Sunday, June 23, 2019

Moral dilemmas for the voting booth and battlefield

A couple of problems with French's tweet:

i) Making moral evaluations about voting isn't about assessing a particular candidate in isolation, but a comparative judgment about competing candidates. You are choosing between one candidate and another. 

ii) French's scruples are ironic and lacking in self-reflection when you remember that French is an ex-Marine. He volunteered for service during the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. And he was deployed to Iraq.

Now warfare is notorious for its moral dilemmas. "The problem  of dirty hands". Take airstrikes which will inevitably result in the killing or maiming of innocent children. Children who are blinded or horribly burned or lose arms and legs as a result of air strikes. 

If that's justifiable, how is voting for Trump worse than that? Both soldiers and voters are sometimes confronted with moral dilemmas. Presumably, French endorses the lesser-evil principle to justify his own, voluntary participation in the horrors of war. Why does he have different moral standards for voting and warfare? 

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