With Boris Johnson’s departure, the drama of the Conservative leadership election, and Keir Starmer’s declaration that “integrity matters” in politics, the question of what ethical standards we ought to hold politicians to has never felt more pressing in the UK.
The idea that ethics has anything to do with politics is often (justifiably) met with some degree of scepticism. As philosopher Michael Walzer notes, it is conventional wisdom that politicians are “a good deal worse, morally worse, than the rest of us”.
