Max Weber on Ethics and Politics

The relationship between politics and ethics is problematic. A good deal of modern political philosophy, especially but not only the Rawlsian programme, can be read as concentrating on setting ethical limits to politics. The philosophical justification of values such as equality and liberty, or the validation of concepts such as right or law, are intended to constrain political power. Typically, recent liberal philosophy seeks to prescribe the content of constitutional or basic law, as Rawls does; or to prescribe the procedures that should generate legislation, as Habermas does. An alternative interpretation can be put on this relationship – that politics seeks to realize ethical values and principles that have been justified philosophically. Here the emphasis is on the substance of policy. And some political philosophy duly focuses on what is politically possible, attending to the gap between that and what is philosophically justified. That is, some political theory we might say concentrates on the political limits to ethics. All these variations on the theme share a presumption that ‘politics’ and ‘ethics’ are independent of one another, two distinct activities or modes of reasoning. Each of them can be engaged in quite without reference to the other. Equally, an actor engaged in one might be thinking about the other. Nevertheless they stand, as we might say, in an external relationship to each other. Thinking which separates ethics and politics in this way also frequently (although it need not) contrasts the two respectively as prescriptive and descriptive, or normative and positive, or as concerned with matters of value as opposed to matters of fact. Politics, according to such views, is a series of processes, practices and arrangements concerning the power to govern – getting it, keeping it, squandering it, using it, opposing it, and so on; while ethics is a series of norms or prescriptions – ‘oughts’ – governing the generality of our conduct regarding other persons and the world. ‘Is’ and ‘ought’ are logically quite distinct from each other, although