Conflicts of Values and Political Forgiveness

Abstract

Citizens have a right to be governed by officials with an acute awareness of the conflicts between the constitutional values of liberal democracy. Such an awareness is an integral part of a public official's integrity. That is why citizens should have a say in deciding whether to remove from office an official with such integrity. In this article, this type of conflict between constitutional values is translated into the terms of an individual official's decision making with the help of moral theory. This yields two paradoxes: one focusing on the decision maker and the other on the object of his or her decisions: the citizen. These paradoxes lead to the following questions: If running a liberal democratic constitution essentially involves moral complexity, should we not try to have it run by officials with a sensitivity to that complexity? And if officials with that sensitivity are bound to commit moral wrongs because of complexity, do not we owe them something like political forgiveness? The paradoxes are used to formulate conditions for political forgiveness.