Yet another post thoughtfully provided by a commenter on my Facebook page, this time in response to an article I posted about Donald Trump’s speech to Congress way, way last week. I’ve been pondering it and decided it was worth my further thoughts. Here’s what the commenter said:
So then, when I expostulated and expatiated with him a bit, he wrote:
I never said you are not a Christian nor did I say you are not a conservative. I said the philosophy of “the end justifies the means” is certainly not Christian, and is also not conservative, and I stand by that.
Hmmm. So I guess I can have the philosophy of being not Christian and not conservative but still be a Christian and a conservative. A bit confusing.
But I got to thinking about this whole “ends justifies the means” idea. Let’s parse it a bit, shall we? The original idea of this phrase was that you could do anything, even something morally wrong (so, the “means”) if you were trying to accomplish something good (the “ends). In this view, for example, it would be okay to torture someone if you were going to get information to save lives (the whole “ticking time bomb” scenario).
Let’s apply this means/ends test to how people voted in November. I know I’ve laid out these different groups before, so bear with me. I have a different end in mind here.
On either extreme of the spectrum were people who were in full agreement with the candidate for whom they voted. There are certainly problems that can be pointed out with their worldviews:
Trump: white nationalism/protectionism/violence/vulgarity/adultery/dishonesty/business background-with-lots-of-bankruptcies
vs.
Clinton: nanny state/pro-abortion/corruption/Bill Clinton-enabling/first-woman-President.
But there is no ends/means collision as such. They were for what their candidate was for, and they voted accordingly.
Now we get to people who did not agree wholeheartedly with either candidate (probably about 98% of the electorate). If you said, “I have to vote for Donald Trump because he’ll appoint good Supreme Court justices, even though he’s a lyin’ cheatin’ adulterer,” why is that not saying that the ends justify the means? The end is to get a conservative Supreme Court, so any means to get to that end is okay, even electing a dangerously erratic man with vile character.
With me, I said the opposite: that Trump was indeed so dangerously erratic (among a whole host of other problems) that I considered it a legitimate action to vote for his opponent as the lesser of two evils. (I know, I know. That phrase is getting seriously shopworn.) So why was it okay to vote for Trump and all his baggage but not okay to vote for Clinton and all of hers, when your choices are:
a. to make a choice,
or
b. to not make a choice, i.e., not to vote for either candidate?
You know what, by the way? I think I was kind of a wuss about this whole voting-for-Hillary thing. I should have just said, “I think she would do a better job. She’s experienced, tough, and shrewd. She knows perfectly well she’s not going to get her way with a Republican Congress, and she’s used to reaching across the aisle. I think having her as President is a perfectly workable outcome of the election.”
But that’s sort of beside the point. My actual point (everybody still with me?) is that we make these lesser-of-two-evils choices all the time, and they’re not the same as ends-justifies-the-means choices. We’re always having to choose between or among imperfect options. If we didn’t do that in the seriously flawed world that we inhabit, we’d never make any choices at all and just sit there and die.
Does that seem like a good idea to you?