Barack Obama is like Robin Hood – because he wants to steal from the [extremely] rich and give to the poor.
We can debate all day long whether or not Robin Hood was morally correct in his wanting to steal from the rich, and thus give to the poor, but I think most people would agree – that Robin Hood was a total badass.
Is the notion of Santa Claus similar to the notion of God? They both seem to know whether or not you’ve been bad or good.
Supposedly Santa rewards you if you’ve been good but it seemed like all my shitty, selfish rich friends always got better presents from Santa when I was a kid.
Situational ethics are based upon moral relativism, as opposed to ‘universal’ morality. It has been argued that moral relativism lacks integrity. The Catholic church is strongly against moral relativism, for example. People like Stanley Fish argue that integrity is a bad quality for a politician to have to do their job effectively.
I won’t go into the details, because it’s complicated, as with much of postmodern theory.
As for Obama, I don’t really like Obama or McCain, but Obama strikes me as more honest, and thus the lesser of the two evils.
I think Obama has more integrity than McCain just by looking at McCain’s record of ethics.
The reason many American politicians are dishonest sociopaths is because America is a heterogeneous society with many different groups of people due to greater levels diversity. Different classes, different races, different religions, different backgrounds, et cetera. To achieve mass-market electoral success, American politicians must appeal to different groups of people who have completely different opinions on things. That’s also why many politicians will just completely avoid talking about the issues at all, or will discuss them superficially.
In more homogeneous societies, where there is less diversity and less social stratification (like many countries in western Europe), politicians don’t have to be as sociopathic to win popularity contests because there is generally less disagreement of opinion within homogeneous societies.
As Noam Chomsky told me once, on an interview, “voting for democrats or republicans is like buying tooth paste, they may have different cover but they are the same…”
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