Ethical Perspectives on Political Excuses

Abstract

Self-styled policy scientists pride themselves on their sensitivity to the ethical implications of social policies. However, the very nature of their enterprise focuses attention on certain aspects of political evaluation at the expense of others. For assessing social action-plans, the obvious bits of moral philosphy to borrow are those for appraising the behaviour of individual moral agents. Such instruments are well suited to praising or blaming policy-makers, individually and perhaps even collectively. But there is more to political evaluation than policy evaluation construed in this narrow way. Some moral goods, in politics as elsewhere, come as simple windfalls for which no one deserves credit; and there are some evils for which no one can be faulted. Thus, the virtue of the state, its balance of good over evil, is partially independent of anyone’s actions. Ethical equipment for levelling recriminations is totally inadequate for assessing these other dimensions of moral goodness. These shortcomings are nowhere more apparent than with the familiar moral maxim, ‘ought implies can’, and its political analogue, ‘politics is the art of the possible’.