48 Moral Minimalism in the Political Realm ∗ STELIOS VIRVIDAKIS There are various diverging answers to the traditional questions concerning the correct assessment of the relations between morality and politics. From Plato and Aristotle to Macchiavelli, Hobbes and Kant, philosophers have elab- orated different conceptions of these relations which could be interpreted as involving a form of subordination of politics to morality, or, on the contrary, of morality to politics. Contemporary liberal thinkers are usually suspicious of any talk about the need for a “moralization” of political life, to the extent that it may hide an objectionable commitment to the promotion of some substan- tive ideal of the good as a collective political goal. However, they often admit that they do respect and sustain a kind of political morality conforming to the values of liberal democracies1. The political morality they are ready to defend is sometimes associated with what is characterized as a minimalist approach to moral issues. The aim of this paper is to cast light on some aspects and versions of this approach, the interest of which goes beyond the concerns of liberal political philosophers, and to try to cast light on the more or less “thin” moral concepts which constitute its core. Minimalism here implies a substan- tial restriction or attenuation of the demands of morality and not a negative ∗Earlier versions of this paper were presented to different audiences in Herakleion, Tokyo, Nanjing and Athens. I am grateful to many friends and colleagues for their questions and sug- gestions and more particularly, to Dionyssis Anapolitanos, Georgia Apostolopoulou, Moon Such Byeon, Myrto Dragona-Monachou, Wolfgang Ertl, Anthony Hatzimoysis, Takashi Iida, Vasso Kindi, Patricia Kitcher, Philip Kitcher, Chrys Mantzavinos, Filimon Peonidis, Stathis Psillos, Pav- los Sourlas, Yannis Stephanou, and Gu Su. 1 I am not interested in dwelling on arguments supporting political liberalism. The issues that I intend to emphasize are related to discussions probably concerning metaethics and moral philosophy more than political philosophy or politics. 860 MORAL MINIMALISM IN THE POLITICAL REALM 861 stance of indifference or rejection of moral values or principles, which would amount to some form of thorough-going amoralism.2 It will be argued that the normative model to be adopted should include both deontological and consequentialist components, that we may want to ascribe a priority to the former, and that its minimalist character will depend mostly on the construal of its central principles and on the way they are supposed to be implemented. Let us begin with a few introductory remarks regarding the interpreta- tion of the concepts of ethics and politics on which we intend to concentrate. In fact, there are alternative construals of the notions of the moral and of the ethical, on the one hand, and of the political, on the other, which one should eventually take into account. Here, we will begin our discussion by seeking a preliminary specification of their content allowing us to get afirst picture of their complex relations. Thus, morality could be conceived as consisting of a set of norms for the assessment and the guidance of one’s actions, insofar as their outcomes affect not only oneself but also the lives of other persons and sentient creatures. It should be noted that, although the terms “moral- ity” and “ethics” are often taken to be coextensive, the word “ethical” is used by many philosophers to refer to broader issues regarding the good life and the values that constitute it, or are conducive to it, while the word “moral” is employed in the more narrow sense of what conforms to a set of abstract principles regulating one’s conduct.3 Morality, as we understand it in the modern era, comprises norms entailing duties and obligations, while ethics is interpreted as involving a richer set of concrete evaluative properties, includ- 2 For a conception of forms of ethical minimalism which involve egoism or even nihilism, see Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, 5-6. Of course, the term “minimalism” is widely used in many areas. The notion of minimalism is usually associated with styles of modernist visual art and music, but the idea has also become fashionable in philos- ophy, especially in the philosophy of language and in relation with a certain conception of truth, discussed by Pascal Engel in his Truth, Chesham: Acumen, 2002, 65-98. 3 This distinction between the “ethical”(ethisch) and the “moral” (moralisch) is elabo- rated in the writings of Jürgen Habermas. The notion of the moral is supposed to cap- ture the proper, other-regarding goals of right action. See the discussion in Rainer Forst, “Ethik und Moral”, in Lutz Wingert & Klaus Günther (Hrg.), Die Öffentlichkeit der Vernunft und die Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001. See also Stephen Darwall, Philosophical Ethics, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998 and Kieran Setiya, Reasons with- out Rationalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, 2. More recently, Ronald Dworkin has proposed to use the terms “ethics” and “morality”, to refer respectively to “the study of how to live well” and to “the study of how to treat other people”. See his Justice for Hedgehogs, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 19, 191 and passim. 862 STELIOS VIRVIDAKIS ing character traits, that is virtues and vices. This distinction is often sum- marized in the contrast between “thin” and “thick” concepts, such as, on the one hand, good, just or right, and on the other, generous, honest, courageous, magnanimous, jealous, cruel, etc.4 There is a clear analogy with the opposi- tion put forth by Hegel, between Moralität -a system of principles adopted by the moral agent-, and Sittlichkeit -morality embodied in social institutions-, although the two distinctions are not equivalent in meaning. In any case, we are not going to proceed by taking for granted the details of the distinction between the meanings of the terms “morality” and “ethics”, to which we may return in our concluding reflections. However, even if one is occasionally willing to speak more loosely, and use the two terms inter- changeably, one should not fail to take into consideration the deep going dif- ferences between modern and ancient philosophical conceptions of morality, the paradigms of which are, respectively, Kant’s deontology and utilitarian- ism, and Aristotle’s ethics.5 It is generally agreed that Greek philosophers, who lay emphasis on the thick ethical dimension, clearly espouse the prior- ity of the “good” over the “right”, and that the opposite is true in the case of modern thinkers who employ mostly thin notions. Actually, according to the analysis that has prevailed in contemporary moral theory, the priority of the good, construed in an abstract, thin sense, is also attributed to teleolog- ical and consequentialist accounts of moral norms, put forth in the modern era, and the clear priority of the right over the good is thought to characterize only those who defend deontological views. The rightness of an action, or of a rule of action, depends on the amount of non moral value (“goodness”) realized in the states of affairs brought about or aimed at by this action, or the rule to which it conforms.6 4 See the discussion in Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, 129, 140, 143-145, 162, 193, 200 and in Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1994, passim. 5 See Elizabeth Anscombe "Modern Moral Philosophy", Philosophy 33, reprinted in Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. III : Ethics, Religion and Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed., Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1984, Williams, op.cit. 6 Charles Larmore criticizes philosophers who speak of a priority of the good over the right in modern teleological and consequentialist theories in his monograph The Morals of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 19-40, 22. A characteristic target of his criticism is William Frankena, (Ethics, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1973, 14-17) and extends to John Rawls’, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971, 30-33. Although I agree with the main idea behind’s Larmore’s argument to the effect that such a priority is primarily found in ancient ethics, I think that there is a clear sense in which we may acknowledge MORAL MINIMALISM IN THE POLITICAL REALM 863 Now, politics can be taken to refer to a set of practices aiming at the effec- tive satisfaction of needs and at the prevention and the eventual adjudication of conflicts among the members of a society, or, at a higher level, among dif- ferent societies. Moreover, we often describe politics as an art, rather than as a science, of governing people and of managing the central institutions of organized, complex communities. Thus, it is generally accepted that, at least in Western liberal societies, politics is conceived as “primarily concerned with public order and safety and the protection of freedom”.7 Even in different cul- tures and in distant historical periods, which present us with ambitious and far reaching political ideals, deriving from religious, metaphysical and ethical accounts of social life –what Rawls describes as “comprehensive” doctrines or conceptions– the fundamental function of political activity in securing the peaceful coexistence of citizens seems to comefirst. Of course, such basic political activity may be complemented by much richer and more ambitious “policies” aspiring to the realization of different conceptions of the good. In fact, one may be interested in the moral appraisal, both of political activity in its more general form and of the particular policies designed and imple- mented by governments and political parties.