Ethical Leverage

Editors' note: This essay is part of the 2025 Global Ethics Day online exclusive roundtable from Ethics & International Affairs. View the whole collection here.

Ethical Leverage

In politics, it is widely held, the demands of everyday morality recede. Machiavelli advised that a Christian standard of morality is not only destined to be flouted in the political realm but also liable to damage to the rulers who try to govern by it. Here the “ethics of intention,” as Max Weber told us, must give way to the “ethics of consequences.”¹ The former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it more colorfully when addressing students at Texas A&M University in 2019:

“What’s the cadet motto at West Point? ‘You will not lie, cheat or steal or tolerate those who do.’ I was the CIA director, we lied, we cheated, we stole. […] we had whole training courses.” (sic)²

The politician cannot afford the ethical sensibilities of a citizen, for if he cares less for his city than for his soul it is his city that will pay the price.

It is hard to deny there is some truth in this. In wartime, no one thinks we should never try to deceive the enemy, or that avoiding any loss of innocent life should take priority over victory. The higher the stakes, the stronger the case for using otherwise unethical means.

Yet even in war we recognize ethical constraints, aware though we are of how regularly they are ignored. The deliberate killing of innocents is prohibited, as is the mistreatment of prisoners, or the destruction of non-military targets, though the lines can become fuzzy. As in war, so it is in politics. Not all means are defensible. Nor are all ends. Ethical considerations retain some leverage. Even when it appears that morality does not matter because “necessity” pushes it aside, ethical reasons will have to be given for any action taken, whether because those following orders need a justification or the public can only be brought on board if a policy or a measure is seen as ethically defensible. Simply pointing to the desirability of an objective will not be enough. Citizens and officials alike usually need more thoughtful persuasion.

Authoritarians, however, acknowledge no such nuances. The means are justified by the ends, and the worthiness of the ends proposed cannot be challenged. This has always been the case.


Authoritarianism in the United States

The authoritarian’s approach is particularly evident in American governance today. The Second Trump Administration has ignored once-settled ethical norms, to which not even lip-service is now paid. It has fired public officials without cause—and in many of these cases, done so illegally.³ It has pressured government agencies to unconstitutionally intimidate public and private organizations or particular individuals that have displeased it.⁴ Internationally, it has illegally attacked and destroyed civilian vessels in international waters without provocation, killing those on board.⁵ And members of the government have accepted gifts for favors or declined to put their business interests in trusts while holding public office. Ethical considerations appear to no longer have any leverage.

The Trump administration’s approach to immigration control supplies a notable case-study of ethical misconduct. It has prioritized the goal of removing unwanted immigrants by casting aside due process in favor of direct enforcement through arbitrary arrests, warrantless searches, and deportations without legal basis—resulting regularly in the abuse and detention of American citizens. Neither the ends nor the means have any clear or defensible moral justification. The ends are questionable in the first instance because the nature of the problem has been misrepresented. Even if one accepted that immigration levels are too high or that illegal immigrants should be returned to the nations from which they came, it is simply false to claim that the United States is experiencing an “invasion,” that it is being overrun by criminals, or that the population has been subjected to grave dangers that warrant the use of violent and extra-legal methods. If the ends are to justify the means, the ends themselves must have a clear warrant. But neither the ends nor the means have been given more than the thinnest of defences. As the executive branch is making every effort to extend its authority, and the instruments of executive power have been emboldened to use whatever means they see fit to pursue their goals, one is tempted to ask whether ethics has simply left the building.

Bringing Ethics Back In

While there is good reason to think that ethical considerations currently play a much-diminished role in public life in the United States, this does not mean that they no longer matter. The critical question is what leverage ethics might have in a world dominated by actors who are not so much political realists as dogmatists. To answer this question, it is important to appreciate wherein lies the source of the dogmatists’ power.

In democracies, even more than in other forms of government, power rests on opinion. This means popular opinion both of the legitimacy of authority and of the justifiability of its policy. Therefore, to exercise power it is necessary to control the narrative. While the executive can exert power by authorizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest and detain people without warrant, or by directing the military to blow up civilian vessels in the open seas, or by sending the National Guard into cities uninvited, such actions can only be sustained if the story behind them is accepted by the public. That story, ironically, has to be an ethical one. In the modern day, the line taken by the ancient Athenians toward Melos, that the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must, simply will not wash. Other justifications will have to be forthcoming: necessity, imminent danger, national security. All such justifications can only be ethical claims. And the only way they can be challenged is by other, more compelling ethical narratives. Of course, necessity and imminent danger might be presented as justifications for suspending normal ethical reasoning. If the very existence of a state or society is under threat, then moral niceties cannot be allowed to impede necessary actions. Here, two things must be noted. First, this is itself a kind of ethical claim: a greater good demands a form of action that is otherwise to be avoided. Second, a case really has to be made, whether in advance or in retrospect, that there really is or was an imminent danger requiring extraordinary measures. In the United States today, neither of these things hold, and power has simply been abused.

Modern democracies have, of course, built in institutional safeguards to protect against the abuse of power. The division of authority among the different branches of government is one important mechanism, as is the federal structure that distributes power across separate jurisdictions. Having political actors and agencies compete with one another so that “ambition might counter ambition” supplies checks and balances on executive as well as other forms of authority. But such checks can work only if those trying to exercise that capacity have opinion sufficiently on their side. Even this is not a guarantee, since political actors (like people generally) are driven by a variety of motives. And of course, some of the ambitious may simply be more powerful. Moreover, even when some individuals or institutions lose popular support, it does not mean that the actors involved immediately correct to track public opinion.

At present, political actors in the United States looking to check the executive seem unable to exercise ethical leverage. This is because they have lost control of the narrative. They are not shaping the moral story. The authoritarians in office, on the other hand, have a keen sense of what kind of story to tell. That story is an ethical one because it is a story—a kind of morality tale—of the need to right wrongs that have been ignored. These are wrongs that have been endured by the nation, which faces an existential crisis, and by particular groups, which have been marginalized. These wrongs have, moreover, been perpetrated by people who care not for their country or for the values their fellow countrymen hold dear. Or so the story goes. Not everyone buys this account, but it is enough that a substantial part of the population does, and a significant minority defend it with passionate intensity.

What is to be done?

The question remains how to respond to such a narrative, which appears to be powerful enough to lead people—not just the populace but also officials, partisan observers, and even other governments—to ignore, or even to praise, what would ordinarily be seen as ethically reprehensible conduct? How should one respond when an administration is praised for its decisiveness even as its actions are illegal and wrong?

While there is no single answer, or indeed any obvious menu of options, let me suggest a line of argument that ought in any case to be made, for example, with respect to immigration. While nationalists insist on the need to “take back control” for the good of the country, the reality is that the measures proposed and taken place a heavy burden American citizens themselves. After all, we have seen citizens subject to warrantless searches, detention, and even deportation. The further risk is that we will see an increasing militarization of society, as well a more cavalier attitude toward such measures as racial profiling and the detention of children or their separation from their immigrant parents. There was a period in the nation’s history, particularly between 1950 and 1960, when hundreds of thousands of citizens were mistakenly deported because the U.S. government was so determined to remove immigrants that it caught up in its net almost as many Americans as it did foreigners.⁶ The risk is that we will return to those days in which the scale and pace of deportations place American citizens in serious jeopardy as more and more continue to have their most fundamental right violated each day. Indirectly, all Americans must now get used to being policed, whether by armed ICE agents operating with little regard for the freedoms guaranteed under the Bill of Rights, or soldiers deployed among civilians, reminding them of the power of the state. The state has truly gone too far when it intrudes far into the lives of ordinary citizens. This government behavior is at its most troubling when it is able to persuade its people that these intrusions are not extraordinary but normal. When the taking of the freedom of others is explained away and normalized, the acceptance of the loss of one’s own freedom will soon follow. At that point, ethics will have been left behind.

The difficulty, however, is that the nationalists have a simple message: America first. The sentiments to which they appeal are pride and patriotism, but also fear and resentment. This cannot be countered with promises of reform or subsidies to disadvantaged groups. It cannot bring people to see unethical conduct for what it is, or disincline them to excuse it. The only strategy that has any prospect of succeeding is turning patriotism on its head and calling into question the nationalist narrative. Easier said than done.

In London in the 1930s the economist and political philosopher F.A. Hayek found himself watching the rise of Nazism in Germany and in his native Austria. The Nazis, he concluded, had come to power because they had convinced the people—or at least, enough of them—that they were victims whose grievances could be addressed only by the national socialist party, which was prepared to use all necessary means to achieve the goal of a greater Germany. The people, he said, were deceived. And the only way to confront this was to engage the narrative and to present to the people the realities that had been concealed from them. The battle could not be won with bribes or crude forms of propaganda, for people would see through this all too quickly. Germans, he said, had to be reminded of their ethical and cultural inheritance, and so weaned off the myths being generated by their new rulers.⁷

In America in the twenty-first century, people need to be encouraged to reflect on their own history. That itself is a kind of morality tale, containing all the complexities and inconvenient facts found in any real-life story. It cannot be presented simply as a story of triumph, but nor can it be (for it is not) just a story of a shameful past. In the American imagination, it is a story of liberty. What is missing right now is a version of that narrative that is a source of pride for all parts of society—even if not for every individual—rather than a cause of resentment and division. The MAGA version of history will appear more comforting and, therefore, compelling, if its alternatives seem only to alienate and exclude a part of the population. The fact that liberties are now being curtailed will not move people for whom freedom is no longer at the center of an understanding of their country. What is now at stake is that freedom that has repeatedly been compromised in the past and recovered on each occasion by resistance.

The ethical problem today lies not in the absence of ethical principles among political leaders, though that might be true enough. It lies, rather, in the failure of those who see the ethical problem to successfully engage the public, which has bought a story that is neither ethical nor true. If ethical principles are to have any leverage, a more convincing story will have to be told, and told quickly.

—Chandran Kukathas

Chandran Kukathas is Professor of Political Science in the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University. He is the author of The Liberal Archipelago and, most recently, Dialogues on Immigration and the Open Society

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