Out of these two articles for the first weeks reading, I did like Walzer's article better, just because it was easier to read and comphrend without having to put too much focus into the reading, and since I joined this class late, I wanted to get these readings "caught up" so that I don't get behind any further and can get fully in line with the rest of the class. Calhoun does an okay job with the article, and I still have the Nixon Watergate ordeal running through my mind from the last article and I do see some similarties with this article as well. However, to get out of that mindset for me, I focused more on her ideas about administration and it's Latin meaning "to serve"
On page 375, she states " People in offical positions occupy multiple valuational worlds. As private people, they are presumably subject to the same moral dictates as moral persons in general, but as government officals they also have extramoral or nonmoral professional duties to act on behalf of their constituents." This really hit a personal note for me. My husbands family was a political one on his mother's side. His aunt was a state senator, and through her and her contacts, we went to a lot of political parties, from birthday parties, to fundraisers for their election campaigns. My husband worked a city job, and was involved in a city aciident that ended up causing his death. The mayor at the time, came to the hospital and just mere inches away from us, (after thanking us for our donations and help for his current bid of re-election at a fundraiser earlier in that week), is on the phone telling the supervisor at the plant that my husband worked at, that the press would be there soon and they were "forbidden" to discuss the accident in any way shape or form. I had a hard time with that, mainly because I could not understand how he could seem to be 2 different people. It really took me along time to get over that one, and now here again, it is all making perfectly good sense to me.
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Do you think that sometimes there is a justified use of the silencing of information by the government for the greater good? Not exactly in the situation with your husband, but in a situation where the revealed information could cause fear and discourse in the public, possibly leading to danger. Is that a justified silencing albeit maybe falling under the category of dirty hands? Or is transparency and honest more important to keep away from dirty hands?
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