Politics and Ethics have always intimate relationship, because the State has a moral aspect, just as it has a social, economic or historical aspect. Ethics is the science of the moral conduct of the individual in society. It deals with the right and wrong of man’s conduct and behaviour. But as man must live in the State, the questions of his right and wrong conduct become political questions. There are two aspects of morality, private and public.
State must regulate private morality indirectly and public morality directly. It is for this reason that the State prohibits drinking, gambling and other immoral acts. It also punishes the promoters of such immoral things as obscene literature, heroin etc. There is, however, a limit to the State interference in the morals of the people. Morality is concerned with the inner thoughts and conscience of the individual which are, in the lastTesort, beyond the power of the State and law to control. Law and State can regulate only the external behaviour of man. They cannot enter into the hearts of the people which is the seat of conscience and moral behaviour. It is this reason why it is said that you cannot make people good by means of laws. In spite of this limit, laws and morals can help each other much. If a law embodies a moral standard, it will sooner or later make the people to live up to its high standard.
There is yet another aspect of the relationship between Ethics and Politics, although there is a centuries-old controversy over it The ancient Greek Philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, believed that Politics was nothing but the continuation of Ethics to public affairs. Aristotle said that the State came into being to make life possible, but it continues to exist to make it good. The State exists to promote the social and moral good of man. It is an organisation for die moral perfection of man. The Greeks believed that the moral side of the State was more important than its economic and other aspects. The State was, to them, a moral person. Good life was the end of the State. This is also the belief of many modern thinkers. They declare that what is morally bad cannot be politically good, and that a good citizen is possible only in a good State.
But this relationship has been challenged by several modem thinkers, especially by Machiavelli and Hobbes. They advocate a divorce between Ethics and Politics, between morality and polity. Machiavelli advises a ruler to be ready to do immoral acts in order to protect his State, i.e., his throne. He says, “A prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by so doing it would be against his interest, and when the reason which made him bind himself no longer exists”.
However, when all is said, the relation between ethics and politics cannot be denied. Modem writers assert that politics without morality is tyranny. Prof. Ivor Brown says: ‘Politics is but ethics writ large. Ethical theory is incomplete without political theory, because man has to live in association with other men; political theory is idle without ethical theory, because its study and its results depend fundamentally on our scheme of moral values, our conceptions of right and wrong”. Lord Acton said that the question is not what the State does, but what it ought to do. Every question of politics has to be judged on its moral basis and import. Hence politics cannot be separated from ethics.