Personal and Political Ethics
Insofar as we are human, we are faced with two problems: we must live well and we must live together. Living well is more important; living together is more essential, because only together can we live and live well.
The Death of Socrates by Jacques Louis-David, oil on canvas, 1787. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERSONAL ETHICS AND POLITICAL ETHICS
The moral sphere, understood as anything that is not amoral, is equal in extension to that of freedom. Private life as well as professional, economic, and political life are equally moral realities. And thus, together with personal ethics there are also professional ethics, economic ethics, social ethics, and political ethics. I will limit my focus here to the relationship between personal ethics and political ethics. As I understand it, personal ethics concerns a person’s conduct as it is ordered towards the good of human life taken as a whole. It is worth asking whether political society has this same aim.
It is easy to see the importance of this issue if one considers, first, that a person’s life and ethical development presuppose certain social and political conditions, according to which the state may, by means of coercion, require or prohibit certain behaviors; and second, that personal liberty is one of these conditions—one of the most important. This is why freedom is rightly seen as a fundamental and inalienable right of the person. Thus, the state’s use of its coercive power is a rather delicate matter that should be based on criteria of justice, dignity, and practicality—criteria that should be rigorously specified and applied. If this is not done, great personal and political evils will arise.
TWO INADEQUATE SOLUTIONS: ARISTOTLE’S POLIS AND THE MODERN POLITICIZATION OF ETHICS
An inadequate way of resolving the problem consists in thinking that political ethics should be an exact equivalent of personal ethics. This is the type of solution that Aristotle provides for our problem. For Aristotle, the ethical perfection of man is developed and expressed completely and thoroughly within the political realm. The polis and its laws tend toward and, in a way, cause the formation of the citizen’s ethical virtues. Hence, the knowledge of what makes the polis good and fair depends on the knowledge of what makes a good and happy life for the individual: ethical virtues are also criteria and objectives of political laws. The good man is equated with the good citizen, in the sense that the individual, insofar as he or she is ordered toward his or her own perfection, is also ordered toward the polis. This political theory contains notable strengths. It is indeed true that the genesis of virtues and their moral education require a particular form of human community that is unified by a conception of the good, by a common tradition, and by certain shared ethical paradigms. Moreover, it is equally true that social and political relationships, along with their organizational and technical dimensions, will inevitably have an expressive dimension as well. They always express certain conceptions of the human person and of the good, and they propose models that transmit and reinforce in citizens the sense of their identity and the value of their membership to the group.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that the Aristotelian political model, in its original formulation, would prove unsuccessful today for at least three reasons. The first is that with Christianity, the concept of the person enters into play, and the dignity and freedom of the person ultimately rests in a sphere of values that transcends politics. This breaks the organic link between the individual and the polis. As Mario D’Addio puts it, “The Greco-Roman ideal of a political community, which seamlessly merges religious ethical requirements with the more strictly political, becomes impossible after the Christian experience.”
Second, today there exists a certain pluralism of conceptions of the human good, so it seems that the political order should look primarily to guarantee to each person and group the conditions of a free, peaceful, and just coexistence. And third, Aristotle’s political ideal would entail an unbearable violation of personal freedom and personal morality; it would create a situation of police vigilance and of manifestly unjust governmental interference; it would endow the state with the function of acting as the source and the judge of personal morality—a function and competence it does not possess.
Let us call another inadequate (and currently very widespread) solution the politicization of ethics. This represents the opposite extreme to the position just described, and historically it was born as a reaction to that position. The main goal of this second solution is to avoid intolerance, that is, to exclude radical and definitive assessments of personal ethics, which are used to justify an illegitimate use of political coercion. The means adherents have chosen for achieving this goal consists in redefining the object of ethics, claiming that it must deal solely with those rules of justice that are necessary to guarantee coexistence and social collaboration. Everyone would regulate his or her own personal (or private) life according to personal choices outside of the scope of morality. This problem is certainly important, but it is not well resolved. The distinction between the public and private spheres, or between personal morality and political morality, is relevant and necessary in relation to the powers of the state and of criminal law; however, it is not always easy to establish. Now if that distinction means leaving the private sphere out of the philosophical search for truth, as it inevitably does in the politicization of ethics, then it makes the mistake of expelling from ethical reflection what regards the human good. The latter is then dissolved into a set of private choices that would be equally valid despite being contradictory. Because of the effects produced, this solution ends up turning against itself. An ethical vacuum arises from it, and this generates attitudes and habits that are inconsistent with the rules of collaboration and of impartiality that political ethics considers universally binding. The lack of valid ethical motivation leads to the demands of justice being perceived as an external constraint that exasperates, with the consequent situations of anomie or normlessness.
The politicization of ethics is today one of the elements that hinders an adequate understanding of personal ethics. When, for example, from the principle that the police should not intervene if there are unchaste sexual practices taking place at home that are not disturbing anyone, one concludes that such behaviors correspond to personal choices about which ethics has nothing to say, then one has missed the difference between ethical reflection and the penal code. This leads to the same error as the first solution, but now taken in a different direction.
The first solution sacrificed freedom at the altar of the truth of the human good; the politicization of ethics, however, sacrifices truth at the altar of freedom. Both solutions presuppose an unsustainable anthropological thesis, namely, that the human, as a being endowed with intellectual knowledge and freedom, contains within himself or herself a contradiction that can be solved only by sacrificing one of the two terms.
It is one thing to assert that whoever says “A” and whoever says “not A” must be equally respected and not discriminated against by virtue of their thought. It is quite another to say that both positions are equally true, or that philosophical reflection has nothing to say about them. Moral skepticism does not follow from the need to respect everyone; in fact, moral skepticism is ill-suited for providing a foundation for such respect. Nothing can be established upon skepticism.
THE FORMAL DISTINCTION BETWEEN PERSONAL ETHICS AND POLITICAL ETHICS
The solution that seems the most appropriate is very old, although it has gone almost unnoticed in the history of philosophical thought. Suggested by Thomas Aquinas in the opening paragraphs of his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, it is a different approach to the one discussed throughout the commentary, which is that of Aristotle. Saint Thomas clearly states that within ethics, not everything is political, nor is everything personal or an application of personal ethics. Ethics has three branches: personal ethics, familial ethics, and political ethics. Each of them is moral knowledge, but each of these parts has a specificity regarding its formal object, that is, each has its own logic.
The distinction between personal ethics and political ethics is based on the way in which political society forms a whole: there are actions of political society that result from the collaboration among people in view of the good of the political whole (the common political good); at the same time individuals and groups within political society retain a field of their own ends. Personal ethics concerns all the actions performed by the individual as such, including those concerning political society (e.g., paying taxes), evaluating their consistency with the good of human life taken as a whole, that is, evaluating their morality, which also includes the virtue of justice.
On the other hand, political ethics concerns the actions taken by political society; that is, it directs the acts by which political society gives itself a form and a constitutional, legal, administrative, and economic organization. It evaluates this form and organization from the standpoint of its own goal for the political community, namely, the political common good. Political ethics is ill-equipped to determine the morality of the actions of the individual as such: rather, this is the task of personal ethics.
Actions of the individual can, however, also be subject to political ethics, but only from the standpoint of their illegality, not from the standpoint of their immorality. Political ethics is concerned with the proper ordering of the life of the community, which requires that goods and personal behavior that are of public interest are protected and promoted by the state, and that personal behaviors that attempt to oppose these goods are also declared illegal. It is the task of political ethics to determine, in view of the political common good and considering all concrete circumstances, which goods should be safeguarded and how, and what negative ethical behavior should be banned and how. In summary, political ethics, in addition to determining the morality or immorality of the actions of the political community (for example, of a civil law or governmental decision) also establishes the illegality of those ethically negative behaviors that threaten the goods whose protection is required by the political common good.
The structure and division of moral theology according to the duties of the human being to God, to himself or herself, to others, and to society, greatly hampers the right approach to the problems of political morality, and this accounts for why moral theology remains caught in a loop today. The duties of man to society are, in fact, duties of personal ethics, usually derived from legal (general) justice. Political ethics is not concerned with the duties of the individual to society, but with what the acts of political society should be. Political ethics evaluates the relationship between the form that society gives itself and the common political good that is its reason for being.
View of the Acropolis from the Pnyx: the official meeting place of the Athenian Democratic Assembly. Painted by Rudolph Müller, 1863. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Jacques Maritain proposed a criterion of distinction between personal ethics and political ethics that is closer to what I argue here. Maritain’s proposal was based on the distinction between the transcendent ultimate end and the bonum vitae civilis, or the good of civil life. His proposal, however, included the defect of having two different criteria to judge the same actions, and judging such actions from different standpoints (a kind of double standard), when in fact personal ethics and political ethics judge different actions: those of the individual, and those specific to political society.
The distinction we have just established might be challenged by the argument that ethics is always personal because it is concerned with free actions, which are always actions of individuals, while society cannot be the subject of a free action. Thus, moral or immoral entities would be, for example, the person or persons responsible for a law or an administrative act, and only secondarily and derivatively the law or the administrative act itself.
Faced with this objection, it should be noted that my distinction does not deny that free actions are actions of one person or a group of persons. Neither does it deny the personal fault of those who make an unjust law or administrative act. It claims, however, that there is a distinction between the political and individual dimension in which free human activity operates. To fully equate both dimensions would be a mistake that could have either hyper-individualistic or collectivist outcomes. For example, in the case that a parliament enacts a tax law that is contrary to the common good, voting officials are morally culpable if they believe the law unjust. They might not be culpable if they think in good faith that the law is just, and the law proves to be harmful to the common good only in the long term. Now, regardless of the personal morality of the officials, such a law has an autonomy, consistency, morality, and effects that all remain even after 150 years of its enactment, after all who voted for it have died. If such a law is harmful to the common good, then it is so even if the officials had not realized that it was unjust. If the economic and social circumstances should change so that the law becomes advantageous to the common good, then the law is just and should not be changed, despite the enactors’ evil act. The law can thus be judged independently.
Consider, further, that the legislature is collegial and works according to the principle of political representation. The laws are not those of the individual officials but of the state and, as such, are judged according to the common good. By means of a parliament elected by the people, it is the political community that gives itself the law: it determines how the community should live and organize itself, which is the subject matter of political ethics. And as already stated, this does not deny that the acts of the officials also possess a personal morality (such officials are honest if their work sincerely seeks the common good, and not when their personal or partisan interest leads them to hold what they know to be harmful to the common good). At this point, we only wish to deny that there is a complete identity between both dimensions of morality, the personal and the political, and we argue that between them there exists a formal difference, which, however, does not undermine the profound unity of ethics.
From the distinction between personal ethics and political ethics, the following consequences arise:
1. No behavior can possess a double moral standard—one for personal ethics and another for political ethics. It would be wrong to think, for example, that lying should be illegal for individuals and legal for the government or state. There is not a double moral standard, because the same phenomenon can never be regulated at the same time and in the same way by personal ethics and by political ethics. Each one of these two parts of ethics has a formally distinct object, and each has formally different moral dimensions.
2. In performing its task, personal ethics and political ethics maintain a close relationship with one another. For example, political ethics could not evaluate the morality of a law dealing with drugs without considering what personal ethics teaches about drug use. Similarly, personal ethics could not specifically determine a person’s duties of justice without knowing the laws of the state to which this person belongs, since just laws give rise to personal moral obligations. Additionally, there are behaviors that are only ethically positive or negative because of the law of the state.
3. To the same extent that political society is ordered toward the good of the people, political ethics depends on personal ethics. Thus, political ethics can never consider as good from the ethical-political perspective a law that promotes an ethically negative personal behavior, nor could it permit a law that prohibits an ethically mandatory personal behavior or that mandates a behavior that a person cannot perform without incurring moral guilt.
4. For establishing that a behavior must be prohibited by the state, however, it is not sufficient to show that is ethically negative, as it is universally admitted that not all morally wrong acts should be punished by the state. It must be demonstrated that such behavior, in addition to being negative from the perspective of personal ethics, is detrimental to the common good, and that the same common good does not provide any reason whatsoever to advise tolerance here and now. For the same reason, it is also not fitting to conclude that the fact that the state does not penalize that behavior means it is ethically good, or at least not negative.
Some examples and applications can better clarify what I am saying. When a person raises the issue of whether to pay all or part of his or her taxes, this is a problem of personal ethics, which must be assessed also in light of just civil laws. But when the issue arises of whether the state should continue with the current tax system or whether it should make major reforms, we have a problem of political ethics that should be evaluated according to the requirements of the common good. A problem that concerns political ethics is, for example, evaluating how school or healthcare systems are organized. Political ethics is not competent, by contrast, to deal with the morality of prostitution, since it is an issue that falls neither to the parliament nor to the state. But presupposing that such behavior is immoral, political ethics must, in conformity with the common good, evaluate the stance that the state must assume with respect to this phenomenon. And depending on the circumstances, it may be politically just to grant a certain tolerance, provided that it always prosecutes organizations that force people into prostitution.
There may be circumstances that warrant tolerance, such as the cohabitation of a couple who are not married. Political ethics, however, considers out of bounds any codification of these de facto unions or their legal assimilation with marriage, as this would assign a public (social) interest to something that corresponds to exclusively private concerns and is not subject to legal regulation aimed at ensuring the social function of marriage. Those who choose a lifestyle that does not aim to contribute to the social interest cannot reasonably claim recognition and legal guardianship of a public nature that is based on such social interests. Naturally, people who live in a de facto union enjoy all rights and services that the state offers to its citizens and have at their disposal all the institutions and benefits guaranteed by private law. What political ethics does not allow is for these people to enjoy the rights and benefits of the legal institution that they reject. In our thesis that the state cannot approve negative behavior from the standpoint of personal ethics, it may be argued, for example, that a law decriminalizing small lies or small domestic quarrels could be a good law. Such an argument would not make much sense, because it does not respect the distinction between the personal and political spheres. Small lies and small domestic quarrels are not relevant to the political common good—that is, they are not within the purview of the state—and therefore, the civil law does not deal with such behavior: with respect to them, the state must simply be silent.
Naturally, if the law is silent about these actions, then it is clear that they are not prohibited by law and, therefore, it is arguably implied that they are permitted. It may, however, be unfair for the state to explicitly approve them, because that would mean that the existence of a private and personal sphere comes by grant from the state (totalitarianism), when in fact the existence of a personal and private sphere of citizens, in which the state cannot intervene, is a natural right that the state is obliged to recognize and respect. In any case, it is clear that when personal behavior gains public relevance, as seen in instances like homicide or serious violence within the family, such behavior ceases to be private.
Political ethics must also question how and to what extent the political common good should express the ultimate end of persons (and the broader social good). For insofar as we are human, we are faced with two problems: we must live well and we must live together. Living well is more important; living together is more essential, because only together can we live and live well. But living well includes dimensions that are transcendent with respect to our living together and thus they cannot be obtained coercively—though they may be facilitated. To respond to the problems that arise from the entanglement of the two requirements, living well and living together, one must venture into the realm of political ethics, a terrain that extends beyond the scope of these reflections.[1]
ENDNOTE
[1] The curious reader can find our position in Ángel Rodríguez Luño, Introducción a la ética política (Madrid: Rialp, 2021).
Ángel Rodríguez Luño, “Personal and Political Ethics,” The Vital Center 2, no.1 (Winter 2024): 9–15.
