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This is a baffling sentence. How do you define "principle", if not a belief about "what is right"?
It's a paraphrase of Isaac Asimov. But I can elaborate of course.
Pragmatists like Willard Van Orman Quine hold that language is not reality but a model of reality, which makes any logically constructed principle or ideology an inherently imperfect tool to observe, predict and interact with the world.
Principles are a map of morality rather than its territory, insofar as one regards morality to be an inherent property of the world rather than a logically constructed proposition in itself (but then that that opens itself to Nietzschean skepticism).
Correct conduct may therefore be at odds with what is logically prescribed by principle in the real world. We most often call this "paradox".
Well known examples of this often quoted in this utilitarian neighborhood include the mere addition paradox or the paradox of hedonism. But this imperfection is a general property of all theories, not just moral or political ones.
Hence, any reasonable political actor, who actually has to enact his moral ideas in this imperfect real world may have to encounter the difficulties of his ideological framework when confronted with the real workings of the world, and if he is to succeed he will have to make compromises. After immediate collectivization failed, Lenin enacted the NEP even though it's totally against Marxist principles in theory. Yet can we really say that Lenin was not a Marxist?
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