On Virtue, Personal and Public
I do hope you’ll read James’s discussion of public servants who can’t live up to their private commitments:
What I’m angling for here is simple: a basic public consensus that if you sleep around on your spouse you are a bad person, and to hell with your future in politics, because we still have enough talent in America to replace you with someone who isn’t a bad person and is nonetheless capable of being a “gifted” and “dedicated” public servant. [Quote marks Americanized by me]
I worry, though, that the peculiar demands and rewards of politics might filter out the sort of talent that James and I hope would be available.
I’m rather worried about the opposite: that the sort of life an elected official leads is one that no good and self-reflective person would ever choose for themselves. At the minimum, I’m moved by Plato’s contention that the only reason a good man would try to lead is fear of being governed by his inferior.
On a side note (since I assume James is reading), I suspect Nussbaum intended to address the matter of Spitzer’s family via deliberate understatement, and leave it at that, since his family wasn’t the topic of the piece. She’s not really one to be at a loss for words.
— Justin · May 8, 06:39 PM · #
That is, the opposite of what James thinks.
— Justin · May 8, 06:40 PM · #
Justin, your concern sounds super-valid too, so here’s another case of both/and. As for Nussbaum, I think she’s trying to privatize certain kinds of harm to third parties (i.e. wives) caused by the otherwise harmless consensual transactions of first and second parties (i.e. husbands and mistresses, hookers, etc.) — the better to claim that sexual ethics and mores are utterly beyond the purview of public law and opprobrium.
— James · May 8, 08:08 PM · #
Can the harm to the wives be assumed, though? Isn’t there a common conception that aome of these womem condone their husbands’ behavior, or at least tolerate it, because they see their marriages as power alliances?
— Dave Hunter · May 9, 05:31 PM · #
I think what we have a politician’s questionable private behavior is a window into their general view of ethics and obligations, albeit an imperfect proxy of this ethic. Let’s assume for a minute that out of an individual’s ethical stance flow certain behaviors in both the private and public sphere, with some assumed correlation between the two. Is it possible that certain ethical worldviews might make for individuals that are simultaneously good politicians and poor spouses?
For example, let’s take a politician who cheats on his wife under the assumption that it does not matter because she will not find out. What we have is a window into his implicit worldview regarding the command of some higher order ethics on his life. This worldview seems to imply a view that a behavior is only wrong if it the pain inflicted exceeds the pleasure of the act (a utilitarian ethical stance… let’s say in contrast to a virtue ethics stance). In a public sphere, what should this ethical stance imply for his behavior? We can think examples of where this view might lead to questionable leadership behavior. For example, this could make for a politician that thinks he/she ought to be able to do anything that maximizes his/her gain (e.g. taking money, cheating his constituents for personal gain) as long as they do not find out.
But is it possible to imagine a more ‘positive’ collective outcome, when we picture this politician putting some collective gain over desire to adhere to a certain personal virtuous behavior? Let’s take the example of coercing (through force or threat) the leader of another nation into avoiding some type of military attack on his/her constituencies. In this example, the principle of maximizing collective gain through a non-virtuous personal act (coercion) could emerge from a similar ethic displayed in the private sexual affair (though with a more widely determine set of constituents to gain from the behavior, rather than primarily personal gain in the sexual act). Let’s contrast this to the behavior that might emerge out of a virtue ethic stance, where this coercive personal behavior is shunned in this negotiation the other leader, thus perhaps increasingly the likelihood of the attack. Again, this is a narrow application of a virtue ethic, but I don’t think that response is impossible to imagine
While not echoing Nussbaum’s argument that we should not care about private behavior, I do wonder if the personal ethical stances that correspond to being what we consider an ‘effective politician’ are the same as those that correspond what we consider to be a ‘good spouse’ (or other personal ethical behaviors of interest). This might suggest a tradeoff between the two meaning we cannot might not be able to have the best of both worlds, and thus meaning a need to more clearly define what IS important to us to have in a politician.
— peter b · May 9, 07:46 PM · #
oops… i meant to say in the last sentence that, “This might suggest a tradeoff between the two, meaning that we might not be able to have the best of both worlds, and thus calling for more clarity with what we consider important in our politicians behaviors.”
— peter b · May 9, 07:50 PM · #