Chris Christie: a Sinner

According to Chris Christie’s wife, “her husband’s family responsibilities preclude a run for the presidency.” According to many Republicans, Christie represents our country’s best hope for getting off of the path to ruin that Obama has charted for us. And Christie does not clearly disagree, but he and his wife have indicated that their family comes first.

Why don’t we condemn Christie as one of the most selfish people in America? He has the opportunity (according to his backers) to help avert economic catastrophe and save American lives abroad (presumably he and his backers think he could wage the 5 wars / bombing campaigns we are engaged in more effectively than Obama), and he is not willing to bring a little bit of inconvenience to his family in order to achieve this?

Leo Katz, in his book Ill-gotten Gains: Evasion, Blackmail, Fraud, and Kindred Puzzles of the Law, explains that we generally view “sins of omission” (the failure to do good things) as much less bad than “sins of comission,” (actively doing bad things) and our treatment of Christie is a good example of this. Christie’s decision leaves the world much worse off, but the mechanism is a failure to do a very good thing rather than the doing of a very bad thing, so we don’t blame him too much. If somehow Christie were to do something “proactively” to bring about the deaths of hundreds of Americans, and cause millions more to lose their jobs, just so he and his family could be a little more comfortable, we’d think he is a really bad guy, unlike in the present case. So why is it that we are so much harder on sinners of comission than omission? A reasonable answer is that if we strongly condemned sins of omission, people would be miserable due to having to constantly worry about what good deeds they need to do in order to meet minimum morality requirements.

But that answer doesn’t fully resolve the problem. Fast forward 6 years to 2017: Recently elected President Christie has 70% approval ratings due to his successful campaign to “stop fiddling around in irrelevant countries in the Middle East and start fixing our own problems, particularly unemployment and our crushing debt.” He is on the verge of striking a budget deal with Democrats. Then, a dirty bomb goes of in Manhattan, killing thousands of people and causing total chaos. Christie decides that this is all just too stressful for his family, so he hands over the presidency to his VP, Rick Santorum, who launches 3 wars in retaliation for the dirty bomb, and drops the budget initiative. Would this be a sin of omission or comission on Christie’s part? Does Christie’s resignation represent an action or a failure to act? Obviously this is just semantics, and it does feel a bit arbitrary that we would likely condemn Christie much more in the case of a resignation than in the current case (particularly if we don’t view Obama as better than Santorum, as Christie’s backers probably do not).

One other issue: isn’t it a shame that a deal can’t be worked out whereby some wealthy Republican would pay Christie $10m per year to serve as president, to ease his concerns about his family’s comfort? In order to avoid the perception of bribery, the wealthy person could a) do this anonymously for the time being, agreeing to reveal his identity only after Christie is out of power (so the donor could still get glory out of it ultimately), and b) put the money in an escrow account which automatically disburses $10m per year as long as Christie is president, so the donor cannot control the money during the presidency.