This is a puzzling result for me to read. As someone who studies international relations theory, the Realist tradition of thinkers (Machiavelli, Hobbes, E.H. C

This is a puzzling result for me to read. As someone who studies international relations theory, the Realist tradition of thinkers (Machiavelli, Hobbes, E.H. Carr, Morgenthau among many others) associate power and consequentialist thinking. It was stated most clearly by Weber in the Politics as a Vocation lecture, where he contrasts the ethic of responsibility (consequences) to the ethic of conviction (deontological). Weber's Realism favors an ethic of responsibility against the more idealist thinkers of politics. E.H. Carr makes a similar distinction between deontological idealism and consequentialist Realism in his classic The Twenty Years Crisis. This fits in with the tradition of Realism, going back the Machiavelli, who argued against actually following moral rules, but instead maintaining the appearance of following moral rules. He also links power, the use of power, the gaining of power, and the maintenance of power to a willingness to abandon moral rules. It was will and virtú that determined the prince's effectiveness in the face of fortuna. Hobbes is probably the most interesting thinker on the topic of the link between power and morality. He makes very explicit the link between epistemology (what we can claim we know) and authority and force. In order to avoid the kind of civil wars he saw around him when writing The Leviathan (the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War), he thought that the ability to make claims about truth/revelation/values/morality had to be circumscribed from the public sphere. The ability to resolve disputes about moral knowledge had to be located in a single figure, the sovereign, who possessed authority and the power to back it up. But Hobbes is not making a descriptive argument--he's not saying that the powerful follow moral rules deontologically. He's making a normative argument--that only the powerful sovereign can make moral decisions for the public, because if anyone can make deontological claims what results is the type of religious civil war that he saw all around him. So, for most of the tradition of Western (realist) thought, the relationship between power and morality/consequences runs the opposite way. The powerful operate (or should operate) according to consequences, not to deontological rules. The idealists--the "unarmed prophets" in the words of Machiavelli--operate on deontological rules and end up being ineffective, overthrown, or conquered.