Kant was born in Königsberg in Prussia (now called Kaliningrad in modern-day Russia). He was educated at the University of Königsberg, and it has been claimed that he never left the city during his entire life. His daily routines were so regular that he was often referred to as ‘the Königsberg clock’ as you could tell precisely what time it was by his daily routines. Also he became used to the fact that one of the students attending his lectures had a button missing on his jacket. One day he attended with a new button sewn on; Kant allegedly asked him to remove it.
Kant’s impact on the history of philosophy, morality and, perhaps to a lesser extent, politics has been massive. The political theorist John Rawls who we will meet later in this book, for example, is a Kantian. Leading contemporary theorist Will Kymlicka is a Rawlsian, so also indebted to Kant. So Kant’s influence has lasted throughout the centuries.
Kant calls this process of universalizing laws ‘The Categorical Imperative’: for Kant, it is necessitous to be moral if we are to be autonomous; that is to say to make laws for ourselves. If we allow consequences of acts to influence our actions rather than if that act is good in and of itself, we start to allow those consequences to control us and do not act freely. We must always, therefore, not do unto others what we would not have them do unto us.
Kant’s contemporary Benjamin Constant raised a problem with this categorical imperative around lying. We should all be truthful and not tell lies according to Kant as, if we tell lies, we are accepting that others can tell us lies, and we would not want this. Constant asks us to imagine what we would do if a friend was visiting us at our house, and there is a knock on the door, and we answer to find a murderer there asking about our friend’s whereabouts. Are we not entitled to lie to the murderer? Is a murderer really entitled to the truth? Could we not universalize the notion that we should not tell murderers our friend’s whereabouts? Kant thinks not, defending the duty to tell the truth at all times. He states that suppose you did lie to the murderer about where your friend was, and the murderer turns around and leaves your porch, only to meet your friend who has made his escape; would you not be endangering him? Being truthful is always the best policy.
But does politics really operate like this? Let us go back to the dilemma that Winston Churchill faced in the Second World War that we discussed above. Churchill knew that the Luftwaffe were planning a bombing raid on Coventry, and had to decide whether to defend Coventry and run the risk of the Germans changing their codes, or allow it to be bombed in the hope of using the code to defeat the Germans by winning the war more quickly. Lives were at risk either way; civilians in Coventry and soldiers (many conscripted) in the war in general. Now we could debate what the best course of action here might be, but is it obvious that either (a) one is morally right, and/or (b) one would have clearly better consequences than the other? It seems to me that this is a judgement call that neither deontology not consequentialism can help us with.
Michael Walzer acknowledges this political problem of ethics in his 1973 essay ‘Political action: the problem of dirty hands’. Politicians, he outlines, exist in a different moral environment to the rest of society. This isn’t because they are more or less moral than the rest of us or those in other professions, but rather because the nature of their role requires them to make certain types of decisions. Politicians are different from other people. Firstly, unlike other professions such as business people, politicians do not ‘merely cater to our interests; he acts on our behalf’; secondly, through tax, laws, etc. the ‘successful politician becomes the visible architect of our restraint’; and thirdly, via the police and the army, politicians can use ‘violence and the threat of violence’ (Walzer, 1973: 162, 163). Other people or professions might do one or two of these things, but not all three. As a consequence of this, politicians find themselves in moral and ethical situations that are unlike those that other people face. It is impossible to remain morally innocent in such a position.
Walzer introduces the notion of dirty hands to the debate around morality in politics; that a good person needs to necessarily get their hands dirty if they are to be a politician, they will, by virtue of their position, need to do things which others will not. But this idea is neither consequentialist nor Kantian. If you as a politician do something, like, say, sacrifice the people of Coventry to protect the Enigma codes, something that you would not do if you were an accountant or a dentist and would clearly be wrong if you did, you are getting your hands dirty in recognition of the fact that it would otherwise be wrong. Your position meant that you had to make a decision that might in other situations have been wrong, but that is the stuff of politics. This is not a consequentialist theory though, as if an act leads to a good outcome, then the acts that lead up to it were good, meaning that you do not have anything to get your hands dirty with. You acted morally.
Dirty hands
The normal rules of morality that apply in our everyday lives do not apply to politicians due to the nature of the decisions they have to take. For Walzer, it is impossible to keep your hands clean and be a politician.
Activity 4. Please attempt the questions below:
1 Do you think that you should be able to lie to the murderer asking for your friend? What conclusions do you draw from this about Kant’s theory?
2 Can you become a politician and remain morally pure?
Weber
Max Weber’s account of the nature of politics in his 1919 essay Politics as a Vocation focuses less on the morality of politics than the attributes that a politician needs in order to be a successful leader. Max Weber, widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern sociology, was a leading figure in the antipositivism school of thought, meaning that he did not think that the social sciences could be studied in the same way as the natural sciences. Social things did not necessarily have simple causes, and elements such as culture and religion have a large impact on social phenomena. Indeed, his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was based on these themes. He was involved in politics in his later years, around the time that he wrote Politics as a Vocation, and as such these works can be seen as a commentary on politics at that time.
The state, according to Weber, ‘is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (Weber, 1946: 4, italics supressed). Weber begins his discussion with this definition, illustrating that the business of politics is always about force, therefore there is considerable responsibility attached to it and it should thus be treated seriously. The modern state has centralized, and bureaucratized, the process of governance. Rather than the personal rule of the time of Machiavelli, with lowerlevel administrators like de Orco having a certain amount of ownership of their actions, in the modern state power is shifted upwards and bureaucrats, often professional civil servants simply enforcing the decisions made above them, are shifted lower down the system.
For Weber, being a politician involves balancing the three essential qualities, (1) passion, (2) a sense of responsibility and (3) a sense of proportion. One needs passion in what you are doing in order to drive through change, and to prevent politics from becoming merely an academic discussion as opposed to actually doing something. Passion is also useful to gain adherents to your cause, and to motivate people when change is necessary. But passion in and of itself is problematic, as you cannot (nor perhaps should you) achieve things by will alone. Here, the senses of responsibility and proportion will help the politician deliver on the issues that they care so much about, whilst also remembering how close they are to the form of legitimate violence.
For Weber the business of being a politician involves balancing three qualities: (1) passion, (2) a sense of responsibility and (3) a sense of proportion. Conviction on its own was insufficient.
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