Would your answer change if you were somehow legally obligated to those 200 people? Say you were a doctor who was in charge of those people?

My thanks to dhruv on a most excellent question!

That does APPEAR to pose a problem, doesn't it?  However, then the question is a Hobson's Choice: you clearly have a legal obligation to your own family as well!

Let me pose you a different question: would you save one of your children over another given that if you do not choose, you lose them both?

Can you be found morally wrong for choosing one life over another when you cannot save both?  I actually do not think that you can.

Such was the issue in the movie, Sophie's Choice, and her choice haunted her for the rest of her life.  However, the choice to give up the daughter rather than the son to the Nazis was not the real dilemma.  It was her willingness to engage with the vile Nazi in the first instance.  By attempting to curry favor with evil, she caused the loss of her daughter.

Still, what you ask is an excellent question.  I am not a believer that one should merely do things because the law demands it - after all, the law itself could be immoral.  If I strictly chose to follow the law in all matters, that would have made me a deontologist when it comes to ethics.  Instead, I evaluate things through three different lenses and ask three different questions:

1. What does the law require of me?  In the case of your question, the law requires that I save both but I cannot save both.  If I help the 200 random strangers, I have actually committed murder of my child.  If I help my child, I have actually murdered 200 random strangers.  While one has more people than the other, the piling on of murders is, strictly speaking, not a legal question but rather a question of consequences, which I will detail in the next question I would ask. As such, the law's requirements are immaterial. DEONTOLOGICAL ETHICS DOES NOT HELP ME HERE.  Note, however, I would still argue that under natural law, I owe a greater allegiance to my own kin than to any stranger, so deontological ethics actually STILL suggests that the very question itself is wrong - I cannot owe a greater legal responsibility to others than to my own flesh and blood but, for the sake of argument, I will allow us to consider this equal balancing of responsibilities and see how it plays out.

2. What about the outcome of it all? Pure utilitarian ethics suggests that I ought to save the 200 random individuals, I am obviously not a pure utilitarian. Still, the problem is that I now have a legal obligation to both groups.  Having earlier rejected the saving of 200 random strangers, we now must weight carefully this decision.  From that utilitarian calculus, it would strongly suggest that we ought to value 200 lives over 1.  CONSEQUENTIALIST ETHICS SUGGESTS HELPING THE 200 PEOPLE.

3. Could I respect my decision later?  If I were to choose the random strangers over my own child, I could not respect that decision.  I would consider myself to be a bad person for having done so.  I would not in the least regret the loss of life of 200 to save my 1 child provided I have merely refused to assist as opposed to actively decided to kill.  VIRTUE ETHICS SUGGESTS SAVING MY CHILD.

So now I have the ultimate issue for me: I use a three-legged stool (deontological ethics, consequentialism, and virtue ethics) approach to ethics.  When all three are in alignment, I know that what I am doing is ethical.  When two of the three are in alignment (as in my previous example), I know that it is more likely than not that it is the correct decision.  When I have a split, ethical considerations suggest that neither side is more ethical.  It ceases (for me) to be an ethical question at all. That means that I would still choose my child.  If it is not a question of ethics, then it is not unethical to do so.

Yet, your question does pose an interesting alternative scenario: why I am willing to allow 200 people to die but not to even actively murder even 1?  Let us return to how this differs from when I said that I would not murder another to save my child:

The real point would be whether I am legally obligated for the murder of my child or not if I refused.  I a madman is holding my daughter hostage and demanding that I kill someone else or else he will kill my daughter and assuming that I literally cannot take action against the madman (always the preferable course of action!), then the question is: would I be legally responsible for her murder if refused to carry out the murder of say ONE people to save her?  The answer from a legal perspective is clear: I would not.  Thus in that case deontological ethics says "don't murder", consequentialist ethics is neutral (one life is no different than another - but note that if there is the murder of more than one, the calculus decidedly goes in favor of the strangers), and virtue ethics also says "don't murder" because while I would love to have my daughter in my arms, I would definitely not be able to respect my decision to murder 200 people even to save my own child.

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Finally, let us consider the perverted regime where the law and morality are not in alignment.  This is really the only scenario where I make an "unethical" choice from the perspective of my ethical framework:

You see if my legal obligation is to strangers MORE than my own kin or even EQUAL to my own kin, I would have to say that the "law is an ass" in the case.  I would now have to appeal to natural law over manmade law.  Once again, under natural law, I owe nothing to others except in the special relationship that exists within the family.  As such, I would never owe a duty to 200 strangers that could possibly override my duty to my own family.  That is how I would "solve" this "problem".

From Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

“Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity.

He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened.

The most frivolous disaster which could befall him would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference? When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others?

It is not the soft power of humanity; it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration.

It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator. It is he who shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice; the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own, for the yet greater interests of others, and the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another, in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves.
It is not the love of our neighbour; it is not the love of mankind, which upon many occasions prompts us to the practice of those divine virtues. It is a stronger love, a more powerful affection, which generally takes place upon such occasions; the love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own characters.”

Would you rather save your child and let 200 random strangers die, or save the strangers but let your child die? Why?

I save my child. Every single day I “let” thousands of people die because I do not save them. That doesn’t mean I could save them but I still did nothing to try to stop them from dying and I do not think a second about them. However, my children are precious to me and I would do anything I could to save them that does not involve murdering another*. If I am in a position to save a person at no risk to anyone else other than myself I will try to save them but if I am asked to choose between one or more individuals, I refuse to employ an objective utilitarian calculus based on pure numbers. If I have to choose who to save it is based solely on their relationship to me. If the two groups are of no importance to me, I will choose the group that is easier for me to save. If saving them requires equal difficulty, my choice will be whichever group is to my right (because I am right-handed), even if that group is smaller in number. After all, the life of those 200 strangers you saved could include a child who grows up to be just like Hitler while the child would died would have grown up to be just like Gandhi and if you consciously saved Hitler and allowed Gandhi to die using a utilitarian calculus based on the greatest number of individuals to be saved, how could you live with yourself?

*Refusing to intervene to save someone is not murder in most cases. I have no legal duty to save the life of another person except for someone who is legally connected to me such as my child. In other words, my legal (as well as moral) duty is to save my child and not the 200 random strangers.

You have 10 minutes to go back in time to talk to a younger you. What do you say?

I don’t. While it might be great to tell myself what the winning lottery numbers are or about what stock to pick or how to deal with relationships, simply talking to my younger self could invoke a serious time paradox that would cause the entire universe to be destroyed. After all, the action of talking to myself would have one of five consequences:

1. I listen to myself and thus change my life in such a way that there is no reason for future me to talk to past me, so that future me does not talk to past me, so that past me does not hear from future me, and the whole exercise never happened in the first place.
   
   2. I listen to myself and thus change my life in such a way that there is STILL a reason for future me to talk to past me, so that I have to do this whole episode AGAIN and we stay in this loop until either outcome 1 or outcome 3 occurs.
   
   3. I do not listen to myself and do everything the same anyway, which means I just wasted 10 minutes of my future life.
   
   4. My past self listens to my future self but this causes a creation of multiple universes with my past self doing really well but my future self never realizing any such benefits because I did not affect my past self in this universe but merely spawned a new one.
   
   5. The entire fabric of the space-time continuum collapses onto itself resulting in everything falling into the void.
   
   My money is on the fifth outcome.

Press a button and a child dies but the world lives. Don't press the button and everyone dies. Which one would you choose?

Yet another Quora Answer:

Let’s think this through logically, okay?

The child dies as well if you don’t press the button. Hmm…. First of all, how long do I have and why can’t I just convince the child to press the button himself or herself by pointing out that it really isn’t suicide when either way you die. It isn’t like the child can live if the button isn’t pushed and that way I do not have to condone murder. Nope, that’s not satisfactory.

Another possibility is that I will somehow figure out how to switch places with the child so that when I press the button, I take only my life and Everyone Else Lives™. After all, I truly have only the right to kill myself and no other. Still, that does seem rather unsatisfactory.

No, actually I think that the best way to solve this problem is to call the bluff of the person who claims that failing to press the button will somehow cause everyone to die. The person who designed such a evil question must surely have realized that he himself/she herself and all of his/her progeny will die. That means that there are only five possibilities here that in my time-limited state I can properly assess and give subjective probabilities to so that I can assess how I should react:

(1) the person is an incredibly smart individual to have figured out such a device and also realizes that he/she wants to live and so the entire button pushing exercise does not actually kill everyone. Thus all I have to do is find the person who designed the contraption, figure out how he /she saves himself/herself and then replicate the world over. Thus Everyone Lives™

(2) the person is an incredibly smart individual to have figured out such a device and WANTS everyone (including himself/herself to die) but since not everyone is ALREADY dead, the person should have realized that he/she had not yet figured out a foolproof way to kill everyone and so it is unlikely that the device will actually work (come on, admit it, how many inventions in real life actually worked as expected on the very first try? The answer is very few — I will take my chances here). The chances that Everyone Lives™ is very high regardless.

(3) the person is a psychologist who did not properly vet his/her human subjects experiment with his/her relevant Institutional Review Board. Such an experiment is undoubtedly fake and so Everyone Lives™

(4) the person is incredibly smart and just wants me to have to make an immoral choice but is not so evil as to actually cause someone to have to die. Once again, I refuse to participate and Everyone Lives™

(5) the person hasn’t really properly thought all of this through. That means that contrary to my original belief that they are incredibly smart, they are actually incredibly dumb and I do not have to worry about the button at all. Everyone Lives™

In other words, I just shake my head at all of the highly immoral, evil individuals on this planet who would push the button and I REFUSE to push the button under any circumstances. I didn’t kill everyone and I didn’t kill the child. The evil person who designed this experiment did the immoral killing. Why if I had access to such a button, I would just . . . never mind. That highly immoral, evil thought just exited my brain because I just can’t bring myself to do it.

What Would I Do If Everything Were Free for 10 Minutes?

I recently wrote the following on Quora in answer to the question, "If everything was free for 10 minutes, what would you buy?"  I actually think this is one of my better answers on that forum:

Everything is free, right?

Let’s start with the assumption that I can only have things that you CAN really theoretically acquire and hold because someone already owns it (so no, I can’t take the world’s air, world’s water, sun, etc.). Let us further assume that I get to keep everything I acquire. Then the answer is simple:

I take over every world government as well as acquire all weapons on the planet and then install myself as World Emperor.

What? You are saying I can’t do that? Sure I can. How do you think world leaders come to power? The only difference here is that I would be the ONLY world leader.

Of course, I will be a dictator. But I will be a benevolent dictator. There will be no more wars because I will own all government. Now everyone has to work together. Everyone will, of course, give me 100% approval ratings in all polls. Oh, and all government debt is hereby abolished. I need a clean slate. What? You don’t want to approve of my rule? That’s okay. This will still be a free world. Just remember, if you don’t agree then you do realize that I also own all the nuclear weapons, so don’t argue with me or Everyone Dies™. I see you are all in agreement now.

First thing we do is get rid of all those pesky tariffs and trade barriers. We are all one world now. No more borders. No need to worry about all those immigrants coming over to “your country” because there aren’t countries any more. There is just one world government. Under me.

Next, everyone is getting capitalism. None of this communist or socialist stuff. You want something, you have to pay for it. Except for me. I can have anything I want because I have the resources of every world treasury. Yes, I will pay you for your things. I am not a cruel dictator. Still, it is good to be World Emperor.

I am going to be reducing taxes by a LOT. Remember I have all the weapons. I don’t really need that much defense spending any more. Don’t really need too much law enforcement. I suppose we still need a little law enforcement but things will be much easier for a while without anyone having any guns. Yeah, I know my friends all thought I was a big supporter of the 2nd Amendment and all that but hey, if I’m the world emperor I don’t want anyone getting any ideas and shooting me or anything. Sorry gang, you can’t have any more guns. On the plus side, you probably don’t need them because the criminals don’t have any guns either. Remember, I took ALL the weapons.

Oh, and feel free to smoke all the pot you want. All drugs have been legalized. Prostitution as well. Same with gambling. All liquor laws except for those that allow those under the age of 21 to buy liquor are hereby abolished. Those of you in Quebec and Ontario, stop complaining about me raising your drinking age. Don’t worry about the Mafia, the Triads, the Yakuza — remember I took ALL the weapons, so organized crime no longer exists. But don’t get any ideas about marrying underage girls because the age of marriage is now 21. NO EXCEPTIONS. At first I was going to raise it to 18 but I really want to ensure that all women in my new empire get an education and are able to live on their own without having their families pressure them into marriage. The key to reducing population growth and increasing world income is to have highly educated women.

Speaking of education, I will return education to local control. Yes, that means I will let you all have local government. Not national government, mind you. There are no national governments and no state governments. Only my one world government. But I can’t literally do everything for everyone, so almost everything is being returned to local control either at the city or county level or both. However all tax revenue has to come to the central world government for redistribution strictly on the basis of population. Remember I got rid of all borders so people can go anywhere they want now. Knowing that your tax dollars will automatically be redistributed to every corner of the globe might ensure that all of you see fit to adopt my new libertarian/classical liberal philosophy that government is best that governs the least even at the local level.

Similarly, health will be returned to local control. Well, except for two things. I’m sorry but everyone has to have vaccinations. I just can’t have global pandemics in my new world order. Also the government will provide emergency medical care free of charge but only for real emergencies. Anything that can go to the urgent care unit goes to the urgent care unit.

I will honor all current pensions and retiree health benefits but we are going to start changing this system. I own everything and I do not want to have to raise taxes on all of you to pay for it. You all need to start taking care of yourselves going forward unless you are already in the system or over the age of 50. Those between 50 and 55 will get a 75% reduction in future benefits. Those between 55 and 60 get a 50% reduction. Those between 60 and 65 will get a 25% reduction. I can’t really ask you to play catchup as much then but those of you under age 50 certainly can. Remember I am also eliminating all social security/Medicare/Old Age Pension, etc. systems.

We are getting rid of income tax. I never liked filing taxes and I think that VATs are more effective. It will be on EVERYTHING and at a single LOW flat rate (probably about 10%). That’s so that we do not have efficiency issues. I know, you are thinking that isn’t enough to run government but look at all the stuff I eliminated from government (and read ahead for even greater reductions). I will probably generate a surplus every year. Of course, I do not have to pay any VAT. We are also going to have a death tax. Sorry folks but that which you tax you get less of and I want less death. I will start the death tax out at 10% of all assets. The death tax may be paid out in cash or in company stock if you have a business. Remember if too many of you are dying, I will be forced to conclude that the death tax is not high enough, so I might have to raise it. I, therefore, suggest keeping death to a minimum. It is good to be World Emperor.

Local governments may only institute a single tax on land, not property. That is the most efficient type of tax.

Oh, and I don’t want any more internal squabbles. Freedom of speech? Sure there will be freedom of speech. Maybe not so much freedom AFTER the speech if you criticize my policies, but . . . Just kidding. Well, sort of kidding. You can criticize anyone else but not me. Remember, I am World Emperor.

All websites must now install Be Nice, Be Respectful rules. That, of course, means that no lèse-majesté (insulting or showing disrespect to me) under penalty of Everyone Dies™. So glad that everyone is nice and respectful, at least towards me.

Oh, I know what you are thinking. Here I am invoking Everyone Dies™ and I do not own the trademark to it. So what? Is David Consiglio Jr. going to sue me? He can’t. I can invoke sovereign immunity to all lawsuits. Nope. I get to do whatever I want. Laws do not apply to me. It’s good to be world emperor.

Businesses? You all can have businesses. I am going to massively deregulate and eliminate all labor laws with the exception of worker safety laws, but don’t take advantage of the situation by trying to defraud people or refusing to pay workers what you promised them. I am a believer in contracts and contracts will be enforced. You are going to have to have clear labelling and tell people EXACTLY what you are selling. Stop whining about that. Business taxation is gone except for the single tax on land and the VAT. Don’t like the level of your single tax on land? Take that up with your local government.

No more welfare or unemployment or the like. I massively deregulated businesses. There are lots of jobs available. I will not pay you not to work. Go for it. Plus I also eliminated a whole bunch of taxes, so there should be a lot of charity available for the poor.

Religion? Hmm. Well, I think they all have to register with me. I will still allow people to have religion but no criticizing my rule from the pulpit or trying to install your religious laws at the local level. Oh, and you will have to stop with this ridiculous notion that people of other religions are going to hell. You can think it but stop trying to convert people with that nonsense. Come to think of it, stop trying to convert people, period. If someone wants to join a religion, they go to you from now on, you don’t go to them. I will let you advertise of television or in print, but none of this door-to-door stuff or trying to instill prayers in places other than your places of worship. Remember, criticize me and Everyone Dies™.

What about Laws? All laws that are based on offense to others (with the exception of lèse-majesté) are GONE. All laws based on harm to self - GONE. All laws based on harmless wrongdoing - GONE. Well almost gone. I do intend to protect the children, so no contract can be entered into by any child under 21 and children may not be prostituted or given drugs or alcohol. Parents will be responsible for their children until age 21. Come on people, I am a classical liberal libertarian, not an anarchist. Heck, I can’t be an anarchist. After all, I am World Emperor.

You should probably hope and pray that I never actually get the ability to be World Emperor (hint: it isn’t just me — you do not want ANYONE to become World Emperor because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Unless you want me to have that power. Then, of course, hope and pray that I get it. After all, life could be a whole lot worse. Most people would not be anywhere near as kind as I am, as you can see from many of the other answers to this question.

Luckily, however, I have some great news! I have been to the future and have seen what the future actually is. This entire exercise was quite prescient in a way. Everything I tell you WILL come true in time. Therefore, I strongly suggest that you state your total and absolute agreement with this answer. Don’t believe me and plan on not state your total and absolute agreement with this answer? Not a very good response I would say. This is really the ultimate Pascal’s Wager - and you know that I exist. Just remember, when I become World Emperor I will go back and see who state your total and absolute agreement with this answer and you will be favored. Fail to state your total and absolute agreement with this answer and bad things will happen.

You see, I am keeping a list of people who view this but who fail to state your total and absolute agreement with this answer. Anyone who fails to state your total and absolute agreement with this answer needs to understand that if I ever become World Emperor, I will use that list. Not telling you for what. But let me give you a hint about it: Everyone Dies™

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------If you want to purchase a really funny book, I strongly suggest you purchase Spoiler Alert: Everyone Dies™: The Lighter Side of Global Annihilation.  I didn't write the book (I wish I had!) but I do think that it is one of the best books I have read in a long time.  You can purchase it at:

 https://www.amazon.com/Spoiler-Alert-Everyone-Lighter-Annihilation/dp/154289302X

Sorry, Trump Supporters, but Hillary Isn't Getting Locked Up (Anytime Soon), Free Trade Isn't Going Away (And Those Overseas Jobs Aren't Coming Back), and Mexico Isn't Paying for the Wall (Though It Still Will Be Built)

Donald J. Trump become our 45th President this morning and I congratulate him on a well-fought campaign.  Many of the things that I would prefer will likely come to pass but not because Trump was elected but rather because the Republican majority in the House and Senate will come together to implement an agenda that I would honestly prefer to see. I don't much like Obamacare, preferring either going to a single-payer system or going to a system in which more competition between insurance companies helps to bring down premiums. I don't like the fact that we don't enforce our immigration laws, preferring instead that we either have open borders or a immigration system that has some teeth.  In both of these cases, we will be getting the latter, rather than the former policy.

I would prefer less regulation, lower taxes, a downsized government, free trade, entitlement reform, a dismantled Federal Reserve System, and a military that is not trouncing around the world trying to enforce democracy or otherwise intimidate other countries into kowtowing to our interests.  It looks like I will be getting at least some of these things although I doubt a Trump presidency will provide meaningful reductions in the size of government, engage in entitlement reform, or dismantling of the Federal Reserve System, and that definitely concerns me because it signals that we will likely do very little with respect to the clear and present danger of the growing national debt.  Still, one cannot have all things and so while I supported Gary Johnson in his quixotic attempt at the Presidency, I cannot be entirely unhappy.

That doesn't mean that there aren't other things that concern me, especially with regard to the hateful and oftentimes egregious rhetoric that came from our newly elected President's mouth during the Presidential campaign.   Unless President Trump can figure out how to put the djinn of division back in the bottle and unite our country, the demographic reality suggests that Republican control of the country will be short-lived.

However, President Trump did something truly Presidential when he took the stage as a winner of this Presidential contest: he sought to bury the hatchet and not in the neck of his opponent.  When history looks back on President's Trump's legacy, it will be this moment in time that will uniquely define it.  I firmly believe that Trump's narcissism is, at this point in time, his greatest strength.  He wants to be loved by the American people and we should let him.  To that end, the rhetoric surrounding his opponents must end.  Calling for Hillary to be locked up or for Mexico to pay for the wall are simply untenable positions.  We do not have a national tradition of punishing our political opponents at the federal level nor can we act as a bully when it comes to other countries and not expect that such imperialist tendencies will be rejected and rebuked by the world community.  Similarly, I do not think that President Trump will fundamentally roll back free trade, preferring instead to ensure that our existing trade agreements, like our immigrations laws, are followed.  We respect of all things the rule of law above all else.  Unfortunately, for many, that will mean having to come to terms with the fact that many of those jobs that have gone overseas will not come back, which will cause many of his supporters in the Rust Belt to feel betrayed.  They should not feel this way.  Even if free trade could be dismantled, the resulting loss of national income that comes from a reduction in trade volume and freedom would effectively cancel, and indeed completely reverse, any minor gains we would get from autarkic policies.

Similarly, Trump will not be deporting 12 million people from America nor will Mexico pay for the wall, though I do believe it will be built and we will pay for it.  Instead, Trump will take a measured approach that insists that our laws are followed and that people who wish to legalize their presence in the United States will have to return to their home countries and go through the proper channels.  As the son of one legal immigrant and the husband of another, I would expect nothing less.  He will likely build a wall that will cost us $40 billion and will be much more symbolic than actually effective but the symbolism is important and it what he can effectively do.  Deportation on such a grand scale would cost far too much, not only in terms of monetary cost but also in loss of fundamental freedom as legal residents and citizens would otherwise be forced to prove their status in this country on an almost daily basis if he were to truly attempt to go through with such mass deportations.  On the other hand, the current system that gives employers an effective "slap on the wrist" and allows sanctuary systems to "turn a blind eye" to illegal activity will end.  Ironically, this simply means the continuation of the actual increase in deportations that has occurred under the Obama administration but remember that symbolism is important and that is what he is doing.

Likewise, there will be no "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" and, in fact, Trump himself walked back that proposal some months ago but I do expect an enhanced and more rigorous vetting process that takes into consideration that in some parts of the world it is more difficult to verify information, which is an somewhat overdue policy change.

One of the reasons for these changes is that Republicans will not go along with his more extreme rhetoric.  The Republican Party needs to play the long game and that requires more nuance and less demagoguery.  In some ways, we would probably be thankful that Donald Trump is our next President.  If he had not succeeded, who knows who would have come next because extremist populist sentiment is difficult to eradicate.  Perhaps it will take a man like Donald Trump, beholden to no special interest other than himself, to purge us of this underlying current of divisiveness that threatens the very core of our glorious republic.

I am thus cautiously optimistic because Donald Trump, though he rode the wave of populist sentiment, is no ideologue and that means that is someone who can be brought to the table to negotiate.  Indeed, that aspect of him is precisely what he has signaled time and again that his rhetoric is merely a negotiating tactic to leverage a better deal for America.  So long as he remembers this, he could very well become one of our greatest Presidents.  If he forgets this and instead echoes the populist desires and prejudices that propelled him to the White House, may God help the United States of America for we will have lost the very essence of what makes America truly great, indeed, exceptional, as a nation.

Chicago Principles on Freedom of Expression Adopted by Winston-Salem State University

Winston-Salem State University (WSSU) became the fourth university in the country, the second public university, the first historically black college or university (HBCU), the first university in the South, and the first university that does not offer a Ph.D. degree to adopt the Chicago Principles when its Faculty Senate passed a resolution in favor of adoption by a vote of 36 to 0 with one abstention on September 10, 2015.  Two weeks later, on September 24, 2015, the General Faculty of WSSU reaffirmed this decision, voting 100 to 8 in favor of the Chicago Principles.

I would not have even known about the Chicago Principles were it not for the activities of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University and the chance invitation that I received to be a part of the Academic Freedom Seminar in July. Along with that invitation came a recommendation to read up on the Chicago Principles, which I wholeheartedly endorsed though I thought for a while that they were almost self-evident and thus should not require a discussion at all. Indeed, much of the time the nuances of speech codes, trigger warnings, and microaggressions appeared to be more about common courtesy until I discovered to my dismay that they were actually being enforced against individuals in direct violation of First Amendment guarantees at public universities.

For me, the Academic Freedom Seminar awakened a realization that our freedoms are not stripped from us in one fell swoop but rather slowly chipped away and that any restriction needed to be examined with the greatest possible scrutiny and allowed only when it served to ensure the proper functioning of the university or when it fell under the banner of unprotected speech in a legal sense and, even then, such restrictions needed to be formulated so that they impeded such discussions in the least intrusive manner and were not based on the content of the speech itself.  Public universities, even more than private universities, need to protect the freedom of expression as they must be cognizant of the fact that they are instruments of the government and thus actions undertaken by them directly contravene First Amendment protections when they go further than government itself is allowed to go. It is for this reason that passage of these Principles are critical to the survival of the public university.  I still remain committed to common courtesy but one must never forget that common courtesy must be a choice. When it is enforced on others, it no longer is courtesy but is instead a mandate and that mandate silences all who oppose it.  The university must resist this temptation because without freedom of expression and the full and open dialogue on any topic that may come up in polite conversation or otherwise, we cannot advance the state of knowledge.

This is especially true for an HBCU, for was it not only a little more than 50 years ago, when common courtesy dictated that African-Americans move to the back of the bus or excuse themselves from the lunch counter when a white person sought a seat?  What would have happened if Rosa Parks or the Greensboro Four had politely accepted that "common courtesy" and had not uttered that one word that strikes fear into the hearts of all who would oppress, "No"?  The answer is as simple as it is obvious: when we allow common courtesy to become a shackle in such a way that it no longer is our personal choice to do so but rather becomes obligatory, we end up with second class citizenship for those of a different race, gender, occupation, opinion, political party, age, social class, sexual orientation, religion, birthplace , or any other difference of which you may consider, and such a surrender of the basic principle that one person should not be able to dictate how another thinks or expresses themselves leads inextricably to authoritarianism and a complete breakdown of the guarding principle of what has come to be known as Western Civilization.