The ethics of power

Terrorism is often executed by groups, organizations and non-state actors. However, terrorism can also be used by governments, states and state agencies. This should lead us to look at the delicate issue of politics and the boundaries of power, or the ethics of using power in politics. Politics and politicians have a bad name everywhere, especially in America. “All politics is applesauce,” said Will Rogers, speaking with the voice of the people.1 “Dirty politics” is taken to be almost a redundancy. In the popular mind, the whole tribe of scurvy politicians consists only of able rascals and honest fools. “I am not a politician and my other habits are good,” said Artemus Ward, an American humorist of the mid-nineteenth century.2 One hundred years later, the poet E.E. Cummings wrote, “a politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man.”3 The popular image of every office-holder is that he hires his relatives and extends favors, at public expense, to his cronies. He eats at the public trough, lining his pockets during his tenure of office. He not only receives an undeservedly high salary, which he himself periodically raises, but also enjoys many perquisites. If he does not accept outright bribes, he diverts campaign contributions to his personal use, and adds to his swollen income by paid public appearances. After leaving office he steps into a lucrative job in the private sector, and gathers fabulous royalties for his memoirs. All these things happen, to be sure, but with nothing like the frequency imagined. The politician is widely seen as power-hungry, one who would do anything to get power. As long ago as Hamlet he was described as one who would circumvent God. In America, because power is hedged around by democratic safeguards, the politician is seen rather as office-hungry, a measure of power being only one of the perquisites of office. The lust for power, said Spinoza, can change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets.4 The Iron Chancellor, Bismarck, who was in a better position to know than Spinoza, agreed; politics, he said, ruins the character. For Spinoza, the lust for power, though no better than other lusts, is no worse. What is degrading about political passions, he held, is not their object but simply that they are passions. In our neo-romanticist perspectives, passion is praised, but power is viewed as intrinsically evil. It is needed at all only because of human failings; its acquisition and exercise is also a failing in itself. Rationality sees power instead as merely the capacity to bring

about certain results, and therefore to be assessed in terms of what the results are and how they were brought about, rather than being condemned beforehand. The contempt for politicians overlooks the fact that the moral level of political behavior cannot rise above its source in social life in general. No politician has ever bribed himself, a member of the Cabinet once pointed out. If politics is dirty, it is because society gives it dirty work to do. Politics is the art of the practical in policy, and practicality demands that when there is opposition – and there always is – one must either crush it or make concessions to it. Practicality without compromise defines dictatorship. Democracy is the way of compromise, and whoever compromises is thereby compromised. In politics, the high principles which insist on all or nothing at all get nothing at all, save the dubious satisfaction of looking down on practical politics as unprincipled. The politician is a scapegoat recurrently driven into the wilderness to carry off the sins of the democratic way. All politics consists in acquiring, exercising and maintaining power. Power itself does not corrupt. It is not the tempter pursuing the politician; the politician pursues temptation. The temptation is for the politician to use all available means to attain his or her ends, to seek and to use power, therefore, in a way that dissociates it from all other values. It is this that constitutes power politics: treating power as the sole or the supreme value in organized social life. The moral issue is whether power is to be appraised in the light of other values or is to be taken to define the domain of value. So-called Realpolitik does not embody realism but a vulgarized pragmatism. The pragmatism of William James and John Dewey saw power as a means to be assessed as are other means –contextually, with reference to specific situations and the real possibilities of values attainable in those situations. In vulgar pragmatism, virtue always triumphs because triumph is regarded as the supreme virtue. Success, in its view, is “getting away with it” – crime without punishment, sin without guilt. Crime and sin belong only to failure. For vulgar pragmatism, success is both sign and substance of worth. In this view, virtue is its own reward only because reward itself defines virtue. This vulgar pragmatism is less characteristic of America than European stereotypes of America make it out to be. In the degree to which it does manifest itself, it is more likely to have an economic cast than a political one. Ideologies extolling power politics have had little impact on the American scene. In Europe many distinguished writers have dealt with political injustice: Kafka, Silone, Malraux, Koestler, Solzhenitsyn and others. American literature, with few exceptions, has focused instead on social and economic injustice, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to The Grapes of Wrath. Even here the emphasis tends to be on the emptiness of vulgar pragmatism – as in Babbitt and Death of a Salesman – rather than on the misuse of power, whether political or economic. American attitudes toward power are infected by an archaic belief in the magic of ingestion, that there are magical effects, both good and bad, of taking various substances into the body. An importance far beyond what the evidence supports is assigned to special food

and drinks, to medicines and drugs, to perfumes and other cosmetics, to tobacco and other inhalants. Advertisers do not create the preoccupation with these things but exploit it. Submission to power is popularly perceived in the perspective of ingestion. To submit is to take one’s medicine, swallow the bitter pill, eat out of one’s hand, eat dirt, eat humble pie, eat crow, lick the dust, bite the dust and swallow the insult or injury. Not to be subjected to power is to breathe the air of freedom. Widespread in both Europe and America is the notion that politics, though momentous in its consequences, is nevertheless amoral. Power is seen as a matter only of means, for ends externally and antecedently given. Politics is put in this light by the fact-value dualism of our time. According to this dualism, facts are one thing, values another. Politics deals only with facts. It concerns itself with values only as part of the facts, the given that certain people have certain values. For the amoralists, whether these values are worth having does not enter into the political process save again as the datum that political supporters or opponents deem the values worthy. Morality does not matter, only morale. The conception that politics is amoral is embodied in the dogma that you cannot legislate morality. Politics, it is said, deals only with what people do, morality focuses on what people think and feel – their intentions, conscience, sense of duty. Each half of the dogma is a half-truth; together they compound the falsehood. Action both expresses the inner life and gives it substance. Dualisms of mind and body, idle intention and mindless action, contribute little to understanding the meaningful conduct with which both politics and morality are concerned. If prejudice cannot be legislated out of existence, discrimination certainly can be, and prejudice is as much the outcome of discrimination as its source. Law cannot compel husband and wife to love one another, but every society has patterns of social control that define for that society the marital relation, within which love has found its primary place from time immemorial. Every society has defined for itself and has enacted into its laws basic moral commandments, such as those prohibiting adultery and murder. Important legal and political issues lie on the moral frontier, issues such as those concerning the right to die, contraception and abortion, deviant lifestyles, and ways of putting an end to racial, religious and sexual discrimination. In a time of rapid social change, law not only embodies the prevailing morality but also gives form to inchoate social norms. If society follows the lead of the court, a landmark decision has been made; if not, before long the decision is overruled. On a large scale, this marks the difference between revolution and rebellion. Here we see in another setting the predicament of leadership. To lead one must march ahead of one’s followers, but not so far ahead that they can no longer follow. The predicament is not easy to cope with but it is inescapable. Political leadership has ineluctably constituted moral leadership as well from Hammurabi, Moses and Justinian to Lincoln, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The fundamental error in Plato’s critique of democracy is that he fails to distinguish between good decisions in the light of agreed values and a good way of

arriving at decisions. That some people can make better decisions than others is incontestable, but this does not justify aristocracy, the rule of the best, as Plato assumed. One way of deciding may be better than another, not only because it leads more often or in the long run to better decisions, but also because the way of deciding has certain consequences of its own apart from the consequences of what is decided on. Specifically, the way of deciding shapes the character of the decision-maker. Even if a gambling system were to make money, it would also be making of its user a gambler in circumstances where there is no winning system. The welfare of the citizenry is not served by even the best of decisions if the citizenry had no part in arriving at them, as Jefferson saw and as modern existentialists have reminded us. The pursuit of happiness is ineluctably bound up with the liberty to define the pursuit. Social norms emerge from and are sustained by the political process. In the nineteenth century, the Marxist critique of ideology argued that social norms express only the interests of the ruling class from which norms can be objectively validated. In the twentieth century, a comparable criticism was made by emotivism, to the effect that value judgments express only the feelings and attitudes of the judge. For both, the question is always who is to judge rather than how the judgment is to be made. Who is to judge is always a political question; it reduces to whoever has the power. Politics negates the Kantian principle that nothing can be right for me if it is not right for everyone else in the same circumstances. The politicization of morality is revealed in its selective character. Countless refugees all over the world were resettled after World War II. There were as many Jewish refugees from Arab countries alone as there were Palestinian refugees, but the Jewish refugees were absorbed by Israel, not kept in refugee camps. If the members of the Arab League had absorbed Palestinian refugees in the same proportion to their population as Israel did, they would have taken in twenty-seven million people. Yet politicized moralists have repeatedly condemned Israel for the plight of the Palestinian refugees. Equally tell-tale is the intermittent character of political morality, which suddenly cries out against “injustices” when events turn the tables politically. From 1948 to 1967, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights were all in Arab hands. In all that time none of the Arab countries so much as mentioned aspirations to a Palestinian state (in addition to Jordan). Such aspirations acquired a moral standing as “just rights” only when the Six Day War made the goal of a Palestinian state a rallying point for continued hostilities against Israel. The bearing of ethics on politics is most frequently acknowledged with respect to procedural norms for acquiring and exercising power rather than with respect to substantive norms – what power is used for rather than how it is acquired. Morality is thought to impinge on policy only at the edges, as though corruption were the only political immorality. The content of policy is much less often subjected to ethical appraisal than whether policy was properly arrived at. What morality, as popularly conceived, asks of office-holders is little more than a conventional family life and no conflicts of interest. The chief virtues called

for are honesty and integrity, both thought of in negative terms, the avoidance of dishonesty and deception. Political morality in our time seemingly demands of politics only that whatever is done be done openly and sincerely – unless, of course, it is a question of what is done by the political enemies of the moralist. In recent years there has been a heightened awareness of public morality, in the professions as well as in government. Ethics committees have proliferated, but their concerns usually remain narrowly circumscribed. Officials must be careful how they use the moneys at their disposal, but moral considerations play little part in the policies the officials make or implement, as with arms sales or taxation. The good is often trivialized to the goody-goody. When tapes made public a President’s swearing, many Americans were more concerned with his profanity than with what he was swearing at. Morality is a matter of more than profanity. Moral concerns reach far beyond such vices as drinking, gambling and prostitution. Moral problems are seriously misrepresented if they are described as essentially conflicts between duty and desire, as though the only moral task is to resist temptation. This may be the chief task for the young; maturity requires that we learn to postpone gratification and to forego some gratifications altogether in favor of some worthy fulfillments. For political morality, the issues usually lie, not in conflicts between duty and desire, but in conflicting duties – to a constituency or to the country as a whole; to one’s class or race or sex or ethnic group or religion; to family and friends, to the family of humanity, or to future generations. To all of these there are loyalties whose compatibility with one another in all circumstances is more than can be hoped for. There are no recipes for the moral life, in the political arena or anywhere else. The moralist’s clarity of moral principle hides the ambiguity of the politician’s moral practice. Often, noble ends are sought by wholly ignoble means, as in the politics of terror. Often, humane means are used though they have consequences for ill as well as for good, as in withdrawing investments from countries with morally damnable policies. Conventional morality is a tyranny tempered by hypocrisy. What is identified as the moral crisis is to a large extent only the situation revealed when the hypocrisy is unmasked. The dualism of value and fact is recognizable in the difference between idealism expressed in what we spy and the so-called realistic calculus embodied in what we do. The difference is not always as great as Americans blame themselves for. We are sometimes as much ashamed of our virtues as of our vices, rationalizing moral motives by pretending that only down-toearth selfish interests are at work. Sunday-closing laws, a product of American religiosity, are defended as protecting the rights of labor, though Saturday closings instead are not permitted, and as measures against unfair competition, though even twenty-four-hour openings are permissible on weekdays. Jesus has been presented as the greatest salesman of all time, morality as good business (“honesty is the best policy”). The bottom line is the bottom line. The young, as they become independent, are slow to reaffirm conventional norms, especially when these deviate markedly from actual practice. Changes in

values are always seen, from the standpoint of the former values, as degradations. Together, these circumstances make for the recurrent illusion of decadence. The world has been going to the dogs since the beginning of time. What is perceived as the decadence of political life is not exceptional. Yet, whether because the hour produces the man, because of random fluctuations, or because decadence is not always illusory, political history repeatedly records that there were giants in former days. The dearth of leaders and statesmanship in America today contrasts strikingly with the abundance of political genius at the time of the American Revolution, and from a population only a tiny fraction of today’s. It is understandable why there are repeated calls for a return to old-fashioned virtues. The very fact that the calls are so often repeated reflects the futility of moral revivalism. Character and principles have purchase on political realities only by way of institutions and policies. Changing circumstances may rob oldfashioned virtues of relevance and even of meaning. It does no good to warn that proliferating nuclear weapons is playing with dynamite. To love your neighbor when neighborliness is a matter of direct personal relations becomes something else altogether when you have 20,000 neighbors living within one mile of you – the average today in urban centers. There is no escaping the need to rethink the path of virtue in a world beset with unanticipated, even unimagined, pitfalls. To do so, one must inescapably rethink both the ends worthy of pursuit and the means necessary to attain them. Where the ends are social, the means are necessarily political. That is why Viscount Morley warned that those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand the one or the other. Much can be said for the view that all political problems are in the end moral problems. Ethics may underlie all normative systems dealing with behavior – not only politics but also religion, law and psychiatry. Political norms rest on an ethical basis, or else they express nothing but self-interest, and that only as selfinterest is antecedently and narrowly defined. For Americans, Vietnam and Watergate heightened awareness that if politics is not subjected to ethics, ethics will be subjected to politics. When political interests in America shifted and new loyalties and identifications emerged, the lesson was unlearned. Today, in Libya and Syria, North Korea and Iran, South Africa and China – indeed, all over the world – the lesson is being systematically negated. Power corrupts and is corrupted when it is dissociated from moral values. For ethics, the most significant political division is that between states where moral norms determine political action and states where politics determines morality. In the first case, the acquisition and exercise of power is assessed by its conditions and consequences for the values enjoined by morality. In the second case, moral norms are adopted and applied only on the basis of their usefulness for getting and keeping power. In democratic thought, to ground morals in politics is to argue in a circle, since democracy subjects political authority to a moral test. American political philosophy recognized from the beginning that the statism which is incompatible with democratic principles does not lie in the range of functions performed by the state – to promote the general welfare is, after all, all-inclusive. Statism lies in the strength of the moral claim made by the

state. Democracy insists that morality, but not government, is above the law. The state cannot rightly claim moral autonomy. In our time, almost everywhere moral principles are politicized. Morality today is determined by party congresses as it once was proclaimed by church councils. The democratic doctrine is to moralize politics rather than to politicize morality. Political aspiration must rest on a moral basis, not the other way around. The tradition reaches back to the Hebrew prophets, who invoked moral principles to condemn misdeeds of political authority. “Thou art the man!” said Nathan to King David.5 For the Stoics, Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, down to John Dewey and such defenders of democracy as there are today, the political order must draw its justification from a moral order. The supremacy of the moral over the merely political has often been expressed in American life by the appeal to conscience. “No law can be sacred to me,” said Emerson, “but that of my own nature.”6 It is the attitude manifested in the rich history in America of dissent and other forms of protest. Conscience may also play a part in shaping American foreign policy, a penance for our riches, and the friendship of other nations a kind of absolution for nameless national sins. Paradoxically, to rely on conscience is to reinstate the rule of force, for this is the only alternative to the rule of law when one person’s conscience differs from another’s. Such differences always exist in any but the most authoritarian and totalitarian states. The distribution of conscience is profoundly unjust: you always have too little and I too much. Worse, your conscience may impose on you a duty to deal with me in ways which my conscience tells me it is my duty to resist. Only the rule of law protects me from your conscience, as it protects you from mine. Conscience can produce tyrants as well as martyrs. The tyranny of conscience is as well known in the political arena as it is in the clinic. Conscience characteristically demands absolute obedience. Contemporary unreason, following nineteenth-century romanticism, rationalizes its absolutism as a dictate of morality. “We are not altogether here to tolerate evil, but to resist and to vanquish it. We do not tolerate falsehoods, thieveries and iniquities but say to them, ‘Thou are false, thou art not tolerable!’ ” says Thomas Carlyle, in discussing the hero as priest.7 Secular absolutists can match the barbarism of religionists like Khomeini and his ilk. The absolutist’s conscience, whatever its source, claims more victims than are lost to unprincipled opportunism. When the dictates of conscience run counter to the law, it is not always conscience that is in the right. Conscience has been deadly, for instance, in refusing to allow children to be inoculated against diphtheria, or in insisting on the handling of poisonous snakes as a demonstration of faith. At best, conscience is unreliable, being notoriously deficient, in the judgment of each of us, whenever its choice of ends and means differs markedly from our own. If conscience is God-given, it is, said Freud, a careless and uneven piece of work. This is not to say that the appeal to conscience has no part to play in politics. Conscientious objectors reaffirm and can revitalize moral principles. Everything hinges on how the conscience has been formed and developed; it is not

self-validating. That an art critic relies on his or her own cultivated good taste does not justify the philistine’s “but I know what I like.” The appeal to conscience, if the appeal is unconditional and the conscience lacking in qualifications, may be no more than rampant subjectivism. It is its subjectivism as much as its ethical claim that makes the appeal to conscience so attractive to the politics of protest in our age of unreason. Democratic politics confronts a dilemma with regard to the place of ethics in politics. On the one hand, in a democracy, politics is always subject to moral assessment; politics does not define morality but is guided by moral principle. On the other hand, if every citizen has the right to a personal veto over any political decision the citizen judges to be immoral, there is no rule of law. Neither law nor morality is served when each person does what is right in his or her own eyes. The dilemma in the theory reflects a real predicament in practice. Every power structure claims legitimacy of some sort. No system of government remains for long the imposition of naked power. It soon cloaks itself in pretensions which provide a perspective by which its demands can be internalized. This perspective is its principle of legitimacy. Power may be cloaked only in rags, but its rationalizations must cover up at least the crudities of self-interest or it will forfeit legitimacy and rule only by violence. Several different principles of legitimacy can be identified. Any particular power structure is likely to rely in various degrees on more than one principle, and perhaps on all. Force can be distinguished from naked power as power legitimized by the principle that might makes right. It is the principle embodied in the Arthurian legend of the sword in the stone: whoever can draw out the sword is the rightful king. Power rightfully belongs to whoever can acquire and wield it. Anarchy is the worst condition of society; to prevent anarchy or put an end to it is justification enough for any power structure – so says the principle of force. In this perspective, the expression “law and order” is a redundancy: order is intrinsically lawful. De facto power automatically becomes de jure. To be able to maintain order is not merely a necessary condition for a government to deserve recognition; it is, on this principle, a sufficient condition as well. The politics of force deduces values from facts. “Virtue,” from the Latin for the vigorous male, means both a moral attribute and the capacity to produce a result, as a medicine acts “by virtue of ” certain ingredients. Legitimization by force is characteristic of Fascist regimes, especially those established by a military takeover. Such legitimization is the modern heir to the medieval trial by combat: the successful use of violence proves the justice of the cause for which it is undertaken. By the same token, failure deserves to fail. Ideologues of force espouse a tautologized political Darwinism: only the fittest survive in the political arena, and the survival demonstrates the fitness. The principle of force, in thus equating fact and value, is congruent with historicist ideologies. Evolution has a direction and carries us ever higher. Order is better than chaos, and the new order is better than the old. Power is justified when it rides the wave of the future. That the future belongs to us, say the historicists, is proven by our triumphs in the past and present; tomorrow, the world! A second

principle of legitimacy centers on the idea of a mission to be carried out by those who hold power. There is a goal to be reached, like socialism or a classless society; moving toward the goal is what justifies the power structure. The goal itself needs no justification; it is self-evidently worthy of pursuit. To attain it is a responsibility imposed by History. For the principle of mission, History is conceived as if it were Providence; it confers upon the rulers the moral equivalent of the divine right of kings. An important difference between historicist philosophies and traditional religious philosophies of history is that holism replaces individualism: the actors in the cosmic drama are collective entities like race, nation, or class, rather than single souls. The Divine Plan remains in these ideologies, under an assumed name. Divine law defining and sustaining the social order was the Greek legacy embodied in Christian feudalism. Modernity did not give up this legacy but only secularized it. Enlightenment physics as well as economics saw natural law as keeping order both among the stars and in the marketplace. Power is legitimized when the ruler proclaims, though in a secular idiom, the equivalent of, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” The Greek sin of hubris, arrogant defiance of the will of the gods, is reinterpreted in modern times as not knowing one’s place. This is the cardinal sin in aristocracy and in its political offspring, a hierarchical bureaucracy. Mission defines an elite, charged with fulfilling the mission. If it is not an aristocracy of birth, it is a Party of the faithful, unswerving in its pursuit of the mission. Hubris is metamorphosed to counter-revolution. Power now becomes a calling, with its votaries and its priesthood, as Max Weber recognized. The secular Church, like its progenitor, demands of its devotees a lifestyle of asceticism. Power is not a means for personal indulgence or aggrandizement. What is exalted by it is only the Cause. Unassuming dress, manners and appearance are familiar symbols of the politics of mission – the Nehru jacket, the Maoist tunic, Arafat’s three-day beard, bin Laden’s white dress. Mission confers the right of revolution. Classical Chinese ethics, in the Book of Mencius, already formulated the argument: by unjust conduct a ruler shows himself to be “a mere fellow,” a usurper of authority.8 If the mission changes, the principle of legitimacy demands corresponding changes in the distribution and exercise of power. Those who held power and what they did with it are no longer justified, and so are to be replaced. The revolution eats its own children. Democratic thought also relies to an extent on the principles of mission: governments are instituted to secure certain inalienable rights. For the most part, however, democratic theory invokes another principle of legitimacy: the principle of representation. Power over me is justified if in essence it is being exercised by myself, as it were, in the person of my representative. Expressions like “in essence” and “as it were” are two-sided: they make of the representative an alter ego, but a substitute is not the real thing – “alter” does mean other. The legitimacy of power in a democracy hinges on whether the formal representatives of a constituency actually represent it. The question is intrinsic to the democratic power structure because of Burke’s dilemma of representation. My

representative, having more political knowledge and skill than I do, owes me his or her judgment as well as a voice to echo mine. If my representative’s judgment deviates from my own too far or too often, then he or she is no longer representing me. How much is too much cannot be defined antecedently. Democratic theory gives to the constituency the right to decide whether it is being effectively represented, whence democracy is called government by consent. This does not dispose of the problem, however, but only shifts its locus. Government by consent is a sham unless the consent is informed and freely given. Information in our time is often withheld or distorted, and we may not know what to do with the information we have. Public opinion is manipulated by devices ranging from paid political announcements to organized “spontaneous demonstrations” and acts of terror perpetrated as propaganda of the deed. Engineered consent is known in varying forms and degrees in both democracies and dictatorships. The secularization of divine right can be recognized in the principle of representation as well as in the principle of mission. It is formulated in the dictum that the voice of the people is the voice of God. The trouble is that divine utterances always need human interpretation, and authoritative interpretation is usually claimed as the prerogative of power. Worse, even if the voice of the people needed no interpretation, the people speaks in many voices. To be able to discern a clear message in the babble of tongues is an art bordering on the miraculous. The problem is not just semantic. It is rooted in the multiplicity of constituencies and pressure groups which make up the politics of democracy. There is a collection of many interests rather than a single community of interests. The device of a bi-cameral legislature is meant to cope with the predicament. In one house each member is expected freely to represent the special interests of their own constituency, while in the other house each member is expected to take the larger view, on behalf of the general interest. The theory only crudely approximates the facts, and the departures from theory are always in the direction of favoring the special interests. Every power structure, whatever the principle of legitimacy on which it relies, exhibits a certain phenomenon appearing in all types of social organization. Efforts are organized to pursue certain ends, the goals or purposes of the organization; the organization inescapably pursues other ends as well, those defining its own survival and well-being. These internal ends do not necessarily contribute in any but the remotest fashion to the attainment of the external ends. The internal ends may interfere with and even prevent the fulfillment of the organization’s purposes. In national defense, for example, inter-service rivalry may stimulate each service to peak performance; it is more likely to weaken the defense establishment as a whole. Internal interests usually enjoy a higher priority than the external ones. In a democracy, the values of the state are construed distributively rather than collectively: they are localized in the individual citizen. Yet means must often be collective: education, health and personal security, for instance, are usually pursued through public instrumentalities. President Kennedy’s statement, “Ask

not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” runs counter to democratic ideology. Governments are instituted to secure certain rights for the individual. Members of the government are servants of the people, not the other way around. But collective effort can achieve nothing unless individuals are loyal to the collectivity, even, under some circumstances, to the extent of putting its welfare above their own. Government is impaled on the horns of the same dilemma – the dilemma of organization – which confronts the military, the press, the Church, schools and corporations. We cannot attain our ends without organized effort, but organization itself may pervert the ends. This is why eternal vigilance is notoriously called for to protect the individual, whether from the state or from lesser aggregations of power meant to serve the individual. Power lies chiefly in organizations whose members, singly and sometimes even collectively, are virtually powerless to control the organizations. The sales force, the production engineers and the shop stewards may be more concerned with their own special interests than with the welfare of the company. On the other side, an organization may deem it the cardinal virtue of its members not to make trouble; this is what often defines a “good student,” a “good patient,” a “good soldier” and a “good employee.” The demands of morals on politics come to a focus in the concept of social justice. John Locke described the aim of government as the protection of “life, liberty and property,” a formula in which Thomas Jefferson replaced “property” by “the pursuit of happiness.” Property continues to be a condition of the pursuit, not a sufficient condition nor perhaps a wholly necessary one, but an important one nevertheless. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread,” said Anatole France.9 Political equality alone does not meet the demands of social justice; the ethics of power is at least as much a matter of economics as of politics. Morality lays down limits for the just distribution of goods and services in the society. Where exactly these limits lie is continuously redefined in the political process. What were once acknowledged rights may later come to be seen as privileges, and what were once thought of as luxuries may come to be viewed as necessities. Distributive justice has been a category of political philosophy since Aristotle; its content has continued to change with the times. Modernity has long been seen as marked by the rise of the middle class, but what constitutes the middle is quite vague. Surveys have shown that more people see themselves as members of the middle class, or say they do, than would be so regarded by sociologists or economists. In any case, the distribution of goods and services exhibits a concentration that many people condemn as unjust. In the United States, fewer than 10 percent of the people own more than do the remaining 90 percent. Distributive justice, as Aristotle recognized, is not a matter of arithmetical equality, but if inequalities are too great, they may well be unjust. Ethics makes another demand on economics: commutative justice, that return should be commensurate with effort. Both Locke and Marx ground the right to

ownership in the labor which produced what is owned. The principles of a fair wage and a fair profit are corollaries of commutative justice. They imply a satisfactory answer to the question, “What have they done to deserve it?” On the domestic scene, the demand for commutative justice, in one formulation or another, has had a marked impact. Internationally, the issues are not even raised. The distribution of natural resources, notably oil, bears no relation to anyone’s labor but God’s. The seven oil-producing members of the Arab League have a per capita income fifteen-times as high as do the remaining fourteen members of the League. The relation of income and labor is even inverse: people in the poorer countries work much harder and earn much less. In the twenty richest countries, the average per capita income is 100-times as great as in the twenty poorest. There was a time when the chasm within each nation between rich and poor, nobles and serfs, was thought to be unchangeable, fixed by the laws of nature, God and man. Since then, taxation, regulation, public services and other uses of power have brought about significant and continuing advances in the war against poverty and social injustice. The time will surely come when inequities will be recognized among nations as well as within them. Until that time, the ethics of power will have little meaning for the overwhelming majority of mankind.