The moral status of politicians

Consider the butcher.  He spends a lot of time killing animals.  Do those who find this morally questionable tend to call butchers personally to account?  I've not heard of that -- though it may happen -- but I do know that many direct their energy to education of those who demand meat.

Consider, say, a fireman on an old train.  His job involved setting fire to a bunch of coal, thus soiling the skies.  Did people blame him for this air pollution?   Or did they think:  "Hey, that's just his job.  It's the result of the choices of many people that we have trains."

In these examples and others I can think of, we tend to hold individuals less accountable for actions that are inextricably bound up with the successful completion of job-related tasks.  Perhaps the most classic example is that of the soldier following orders; yes, we often tend to think a soldier should listen to his conscience, but we also often leave way for the explanation that the soldier accepts the moral authority of his superiors.

GMU economics professor Don Boudreaux has recently inveighed against politicians -- practically all of them -- on moral grounds:

I challenge anyone to argue that the behavior of any of the major candidates (with the exceptions of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich) is admirable.  Everyone knows that each serious candidate trims, waffles, is duplicitous, has his or her finger in the winds blown by polls, and wants to be President not because of any burning itch to help fellow human beings but because the job comes with all the trappings, and much of the power, of royalty.

I see two distinct complaints here:  (1) politicians play games with words, and (2) politicians act from self-interest.  I feel that any self-respecting economist should dismiss the latter complaint out of hand; there's nothing wrong with acting primarily out of self-interest.  That leaves us with the first complaint, that politicians are tricksters.

What if it is the case that we live in a world where there are some serious interpersonal conflicts that cannot be resolved via honest back-and-forth discussion to mutual agreement?  For the means to bring about the necessary resolutions, then, we are left with second-best choices such as violence and duplicity.  I would venture to guess that many of us would choose duplicity over violence as a means of resolving a dispute.  And if these sorts of conflicts are unavoidable, and if "politician" is the occupation held by those who resolve these conflicts under a division of labor, then I find it unacceptable for those of us in other professions to consider ourselves morally superior to politicians.  Can we call on them to minimize their duplicity to the extent possible?  Without a doubt.  Can we also recognize that it is an intrinsic part of their work?  I would like to say, "Yes, we can."