Maggie0927
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June 15, 2020 at 2:25 pm
Should a governor act according to the highest ethical and moral norms all the time? From my point of view, we should not always ask officials to do so. This is because minor moral abnormalities are tolerable. Moreover, in some circumstances, maintaining the highest standards will conflict with people’s interests.
Admittedly, some people may agree with this issue. Sticking to the highest moral standards is beneficial to the public. Due to the authority of public figures, they can function as moral models for citizens. Imagine that governors maintain the standard norms in their behavior, such as not talking dirty or smoking in public. Then citizens are likely to behave similarly in the manner, regulate their behaviors, and reach a higher moral level. As a result, asking for officials behaving civilized will benefit the whole society.
However, we cannot ask officials to act perfectly, because everyone has weaknesses. Small ethical or moral mistakes will not turn a great leader into a notorious one. Consider Napoleon, the celebrated revolutionist in France. His greed for pursuing power, a moral imperfection, did not limit him to become an effective leader. Instead, it was his brevity and his significant contribution to France that impressed people. Consequently, it is reasonable not to expect governors to behave according to the highest norms.
Moreover, the highest standards sometimes contradict to most people’s interests. For example, at the highest ethical level, governors should forbid killing animals, since animals are our friends. But it is ridiculous if we human beings are not permitted to eat meat. Similarly, a leader may holds that terrorists should not be condemned to death since everyone was born equal. This seemly virtuous order will cause great disasters to society. In these circumstances, keeping the highest moral standards is detrimental to citizens. Hence, governors should not be expected to do so.
To sum up, it is not required that governors should maintain the best ethical and moral standards, despite their positive influence on regulating people behaviors. We can tolerate a great governor to have small moral mistakes. Whether or not keeping the highest standards also depends on their parallelism with citizens’ interests.
June 9, 2020 at 3:45 amIn this article, the president predicts that the online courses will help increase the enrollment in Humana University as well as solve the budget deficit problems. To support the prediction, the president cited the increased admission in similar programs in Omni University associated with less money spent on school buildings last year. However, there are a few questions regarding his/her lines of reasoning that requires further analysis. The argument could end up being pretty convincing or invalid in the end, depending on the answers to those questions.
To begin with, I need to ask whether other factors can help explain the less money spent on classroom space in Omni. While the amount of enrollment in online courses increased significantly last year, we need to know if the students in Omni lived in the dormitory or not. It is possible that students were more inclined to live in their own home instead of in the university. If so, Omni did not necessarily have to spend money on the dormitory. Since in this case expenditures for dormitory are uncorrelated with the online programs, the argument of the president is debatable.
In addition, the comparability of the two universities remains an unanswered question. The author reaches its prediction based on the fact in another university, but we have no information of suitable teaching methods in these two universities. For example, maybe Humana has practical courses like chemistry and biology so that classrooms are needed to conduct experiments. It is less appropriate to teach such classes through the internet. If it is the case, the implementation of online programs in Humana is unconvincing. In other circumstances, it is not.
Even though the online courses can actually help reduce the expenditures and two universities are comparable, we still need to question whether these programs will be beneficial. If the implementation requires expensive high-tech equipment, the cost will be considerable and may even exceed the income. In this case, the online programs will not be profitable, and the author’s argument will be unreasonable. Otherwise, the measure will solve the budget problems.
To sum up, while it may be logical to institute the online programs in Humana, we still need to consider several questions regarding other factors that may contribute to the decrease of the expenditures in Omni, the comparability between Omni and Humana, as well as the profitability of the measure. Only after addressing those questions can we evaluate the president’s argument and reach a logically sound conclusion.
