BOOK SUMMARY:
POLITICS AND MORALITY
by Susan Mendus (2009)

Have you ever wondered what the role of morality in politics is?  Or have you fully embraced the modern tendency to view all things political with the utmost skepticism, cynicism even!  Some are even mildly amused that these 2 words are ever mentioned in the same breath.

Fear not.  Apparently, Professor Mendus had written just the book for you.  Susan Mendus is Professor of Political Philosophy and a member of the Morrell Centre for Toleration at the University of York.

In this book, she seeks to address the tension between the personal morality of politicians and the public duties that political office entails. She explores whether the popular perception of politicians being lacking in integrity hides the real picture of underlying moral goodness.

She first defines integrity as involving a willingness to stand by one's most fundamental moral commitments and showed how this could be applied to the political sphere.

She examines the 3 reasons why people think politics is incompatible with morality:
1.  Unlike morality, political judgement is based on utilitarian calculations.
2.  Politics and morality having separate, but equally ultimate realms of value is an unrecognized pluralistic fact.
3.  Politics involves the difficulty of reconciling the demands of different social roles.

Her conclusion is that the  moral difficulties in politics are by no means unique to politicians.  They are the same moral challenges that each one of us faces daily in this complex modern world.  So, not only the politicians, but all of us run the risk of losing our integrity.

To that extent, we are all politicians!