A Republican supporter of Joe Biden argues with supporters of Donald Trump as they protest outside a campaign event held by the US Democratic presidential candidate in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 12 October The boss wants you to carry out this unenviable task. What should you do? Agreeing will violate the ideals that compelled you to volunteer in the first place.
But if you quit, the euthanising will still happen — and might very well be less humane than if you were doing it. A more familiar context in which this problem presents itself is at the ballot box.
Suppose you believe the state should look after the wellbeing of the poor and combat the structural forces that enrich the wealthy. What kind of ballot should you cast? The moral dilemma behind these scenarios is the subject of a well-known argument in moral philosophy. Bernard Williams argued that you should care about maintaining integrity in your personal ideals — not necessarily at all costs, but at least a bit.
You are responsible for the acts you do, not for everything that they lead to. But perhaps you find this way of thinking a bit spineless, or even a bit lawyerly. It sounds like the special pleading of a moral narcissist — someone who cares more about preserving an unblemished moral record than about making the world a better place. The significance of integrity runs deeper than this, though. If you allow the shelter bosses of this world to dictate the choice architecture within which you and others make decisions, you grant them an agenda-setting prerogative that is rightly yours, as much as it is theirs.
How might this play out in the voting case? Politics has its own standards of excellence which are different from those of other spheres of action. It is also obvious that Humphrey has a better intellectual grasp than his opponent of some of the substantive problems with which the next president must come to terms.
Humphrey is aware of the acute threats to American society, through the decay of the cities and the aggravation of racial conflict, and he knows that these threats must be countered by reforms rather than by repression. But the reforms he has suggested by and large have been bypassed by history. They might have been adequate twenty or thirty years ago but they are only palliatives today.
While Humphrey has shared the liberal illusion that disarmament is possible without at least concomitant settlement of the political issues from which the armaments race arose, he has clearly seen the enormous risks of nuclear proliferation as well as the risks and irrationality of the nuclear arms race.
The role Humphrey has played in the conduct of the Vietnam war has been deliberately obscured and falsified. There has only been one Humphrey, wholeheartedly and passionately supporting the war in private as well as in public. He has always been warmhearted, decent, idealistic, enthusiastic, uncritical, easily swayed by emotion, intoxicated by his own rhetoric, lacking in political judgment, failing in political organization and management, and without the authority of a political leader.
The New York Times , in its editorial of October 6 endorsing Humphrey, has embellished the myth of the dovish Humphrey struggling at long last to emerge from under the wings of Johnson.
George Ball, who had doubts about some of the tactics of the war but, as his recent book clearly shows, has seen eye to eye with Johnson on philosophy and strategy? Or those former members of the Johnson Administration who, far from being opposed to the war, wanted to improve its operations? Or those who enthusiastically supported the war so long as the polls supported it, and followed the polls into half-hearted opposition?
He has shown no intellectual understanding of the momentous issues with which the next president will have to deal. His remedy for the disintegration of American society appears to be private enterprise and the police.
However, Nixon has one quality, indispensable but not sufficient in a political leader, in which Humphrey is lacking: the gift of political organization and manipulation. He transformed the Republican Party, virtually moribund four years ago, into an instrument of his power and victory.
He has done this by organizing the party from the grass roots up, by giving his competitors enough rope to hang themselves, by straddling the issues, such as Vietnam, or by glossing them over with unexceptionable generalities, such as those on the cities and race. These political gifts are at the service not of a great political vision nor even of a limited political program, but of a drive for personal power.
Nixon thus far has shown all the qualities of a politician of the second rank, but none of those of a political leader or statesman. The mistakes Humphrey would have made enthusiastically, unthinkingly, well-meaningly, Nixon is likely to make by limiting his calculations to the effect his actions might have upon his personal political fortunes. However different the two contenders are in personality, ability, and style, they offer us the prospect of the same calamities.
That grim picture has only one redeeming feature, favoring Nixon. Nixon is more likely than Humphrey to make an end to the Vietnam war; for in contrast to Humphrey, he is not emotionally committed to it, nor does he bear any responsibility for it.
He can afford to allow political calculations to determine his actions, and these calculations point unmistakably in the direction of speedy liquidation of the losing enterprise.
If the cost of liquidation should be painfully high, the Democrats are available for blame. Weighing the over-all prospects both candidates present to the people, and trying to choose between them, one must suspend political judgment, which is supposed to guide us to the choice of the lesser evil. For while they present two different kinds of evil, by what objective criteria is one to decide which is the lesser?
Political judgment tells us only that neither candidate is qualified to be president of the United States from to and that it is impossible to foresee on the basis of the record which administration is likely to be less calamitous for the nation. This being the case, it is perfectly rational not to vote at all since there is no basis for a rational choice. The decision to vote nevertheless becomes then a matter of subjective preference, of political taste. In truth, the crucial issue—crucial for the future of American democracy—is not between Humphrey and Nixon, but between Humphrey and Nixon, on the one hand, and Wallace, on the other.
The rational voter is called upon to answer not only the question—unanswerable on rational grounds, as we have seen—as to who, Humphrey or Nixon, would make the better president, but also and above all who is better qualified to defend American democracy against the onslaught of the Wallace movement. That latter question is indeed susceptible of a rational answer.
The Democratic Party is likely to suffer a debacle similar to the one that befell the Republicans in The debacle of may turn out not to be worse than that of as far as popular and electoral votes are concerned—although even this is quite possible—but it is bound to be worse in its political consequences. But it is also an opportunity to go beyond voting to make a better world. So vote for the lesser of two evils, then break all hell loose to protest his faults and change the voting system, so that you can vote your heart in the future.
Anna Hiltner is a sophomore. She may be reached at ahiltner princeton. Arts Entertainment Lifestyle Self. Video Podcast Visual Essays. Puzzles Special Issues Satire. Subscribe now ». Economics Professor Ellora Derenoncourt discusses new center on inequality. Charlie Roth. Braden Flax.
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