Taking life philosophically.
10 January 2010
Apparently a new TV series on the Borgia family is supposed to be out in 2011, titled simply The Borgias. Should be quite interesting. The history of Renaissance Italy is full of great characters and imaginative and immoral schemes, so the writers can draw from a rich source of material.
There is however an unfortunate stereotype. Quoting from the press release:
The series begins as the family’s patriarch Rodrigo (Jeremy Irons), becomes Pope, propelling him, his two Machiavellian sons Cesare and Juan, and his scandalously beautiful daughter, Lucrezia, to become the most powerful and influential family of the Italian Renaissance. And all that power and influence eventually leads to their demise. As Machiavelli once said about his friends, the Borgias, “Politics have no relation to morals.”
As far as I know, neither Machiavelli nor anyone else ever said such a thing. The confusion can be attributed to the influence of a famous interpretation according to which Machiavelli separated the spheres of morality and politics. This interpretation can be traced back at least to Benedetto Croce. However, this interpretation has been shown to be untenable for several different reasons, perhaps most notably by Isaiah Berlin.
The idea of the Crocean interpretation is that different reasons guide political and private action, and that it is as inappropriate to use private, ethical criteria to appraise political action as it is to use political criteria to appraise private action. They are two separate spheres.
The first problem with the interpretation is that such spheres do not exist. The whole point of ethics is that all action has to be appraised using ethical criteria. Ethics admits no exceptions.
The second problem is that the interpretation seems to be quite obviously in contradiction with what Machiavelli actually says. Machiavelli does not think politics are separate from morality. It can however be said that his moral principles seem to us so strange that it is difficult for us to recognize them as moral principles. Yet, without doubt they are moral principles, and should be understood as such.
The Borgias themselves may often have conducted their business in immoral ways, but that is no reason to jump into strange conclusions about the metaethical thinking of their contemporaries. Let us hope the series can offer a fresh view into the life of this unusual group of people in an unusual period of history.
The journal of Timo Laine (contact information). Cultural commentary from the perspective of a philosophy student in Helsinki.