Politician ethics: between personal conviction and party discipline

Abstract

Politician ethics, that should impregnate the exercise of his public responsibilities, is trapped between personal conviction and party discipline. Politician ethics, in first place, does not only correspond to those who are specifically devoted to politics, but should be understood as citizen ethics. On the other hand, political action is so if it is morally orientated, in other words and to be more precise, it will be political action if its sense is expressed through the search for justice objectives, which can be proposed, assumed and carried out with global criteria. In order to go into bidirectional relationship between moral demand and political action in greater depth, and to reach specific conclusions about politician ethics from previous clarification of how every citizen is concerned by what such a relationship means, the reflection on crucial contributions by three contemporary thinkers is articulated: Emmanuel Lévinas, Max Horkheimer and Max Weber. Then, the question is how the party can be of better use to achieve political objectives for those working in politics and not to see how it is used for particular benefit by those who do politics for a living. Finally, the text stresses that party discipline should not drown judgment capacity, internal criticism, when necessary, and indeed, it should be enforced through established organs.