has been put into practice. “Learning, failure to learn, and drawing the wrong conclusions are all possible

62 David Hume (1817) A Treatise of Human Nature. London: Thomas and Joseph Allman, 104. 63 Philp (2012), 635.

outcomes” and whatever happens must be evaluated, understood, and explained by political actors.65 _{These skills “do not automatically come with the mastery of certain theories.”}66

2.5

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-

The last objection realists have to moralism (that we discuss here) is its claim to universality: the idea that the principles philosophers come up with can be stripped away from all the facts of the real world and that they are therefore desirable for all peoples at any time and place. Realists like Geuss and Williams reject the idea that morality or rationality can provide the ultimate justification for any “universal” moral principle without being influenced by the real world. We have to acknowledge, Williams says, that “we do not make our thoughts out of nothing” so that we will finally understand that “they come in part from what is around us, and [that] we have a very poor grasp of what their source may be.”67 _{We should therefore}

accept that “the Cartesian project of setting aside everything we know and value and starting

ab nihilo to build up our view about the world on a certain and incontrovertible base that

owes nothing to social conventions is unworkable.”68

This does not mean principles we value are false or that they should be rejected. However, when establishing principles we should remember that their potential desirability is largely due to the fact that they fit in our beliefs, traditions, and history. We can justifiably pursue a value simply because it feels right to us, but it is an odd thing to assume that every other value in history is therefore false or inferior to it. This moralist way of thinking cannot, as Williams argues, “plausibly explain, adequately to its moral pretentions, why, when, and by whom it has been accepted and rejected” that their ideas are the universal truths we have been looking for all those centuries “and why these truths have been concealed from other people.”69 _{Realist might happily say that modern liberal values are the most legitimate ones}

for us right here right now, like Williams indeed does, but we cannot therefore assume they are universal.

2.6

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’

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There is one persistent myth that makes realism even more confusing that it already is and this is the consequence of a misunderstanding of the one of the fundamental claims of

65 Geuss (2008), 5. 66 Ibid., 15.

67 Bernard Williams (2007) There Are Many Kinds of Eyes, in: The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of

Philosophy, ed. M. Burnyeat. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 327.

68 Raymond Geuss (2010) Politics and the Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press, x. Emphasis in original.

realism. It is the idea that realism is essentially opposed to the use of ideal theory in political thought. It is necessary to explain why this is not the case, because otherwise realism would amount to little more than a methodological policy instead of a philosophical position on the nature of politics.

So what is ideal theory?70 _{In a word, ideal theory tries to depict a perfectly just society}

by ignoring some empirical constraints about the real world. In order to do this it commits itself to two forms of idealization. First, it describes a society that has successfully and completely implemented the principles that the theorist wishes to argue for. The other way ideal theory idealizes is by making some counterfactual assumptions in order to be able to theorize. This second form often leads to the assumption of full compliance: on the one hand it assumes favorable conditions – the society is developed enough to be able to realize justice – and on the other hand it assumes that everyone in the society in question complies with the principles set out. This second form could also for instance be done for our current society by imagining what the world would look like if everyone always complied with our rules and laws. The perfectly just society is meant to act as a final objective for our actual society, although the ideal theory does not give us a clear path to take towards this goal. It is, in this view, the job of non-ideal theory to deal with partial compliance and non-favorable circumstances and to tell us how to arrive at the end-state.71

In order to describe an ideal society one has to idealize some of the aspects of the political status quo. Realists have attacked both sorts of idealization. For instance, Colin Farrelly complains that “armchair theorizing” of this sort leaves out some actual injustices in society while the entire philosophical project should be to find cures for those injustices. Merely creating a world in which they are absent does not help. He therefore concludes that the prescriptions that these theories yield “are of little use when applied to real societies.”72 _It

is exactly because our society is not perfect that rules and institutions designed for a perfect society will not work. Others have resorted to a more Marxist argument. Marx had explicitly chosen not to theorize what his ideal classless society would look like because he acknowledged his own consciousness was shaped by, and programmed to reinforce, the form

70 I owe much of the following paragraph on ideal and non-ideal theory to Laura Valentini and Lorna Finlayson. See Laura Valentini (2012) Ideal vs. Non-Ideal Theory: A Conceptual Map. Philosophy Compass 7(9),654-664; Lorna Finlayson (2013) Preachers and Propagandists: Political Theory and the Status Quo.

Journal of Political Ideologies, 281-298.

71 Both distinctions between ideal and non-ideal theory originate from John Rawls. For the former, see John Rawls (1999a) A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 8, 125; for the latter, see John Rawls (1999b) The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 89-90.

of society in which he lived.73 _{The combined prognosis is thus that prescriptions resulting}

from ideal theory of this sort are (at least partially) doomed to failure and will (at least partially) reproduce some of the elements of the unjust society it wishes to replace.

In order for us to understand the relation of this ideal theory with realism, we have to distinguish between “realism” and “being realistic.”74 _{The latter is a disposition, a}

methodological policy to theorize in a certain way, while, as we have seen, the former is a theoretical position about the nature of politics. If we are “being realistic” we observe the way the existing framework of society works and adapt our desires to whatever society has made possible. In this way, someone who is being realistic is looking for the best outcome while acknowledging the status quo – the realistic person, that is, is concerned with

feasibility and will shy away from anything utopian. Being realistic therefore means that one

rejects both ways in which ideal theory idealizes. A “realist” on the other hand theorizes in a manner that shows understanding and appreciation of some of the aspects of political life that are ineradicable – e.g., his way of theorizing always involves some factual constraints concerning human nature, the role of conflict, and the role of power. He can do this, however, in a realistic or an unrealistic way. As Raymond Geuss points out, “theoretical realism should start with a recognition that the process by which a society sorts certain potential courses of action and outcomes into two groups: ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ is itself highly variable.”75

He argues that the politically possible is a social construct: scientific and biological impossibilities aside, the “impossible” is often a result of something simply being unimaginable or of the costs being deemed too high. These actions are not impossible but incredibly implausible. Furthermore, we do not always know what is possible and sometimes it is a requirement for some aspiration to even become possible that someone first aspire to it. “After all,” Geuss concludes, “in the human world, much of what we desire might not antecedently be given as possible or impossible.”76

If we look closely at the above we see that the realist “resolutely anti-utopian” stance is far more nuanced than Galston would have us believe. Idealizing a desirable society by making some counterfactual assumptions could be permitted by realists, as long as certain facts about the real world are left alone – namely, some aspects of human nature and politics. If realists would not allow for this type of idealizing, they would only be able to defend the

status quo, which is not what they desire.

73 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1998) The Communist Manifesto. London: Verso, Chapter 3. 74 Geuss (2015), 16; Finlayson (2013), 282.

75 Geuss (2015), 15. 76 Ibid., 16.

This is not philosophical nitpicking. An attempt can be made to illustrate the relevance of this distinction using a simplified analogy. Let’s pretend that I do not like kidney beans. It might be that I don’t like the taste, or think the kidney bean industry is inhumane, or that I just fundamentally object to kidney beans – it does not matter. Now the situation arises in which I am served a homemade chili with kidney beans in it, which I would obviously not like. Consequently, I don’t eat the chili. It is not that I necessarily have a problem with chili: if you could replace the kidney beans with something else I might like it. But let us suppose that the cook is a gastronomical purist and thinks chili without kidney beans is an abomination – it is simply not chili. If this is the case I will in practice always dislike chili and will never eat it. Still, if the cook then describes me as someone who is “resolutely anti-chili” he would completely be missing the point. I don’t care about chili, the only things I am truly “resolutely anti-” about are the kidney beans inside the chili. Similarly, realists do not have to object to ideal theory or utopian thinking altogether, but to the moralist misunderstanding of politics that is a part of it.

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After these first two chapter we have finally gotten a somewhat clear grasp of the overall argument against moralism. If we simplify the realist demand to one sentence it would look something like this: It is acceptable to give morality and moral concepts a role in any political treatise and counterfactual aspirations are the catalysts of change, but a philosopher should make sure to understand the fundamental ways in which the real world works and will most likely always work in order to avoid his theory taking the shape of science fiction or fantasy. As long as we steer clear of claims to universality and take the human condition seriously, we can guide the eyes of philosophers from their fantastical light of universal truths down to the darker realms of human life we will examine in the next chapter.

These first two chapters have been important. We are now able to place our subject within the larger tradition of realist thought and to acknowledge some of the elements of our society that we have to make sure we do not forget while creating our own theory. It is at this point that we can get acquainted with what I take to be a more interesting as well as less well-known aspects of realism, which is the aspect of political philosophy in which realism has the potential to provide a solid positive contribution par excellence: the judgement of political agency. We have seen that moralism tends to reduce politics to mere morality and, it will be pointed out, the judgement of political action is often similarly reduced to a judgement of action using ordinary morality. Moralism, that is, often tries to “reduce political problems to

matters of personal morality.”77 _{Some think, for instance, that politicians ought to act as}

ordinary citizens do. I will argue that, if we take the points made in this chapter seriously, this thought is a misrepresentation of the very nature of politics and political action. Politicians, that is, sometimes have to get their hands dirty.

C

HAPTER

3. P

OLITICS

AND

M

ORALITY

The debate on the judgement of political conduct revolves around the relation between politics and morality. Usually it is thought that there are three approaches to this relation: the idealist approach, in which morality trumps politics; the consequentialist approach, in which politics trumps morality; and what I would like to call the trade-off approach, in which neither trumps the other, but a compromise needs to be reached when the two normative systems conflict.78 _{In this chapter I will explain the different ways in which the relation}

between politics and morality can be understood and I will, moreover, propose a fourth approach that fulfils the demands of the last chapter best.

Since it has already been pointed out that morality does have a major role to play in politics, the purely consequentialist will only be explained briefly. The idealist approach is more important here, since this is the most moralist way of looking at politics and morality. Mark Philp’s trade-off approach is the most realist one of the three mentioned above and he has correctly pointed out that there is something special about political conduct that the other two approaches choose to ignore. He argues, as this chapter will show, that there is a need for a typically political morality if the judgement of political action is to be done in an adequate fashion. It is important to note that I am not defending his idea of this political morality – in fact, I will argue against it – but his rejection of the idealist and consequentialist approaches and his emphasis on the need for a political morality is crucial for our purpose. In the last section of this chapter I will therefore take his idea of a typically political morality even further than he has done by building on Machiavelli.

3.1

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Consequentialism is a normative ethical theory that dictates that the basis for the judgement of one’s actions is and should only be its consequences. This means that when the goal is important enough, its realization can justify the means that are used to achieve it to a very large extent. In the more extreme theories, the politician ought therefore only to be concerned with the achievement of the optimal results, whatever this might take. There are many different forms of consequentialism and some forms do limit the means that can be used, but for our purpose it suffices to say that the focal point of the judgement of political conduct

78 A different version of the identification of three approaches to the relation of politics and morality can be found in Paul Formosa (2008) “All Politics Must Bend Its Knee Before Right”: Kant on the Relation of Morals to Politics. Social Theory and Practice 34(2), 158.

using this approach lies in the realization of certain ends rather than in the actual actions of the politician.

Although political conduct is focused on results to a much larger extent than private conduct is, merely judging political actions by their results does not provide a satisfactory judgement. The point Mark Philp has, I think rightly, is that

the kind of evaluation made of those acting in politics cannot be entirely consequentialist but must be concerned with the extent to which particular individuals acted well, achieved what they sought to achieve, and recognized and weighed appropriately the opportunities and potential costs they faced.79

The achievements of a politician need to have a major influence on the way his conduct should be judged, but merely focusing on them leaves out too much context. If we are to judge political excellence merely based on consequences, the politician who, for instance, beats all odds when implementing a groundbreaking new civil rights policy would have to be judged the same as the politician who merely finished what his predecessor started (if that policy is of similar importance). Similarly, the politician who coincidentally achieved desirable results would have to be judged as a superior politician to the politician who did everything he could to achieve desirable results but had the bad luck that external forces outside of his control thwarted his attempts. There are infinitely many variables to take into account and by merely looking at the final results the consequentialist approach leaves out too many of the relevant aspects of politics that we have seen in the previous chapter. For a satisfactory judgement we need to be able to assess the reason why a politician did something, how he did it, what was possible at the time, what would have been the costs of any alternative course of action, and so forth. The purely consequentialist approach of looking at politics is therefore bleak and overly simplistic.

3.2

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The paradigmatic exemplar of the idealist approach is Immanuel Kant, who has famously said that “all politics must bend its knee before right.”80 _{It is an uncompromising stance and}

has as a result often been branded as unrealistic. Kant does not merely mean that politics and morality ought not to be at odds with each other, but that they, properly understood, cannot

79 Mark Philp (2010) What Is To Be Done? Political Theory and Political Realism. European Journal of

Political Theory 9(4), 472.

80 Immanuel Kant (2006) Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, in: Toward Perpetual Peace and

be. Kantian morality, “the totality of the unconditionally commanding laws according to which we ought to act,”81 _{is a theory that sets out the right while politics is primarily the}

practical force that implements this. “Therefore,” Kant argues, “there can be no dispute between politics as the applied doctrine of right and morality as the theoretical doctrine of right.”82

Kant understood that the political reality is too complex to enable us to effectively and correctly predict the outcome of political decisions and hence Kant argued that it is more prudent to adhere to the principles of his moral theory as a guide to action unconditionally. The precise nature of these laws and exactly how strict we should understand them has been the focus of extensive debate, but we have no need to elaborate on all different interpretations. Let us instead look at Paul Formosa’s more permissive one. He states that we should not be frightened by the infamous “murderer at the door” example,83 _{and that there}

actually are instances in which we are allowed to lie. We are allowed to lie if nobody is seriously deceived by it or, Formosa argues, if we are protecting our or others’ rights. Politicians may also use coercion and force “to effect a hindering of a hindrance to freedom,” because this will be a realization rather than a restriction of freedom.84 _{Lying and coercion}

can, for Formosa, sometimes express love for human dignity – one of the pillars of Kantian ethics – rather than infringe it.

This is a very sympathetic reading of Kant, but for Formosa the manipulation, secrecy, lack of publicity, and deceit that seem so rampant in the political sphere are not permissible. Kant’s views on politics, whatever the interpretation, are a clear representation of Bernard Williams’s structural model of moralizing: he sets out strict, predetermined moral rules by which politicians ought to act. The fact that Kant is only concerned with the final motivation of the act, the maxim, makes it even more demanding – just acting in accordance with the rules is not enough and great results do not excuse morally impermissible maxims. The Kantian moral rules for politicians are the same as for any private individual and,

81 Kant (2006), 8:370. Emphasis in original. 82 Ibid., 8:370.

83 In On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy, Kant imagines a situation in which a murderer comes to your door and asks about the location of a friend of yours, who is currently hiding in your house. Presumably you know that if you tell him the truth, he will come in and kill your friend; if you lie, he leaves and your friend lives. Kant argues that you have an unconditional duty to tell the truth, even now, and that you can be held “legally accountable for all the consequences that might arise” if you decide to lie. Consequently, if your friend saw the murderer coming and fled, but because you lied the murderer left and found him in the streets, you are legally accountable for his death. Immanuel Kant (1993) On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns, in: Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: with On a Supposed Right to Lie because of

Philanthropic Concerns, trans. J. W. Ellington. London: Hackett Publishing, 8:425-427.