Ethics

Ethics is the most general term used to characterize the different conceptions of the good as opposed to the evil and the just as opposed to the unjust. These abstract conceptions vary from one school of thought to the other. Kantianism favors an approach that focuses on principles, insisting on the role of duty and the universality of moral law. It builds a liberal ethics stressing the necessity of a public debate on the universality of core moral and political choices. In its Benthamian version, consequentialism and utilitarianism plead in favor of the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain, while John Stuart Mill argues in favor of the maximization of happiness and the minimization of unhappiness. Aristotelian ethics focuses on the importance of virtues that characterize the citizen of the polis. When ethics is contextualized, it is most often referred to as morality and designates a less abstract phenomenon. The different sets of values to which the good and the just are associated are then rooted in historical and social preferences. Finally, ethics is also used as a synonym of morals that characterize the domain of habits that includes ethos and mores. The etymological root of the word ethics—ethos—already includes this double meaning: ethics and habits. This threefold dimension of this notion—ethics, morality, and ethos—is of great importance for political scientists. It parallels the division between different approaches used in the discipline: normative accounts, causal explanatory analyses of social phenomena or correlation analyses, and interpretative analyses.

Political science echoes a strong interest for ethics and its related themes that has prevailed in the humanities since the early 1990s. However, the degree to which ethics is accepted as a legitimate theme of research differs from one subfield to the other. Some political scientists are still reluctant to use this terminology. It is more common for political theorists to do so because at least some of them engage in debates on normative issues. Political sociologists are more skeptical about using ethics as a concept. Since they usually maintain a position of axiological neutrality, they are more inclined to study the functional uses of morality. In comparative politics, the use of ethics as a terminology and as an abstract and absolute concept can also be a controversial issue, because ethics, some political scientists argue, has different cultural meanings. For similar reasons, ethics is also a controversial question in the field of international relations; it has, however, attracted significant attention and has become more and more popular in the literature over the past 2 decades.

The social sciences have been primarily interested in explaining and understanding ethics as a social and political phenomenon. Political scientists have drawn their inspiration from the works of major authors who have studied the genesis of ethics and its functions. They have used this knowledge to elaborate a new thinking on contemporary issues in which norms and values play a significant role. This has created a debate that is of great significance for all the branches of political science and has had a deep epistemological resonance. It also unveils tensions and quarrels between social sciences and normative theories, primarily those proposed in philosophy, that need to be elaborated. This development should encourage political scientists to engage in an interdisciplinarity debate and be open to views that lie at the close borders of their field.

...