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But, he wrote, it is "exceedingly sublime that a good man should be found voluntary to employ wicked means to become prince, even though his final object be good; or that a bad man, after having become prince, should be leaveing to struggle for good ends." If the nature of the task requires im chasteity, burn down any moral end be achieved as a result?

Watzer begins his sermon by observing the commonly expressed opinion of politicians, that is to say that (paraphrasing) "they argon all a bunch of crooks." That is, the general opinion, which Walzer holds is essentially correct, is that politicians--and, by extension, public officials of all sorts, whether directly elected or not--are not and dischargenot be good, because in taking their posts they have acceded to the urge law of expediency. That is, even if they have sought office, and exercise office, in the sincere pursuit of good ends, they sooner or later(prenominal) (and generally sooner) find themselves face to face with the Machiavellian point of whether the ends justify the means. Whether it is dealing with the seamy side of patronage in format to win an election so that one can achieve some worthy goal, or incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki in piece to avert the greater horror of a prolonged war, governmental actors must do wrong if they are to act at all.

Let us begin where Walzer does, and examine the public perception of politics and politicians. This perception is not loftier in the 1990s than it was when Walzer wrote in the 1970s

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince and the Discourses. New York: Modern Library, 1950.

As it happens, the present writer heard the story before sightedness the film--and was as profoundly unmoved by "Mr. Smith" as the premiere audience was said to be. Why? Because at least in one person's view (my own), the film trivialized what is very roughly the gravest moral decision that a public official can make, namely that of putting his or her career on the line. such a decision--to resign, or to cast a vote that will mean certain defeat in the next election--is the " atomic bomb" of public performs. Once taken, it effectively eliminates all opening of future influence for those causes the official regards as worthy and important.

If employ without effect, it becomes a sort of political hara-kiri, serving only to clear the person who does it of moral responsibility for a course of action that could not be flipd. If there was a possibility of exerting change by continuing in the process, it becomes a sort of desertion.

Walzer in his essay offers dramatic hypothetical examples of situations in which public officials are presented with moral quandaries, where the "greater good" might be seen as requiring an immediate bad act, e.g., torturing a prisoner to order to obtain information that will avert a jalopy killing. Such quandaries can certainly be found in real life as well, but the more sign moral peril for a public official is the slithery slope.

In Walzer's analysis, he proceeded from the public's perplexity that politicians are venal to their suspicion that politicians committed more than venal evils. When Walzer wrote, the Vietnam War was still raging, so this dimension was perhaps more obvious than it is today, when our politicians are not conducting a large-scale, widely unpopular war. The curious thing is, though, that in Walzer's day as in ours, the common popular explosive charge against politicians was venality, not higher crimes. It i
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