Can Our Politics Be Moral?
It seems such an odd question. If it strikes us as odd, it’s probably because we’ve become inured to the corruption and duplicity of our current exceedingly-polarized politics. Nowadays, when we think of moral , we probably think there’s an ought hidden in there, as in “we ought to do this, and we ought not do that.” We say to ourselves, “Folks who think or do this are moral, while folks who think or do that are immoral.” That’s conventional wisdom (though for many it is more conventional than wisdom), and each of us quite likely has at least some inchoate sense of the sorts of ideas and behaviors that we would judge to be moral or not. Politics, on the other hand, is about gaining and exercising power through the apparatus of government in order to achieve certain ends, outcomes, purposes, or objectives sought by citizens. In a civil community or society where many people live together under a government, unanimous agreement is extremely rare because the objectives vary; d