Political norms and moral values

Is genuinely normative political theory necessarily informed by distinctively moral values? Eva Erman and Niklas Möller (2015) answer that question affirmatively, and highlight its centrality in the debate on the prospects of political realism, which explicitly eschews pre-political moral foundations. In this comment we defend the emerging realist current. After briefly presenting Erman and Möller’s position, we (i) observe that freedom and equality are not obviously moral values in the way they assume, and (ii) argue that a non-moral distinction between politics and sheer domination can give us a distinctively political normativity. The two points are related but freestanding.