Michael Walzer on Political Action

The question at hand is not willful immorality or amorality. The moral philosopher writes in vain for the public figure who is indifferent to moral concerns. Walzer's fear is directed toward the person who possesses moral values which he or she desires to live up to, but who in the course of public office (whether elective or as a civil servant) will at some point be forced to choose the least of evils. Even the least of evils is an evil; can any moral person choose a position in which this choice must be made?

Machiavelli is famous, or infamous, for arguing that the ends justify the means. It is less familiar that he raised the question of whether good ends could be achieved in circumstances where only evil means would suffice to gain them. In The Discourses, he considered the problem of instituting sweeping reform in a "corrupt republic," and concluded that it could be done only by someone siezing dictatorial a

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110 miners. This episode produces two quite different sorts of moral issues. One, the one more frequently addressed, is that of individual moral obligations within an organization. Should Inspector Scanlan, who had authority to order the mine closed, have done so, even though he feared that he would simply be replaced by a laxer official, one who would not even pressure superiors as Scanlan had done? The other moral issue--perhaps ultimately more important to the morally conscious public official--is why the system as a whole failed, and what could have been done to prevent it. The apportioning of blame after the fact, or even the accepting of blame after the fact, is the coldest of comfort to the victims. The diffuse public hostility toward politicians and "the system" as a whole reflects the latter concern; what rightly angers people is less that individuals take or evade blame than that that which should be done is not done. Mines explode, airliners crash, nations blunder into wars, because the diffusion of responsibility (in the practical even more than the narrowly moral sense) prevents necessary measures from being taken. Now, it was in precisely the diffusion of responsibility, in the form of a corresponding
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2256
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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