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# Posted 4:54 AM by Patrick Belton

ECONOMIST ENDORSES HAVING A MISTRESS: At least for wartime presidents. In a highly laudatory review of Lord Black's one-volume biography of FDR, the newspaper's editors conclude with the following paragraph:

After his death, their daughter Anna had to explain to her mother that he had been, at the last, back in the company of his mistress Lucy Rutherfurd, whom Eleanor thought she had banished more than 25 years before. Such is the private life of those who have to live with Atlas as he holds up the burden of the world.

This is simply silly. That FDR was inimitably great as a president is beyond refute. But having a mistress is either wrong (principally because it involves promise-breaking, a delict in most ethical systems; my personal view), or it isn't (the view often attributed to the French, though interestingly, generally by jealous Anglo-Americans). What simply isn't the case is that elevated office, irrespective of its demands however Atlas-like, could transfer the incumbent's personal (and sexual) conduct into a different moral universe from the rest of us. To think so is a dangerous and common tendency, and generally implied rather than baldly stated - but Pinochet lies that way, as do many other instances of the abuse of privilege. The other way lies civic republicanism as first enunciated by the classics: for Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, eudaimonia - happiness, or human flourishing- is a complete and sufficient good because it satisfies all desire and has no evil mixed in with it. And while the exercise of political virtue and the ability to be, say, Roosevelt may not be distributed equally across a population, phronesis - that is, the practical wisdom to distinguish ethical conduct from contrasting vices - is something which all human actors have an equal need to acquire in order to flourish. Wartime presidents and prime ministers, too.

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