Political Communication Ethics: Theory and Practice brings together scholars and practitioners to introduce students to what, if any, ethical responsibilities political professionals have. Chapter authors range from a top Republican lobbyist to an Obama appointee, from leading academics to top digital strategists, and more. As a collection of diverse perspectives covering speechwriting and political communication, advocacy, political campaigns, online politics, and American civil religion, this book serves as an essential resource for students and scholars across many disciplines.

Responsible citizens are expected to combine ethical judgement with judiciously exercised social activism to preserve the moral foundation of democratic society and prevent political injustice. But do they? Utilizing a research model integrating insights from rational choice theory and cognitive developmental psychology this book, first published in 1997, carefully explores three exemplary cases of morally inspired activism: Jewish rescue in wartime Europe, abortion politics in the United States, and peace and settler activism in Israel. From all three analyses a single conclusion emerges: the most politically competent individuals are, most often, the least morally competent. This is the central paradox of political morality. These findings cast doubt on strong models of political morality characterized by enlightened moral reasoning and concerted political action while affirming alternative weak models that fuse activism with sectarian moral interests. They provide empirical support to further upend the liberal vision of democratic character, education, and society.

When do governments merit our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? Ian Shapiro explores this most enduring of political dilemmas in this innovative and engaging book. Building on his highly popular Yale courses, Professor Shapiro evaluates the main contending accounts of the sources of political legitimacy. Starting with theorists of the Enlightenment, he examines the arguments put forward by utilitarians, Marxists, and theorists of the social contract. Next he turns to the anti-Enlightenment tradition that stretches from Edmund Burke to contemporary post-modernists. In the last part of the book Shapiro examines partisans and critics of democracy from Plato’s time until our own. He concludes with an assessment of democracy’s strengths and limitations as the font of political legitimacy. The book offers a lucid and accessible introduction to urgent ongoing conversations about the sources of political allegiance.

Examines change in the normative underpinnings of both ancient and modern practices of political governance, public duties, and personal responsibilities

Prologue: Quintilian and John of Salisbury in the Ciceronian tradition -- Rhetoric, emotional manipulation, and morality: the contemporary relevance of Cicero vis-a-vis Aristotle -- Political morality, conventional morality, and decorum in Cicero -- Rhetoric as a balancing of ends: Cicero and Machiavelli -- Justus Lipsius, morally acceptable deceit, and prudence in the Ciceronian tradition -- The classical orator as political representative: Cicero and the modern concept of representation -- Deliberative democracy and rhetoric: Cicero, oratory, and conversation

This book argues that the concept of care is a political and a moral concept. As such, it enables us to examine moral and political life through a radically different lens. The editors and contributors to the book argue that care has the potential to interrogate relationships of power and to be a tool for radical political analysis for an emerging critical social work that is concerned with human rights and social justice. The book brings a critical ethics of care into the realm of theory and practice in social work. Informed by critical theory, feminism, intersectionality and post-colonialism, the book interrogates the concept of care in a wide range of social work settings. It examines care in the context of social neglect, interdisciplinary perspectives, the responsibilisation agenda in social work and the ongoing debate about care and justice. It situates care in the settings of mental health, homelessness, elder care, child protection, asylum seekers and humanitarian aid. It further demonstrates what can be learnt about care from the post-colonial margins, Aboriginal societies, LGBTI communities and disability politics. It demonstrates ways of transforming the politics and practices of care through the work of feminist mothers, caring practices by men, meditations on love, rethinking self-care, extending care to the natural environment and the principles informing cross-species care. The book will be invaluable to social workers, human service practitioners and managers who are involved in the practice of delivering care, and it will assist them to challenge the punitive and hurtful strategies of neoliberal rationalisation. The critical theoretical focus of the book has significance beyond social work, including nursing, psychology, medicine, allied health and criminal justice.

For civil servants who take an oath to uphold the Constitution, that document is the supreme symbol of political morality. Constitutional issues are addressed by civil servants every day, whenever a policeman arrests a suspect or members of different branches of government meet. But how well do these individuals really understand the Constitution's application in their jobs? This book encourages civil servants to reflect on specific constitutional principles and events and learn to apply them to the decisions they make. Twenty seminal articles by a preeminent scholar seek to legitimate public service by grounding its ethics in constitutional practice. John Rohr stresses that ethical practice demands an immersion in the specifics of our constitutional tradition, and he offers a guide to attaining a greater sense of those constitutional principles that can be translated into action. Along the way he considers such timely issues as financial disclosure, the treatment of civil servants as second-class citizens, and instances of civil servants caught between executive and legislative forces. Rohr's opening essays demonstrate that responsible use of administrative discretion is the key issue for career civil servants. Subsequent sections examine approaches to training civil servants using constitutional principles; character formation resulting from study of the constitutional tradition; and the ethical choices that are sometimes posed by separation of powers. A final group of chapters shows how a study of other countries' constitutional traditions can deepen an understanding of our own, while a closing essay looks at past issues and future prospects in administrative ethics from the perspective of Rohr's long involvement in the field. Throughout this insightful collection, Rohr seeks to remind public servants of the nobility of their calling, reinforce their role in articulating public interests against the excesses of private concerns, and encourage managers to make greater use of constitutional language to describe their everyday activities. Although his work focuses on the federal career civil servant, it also offers valuable lessons applicable to state and local civil servants, elected officials, judges, military personnel, and those employed in the nonprofit sector.

Europeans and Americans tend to hold the opinion that democracy is a uniquely Western inheritance, but in The Common Cause, Leela Gandhi recovers stories of an alternate version, describing a transnational history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of ethics in the broad sense of disciplined self-fashioning. Gandhi identifies a shared culture of perfectionism across imperialism, fascism, and liberalism—an ethic that excluded the ordinary and unexceptional. But, she also illuminates an ethic of moral imperfectionism, a set of anticolonial, antifascist practices devoted to ordinariness and abnegation that ranged from doomed mutinies in the Indian military to Mahatma Gandhi’s spiritual discipline. Reframing the way we think about some of the most consequential political events of the era, Gandhi presents moral imperfectionism as the lost tradition of global democratic thought and offers it to us as a key to democracy’s future. In doing so, she defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection and mounts a postcolonial appeal for an ethics of becoming common.

Scrutinizing the practice of legislators and politicians from an ethical perspective, this work looks closely at various methods to facilitate ethical conduct.

The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Politics and Organizations synthesizes and extends existing research on ethics in organizations by explicitly focusing on ‘ethico-politics’ - where ethics informs political action. It draws connections between ethics and politics in and around organizations and the workplace, examines cutting-edge areas and sets the scene for future research. Through a wealth of international and multidisciplinary contributions this volume considers the broad range of ways in which ethics and politics can be conceived and understood. The chapters look at various ethical traditions, as well as the discursive deployment of ethical terminology in organizational settings, and they also examine large scale political structures and processes and how they relate to different forms of politics which affect behaviour in organizations. These many possibilities are united by a focus on how ethics can be used to inform and justify the exercise of power in organizations. This collection will be a valuable reference source for students and researchers across the disciplines of organizational studies, ethics and politics.