Question

Brief note on machiavelli's view on ethics and politics

Answer 1

Machiavelli was the first theorist to decisively divorce politics from ethics.

Machiavelli wrote “The Prince” to serve as a handbook for rulers, and he claims explicitly throughout the work that he is not interested in talking about ideal republics or imaginary utopias, as many of his predecessors had done: “There is such a gap between how one lives and how one should live that he who neglects what is being done for what should be done will learn his destruction rather than his preservation,” he writes. To Machiavelli, the state was not a means to an end but was an end in itself, with its own interests. State power was an end in itself and not a means to gig her moral end of promoting social welfare.

Machiavelli prescribes a double standard of conduct for the ruler and for the individual citizens on the basis that the ruler is a creator of law and also of morality for moral obligations must ultimately be sustained by law.

Machiavelli not only separated morality from politics, but also relegated religion to a very subordinate position in his political system, and it is because of this that we think that the modern study of politics begins with Machiavelli.

Answer 2

Among the administrative philosophers who established the idea of division of ethics from politics, the Italian legislative philosopher and diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli is the most famous. Before Machiavelli, politics was rigidly bonded with standards, in philosophy, if not in practice. According to an old-fashioned tradition that stretches back to Aristotle, diplomacy is a sub-branch of ethics — ethics being described as the moral behavior of people, and diplomacy is described as the morality of people in social groups or organized neighborhoods. Machiavelli was the first philosopher to decisively separate politics from values, and hence to give special sovereignty to the study of statesmanship.