This was an interesting read, and a surprisingly dense one despite its brevity (~ 20,000 words), anedoctal sections, and relatively unstructured form. There are a number of themes underlying the sub-headed parts ("The world as I found it", "From Kant to Kelly", "Love of country", "Through a glass darkly", "Torture", "Floating world"), but the connections are not always clear, and there are plenty of diversions along the way. Essentially, though, "Breach of Trust" is indeed concerned with the relationship between truth, morality and politics, and I think that some pretty clear themes and ideas emerge from Gaita's essay.
For one thing, Gaita consistently argues against a consequentialist view of ethics - he refuses to accept that ethical judgements can be made solely on the basis of consequence of actions - although at the same time he is at pains to distance himself from the charge of moral absolutism (he uses 'ethics' and 'morality' interchangeably). Gaita argues that "ethical considerations need not be understood merely as principles that regulate a practice whose essential nature is directed to other ends ... standards may be partly constitutive rather than merely regulative of an activity", but that contemporary society is estranged from its fundamental values, having in large measure lost the conceptual frameworks necessary to think of ethics in this fashion.
He goes on to argue that politicians will often be forced to choose between incommensurable, irreconcilable moral and political imperatives - for him, it is misguided to suggest that all such conflicts can be reduced to purely moral terms, for such a reduction relies on a (mistaken) view of morality as a set of rules or principles, serving a purpose, which can be creatively adapted to serve our (political) interests. Nonetheless, he contends (if I understand his argument correctly) that politics is not separable from morality - each must always inform and be answerable to the other, despite their complex relationship. Precisely how he thinks this would work in practice is something left hanging in the essay, I think, but the picture of the relationship between the two which he develops is sufficiently nuanced that I wouldn't be surprised if I'd missed a large part of it on my first reading.
Yet that's only really one thread of Gaita's argument in "Breach of Trust". Intertwined are also serious considerations of the nature of moral judgement (and the consideration that it need not entail blame - a counterintuitive position which I at first thought was absurd, but have since come to accept), the meaning, value and foundation of "patriotic loyalty and its corruptions" (and, relatedly, the questions surrounding notions of national pride and national shame), the importance of truth (and its relationship to lying and mendacity), and related digressions on topics relevant to the current Australian and global political landscape including the legitimacy of torture, the possibility of forming moral judgements about terrorists, and the continuing fallout from the (ill-founded but now factual) invasion of Iraq.
It's difficult for me to really articulate what I think of Gaita's arguments - or to form a coherent critique - for the simple reason that I don't think he himself articulates those arguments especially clearly in the first place. There's a lot going on in this essay, and while the constituent parts generally read well, it's often left to the reader to make some fairly large leaps of understanding and intuition in order to piece together a sense of how the whole hangs together. It would take more time than I'm currently willing to devote to disentangle all of the threads and work out how everything fits together - instead, lazily, I'll wait on the correspondence (and hopefully Gaita's response thereto) in the next QE to see what others have made of it.
