What Hacker News says

airstrikeOct 2022

> the fictional, fantastical cop-movie interface [is] a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place.

Before proselytizing the dissolution of law enforcement, perhaps one ought to spend time researching the basics of sociology. Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation is probably a good place to start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_as_a_Vocation

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hither_shoresOct 2022

It's from Weber. Here's the relevant paragraph of Politics as a Vocation:

> 'Every state is founded on force,' said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of 'state' would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as 'anarchy,' in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state--nobody says that--but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions--beginning with the sib--have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that 'territory' is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the 'right' to use violence. Hence, 'politics' for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.

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CalChrisAug 2018

Max Weber. However, he stated it as Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

Politics as a Vocation.

http://fs2.american.edu/dfagel/www/class%20readings/weber/po...

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PercevalJan 2014

> What I'd really like to know is what process does the President-elect endure that turns him into an alien lizard from hell?

A Truman-era bureaucrat coined the phrase, "where you stand depends on where you sit."

When Obama was outside the executive branch and had only a year of Senate experience before embarking upon his presidential campaign, he had a very different set of interests and responsibilities. As a junior, back-benching senator with no Washington DC experience, Obama had very few capabilities or political capital. People who are weak decry the power of the strong and seek to limit it.

When Obama became president and was given responsibility not just for Illinois, but for the United States and its allies, he assumed a very different set of responsibilities, interests, and capabilities. Obama entered office with a tremendous amount of political capital and the full panoply of executive branch powers at his disposal. The powerful do not generally seek to limit their own power or to accept limits placed upon them.

This happens to every candidate-turned-president, but with some it's more extreme than others. Some presidents enter office with executive branch experience, e.g. Bush Sr. or Eisenhower. Some enter with tremendous political capital and experience with DC politics, like LBJ a.k.a. the "master of the Senate." The transformation is not so great with these presidents.

Some enter with almost no political experience whatsoever, like Obama. The subsequent transformation is much more jarring, because the change in their power is much starker.

> I mean, seriously .. its like black and white with Obama. Pre-Presidentiality, Obama was real. After-President'ness, he's become some obscure caricature of all other Presidents who came before him..

On the contrary, pre-presidential Obama was fake. He was in campaign mode from his entrance on the national scene in 2004 through 2008. You cannot honestly believe that the campaign image of a politician is the "real" version of that person.

Presidential Obama is the real Obama. Abraham Lincoln said, "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." This is who Obama is. There's a reason why presidents seem to feature greater continuity than change, and part of that reason is that the responsibilities of the office don't change according to the president, rather the president must change in order to perform the responsibilities of the office. Many wildly different personalities can occupy the office, but the office structures and constrains those personalities.

Idealists often have a consequence-free vision of what presidents ought to do (a "deontological" ethic). But politics does not work that way. Max Weber contrasted the (deontological) "ethic of ultimate ends" with the "ethic of responsibility" in his essay "Politics as a Vocation," which I urge you to read. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/ethos/Weber-vocation.pdf

Responsibility is a different ethical standard than what individuals on their own would be held to. And what an individual ought to do is very often different from what someone responsible for the lives of others ought to do. And the actions a responsible political figure ought to undertake are often morally repugnant to the private individual. But it is a mistake to judge the leader by the standards one would use to judge a private citizen. Weber says as much:

> "It follows that as far as a person's actions are concerned, it is not true that nothing but good comes from good and nothing but evil from evil, but rather quite frequently the opposite is the case. Anyone who does not realize this is in fact a mere child in political matters."

Isaiah Berlin in his famous article on Machiavelli (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1971/nov/04/a-speci...) puts it even more starkly:

> If you object to the political methods recommended because they seem to you morally detestable, if you refuse to embark upon them because they are, to use Ritter’s word, “erschreckend,” too frightening, Machiavelli has no answer, no argument. In that case you are perfectly entitled to lead a morally good life, be a private citizen (or a monk), seek some corner of your own. But, in that event, you must not make yourself responsible for the lives of others or expect good fortune; in a material sense you must expect to be ignored or destroyed.

> To be a physician is to be a professional, ready to burn, to cauterize, to amputate; if that is what the disease requires, then to stop halfway because of personal qualms, or some rule unrelated to your art and its technique, is a sign of muddle and weakness, and will always give you the worst of both worlds. And there are at least two worlds: each of them has much, indeed everything, to be said for it; but they are two and not one. One must learn to choose between them and, having chosen, not look back.

> There is more than one world, and more than one set of virtues: confusion between them is disastrous. One of the chief illusions caused by ignoring this is the Platonic-Hebraic-Christian view that virtuous rulers create virtuous men. This, according to Machiavelli, is not true. Generosity is a virtue, but not in princes. A generous prince will ruin the citizens by taxing them too heavily, a mean prince (and Machiavelli does not say that meanness is a good quality in private men) will save the purses of the citizens and so add to public welfare. A kind ruler—and kindness is a virtue—may let intriguers and stronger characters dominate him, and so cause chaos and corruption.

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jhhJul 2013

It reminds me of German sociologist Max Weber's famous passage in his essay "Politics as a Vocation" (1919):

"We must be clear about the fact that all ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an 'ethic of ultimate ends' or to an 'ethic of responsibility.' This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism. Naturally nobody says that. However, there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends--that is, in religious terms, 'The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord'--and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one's action.

[...]

If an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor's eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God's will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil. However a man who believes in an ethic of responsibility takes account of precisely the average deficiencies of people; as Fichte has correctly said, he does not even have the right to presuppose their goodness and perfection"

Source: http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber... (public domain)

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PercevalMar 2010

This is a puzzling result for me to read. As someone who studies international relations theory, the Realist tradition of thinkers (Machiavelli, Hobbes, E.H. Carr, Morgenthau among many others) associate power and consequentialist thinking. It was stated most clearly by Weber in the Politics as a Vocation lecture, where he contrasts the ethic of responsibility (consequences) to the ethic of conviction (deontological). Weber's Realism favors an ethic of responsibility against the more idealist thinkers of politics. E.H. Carr makes a similar distinction between deontological idealism and consequentialist Realism in his classic The Twenty Years Crisis.

This fits in with the tradition of Realism, going back the Machiavelli, who argued against actually following moral rules, but instead maintaining the appearance of following moral rules. He also links power, the use of power, the gaining of power, and the maintenance of power to a willingness to abandon moral rules. It was will and virtú that determined the prince's effectiveness in the face of fortuna.

Hobbes is probably the most interesting thinker on the topic of the link between power and morality. He makes very explicit the link between epistemology (what we can claim we know) and authority and force. In order to avoid the kind of civil wars he saw around him when writing The Leviathan (the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War), he thought that the ability to make claims about truth/revelation/values/morality had to be circumscribed from the public sphere. The ability to resolve disputes about moral knowledge had to be located in a single figure, the sovereign, who possessed authority and the power to back it up. But Hobbes is not making a descriptive argument--he's not saying that the powerful follow moral rules deontologically. He's making a normative argument--that only the powerful sovereign can make moral decisions for the public, because if anyone can make deontological claims what results is the type of religious civil war that he saw all around him.

So, for most of the tradition of Western (realist) thought, the relationship between power and morality/consequences runs the opposite way. The powerful operate (or should operate) according to consequences, not to deontological rules. The idealists--the "unarmed prophets" in the words of Machiavelli--operate on deontological rules and end up being ineffective, overthrown, or conquered.

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