LYING AND HYPOCRISY IN MORALITY AND POLITICS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/eps.2.1.86Keywords:
Lying, Hypocrisy, Politics, Ethics, “Dirty Hands”, “Post-Truth”Abstract
Hypocrisy is necessary in politics, especially in democracies, but while hypocrisy can facilitate democratic cooperation, lying tends to undermine it. There are two basic alternative possibilities for how to think about political ethics. The first begins with universal moral principles that are then applied to politics as well as to other areas of life. In the second approach, instead, each activity or type of relationship has its own moral requirements. What is it about politics that makes hypocrisy and lying either morally legitimate or morally illegitimate? For the first approach, lying and hypocrisy are vices, whereas for the second, they may be considered as virtuous under certain circumstances. Hypocrisy is necessary because political relationships are relationships of dependence among people whose interests do not exactly coincide. To secure supporters and coalition partners requires a certain amount of pretense. The case of lying, however, is quite different due to three additional characteristics of political relationships: cooperation over time requires trust; accountability requires transparency; and consensus requires a shared sense of reality. Lying undermines all three. Thus, truthfulness is among the political virtues even if exceptions sometimes must be made. Today, “post-truth” politics (“New Lying”), threatens to create a dangerous indifference to the truth and a cynical, wholesale acceptance of political lying.
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