Political Ethics

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A comprehensive introduction to contemporary political ethicsWhat is the relationship between politics and morality? May politicians bend moral constraints in the name of political necessity? Is it always wrong for leaders to lie? How much political compromise is too much (or too little)? In Political Ethics, some of the world’s leading thinkers in politics, philosophy, and related fields offer a comprehensive and accessible introduction to key issues in this rapidly growing area of political theory.
In a series of original essays, the contributors examine a range of urgent political problems: lies and deception, compromise and refusal to compromise, the meaning and limits of political integrity, representation and failures of representation, good and bad democratic leadership, the virtues and excesses of partisanship, administrative ethics, political corruption, whistleblowing, legitimate and illegitimate claims of political emergency, and lobbying. What emerges are realistic but demanding ethical standards—and a clear-eyed understanding of the ethical challenges of political life in the twenty-first century.
With contributions by Richard Bellamy, Alin Fumurescu, Edward Hall, Suzanne Dovi and Jesse McCain, Eric Beerbohm, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, Joseph Heath, Elizabeth David-Barrett and Mark Philp, Michele Bocchiola and Emanuela Ceva, Nomi Lazar, Phil Parvin, and Andrew Sabl.

US Edward Hall is senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Sheffield and the author of Value, Conflict, and Order: Berlin, Hampshire, Williams, and the Realist Revival in Political Theory. Andrew Sabl is professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics and Hume’s Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England (both Princeton). “All over the democratic world, citizens are asking how we should expect our politicians to behave. Edward Hall and Andrew Sabl put this question directly to some of the world’s leading political theorists and the answers are challenging and disrupting. Everyone who reads Political Ethics will be left with a new set of standards by which to judge our leaders and to hold them to account.”—Marc Stears, director of the UCL Policy Lab, University College London

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