WaPo Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales raised the possibility yesterday that New York Times journalists could be prosecuted for publishing classified information based on the outcome of the criminal investigation underway into leaks to the Times of data about the National Security Agency's surveillance of terrorist-related calls between the United States and abroad.
It's about time."We are engaged now in an investigation about what would be the appropriate course of action in that particular case, so I'm not going to talk about it specifically," he said on ABC's "This Week."
3 comments:
If you do not vote, then you have no basis to complain about the person elected, no matter who it is.
Don, why is that? What is the moral claim, or better, what is the ontological claim that exercising your right to vote in a democracy provides the only basis for political participation outside of voting? I am not sure I understand your comment.
Let's ask it this way. Why do we all exercise the right to vote? Does the majority's decision mean that we have reached the "correct" decision? If that were so, you would have to take the view that there is no objectively virtuous or correct result, only one dictated by method, due process. IE, as long as the vote were "fair" it would be right and good. But that would suggest a positive law notion of the moral good. What is legal, meaning voting upon in a fair way, is good. And vice versa.
But even assuming that you abide by all of the democracy plank, what if someone takes the view that the moral good exists and subjecting some things to a vote is just immoral. What if a democracy asks whether it should kill of the Christians or Jews within its borders. And what if the majority, in a fair vote, agrees. Let's even also assume, it agrees by a majority of four to one, enough to literally rewrite the constitution, assuming it had one. Would the murder of the Christians or Jews be a good thing? If not, that would suggest that not voting as a protest of subjecting such questions to a vote would be the moral thing to do. If you didn't vote in such circumstance, but everyone else did and they voted to murder the Christians or Jews, would you be foreclosed from protesting such vile behavior? You suggest that you would be.
I really do not understand what Dan's comment meant relative to the subject of this post, nor why I would have answered him as I did, except that it must have been related to the contents at the time of the site he pointed to.
As to why we vote it is to make our contribution as to what is right and not, and if we do not go to the trouble of voting, then we should not complain if enough others voted the other way and a decision we dont like got the majority.
As you point out, just because a majority decides to do something does not make it right, but at least it is what the majority want.
We just have to hope that the majority does not decide to do something that is morally wrong. There are no guarantees, but it is more likely than that a dictator will decide to do something that is not morally wrong.
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