| > Is it pointless to consider political parties to be subjects of morality? Yes, though perhaps somewhat less so (I'll address the “perhaps somewhat less so” part later.) What I said further down a sibling thread about corporations applies exactly to political parties as well: “It makes sense to talk about, in any given value framework, the desirability of corporate action, and the morality of any of the individual actors.” > Is it meaningless to say "The Nazi Party is bad."? No, if by “is bad” you mean “tends to produce bad outcomes”. In the general sense this is distinct from though correlated with the morality of the persons comprising the party. > The entire reason individuals organize into groups is because they can do more as a group than they could have accomplished as individuals. Yes, groups are tools of individuals, not moral actors. It is no more sensible to talk about their morality than it is to talk about the morality of other tools. You can talk about the morality of the people who are using the tool. In some types of groups, many actions of the group are a fairly direct reflection of a moral consensus of the members, and in the case of those actions of those groups one can refer to the morality of the group as a useful shorthand for the morality of the shared position of the membership that is behind the action. This is true of political parties generally in a simplified, idealized view, and frequently enough in a realistic view that it's not always completely pointless to talk about the morality of political parties. It's almost never true of the complex set of stakeholders with different structural roles that are behind business corporations, especially large and/or broadly held corporations. For any given action of a particular corporation, there might be some group of it's constituents whose morality it fairly directly reflects, but even for actions for which this is the case it won't necessarily be the same group (or even a similarly situated group) from action to action. |