Reading 30

“What features of the political system are likely to select for those dispositions in politicians which are at once morally welcome and compatible with their being effective politicians? What features of the system can help to bring it about that fairly decent people can dispose of a fair degree of power? How does one ensure a reasonable succession of colonists of the space between cynicism and political idiocy?

“It is a vast, old, and in good part empirical question. If one adapts Plato's question, how can the good rule?, to Machiavelli's, how to rule the world as it is?, the simplest conflation - how can the good rule the world as it is? - is merely discouraging. It is also, however, excessively pious. The conception of the good that it inherits from Plato invites the question of how the good could do anything at all, while the Machiavellian conception of the world as it is raises the question of how anyone could do anything with it. (A popular sense of 'realism' gets its strength from the fact that the second of those questions has some answers, while the first has none.) But if one modifies from both ends, allowing that the good need not be as pure as all that, so long as they retain some active sense of moral costs and moral limits, and that the society has some genuinely settled politics and some expectations of civic respectability, then there is some place for discussing what properties we should like the system, in these respects, to have.”

- Bernard Williams, “Politics and Moral Character,” Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980 (1981)