Many of my fellow Paul supporters insist that in this year\u2019s presidential election, under no circumstances will they vote for either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama.\u00a0 Even if one of these two candidates can rightly be judged the lesser of two evils, an evil is still an evil.<\/p>\n
And one must never will an object that conscience has declared to be an evil.<\/p>\n
The great Christian thinker Thomas Aquinas agreed.\u00a0 However, he was quick to make two observations.<\/p>\n
First, conscience, because it is nothing else than a species of reason, does indeed go wrong.\u00a0 Just because my conscience declares this or that to be a good or an evil doesn\u2019t make it so: each object of the will is good or bad independently of what we happen to think of it.<\/p>\n
Secondly, one\u2019s ignorance of the moral significance of an object may or may not be pardonable.\u00a0 For instance, ignorance of right and wrong\u2014the natural law, Aquinas would say\u2014fails as miserably as a justification for evil doing as ignorance of the law fails as a justification in court for unlawfulness.<\/p>\n
There are just some things of which we must be aware.<\/p>\n
In light of this highly attenuated account of Aquinas\u2019 ethical analysis, it is safe to say that while my fellow Paul supporters are correct in their judgment that conscience forbids us from deliberately choosing evil, it is their application of this principle to the presidential election that demands further examination.<\/p>\n
Liberty is a good.\u00a0 Paul supporters recognize this.\u00a0 But what is liberty?\u00a0Liberty consists in a decentralization of authority and a diffusion of power.\u00a0 Paul supporters know this also.\u00a0 They know that the more centralized a government, the less free are its citizens.\u00a0 In desiring liberty above all, every Paul supporter seeks, then, a decentralized government.<\/p>\n
Sadly, it has been quite some time\u2014arguably a century-and-a-half\u2014since Americahas had anything even remotely approximating a federal government of the scope and size delineated by our Constitution.\u00a0 So, Paul supporters know\u2014or at least should <\/em>know\u2014that if such a lost governmental structure is ever to be restored, it is not going to happen over the next four to eight years\u2014regardless of whether our President over this time is named Obama, Romney, or Paul.\u00a0<\/p>\n We must judge matters from where we are at.\u00a0 In other words, ignorance of our reality\u2014ignorance of the immensity of our national government, say, and ignorance of the sheer powerlessness of any one person or even group of persons to scale it back to so much as a shadow of its counterpart from the eighteenth century\u2014is inexcusable.\u00a0 To make a decision regarding something as momentous as the future of our country on the basis of this sort of ignorance\u2014even if it accords with one\u2019s conscience\u2014is to condemn oneself.<\/p>\n You should know better.\u00a0<\/p>\n From the standpoint of liberty, I agree that Paul is a better choice than Romney.\u00a0 As I have already indicated, though, this is not because Paul would necessarily be able<\/em> to do all that much more than Romney would be able to do in the way of freeing up the American citizen.\u00a0 But he would at least be willing<\/em> to do more than Romney.\u00a0 And, at this stage in our national life, this makes him a better choice.\u00a0<\/p>\n Paul, however, is no longer an option.\u00a0 Still, the same reasoning that drives the liberty lover to choose Paul over Romney should drive him to prefer Romney to Obama: though Romney is not going to be able to dramatically reduce, or reduce at all, the size of government, he is resolved to prevent it from growing to the size that Obama desires.<\/p>\n There are a number of policies that Romney advocates that are less inimical to liberty than are those advanced by Obama.\u00a0 The latter\u2014like Obamacare, for example\u2014Romney promises to repeal.\u00a0 Will Romney follow through?\u00a0 No one–maybe even Romney himself–can know for sure.\u00a0 But even if he doesn\u2019t, that he has pledged to reduce the\u00a0scope of the federal government while Obama has pledged to expand it\u00a0yet further should be enough to bring the lover of liberty around to his side.<\/p>\n Think of it this way: if your loved one, your child say, had a terminal illness and there was the slightest\u2014just the slightest\u2014chance that he could be either saved or maybe even kept alive longer in the hope that, in the meantime, a cure may be discovered, would you not jump at the chance to stop the Grim Reaper from claiming him then and there?\u00a0<\/p>\n Our country is our loved one, and it is sick.\u00a0 It is very sick.\u00a0 We should attend to it with all of the care and concern, all of the sobriety, with which we would attend to our children.<\/p>\n But, the Paul supporter will object, even if Romney is the lesser of two evils, the lesser of two evils is still an evil, and it is always wrong to choose an evil!<\/p>\n To meet this objection, we should again turn to Aquinas.<\/p>\n Aquinas articulated what has since been recognized by theologians and ethicists as the doctrine of \u201cdouble effect.\u201d\u00a0 The doctrine asserts that since moral worth hinges primarily upon an agent\u2019s intention, it is permissible for a person to will a course of action that he foresees will have bad consequences if the consequences are unintended and the action is necessary in order to prevent a greater evil.\u00a0<\/p>\n For example, suicide is always immoral.\u00a0 Even if a person is terminally ill, it is not permissible for him to intend his own death.\u00a0 But suppose a terminally ill person seeks not to end his life, but to administer to himself dosages of morphine sufficient to relieve his pain but equally sufficient to end his life.\u00a0 This would be permissible, for though death is a foreseeable consequence of his action, it is not an intended one.\u00a0 It is an unintended side effect of a non-suicidal act: an act intended to relieve pain\u2014not end life. \u00a0<\/p>\n It is indeed always and everywhere unacceptable to willingly choose what one thinks is evil.\u00a0 Yet even if one is convinced that Romney is the lesser of two evils, in voting for him, one need no more be guilty of choosing an evil than a terminally ill person who consumes a lethal dosage of morphine to relieve pain can be said to be guilty of having chosen evil.\u00a0 A liberty lover needn\u2019t be any more attracted to any of Romney\u2019s policies in order to vote for the Republican nominee than need the prospect of a fatal drug overdose appeal to the terminal patient in search of pain relief, or chemotherapy appeal to a cancer patient.<\/p>\n The liberty lover simply (yet reasonably) needs to believe that the only way to achieve some measure\u2014any measure\u2014of relief for his country from Obama\u2019s liberty-eroding agenda to \u201cfundamentally transform\u201d it is to vote our 44th<\/sup> president out of office.<\/p>\n However, the only way to do this is to vote for Mitt Romney. \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many of my fellow Paul supporters insist that in this year\u2019s presidential election, under no circumstances will they vote for either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama.\u00a0 Even if one of these two candidates can rightly be judged the lesser of two evils, an evil is still an evil. And one must never will an object…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n