LeoCasey at aol.com:
> I don't see the type of moral connection you posit. The only moral imperative
> that I see in elections is that of making an informed decision to support
> candidates and parties which, in your judgment, do as little harm and as much
> good as possible. The best analogy I can see to the choices we face in
> American elections is to medical triage, where because of a host of difficult
> conditions, a medical professional has to make difficult decisions about how
> to save the largest numbers of lives. One does not abandon one's moral
> commitment to the preservation of _all_ life by engaging in triage; one
> simply fulfills it to the greatest extent possible, given the circumstances.
> To paraphrase the old post-Hegelian, "We don't make history as we please, but
> under conditions..."
>
> Insofar as I have moral qualms about supporting the election of a Gore, they
> would be on issues such as his support for capital punishment, which I
> consider to be a clearly immoral policy. But since the election of Bush would
> not produce a more positive result in this particular policy area, and yet
> clearly would produce far more negative results in other policy areas, I
> don't think that the choice to support Gore's election is a particularly
> difficult one to make.
I'm confused by your answer. Are you saying that the Drug War is not a moral issue, or that moral issues don't matter very much in elections? What standards of harm and good, and for whom, are being used here? The triage analogy doesn't work for me -- the analogy I see is being offered a choice between to mad doctors, both of whom offer to help some of the wounded if they're allowed to shoot others. Maybe we guess one has more bullets in his pocket than the other. But why should one participate in and thus legitimate such a choice?