…nor should it be.
I was in my car listening to the governor of a nearby state talking about trimming the budget (a campaign promise like most, not to be kept). What struck me was his statement that the reason he’d not be trimming the budget was his balance of a “constituional obligation” to bablance the budget with a “moral obligation” to provide services to the people.
Let us be clear that there is no moral obligation to be had here. This is something that has crept into politics over the last couple of decades on both sides, and it holds great peril.
Morality is subjective and contextual, which makes it difficult (perhaps impossible) to dictate explicitly. Were this not the case, philosphers and theologians would have been out of business long ago. Indeed the degree to which a person does a thing may decide to what degree a thing is good or evil, and that quantification of good or evil will be seen differently by different people. In the case where there is uncertainty (where there almost always is) there is relief, but that relief lies in a moral leader, and that moral leader will be different depending on faith or creed, and could in fact be the individual.
Constitutionality, on the other hand, strives to be objective and explicit. An action is either right, or it is wrong; written or not written. Where there is context to be had, there should be exception in writing (an example might be murder in one case and self-defense in another). To be sure, it is not a perfect system, but there is relief; The Supreme Court.
One of the better and stronger arguments made by The Left in recent decades has been for secularization. It has taken a decidedly strict and extreme turn, and I think has gone off the tracks, but it is a sound principal and one we should all take a cue from. The government ought not be in the business of religion, if for no other reason than its necessary link to morality. Pulling “In God We Trust” off our money isn’t going to solve anything, except for maybe the problem some people have with reading it. Removing the ascribed morality from government will remove uncertainty from its actions.
There are problems with going with a strict amoral government, but these problems are mostly with perception. Morality is often at the individual level, and the particular case. Where there is a very small minority in need, the government may not be right in acting, even though it may seem (or even be) morally good to act. That is the other part of government that is all too often lost; that it must always act for the good of the exceptional majority (understanding that the exceptional majority is aiming for the 99.9% and is not meant to be acted in favor of at the detriment of the slim minority).
The problem is the difference between “good or bad” and “right or wrong”. The latter is not always perfectly obvious, but it is, in most cases, much clearer and easier to define than the former.
