“No!” the usual answer goes. “Why should we vote for the man or woman who remains faithful to their spouse? How does that help the deficit down and the aeroplanes back into the sky?” Alasdair MacIntyre would beg to differ:

Managers themselves and most writers about management conceive of themselves as morally neutral characters whose skills enable them to devise the most efficient means of achieving whatever end is proposed. Whether a given manager is effective or not is on the dominant view a quite different question from that of the morality of the ends which his effectiveness serves or fails to serve. None the less there are strong grounds for rejecting the claim that effectiveness is a morally neutral value. For the whole concept of effectiveness is… inseparable from a mode of human existence in which the contrivance of means is in central part the manipulation of human beings into compliant patterns of behaviour; and it is by appeal to his own effectiveness that the manager claims authority within the manipulative mode.¹

Of course, to believe MacIntyre, you’d have to accept that our politicians belong to the genus “manager”, and who would believe that?

1. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: a study in moral theory, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985), p. 71 [↩]

An interesting passage from the “Sage of Concord” about the whiphand of conformity, and how we have to “act nice”, even if we don’t “feel nice”:

Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays: First Series, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, vol. 2, 5 vols., The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979), 32.