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38 J. Value Inquiry 1 (2004)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi38 and id is 1 raw text is: LA The Journal of Value Inquiry 38: 1-9, 2004. 1 © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. EDITORIAL Private Values in a Public Arena THOMAS MAGNELL Editor-in-Chief 1. Integrity in Office and Value Inquiry Presidential election year campaigns in the United States being what they are, it is easy to become jagged about the integrity of politicians in general. How should a politician act? Name an issue and answers will not be hard to come by. Nor, for that matter, will criticisms of whatever the politician does be in short supply. We are all ready to throw in our two-cents worth, even when the policy advocated by the so-and-so is not worth a dime, or the so-and-so's reasoning is not worth a plug nickel. But occasionally we may be extravagant with our praise. If only more politicians would come to act as they should, and do the right thing. In attempting to do the right thing, a politician should do whatever he or she thinks is right. This is not a tautology. An honest peanut farmer in the Oval Office might come to recognize the poverty of his substantive judgments and take them as contrary indicators on how to act, unlikely as this is sure to be. We may, however, turn it into a near tautology by saying that in attempting to do the right thing, a politician should do whatever he or she thinks is right, all things considered. Faced with a decision to run again or go back to the farm, the former farmer could think it right to run again, but decide, after taking his judgment as a contrary indicator, that it would be right, all things considered, to go back to the goober patch. Perhaps a similar pattern of reasoning led silent Cal to the unusual all-things-considered judgment: I choose not to run. The wisdom of that judgment may be even more plain in our time by the failure of such a judgment by the forty-second President of the United States. How better for him and for the country if the first elected President to be impeached and fined as well as being held in contempt of court for his actions under oath, had he heard the call to go to the hills of his native state or even the canyons of Gotham.

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