All politicians enter into a contract with the people. Some terms and conditions are specific to a particular politician, others are common to them all.

I am not referring just to promises, as each politician makes promises. To borrow Machiavelli’s words, the politician then has to decide whether the promise given was a necessity of the past and the word broken a necessity of the present.

I am referring to the terms and conditions of the social contract which apply to all politicians. I think I would be right to argue that these ‘contractual’ terms and obligations form part of the constitutional set up of a State, even when they are not written.

Now it must be said that, whereas all societies have a vague notion of this social contract, not all societies share the same notion. Some societies, particularly those influenced by the Protestant ethos, are quite strict with their politicians. Others are more lenient and others still simply accept non-observance as a fact of life, even considering any mention of the contract as naïveté.

Our own Prime Minister is aware of his contractual obligations toward the Maltese people. However, he repeatedly tries to wriggle out of them by citing a number of exceptions or mitigating circumstances.

For the first months of his administration, he begged the People for forgiveness because it (the administration) was still green. As time passed, and this excuse expired and lost its efficacy, he resorted to at least three other different approaches.

The Prime Minister argued by implication that since the Nationalists had also done certain things, then there was really no contractual obligation. I disagree with those who read this defence of his as meaning that, since the Nationalists also did certain things, then he should not be held accountable. I think what Dr Muscat meant was this: his critics were inventing higher standards which obviously did not exist, since not even the Nationalists had abided by them in the past.

The second approach was to accept the existence of certain contractual obligations, whilst requesting that evidence be put forward in support of their contravention.

The third approach was to accept the existence of the contractual obligations and to accept that they had been contravened, but to justify the breach by arguing that the persons involved were too precious lose, despite the blatant breach of social contract.

Frankly, I find none of these excuses acceptable. Being green is neither here nor there, as such an argument denies the role of the Civil Service. Claiming that contractual obligations do not exist is a non-starter because, in politics, rules evolve. The insistence on evidence makes little if any sense at all in politics – politics is based also on perception. Lastly, retaining for whatever reason individuals who have clearly schemed to fatten their pockets is the wilful injection of a deadly virus into the social organism.

But Dr Muscat can still get away with it, because he keeps appearing as the doctor curing two ailments: the aspirations of certain minorities and the economy. As Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce said, politicians are often like doctors or surgeons. You don’t care whether your doctors or surgeons are personally honest; you only care that they cure you.

The Nationalists need to persuade the electorate that while Dr Muscat could be a good doctor for some of Malta’s ailments, he is also the cause for new ailments which he cannot cure, but they can.

It took 15 years

Fifteen years ago, with the input of other colleagues, I prepared the first draft of the Code of Ethics for the Notarial Profession. I wrote an article for The Times of Malta about the experience and the persons involved, including Drs J. Vassallo-Agius, J.H. Sciriha, J.H. Saydon, R. Wadge, C. La Rosa, P. Attard and A. Spiteri Debono. The article was published on 20 April 2003 and the Code has finally come into being, after 15 long years of gestation.  

Who is a human being?

The IVF debate has raised an important question and it is not whether the embryo is a human being. The important question is whether we who have been born are human beings.

One of the most insightful answers to this important question was given by the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico: we are human beings because we bury our dead.

If showing respect to the lifeless bodies of those we have loved is what makes us human beings, then we are human beings also because we show respect to those we have yet to love.

Whether the embryo is viable, potential, actual or any other of these words, is of no real import. One part of the crux of the matter is that the embryo is somebody’s progeny. Yes, even if still in the form of eight undifferentiated cells, it is still somebody’s child.

Another part of the same crux is that not all desires imply an obligation of fulfilment. We are human beings because we neither kill our offspring nor do we commodify them.

We are human beings because we respect all those who belong to humanity because, to borrow an ancient phrase made famous by Thomas Hobbes, we are not wolves to one another.

My personal library (5)

Leonardo Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl (1960) (Il Giorno della Civetta in Italian) is a novel about contractors in Sicily paying kickbacks and protection money to the Mafia and the murder of one small construction contractor who refused to follow suit. An upright policeman from mainland Italy tries to solve the murder but his efforts are foiled by the whacking of a key witness. A film of the same name inspired by the novel and directed by Damiano Damiani, was released in 1968.

At the time the novel was written, there was resistance in Italy towards accepting that the Mafia really existed. Sciascia’s publication proved instrumental in overturning the situation.

The novel contains the famous subdivision of humanity by the local Mafia boss into five categories:

“I have a certain experience of the world; and what we call humanity – all hot air, that word – I divide into five categories: men, half-men, pigmies, arse-crawlers – if you’ll excuse the expression – and quackers. Men are very few indeed; half-men few, and I’d be content if humanity finished with them... But no, it sinks even lower, to the pigmies who’re like children trying to be grown-ups, monkeys going through the motions of their elders... Then down even lower we go to the arse-crawlers who’re legion... And, finally, to the quackers; they ought to just exist, like ducks in a pond: their lives have no point or meaning.”