Beyond the Ethical Demand

5. Politics and Ethics

F I V E Politics and Ethics There are two different types of power. One is the immediate or strictly personal power that one person exercises over another. This is occasionally also referred to as psychological power. The underlying idea is that the life of one person is interwoven with that of another, that all relationships between people are, in the immediate sense, relationships of power. Another type of power is the power that has been delegated to a person. This power is public, often defined by laws governing how it should be exercised . This is sometimes referred to as power by virtue of authority. It serves to regulate our communal lives and to protect one person from violations perpetrated by another. This transports us into political life, the word “political” being applied very broadly. Here, however, we run into the view that ethics has very little to do with politics, and the commandment to love one’s neighbor has nothing whatsoever to do with it. From many different sides—from among the ranks of social scientists and the ranks of theologians—attempts are being made to disengage ethics and politics. The social science justification is twofold: (a) economic life has become far too complicated to allow political decisions to be made on the basis of ideological and ethical viewpoints, and (b) ideology and ethics in politics serve no other purpose than to camouflage selfish interests. Or it 141 Beyond the Ethical Demand 142 is put this way: People’s selfish interests express themselves in the economic laws. Not respecting them will lead to catastrophe. The Soviet Union’s agricultural policy during Stalin’s rule is a textbook example. Or references are made to wage policy, asserting that if everyone receives equal income, people will not work just as much as everyone else, but just as little, causing the total amount of work performed to decline, which will disadvantage everyone. Equal income for all will, in the long term, give everyone a lower standard of living—not just those whose pay is reduced , but also those whose pay initially increases. Moving on to the theological justification for keeping ethics and politics clearly segregated, it also is twofold: (a) politics is about the collective order, while ethics in a radical sense belongs to individual interpersonal relations, and (b) ethics renders politics overly idealistic. So the question is: Can we effectively use ethical viewpoints in political life without becoming prone to excessive idealism and transferring that which only applies to individual interpersonal relations to the collective order? What we will have to do is to moderate morality for use in our society ; we must de-radicalize and de-emotionalize it. But then, one might immediately ask, why not just stick to a moderate morality that can readily be used politically, instead of going to a radical morality that must first be moderated to become politically applicable? There are two reasons for opting in favor of the latter: (1) it is not possible to conceive of a more natural morality than the ethical demand, which springs from the fundamental fact that there is an element of power in all our mutual relations with one another, and (2) the most natural morality conceivable is the most radical morality conceivable. The Golden Rule The most natural of all moral rules is the one known as “the Golden Rule,” which states that what you would have others do unto you, you should do unto them. This is a very radical rule, thanks to the element of imagination it contains, and indeed depends on entirely, for here there is no mention of reciprocation. On the contrary. It is not based on establishing that since the other person actually took care of me, I must return the favor and take care of him or her. It does not consist in doling out assis- Politics and Ethics 143 tance. It does not say: to the extent that another person helped me to flourish , so must I help that person to flourish. On the contrary, the Golden Rule is radical. It says that even though the other has done nothing for me, I am still to do for that person the things he or she is in need of. Perhaps the other person has never been in a position that enabled him to do anything for me. He may always have drawn the shortest straw in life. In...