| | Ethics is different for politicians because of what politics is. And because of what politics is, even the definition of politics is recursively political, and this influences its ethics.
One definition: the art of government of others.
Another definition: the art of ruling others.
A meta-definition: the art of getting what you want from others.
In all of these definitions, why you want it is immaterial to the fact of you wanting it, as long as you can get it and that pushes ethics in politics to the back burner.
Politics has a subset: mega-politics, the art that includes brute force. (War, crime, force based conflict resolution.) Little ethics involved in mega-politics, just winning, unless academics ponder such acts from afar. But, not the principals in the conflict; so it is with other than mega-politics.
Just because the balance of politics excludes force does not make it ethical; the balance of politics includes lies, deceit, cheating. Those are all schemes for getting what we want from others, and they permeate our politics.
Commerce is a subset of politics; a scheme of getting what we want from others by voluntarily trading value-for-value with them in what is most often a win-win exchange. But even commerce is infected with unethical behavior such as the foisting of false value for real value, when simple 'win-win' is not enough of what some want.
There are inter-personal politics, which is how we get what we want from those around us, especially our loved ones. Sometimes what we want is as simple as the TV remote, and we get what we want by simply asking them. Often what we want is specific changes in their behavior, and those interpersonal conflicts require much greater arm wrestling politics short of placing a gun to their head. But, sometimes that includes telling lies, as well.
Public politics by definition permeates our public machinery of government, the state. Non-personal politics. Getting what we want from strangers over the horizon that we will never have to face.
It's hard to lie to your spouse, and yet, it is often done; imagine how easy it is to lie to someone far over the horizon that you will never face.
Rather than imagine a new, perfect species where this is not the case, better I think to seek forms of government that recognize this unavoidable boundary condition, this fact.
One consequence of recognizing that fact is, I think, government with nearer horizons. Governments, not government. We've been heading in the opposite direction ever since the civil war.
Another consequence is, a fettered government that simply does less. We need to have double yellow lines painted down the middle of the road, and we need to pay for the paint, and we need to have folks paint the lines, but it has little impact when those folks lie about what they are doing; we can see the lines. But when we tolerate a government that lurches out into every corner of our lives and economies, that sells leverage via its guns to shortcut seeking imperfect humans, then ethics in politicians is of crucial importance, and we are requiring that undiscovered species to make it work and not be the latest totalitarian FAIL. What starts out as an enforcer against fringe unethical behavior in our societies, plural, soon becomes the single greatest element against which we require protection from, as it inexorably attempts to shepherd our societies into "S"ociety, by forced association.
Unavoidable unethical behavior running loose in that totalitarian 'it' is the greatest self-made, self-tolerated threat to our freedom imaginable.
We need to accept the boundary condition that unethical behavior is endemic, and so, unleash/tolerate only smaller entities with smaller too corruptible levers running loose in the nation.
We can move in that direction by restoring federalism.
Not that we will.
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