Tucholsky im Urtext

"The political code you mention that embraces pluralism and allows freedom has already made a moral choice..." I disagree. It has made a political choice. As I said before, there's an overlap between political ethics and morality, but they aren't the same thing. The French and American revolutions and the thinkers like Thomas Paine on whose works those ideologies were based were, it is true, influenced by moral philosophy, but also by political necessity. Simply put, the political systems of monarchical France and imperial Britain did not work for France or the American colonies. In France, the result was abuses of power by the King and famine; in America, the result was a perception of injustice, unrest, and a lack of representation in Parliament. Therefore both nations sought a system that functioned better on a political level (whether they succeeded or not is a different issue altogether).

Politics and morality must remain seperate. We cannot force our moral values on another, nor should we try. You cannot honestly tell me, William, that it would be a good thing to force another person who disagreed with you to follow your moral code. While that ideal seperation of politics and morality is indeed rare in the modern world, and even rarer in history, that just points to the inadequacy of political systems throughout both. It merely makes clearer the difference between what politics ought to be and what politics is. It doesn't affect my basic argument.

"Ghandi believed that nonviolent resistance would eventually bring the oppressor to an understanding of the savagery of his actions, which of course only works if the oppressor is a moral agent. Plenty of killers aren't cognizant in that way, and so someone like Ghandi would merely most often expose himself to more butchery." In the same way many killers aren't cognizant, neither are many racists; they merely hate, without rational thought for what they do. In such a circumstance, racism like the British empire exhibited to its Indian subjects (not least that the prospects of a country like India could be improved if only white people were in charge) cannot made to be embarassed by nobility of action, it can only be opposed powerfully. The choice of nonviolence isn't made for calculated political reasons, it's made because life, even the life of people who act badly, is sacred, and cannot be taken lightly. While sometimes it may seem clear who ought to die and who oughtn't, reality is often so much murkier than that, and sometimes the only way to ensure one's conscience is clear is never to kill at all.

"The human brain is limited..." Yes, tell that to Einstein, Hawking, or any philosopher you care to name. Sorry, laziness is not an excuse for sloppy thought; generalizations fail to be useful. Nothing is always absolutely so, to quote Heinlein, and once again, I only use Fox News as an extreme example, because of the usefulness of the reductio ad absurdum argument, but let me be clearer if I can: no statement of the form X is Y in the English (or, for that matter, German) language is going to be factually correct in every instance, and when it comes to discussions of an abstract nature, they are not useful, even as stepping-off points for a discussion. They ignore nuance, which is perilous at the best of times, they sometimes construct within the mind of their user an idea that has the ironclad determination of dogma, and they serve to allow people to parrot a statement mindlessly, clinging to the belief that the truth of their words is self-evident, when in fact it is not, without taking a moment to analyze the deeper implications of what they are saying.

"But hiring, training, and paying a standing army is an act of building a war machine that needs to consume human lives to survive..." This sounds all very well, but in fact, all the military needs is funding to survive; it doesn't actually have to kill people. We've gone years without war before, and I haven't seen the Pentagon or the DoD starve to death.

Please don't tell me you're that kind of conspiracy theorist. The war on terror doesn't exist to keep the military in existence. If we want to be as cynical as possible, at most it exists so the Republicans have an issue they can use to terrify Americans and thus garner votes. I realize in an all-liberal crowd like this one, hyperbole can be fun sometimes, but if you actually think that the military would cease to exist if we stopped having people to declare war on, I'm going to need to see evidence to back up your assertions.

The use of a phrase does NOT cause those who hear it to analyze what they are saying. That's what slogans are *for*. This is why political discourse is so troublesome in America right now; rather that participating in nuanced discussion of the issues, both sides repeat slogans and watered-down versions of their ideas on cable news and the floor of Congress, leading to ideological impasses.

Christopher, no I am not arguing political decisions don't have moral content: I'm arguing that political ethics and moral ethics are not the same thing, and that some political decisions do not have moral content--i.e., that it is self-evident gay marriage should be legal regardless of what the individual believes to be moral.