A tale of two Keirs

Tweet

 

As a general rule, ethics sounds like a good thing to possess. Politicians, in particular, would rather like us to believe that they are a particularly ethical breed of person, although there is a certain amount of objective evidence to suggest that it isn’t exactly the first profession to which one might turn in search of an ethical person. Attempts to base policy on ethics haven’t always been entirely successful. Robin Cook had a stab at an ‘ethical foreign policy’ back in 1997, but it didn’t stand the test of time, and any limited ethical basis that was introduced didn’t outlast his tenure. Business as usual returned us to a policy based rather more on naked economic interest.

Some businesses and investment companies have also tried to base their activities on an ethical approach, with varying degrees of success. The biggest problem, in politics and business alike, is that ethics, like beauty, tend to reside in the eye of the beholder. What one person considers to be ethical might be considered to be quite the opposite by another, and people can find some sort of ethical justification for just about anything. A fine-sounding word turns out to have, at best, a somewhat flexible meaning. Somehow, it usually seems to be the case that the most ethical thing to do is that from which the self-styled ethical person derives most benefit, or which best fits with his or her own priors.

There was a classic example yesterday, when a group of Labour politicians demanded that spending on armaments should be redesignated from unethical to ethical. It seems that investors who want their money to be used ‘ethically’ are shunning the idea of putting their cash into death and destruction, and the ‘solution’ according to an astonishing number of Labour politicians, is to recategorize death and destruction as being an entirely ‘ethical’ receptacle for investment.

There is, of course, a debate to be had about whether spending on armaments might be ‘necessary’ at times; and the balance of that debate will vary according to the circumstances, to say nothing of the personal views of individuals. But the idea that using the Earth’s necessarily finite resources to deliver death and destruction rather than health and prosperity can ever be designated an inherently ethical thing to do is a strange one, which strips the word of all common sense meaning. It’s another example of how far the Labour Party has travelled from the principles of one Keir to another.