Ética y política

If ethics is attention to our relationship with others, and if, according to Aristotle, "the end of politics is the best good, and politics takes the greatest care to make citizens good and capable of noble actions", there is no politics that is not also an ethic. In the Western world we have spent no less than 25 centuries debating the possibilities and impossibilities of reconciling public life and moral principles. The philosophies of Machiavelli, Marx and Weber represent three canonical ways of separating ethics and politics. But Kepa Bilbao's reading of these three authors reveals their complexity and invites us to maintain the constant tension between ethics and politics, between principles and practice, without ever abandoning ourselves to the impeccability of the ends or the media relentlessness. In times of disaffection with politics, uncertainty and risk, we cannot hide behind the comfort of practical Machiavellianism, in the juxtaposition of conviction and responsibility or in historicist determinism. The question is to think about politics ethically and ethics politically, perhaps in the way that great moralist committed to all the tragedies of his time, Albert Camus, did: "It is about being at the service of the dignity of man with methods that they continue to be worthy in the midst of a story that is not. Calculate the difficulty and the paradox of such an undertaking".