The fact that leaders don't know specifically who will die of coronavirus makes their choice of how fast to open less excruciating but no less profound in its moral implications
is a column by POLITICO founding editor John Harris, offering weekly perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption.
Polis was blandly indirect in his answer. While he might wish to have “next week’s information and next month’s information available to me today,” the Democratic governor said, “that’s not the world we live in.” During a pandemic that likely will continue for months, he’s looking for a path forward in “an ongoing sustainable way,” one that takes into account citizens’ interests “psychologically, economically, and from a health perspective.”The murkiness of Polis’ reply requires translation.
Let’s suppose this is a reasonably fair interpretation. You could call Polis’s argument provocative: No wonder he speaks so circuitously when what he really thinks is so cruel. Alternatively, you could call his argument banal: There is no one on any side of the shutdown debate who has not made saving lives a top priority, but also no one in a position of authority who has made this the exclusive priority.
The pandemic highlights a different way of understanding relativism. It is not that values are no more than a matter of taste, in the way that you like pistachio but I like vanilla. It is to acknowledge—in a way our politics usually does not—that any important value is inevitably, at key moments, in competition with other important values. Individual liberties are in tension with public order. Respect for tradition is in tension with tolerance for diversity.
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