The Horrible Esthete Wrote:What I mean by that is the moral and ethical codes of the populace may (and should) be scrutinized, but when it comes time for that populace to select its leader, his 'rightness' or 'wrongess' for the nation is established by the democratic process itself, regardless how morally rich or bankrupt that populace might be. Do you understand what I'm getting at here?
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The Evangelical Christians are on the same level with Muslim Extremists in my eyes. The best goverment, IMO, is a government that establishes moral and ethical standards outside of religious doctrine.
Well, we can agree on at least one thing: fundamentalist intolerance has no place in policy-making. I've always been in favour of rational argument and respect for evidence, myself....
But you're continuing to argue by appeal to popularity. Who's "right" or "wrong" for me
may be a matter of my preferences, but who is right or wrong for
an entire nation certainly can't be considered a matter of 50 percent opinion plus one. You're attempting to justify the appeal to popularity by equating "right" with "popular" in your premise, which makes your argument circular:
1. what's popular is right.
2. a choice was made by popular vote.
3. therefore the popular choice is right.
This looks like an ideological bias to me, an assumption that democracies result in correct decisions or at least that what people want is what is best for them. Unfortunately, this doesn't coincide with the actual facts. Hitler was popular, but was not "right" for Germany -- and in the long run, he turned out not to be right for anyone. Turning to democracies, we can find numerous examples of popular, elected governments whose promises, when carried out, caused negative results.
The basic assumption that what's right for me is a matter of my opinion is also flawed. People routinely make poor decisions in everyday life, and they are even more likely to do so in politics, particularly in campaigns where policy takes second place to "character" and "values."
Which happened here, on both sides -- because I'm sure we can also both agree that the central argument of the Democratic campaign was less that Kerry would be good for the country than that Bush would be bad. If I was concerned that under Bush I might be drafted, for example, and voted to get rid of Bush, I'd be making a bad decision because given Kerry's Iraq policy I'd be just as likely to be drafted under him (whatever the real likelihood would be) as under Bush.
cratch:
