By Nathan Beacom
Monday, August 24, 2026
Are there two different moralities for public and private
life? For centuries, the mainstream answer in the Western tradition was no. For
Aristotle, the Stoics, Cicero, Boethius, and the Scholastics, it was natural to
think that those who held authority in a political community should have
exceptional virtue. To be virtuous meant not just achieving good outcomes, but
achieving them in the right way and for the right reasons.
But later, a different answer emerged from the pen of
Niccolò Machiavelli. The Italian diplomat reinvented virtue, not as a nobility
of soul expressed in justice, prudence, and self-control, but as the ability to
win, hold, and exercise power. To do this well, he wrote, the leader
must have a flexible disposition and be willing to do evil in service of the
state.
Machiavelli was writing in 1532. But in a fascinating recent conversation at the New York Times, this
debate played out again, this time with journalist Ezra Klein siding with the
classical mainstream and activist Christopher Rufo appearing to take a more of
the secular-modern approach. Because Rufo professes—both to Klein and in
general—to be building a culture of virtue in America, Klein pressed him on the
apparent viciousness of the leaders of Rufo’s political movement. “I guess one
thing I think about, when I think about Donald Trump and virtue, is corruption
… The number was about $4 billion in this term,” Klein said. “It doesn’t look
virtuous.”
In response, Rufo appealed to Machiavelli. “Politics is
always a conversation between virtue and virtù,” he said. Here, virtù
refers to Machiavelli’s conception of political excellence, defined not by
moral rectitude, but by an “ends justify the means” approach to gaining and
wielding power. Rufo also dismissed academics who want political practitioners
to use “pure means” to reach “pure ends” as laughably naïve.
This “realistic” approach to politics, which would allow
us to look past right and wrong in our pursuit of power, is a race to the
bottom. And while Rufo himself would balk at such a philosophy taken to its
extreme (he is willing to acknowledge and push back on some of the
problems with his own side when pressed by Klein), there are those in political
life who are willing to go further than he. The more we excuse bad behavior to
achieve our own ends, the more we justify the bad behavior of others. Thus we
foster an environment where the public competes to outdo one another, not in
virtue, but in vice.
***
Rufo is not alone in his espousal of Machiavelli. Patrick
Deneen, one of the most prominent conservative intellectuals in America today,
has written (in his book Regime Change) that we must “use Machiavellian
means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” The problem is that, almost by definition,
Aristotelian ends are inseparable from Aristotelian means. Virtue ethics is
characterized by a belief that, in order for an action to be good, it must be
good the whole way round. As Aristotle famously pointed out in the Nicomachean
Ethics, a virtuous act is one that is noble in its object, intention,
and execution. You cannot, for Aristotle, do something that is
intrinsically wrong, even for the sake of something good. Aquinas followed the
philosopher in this opinion, too: “An evil action cannot be justified by
reference to a good intention.”
Suppose that, in order to start a public conversation on
a topic you consider important and insufficiently discussed, you felt it was
necessary to invent a salacious story in order to rile up public passions.
Suppose you made up a story that immigrants were stealing and eating people’s
pets in order to start a conversation on immigration. For a virtue ethicist, a
good end and a good intention (supposing, for the sake of argument, that
prompting a public discussion of border security is the good being aimed at)
cannot justify an act that is in itself bad, in this case the act of lying and
the act of slander.
Cicero, in his great work De Officiis, had harsh
words for those who imagined that political expedience could be disconnected
from moral standards. “Bad men,” the Roman statesman wrote, “are accustomed, in
considering any question, to weigh the morally right against what they think is
expedient; good men are not.” For a good man, there is no question of the
politically expedient trumping the morally right. For Cicero, the answer is
easy: “It is the error of men who are not strictly upright to seize upon
something that seems to be expedient and straightway to dissociate that from
the question of moral right. … Away, then, with questioners of this sort for
their whole tribe is wicked and ungodly.”
We sometimes seem to think that we can deceive, massage
the truth, manipulate, propagandize, tolerate corruption, and sow division so
long as, at the end of the day, we win political influence and push our
policies through. But you can see how this becomes a race to the bottom indeed,
as competing factions with competing ends concur only on the underhanded means
they will use to achieve victory. One side’s lowering of moral standards lowers
the bar for the other. A culture of cynicism develops in which everyone assumes
that other actors are acting in bad faith and, as a result, makes excuses for
their own bad faith.
You can say, if you like, that this is just the nature of
politics, and nobody likes to see how the sausage gets made. Yes, politics
involves policy compromise, it involves accepting imperfection, and it involves
strategic thinking. But to say that this compromise extends to the moral
character of our means is to create a crooked culture in which only the most
cynical win. Policy compromise is necessary. Moral compromise
undermines a republic.
Republican government relies on the self-government
of citizens and leaders, because it is a form of rule in which the citizens
have a wide latitude of freedom and a voice in the direction of their own
community. Montesquieu, one of the key influences on America’s founding, put it
this way in his Spirit of the Laws: “There is no great share of virtue
necessary to support a monarchical or despotic government: the force of laws,
in one, and the prince’s arm, in the other, are sufficient to direct and
maintain the whole: but, in a popular state, one spring more is necessary,
namely, virtue. When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of
those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole
community.”
John Adams, in a letter to his friend Mercy Otis Warren in 1776, put the
relationship between public and private virtue in a republic plainly: “Public
Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only
Foundation of Republics.” Public and private virtue are not severable; they are
manifestations of one and the same moral character. One cannot be an
Aristotelian at home and a Machiavellian in the office.
***
Rufo further justifies support for immoral leaders by
explaining that politicians are “not your priests. They are kind of blunt
instruments”—the character of a political leader does not matter; what matters
is whether you can use him to advance your agenda. This manner of thinking
seems to have become more common. Voters have become far more tolerant of breaches of public trust and bad character.
But again, this cuts against the grain of the classical
tradition. It struck Aristotle as common sense that a ruler needs to be a
person of good character. “If the ruler is not temperate and just, how will he
rule well?” he wrote. Elsewhere, he said that “the statesman, the man who
controls or is competent to control … the administration of the commonwealth,
must essentially also be a good man.”
Here again, Cicero is helpful. In his Laws, he
held that the morals of the people were most influenced by the example of those
who lead them.
My opinion is, that the manners
of mankind change with those of their superiors. Hence, great men of a vicious
life are doubly pernicious to the state, as being not only guilty of immoral
practices themselves, but likewise of spreading them far and wide among their
fellow-citizens. The mischief they do, is owing not only to their being
debauched themselves, but also to their debauching a crowd of their foolish
imitators. In a word, they do more harm by their example than by the crimes
they commit.
The crowning
moral tradition of the East, Confucianism, holds a similar view. The book
of Mengzi’s sayings and doings begins with the philosopher reproving a king for
his obsession with profit, on account of the fact that his example will lead
everyone in the kingdom to the same vice, ending in “total usurpation.”
***
William Wordsworth, after the death of Lord Nelson in
1805, composed a famous poem describing his vision of the ideal leader: “Character of the Happy Warrior.” Among the qualities of the
happy warrior are a steadiness in the face of struggle, endurance under
suffering, and a sympathy for those whom he leads.
But there is another quality essential to good activity
in public life: a refusal to use bad means for the sake of good ends.
Wordsworth had been chastened by his observations of the French Revolution. As
a political idealist, he had thrilled in 1789 at the cry of “liberty, equality,
and fraternity,” but he soon was disillusioned as he watched the supposed
heroes of liberty and virtue, in mobs and kangaroo courts, massacring innocent
people. The ancien régime was corrupt and unjust, yes, but the medicine
had become worse than the disease.
What Wordsworth observed in his poem was that much of the
world’s evil comes from men who consider themselves to be pursuing good ends. A
good statesman, a happy warrior, does not make this mistake. He will not
advance by shady means, he will not win the public by deceiving them, he will
not grovel before evil men for the sake of influence and power. “He labors good
on good to fix, and owes/ To virtue every triumph that he knows.”
When virtuous policies are implemented through wicked
stratagems and by bad people, those policies themselves are discredited. We
might think, for example, of the manner in which the personal and political
vice of Joseph McCarthy did more to discredit reasonable concerns about Soviet
influence in America than to address them.
A lasting culture of virtue cannot be built on unvirtuous
means. A perception of hypocrisy and cynicism reigns among the public with
regard to their political leaders when it is discovered that they have lied,
twisted the truth, or cheated the system. Vice does not propagate virtue; it
propagates further vice.
More than this, our souls, our characters, are not left
untouched when we give up virtue for Machiavellian virtù. The great
historian Will Durant summarized virtue ethics with the memorable phrase: “We
are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” We
cannot expect that if in politics we are hateful, scornful, rude, dishonest,
equivocating, and temporizing, we will remain kind, generous, honest,
courteous, and courageous in our personal life. We cannot live long as both Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
This is not an idyllic demand for a utopia of flawless
morality. There is no world in which the ship of state is manned top to bottom
with perfect saints—all the more reason why the hands at the helm and at the
watch should be people of integrity, all the more reason why officers should
set an example of virtue for the humblest deckhand to follow.
The health of our polity, of our republic, will depend
upon those who are willing to be called naïve, people who will not do a thing
they think is wrong for the sake of political victory. Men and women who will
not give up their integrity are like a ballast by which the ship of state keeps
an even keel. Without them, the Scylla of civil strife or the Charybdis of
tyranny will bring a republic to its end.
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