INTRODUCTION

Political philosophers often imagine themselves as advisors to political leaders. Much of what such philosophers do consists in offering principles by which the decisions of political leaders might be guided, criticized, and assessed. We offer, as it were, moral standards by which the actions of governments might be evaluated; the more ambitious of us hope that such governments might, indeed, be guided by our words.

This is a perfectly legitimate goal for political philosophers. It need not be, however, the only focus of philosophical inquiry in political life. In what follows, I want to begin an exploration into a different area of political ethics. We need, to be sure, ethical principles applicable to the decisions of those agents directly controlling the decisions and policies of governmental power. We would also, I believe, benefit from an examination of ethical principles applicable to the behavior of those agents whose relationship to governmental power is less direct. There are, after all, a multitude of agents with roles to play in the political process: citizens, unions, ethnic associations, political parties—all these, and more, have roles to play in the wider process of governance. The specific task of some of these agents, however, consists primarily in the response to governmental policy, rather than in the direct exercise of governmental power. I refer to such agents as “second-order political agents” when their primary mode of agency involves the critical response to governmental action, rather than the exercise of state power.