Ethics and Morality -- Relationship Essay

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38); a Prince should also appear to keep at least some of the old ways so the people will readily accept the new ways (Machiavelli, Discourses on the first decade of Titus Livius, 2007, p. 98). While the circumstances may change, it is clear that a Prince must be willing and able to manipulate appearances in order to convince others to give their power over to him.

3. Conclusion

Niccolo Machiavelli's ideas on appearance, reality and power stem from his background and place in the political shifts of 16th Century Italy. A career politician who used and was used by the politics of the time, Machiavelli developed certain unvarnished "truths" about gaining and retaining power. It was during his political exile that he wrote the Prince, his most famous work and a book that is still read 500 years after its publication. For Machiavelli, reality was quite different from the ideally morally-driven politics espoused by Aristotle. In Machiavelli's world, reality was about obtaining and retaining personal power, necessarily divorced from ethics/morality because men are "ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous…" and fortune is fickle/cruel.

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Rather than acting on what "ought to be," the Prince ideally acted on "what is," resorting to force, fraud and generally "knowing how to do what is wrong" if the circumstances warrant it. In addition, Machiavelli discussed the importance of manipulating appearances in order to have other people give over their power to the Prince. A Prince should exhibit the five virtues of mercy, faithfulness, humaneness, religiousness, and uprightness, whether or not the Prince actually possessed those virtues. A Prince should also manipulate appearances to make people fear him, to appear well-established, to encourage hope in his subjects, to make his subjects fear their enemies' cruelty, to safeguard himself against people who seem too bold, and to make his subjects accept his new ways by at least pretending to keep some of the old ways. For Machiavelli, a Prince's ability to accept reality and do what is necessary, both in reality and appearance, amounted to virtu that could give him personal power and power given over to him by others.

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