Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. asked us to cast a vote for him rather than Donald John Trump because, he said, the soul of America is at stake.
That’s a scary argument on many levels, not the least of which is the implied threat to suck us back before the 1648 Peace of Westphalia when rulers were thought to be anointed by God. Scary or not, it might be true.
I tried to teach my undergraduate students that it takes more than a correct choice between legal and illegal to make a correct choice between right and wrong but the latter choice must still be made. If you are a police officer, authorized by the law to deploy deadly force, making an unwise choice between right and wrong will lose you more than your job.
If you whine and cry about the unfairness of being impaled on the horns of a complicated dilemma with life and death in the balance and mere seconds to decide, somebody is sure to remind you that you applied for the job, tested for the job, and you were in my class to prepare yourself for the competition you had to win to find yourself alone on a dark street with a fistful of 9 mm justice.
The decision you make about the use of that pistol is a decision of government. At the moment of the decision, you are the government.
It’s easier to understand a judge as the government because the judicial branch is co-equal with the legislative and the executive branches. When a judge signed the search warrant that authorized a band of armed men to enter Breonna Taylor’s apartment without knocking to conduct a search, he was the government. The police were authorized to use deadly force to accomplish their purpose and Ms. Taylor had an overnight guest who was in possession of a licensed pistol and a legal right to use it to repel intruders. What could possibly go wrong?
If we are looking for moral decisions required of government, criminal justice is low-hanging fruit. However, in times of great emergency — -the Great Depression and the COVID 19 Pandemic come quickly to mind — -it’s no great feat of imagination to come up with decisions by government that are matters of life and death involving much higher body counts than law enforcement actions.
I hope most readers can indulge with me the assumption that when one human being decides to take the life of another, that decision normally requires some reference to moral authority, express or implied. I’m unclear why ignorance of the identity of the victim should affect the moral calculus, but I can certainly understand the emotional impact of looking an individual in the eye whose life is about to be devastated even if it’s allowed to continue at all…that never slowed down Donald Trump, nor did it have much effect on his popularity, so it could be that I err on the finicky side.
Ignorance stands in the way of attributing moral agency to government. I spent my first career in government, and the memories are dominated by decision points coming at me thick and fast, sometimes anticipated and sometimes not. I was a judge and foreseeably in the business of making decisions, but I’m not speaking of the craft of judging. There are ancillary duties not visible from the outside that will determine how long an accused citizen can be held before seeing a judge, who shall sit on the grand jury, the skills of the persons tasked to determine compensation for property taken by the government — -these decisions vary among jurisdictions, but judicial duties are seldom limited to trying lawsuits.
Few people go to work for any branch of any government with a purpose to do harm, so it’s fair to ask how much moral judgment can be attributed to conduct in the absence of mens rea (a “guilty mind.”) The guilty purpose of a few governments is obvious, and when we go to war, we always try to argue that is the case. Sometimes it seems that the Nazis will always be with us — even rhetorical goals require goalposts.
Mein Kampf is an awful piece of writing, but it leaves little doubt of the author’s evil intent. So evil, it seems to me, that anybody who wants to argue that governments lack moral agency must account for the Holocaust, genocide as abstract argument brought in a very short time to genocide as praxis.
Nazis present such unalloyed evil as to be of little use beyond laying down a marker. Normal governmental decisions involve arguments that offer two sides. President Herbert Hoover has a lot of human misery attached to the history of his presidency, but the portrait that comes down to us is of a decent man of his times. He could see people hungry and homeless, but he could not understand hunger and homelessness as harms within the power of government to redress, or at least within the power of the sort of government he had been elected to lead.
Mr. Trump would not be limited by such thoughts because it is unlikely he had them. After watching the man in action and inaction for four years, it remains hard for a person of my limitations to picture Donald John Trump interrogating what powers he had as POTUS, let alone what powers he ought to have had.
Mr. Hoover would see the problems facing his nation as challenges to private charities, to which he would give generously. Mr. Trump would adopt that understanding right up to the part about giving generously.
When I had the good fortune to be hired away from a tenured position at the University of Texas-San Antonio to a position of the same rank but without tenure at Indiana University-Bloomington, the department chair who did the negotiation was an authority on white-collar crime who took his terminal degree from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
Wharton has an excellent reputation, but I had never before had dealings with anyone educated there. By the time Mr. Trump had beaten a woman with qualifications superior to his own to become POTUS by grace of the Electoral College, I felt qualified to state an opinion of the graduate education offered by Wharton, an opinion that blew right past my bias against business schools generally.
It was only after Mr. Trump made errors in political science that should shame an undergraduate that my own error hit me in the face. Mr. Trump had never been exposed to the graduate education offered by the Wharton School…or any other graduate school. After an undergraduate ride that failed to set the world on fire according to all available evidence except Mr. Trump’s self-reporting of his own brilliance, his education ended.
Graduate school is not a requirement to become President, but I hope my confusion is understandable when I’m asking after the education of the POTUS who knows more about the unitary theory of the executive than his lawyers, more about a pandemic virus than his doctors, and more about urban guerrilla warfare than his generals. While the POTUS has access to the very best advice from the very best experts in the world, it is necessary that he ask. Asking is an implied admission that there is something Mr. Trump does not know, something beyond the ken of a “very stable genius.”
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Previously Published on Medium
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