Quora Answer: Do You Believe Heads of State Should be Morally Good?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Do you believe a head of state should be a morally good person?  Why or why not?”

Whilst it is preferable that the heads of state be good people of sound moral character, that alone is insufficient.  The worse kind of fool is a pious fool.  A rational, morally ambiguous person is aware when he is making a decision based on national interests that would inclemently affect others.  He is self-aware that he may be committing a wrong.  A moral fool, on the other hand, can be led to commit egregious outrages and horrors upon people, and believe he is doing God’s work.

We know, from history, of the religious who visited great horrors on the infidels, the outsiders and the “enemies of God”.  When the Zealots attacked their fellow Jews during the siege of Jerusalem, as Titus attacked, they burned the food stocks, poisoned the wells and killed their own women and children for not resisting.  We have many examples by the Church, from the Albigensian Crusade, where they blockaded people in the cities and burned them down, to the Inquisition.  We have ISIS claiming a caliphate and engaging in genocide.  We have the Hindutva in India, murdering Muslims.

People make the mistake of assuming that morality means the same thing to everybody.  The moralities of various times justified child marriages, slavery, mass murders, pogroms, and all forms of evils.  And even when we take away religion, the atheists are no better.  Trotsky, Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot were responsible for millions of deaths.  Each of them saw themselves as moral men, upholding some imagined virtue.

In summary, we do not need more moral heads of state.  We need more leaders with common sense, and a sense of grounding.