The virtues and vices of resigning from office

Resigning from office can have a deeply moral dimension, whether to make amends for an unethical deed or to avoid having to carry one out. It is therefore no surprise that those calling for a restoration of morality in public affairs should stress the virtues of resigning. Is it always morally responsible to resign on ethical grounds, however? This paper argues against this Manichean stance. Instead, loosely borrowing from Aristotle’s theory of the mean, it asserts the proximity of vice and virtue in many instances, rendering the decision-making process more complex than following some simple ethical rules

Deed · Environmental ethics · Ideology · Immorality · Law and economics · Morality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Surprise · Virtue · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought · War, Ethics, and Justification