Conceptualizing Politics

1.   Ethics and politics
Politicians and political theorists, along with clergymen and essayists, do often evoke 
this relationship, but mostly leave its first pole fuzzy in appearance, which is why we 
need first a short interlude in order to bring some order to the field. In the follow-
ing, I shall restrict the use of the common wording ‘ethics and politics’ and replace 
the first term with ‘morality’, the attitude based on the moral point of view, that is 
the attitude to act on principles, to reject egoism, to regard what is good for other 
people as having equal dignity with what is good for me.
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 Whatever the specific 
attitude and doctrine, morality is clearly opposed to a self-centred stance, aimed at 
an opportunistic evaluation of what is best in the given circumstances for oneself or 
one’s own community. This stance has sometimes been called prudence, in a last twist 
to the history (already mentioned in Chapter 1) of this word, far removed from 
Aristotle’s original understanding of 
φρόνησις/phronesis.
Moral theories, giving shape and justification to human acting, can treat the 
question of ‘what is right?’ (normative theories, assessing the morality of single acts 
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