We want our politicians to be good persons and act morally on our behalf. Yet they continually fail to live up to our expectations. We think of a great many of our politicians as corrupt, self-serving and, at best, amoral. They lie, obfuscate, and avoid answering important questions and rarely, if ever, accept responsibility for their errors or the bad things they do. Conversely, politicians are quick to claim credit for successes for which they were only tangentially responsible or if they happen to be the lucky recipient of a fortuitous series of events. It is no wonder then that our faith in political institutions and the men and women who serve in them is very low. In the 2018 Ipsos MORI Veracity Index, only 19% of a representative sample of a 1001 British adults trusts politicians to tell the truth. (The one group who scored lower were advertising executives with 16% while nurses, in contrast scored, 96%.)
Can Politicians Be Moral?
Political morality should allow for rare dirty hands practices
Issue 73, 20th May 2019
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