LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Political Ethics: Problems
built 212 days ago
Because of a lack of strong instrumental rationality, Confucius only symbolically handles his problems with political practice. From a purely ethical point of view, existent historical systems become the means for realizing an essentially ethical rather than a political ideal. The existent system provides him with a set of behavioral rules for projecting his ethical conceptions. A lack of the political dimension is equivalent to the exclusion of the first parameters of these three: the political, the moral-behavioral and the ethical-subjective. That the relation between the remaining two parameters can be more exactly measured is the special significance of the Confucian text: its lack of the political aspect allows for the disclosure of a strong ethical dimension.
Source:
How do the hard facts of political responsibility shape and constrain the demands of ethical life? That question lies at the heart of the problem of “dirty hands” in public life. Those who exercise political power often feel they must act in ways which would otherwise be considered immoral: indeed, paradoxically, they sometimes feel that it would be immoral of them not to perform or condone such acts as killing or lying. John Parrish offers the first wide-ranging account of how this important philosophical problem emerged and developed, tracing it – and its proposed solutions – from ancient Greece through the Enlightenment. His central argument is that many of our most familiar concepts and institutions – from Augustine’s interiorized ethics, to Hobbes’s sovereign state, to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” understanding of the modern commercial economy – were designed partly as responses to the ethical problem of dirty hands in public life.
Source:
The question of “good works” itself diverges from the traditions of political ethics, and is regarded as highly problematic by some, namely: What are the different ways of witness through which God’s justice reaches into politics? This brief essay can hardly do justice to the questions—this reflection is part of a research project--but it addresses one of the most pressing questions of political theory: how is political action is possible.
Source:
This volume investigates the causes of the political, economic, and moral problems of today's Africa and provides a framework for the reconstruction of modern African states. The author focuses on the interaction between religion and politics throughout history and on the role of the Church in postcolonial Africa. In order to develop a basis for African political and religious ethics, he uses an interdisciplinary approach that draws from political theory, history, and social and religious ethics. Among the issues discussed are ethnicity, mismanagement, corruption, and the African concept of power.
Source:
In contemporary moral philosophy and political theory, this particular kind of publicly driven moral dilemma has gone by the name of the problem of “dirty hands” in public life. Michael Walzer proposed the term in an influential article, drawing on the title of Jean-Paul Sartre’s drama of moral dilemmas in revolutionary politics.1 But the image this metaphor evokes is more ancient, recalling a time when the ideas of morality and cleanliness, as well as immorality and uncleanliness, remained closely linked. Sometimes the hands are bloody, as in Pilate’s washing his hands of the decision to crucify a Nazarene troublemaker, or Lady Macbeth’s obsessive scrubbing away of a long-since-vanished stain. But murder is not the only crime that has sometimes seemed necessary to political actors: it often seems ... that one must lie, betray, compromise, abandon, mislead, manipulate, coerce, or otherwise act in ways that, were one not to claim one’s political responsibilities as an excuse, would seem thoroughly vicious and corrupt.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Problems