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The Relationship Between Politics And Ethics Constantly

Satisfactory Essays

The relationship between politics and ethics constantly overlaps, causing us to have to consider things such as the ‘dirty hand problem’ which can seem like a politically right thing to do, yet cause controversy in the ethical discipline. In this essay, I shall set out to explain what the ‘dirty hand problem’ is, and arrive at the conclusion that the conceptual confusion that the dirty hands problem causes is merely due to a conflict between politics and ethics in certain situations- I will solve this paradox by offering a ‘situationalist’ approach. With regards to acceptability of the dirty hands problem - I intend on stating that the problem is helpful in highlighting when it is necessary for politics to weaken the role that ethics plays …show more content…

In my view, this is a circumstance where dirtying ones hands is arguably justified. In ii), however, we may still have the same prima facie assumption, however the underlying intention of X is merely a dirty hands ‘ploy’- which is done out of self-gain for X, which I would say is an abuse of using ‘dirty hands’. I would like to distinguish between the two, as I will use this to explain how the relationship between ethics and politics is majorly situational. With this in mind, I will aim to defend the assumption that dirty hands conflicts political decisions through ethical implications - meaning that while ethics takes a powerful influence in politics, it’s significance is not always appreciated when evaluating how one should govern a state, or when to make ‘politically’ moral judgements.

Now that I have explained what it is to have ‘dirty hands’ - I will move on to explain where the problem with this lies.

One of the essential problems with the idea of ‘dirty hands’ is that it causes a huge conflict between ethics and politics. If one is to say that politics is dependant on ethics (and we should follow ethical practice in every political decision - I will call this having ‘clean hands’) then our moral duty that may seem admirable can actually become harmful to one’s state. To explain my point - I will offer an example below: iii. X has the opportunity to find out where Y will next invade in X’s state if X

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