[lit-ideas] Re: "A right and an obligation"
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 7 Apr 2013 04:57:19 -0700 (PDT)
________________________________
From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2013 4:32 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: "A right and an obligation"
Omar wrote
> Right, well, to situate it, here in Montenegro we have a choice between
> two (2) candidates, and I (and I am not alone in it) don't consider
> either one of them quite right. On the other hand, a difficult economic
> and political situation would seem to call for doing something, but I am
> not sure that voting will change much of anything. Can my legal right to
> vote be construed as a moral obligation to do so ?
I'm not clear about the relative badness of the two. Surely, no country wants
to be governed by a bad (corrupt, ineffectual, megalomaniacal sex abuser) but
you say that neither of the candidates 'seems quite right,' which is hardly
damning criticism. (A painting hung upside down, vs. one whose frame needs just
a touch to set it straight.) So, suppose that a totally corrupt person were
running against someone whose only 'flaw' was that he had a very bad memory and
sometimes had trouble recalling what he'd just said. Here there would seem to
be a difference that mattered.
*I didn't want to go into too much detail since the question might have more
general import, hence the vague formulation 'not quite right'. One of the
candidates (the incumbent) can be fairly described as totally corrupt, or as
close as it gets, IMO. The other one is more of an enigma since he hasn't been
in the country in a while, but his past has serious blemishes, to say the least.
O.K.
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