Ethics and the Philosophy of Politics

Ethics and its teachings is one the main basis of the permanence of social life and a suitable interaction between its members. The amount of obedience of citizens and politicians from ethical teachings and rules, called ‘political resource’ in civil and social literature, has a great effect on the stability of the form of social life in different societies. A great deal of the classical political and philosophical teachings in the East and the West depend on improving the ethical structures of the societies. Scholars and different theoretical schools of the main birthplace of thought and wisdom in the West, the Ancient Greece, paid a special attention to ethical teachings. The great Divine and monotheistic religions of the East realizes the purification of human’s souls and correction of their ethics to achieve felicity in this and the next life as the most important matter. On the other hand governing human’s social system, called ‘politics’, has a deep-rooted relation with regulating society’s ethical system and structure. Islamic and Greek theosophists categorize ‘ethics and politics’, which are both related to action, as a practical theology and investigate their role in the stability of social life. Ethics and politics are theoretically two important fields which complete each other in regulating human’s social relations. Since political acts and decisions are along with judiciousness, gaining benefit and reducing detriments, the relation between ethics and politics is struggled. The history of political ethics shows that this struggle and opposition between the two usually ends up to the benefit of politics and to the detriment of ethical values. This article tries to briefly and comparatively study the above mentioned issues in the field of philosophy of politics and especially the classical philosophy of politics, and exactly study religious and Islamic teachings to understand the relation between ethics and practical politics.