Can presidents have fun?
Following on my last post on the use of public funds to pay for the costs of the president’s social activities, an AP article noted that the president was “criticized for the trip to New York in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression…” This raises the question: should presidents be having fun at all, when they could be working to solve the nation’s problems?
Note: this has nothing to do with the empirical question of whether people need some down time in order to perform well during work. Instead we are concerned with the extent to which the president should devote him (or her) self to the job. Assuming the president’s work is in pursuit of what he believes to be right, the question collapses into the classic question in political philosophy on the demands of justice: to what degree must an individual dedicate him or herself to the pursuit of justice?
There are two prominent positions in this debate. Both argue that we need to do a lot in pursuit of justice, but they differ in exactly how much. One position, argued for most prominently by American philosopher Peter Singer, claims that we have a duty to spend time, money and effort in pursuit of justice until the point at which doing any more would cause us to fall below a level of “basic sufficiency” – that is, doing anything more would result in a net moral bad.
The alternative requires individuals to pursue justice until the point at which doing more would cause a significant risk of worsening one’s life, by depriving the individual of that needed to pursue important personal goals and activities. In other words, we are not required to continue pursuing justice when doing so would get in the way of those other things that are important. Clearly, this requires significantly less than the alternative, but it is still much more than practiced by most individuals.
Both of these positions assume that an individual has some responsibility to work toward a more just world. One might complain that these alternatives seem to dismiss what is often thought to be a libertarian position that we should be able to live our lives without concern for justice or the lives of other individuals. This, however, is a perversion of the libertarian philosophy. While the libertarian ideal may be one in which we are able to just live our lives, libertarians are under no illusion that this world exists. Libertarians – and for that matter, anyone who believes in morality – must work just as hard in pursuit of their version of justice.
-Marc
Photo by Flickr user senorglory used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
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[...] Marc raises an interesting question about the demands of justice. He mentions Peter Singer as forwarding a particular demanding interpretation of personal morality. Here is an outline of his famous argument that concludes that we ought to be giving nearly all our money to the global needy. [...]
[...] focus on national priorities, as opposed to having fun or taking on pet projects. I’ve addressed this question before (as well as the related question of how much the American people should have to pay for the [...]
[...] written numerous times on the demands of justice: to what degree must we dedicate ourselves (including time and [...]