Politics Recovered by Sleat Matt

Author:Sleat, Matt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC

Politics Versus Impartiality

A great many factors in Western traditions encourage us to make these connections and distinctions among motive, intent, and impartiality.8 The Reformation was driven in part by the rejection of a conception of divine grace that suggested that it could be bought in the form of indulgences or earned through works. Both routes raised the problem of whether, if you are doing something only in order to be saved, you are doing it for reasons that an omniscient God will or ought to reward. In this tradition, it looks as if the sole legitimate motivational structure we can endorse in our relations with God is one that is utterly abject and selfless. For many, not worshipping God for the right reasons is as bad as (perhaps worse than) not worshipping him at all.

Are we expecting something similar when we worship at the altar of the impartial state? Clearly, the Seven Principles of Public Life developed by the United Kingdom’s Committee for Standards in Public Life (and informing codes of ethical conduct around the world) seem to suggest this expectation: the list begins with “selflessness.”9 It does so because in the West, perhaps more specifically in Anglo-American and northern European Protestant cultures, our conception of bureaucratic orders demands a sharp separation between the motives that the agent may have for doing the job and those that are brought to bear in decision making under the allocated powers of office. There is a right way to take the decision, and there are a range of motivational components that need to be excluded from that process. The impartial state demands purity of heart in the exercise of judgment. But this emphasis on impartiality obscures a major dimension of political life.

Rothstein’s good-governance/impartiality-based understanding of corruption depends (perhaps not sufficiently explicitly) on a line being drawn between political decision making and the impartial administration of policy. He accepts that political decisions are not impartial and (by definition) cannot be. They are not necessarily self-interested, but in them someone often, as Bernard Williams puts it, “wins.”10 People win office by appeals to partial and sectional interests as well as to general considerations. True, the struggle for power is constrained in part by rules and procedures that define the process, but these components do not determine its outcome. Competition for office inevitably involves conflicting commitments and judgments—not just conflicts of preferences but value conflicts that can run extremely deep. Once someone is in office, his or her political decisions are affected by a range of considerations in which impartiality may play a greater or lesser role, but underlying the exercise of political office is some sense that in winning that person has the opportunity (perhaps a mandate or even an obligation) to pursue some ends, values, and goods rather than others. And if we are inclined to insist on separating politically partisan policy making from the impartial administration of decisions, we need to be aware that the line between political decisions and administrative decisions cannot

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