Politics and Ethics

Some say that politics and ethics have nothing to do with each other and any political action cannot and must not be assessed from ethical point of view. Is it really true?

In the past couple of years Latvia (an xUSSR country) passed a number of laws concerning Russian language. Russian language was turned into a foreign language (i.e. not second official language); the area of its official application was narrowed. Use of Russian language in schools, especially in middle, high, and professional, was also restricted (“at least 60 percent of all classes taught in Latvia”s public schools for Russian minority must now be taught in Latvian”). I don’t want to talk about why it happened, what impact it will have, and how to “fix” it, as I don’t want to be too biased. There are many websites out there that represent at least three different points of view (depending on whether you are a conservative Latvian, Latvian Russian, or other ). For our purposes it will suffice to say that these laws will directly concern “around a third of Latvia”s population of 2.35 million”.

Latvia certainly has the right to pass such laws, but I argue that such legislation is unjust (and thus unethical in this case). Politics is not about being ethical, but this time it would”ve benefited Latvia to try to be more ethical. By passing these laws Latvia broke even more bonds with Russia (which is politically and economically a bad decision for Latvia) and made European Union wary… Thus, Latvia, by making an unethical decision, made a bad political decision.

If you want to read more about how some languages are favored over others, I suggest you read an article called “Urban Legend: German almost became the official language of the US” and especially this one (as it actually has a connection to the topic I discussed above): “Requiring English / Accepting Other Languages in the U.S.”

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