Virtue Ethics and Political Realism: Friends or Foes?

Political realists reject pre-political moral norms, contending that such norms lead to utopian ideals and ideological conformity. Rather than viewing politics as a means to achieve justice, equality, well-being, or other moral goods, realists argue that the focus of political philosophy should be the actual workings of politics and a critique of the moral justifications used to solidify asymmetric power relations. These arguments in favour of keeping moral norms separate from political theorising have faced ample conceptual criticism (Erman and Möller 2015; 2022; Leader Maynard and Worsnip 2018), as well as substantive critique that theorising about politics without accounting for ethics can lead to ignoring evidence directly related to values, such as epistemic injustice (see also (Baderin 2021), and on importance of engaging with empirical data in normative theorising, see Dowding 2020; Perez 2023; Baderin 2023). Aligning with the critics who assert that political theorising devoid of any underlying moral principles is unfeasible, I aim is to demonstrate that by conceptualising morality as an epistemic rather than a substantive and teleological concept, it can become appealing even to the most stringent realists. For this, I expand on the distinction between morality and ethics - as also articulated by Bernard Williams (1985), one of the leading figures of the 'realist turn' in normative political theory – by outlining the realist contours of Christine Swanton’s (2003) pluralist perspective on virtue ethics and complementing it with virtue-driven conceptions of truthfulness and empathetic understanding. I argue that virtue ethics can offer political realists a normative framework that avoids the pitfalls of ideological dogmatism and utopianism. By incorporating virtues into normative political theorising, realists can maintain a critical stance towards moral norms without succumbing to formalism, while also sustaining the ability to devise prescriptive tools to envision positive change.