An interesting question. The word comes from 'elite', obviously, and ultimately from Latin by way of French; originally it meant the 'chosen' or 'elected'. So, in a democracy (and for the purposes of this answer I'll assume that's the position we are concerned with) our leaders are indeed the 'elite', and insofar as we think there should be elections and that the winner of the election should be the new leader, all voters are 'elitist'!

But that is disingenuous, because that original meaning would have had little to do with our modern sense of democracy. Instead, the original meaning would have referred to those of high social rank (who were elected by fate, perhaps, to play that high born role), or those ministers of state who were favoured by the king, or a figure like the Pope who is (ultimately though indirectly) chosen by God. In fact, it was the transition to democratic modes of government in recent centuries that gave the word 'elite' a tarnished reputation. The 'elite' were precisely those NOT chosen by the people: those who had power simply because of wealth or social position or historical accident.

Correspondingly, 'elitism' has two meanings. The first is a political theory that says rule by the most capable, wise and educated is a good thing. Such a theory can trace itself back to Plato's Republic. It doesn't matter who these people are. It is a historical accident that the people in power already were also the ones who got educated, and thus elite in the sense of 'high social rank' tended to overlap with elite in the sense of 'the best to lead'. The second meaning, however, is a description of a person or institution that acts in ways to reinforce the position of the few. Or, in other words, someone or something that doesn't understand, care for, or act in the interests of those who are not already in positions of interest, who are assumed to be in the majority. Some accuse certain universities of 'elitism', for example, in that for one reason or another they tend to accept students from already privileged backgrounds. Calling a politician 'elitist', then, is tantamount to saying he or she is not a 'man/woman of the people'.

Should our leaders be the 'elite'? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that we all hope the democratic process works and thus genuinely capable people are given the job. No, in the sense that they are not chosen from above, by a higher authority, but 'from below' so to speak, by the people.

No. If a citizen doesn't have a preference for any of the candidates, then he or she has no duty to express one.

One's answer to that might well depend on one's general political orientation. There are those who think that property is theft (a slogan associated with Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon). Such people would tend to answer your question 'absolutely not!'. Others believe that people can and often do own things and do have a right to hoard, if they choose to: it would be a good and generous thing for the wealthy to share their resources. But they are not morally obliged to. Personally I think it is hard to justify the institution of ownership. John Locke famously attempted to do so. (I think this was related to his defence of British colonialism in America). Roughly speaking (if I remember correctly, which perhaps I don't - maybe someone will correct me if I am wrong) his idea was: God gave the Earth to mankind in common. So if there is some as-yet-unowned good, you have a right to put it to use - mix your labour with it and thereby increase its value. Since you own your body, you thereby come to own the good. However, Locke has a proviso: there has to be enough and as good left in common for others. It is hard to see what gives anyone the right to procure a previously unowned object if there are others around who need it as much or more. And this would lead one to think that nobody has the right to hoard an essential resource.

It's hard to know exactly how to respond to this question, I'm afraid, without knowing what the specific conflict is. I suppose your questions might be rephrased as something like: when religious imperatives are somehow inconsistent with government law, which should be given precedence? I don't think there is a definite answer to this question. I can think of cases (such as conscientious objection to military service or the defiance of race-based segregations laws on religious grounds) where I think religious imperatives trump national law. I can also think of cases (such as laws against murder, rape, or assault), where I think national law should supersede religious prohibition. I suppose your question might refer to the Archbishop of Canterbury's recent remarks about incorporating Sharia into British law. Evaluating his remarks depends, however, upon what specific changes one might take them to imply. I think distinct judicial system for Muslims in Britain would be a bad idea, but a separate banking system may not. Sharia-oriented prohibitions against blasphemy should generally not be honored, not because they're Muslim but because they're morally and politically indefensible. British law, like American law, however, might I think relax its prohibitions against polygamy--but not, I think, its sanctioning no fault divorce, not its custody rights for women, and not its requirement that marriage be a consensual affair among adults only. So, you see, one really needs to look at the issues on a case-by-case basis and not pursue a general principle here.

In a word, yes. The extent to which states prohibit people from exercising the liberty to live where they wish troubles me. In fact, it's funny you raised this question just now, as just the other day my son found himself reeling when, after announcing to me that he planned to emigrate to Scotland or Greece when he grew up, I informed him that doing so might not be possible unless the governments of those nations gave him permission. It was painful to see him come to terms with the extent we live at the discretion of others.

Now, having said that, it is also important to recognize that migration, like many transactions in life, does need to be regulated. Why? Well, because unregulated migration can, in fact, as you put it, "infringe on the rights of others." It can because people are not simply individuals but social-collective beings, and sudden or overwhelming migrations of large numbers of people can disrupt and arguably undermine various social collectives--e.g. national cultures.

Of course, there's no reason national cultures or other collectives should be preserved at all costs--just as there's no reason "all white" or "all Protestant" neighborhoods in a city should be thought of as eternal. Nations, cultures, religions, and cities come and go. But it would also be wrong to allow a culture, a people, a language, a religion, or a nation to perish or suffer severe diminishment just because another is more prolific--especially if the immigrating population's growth is morally indefensible. In a world of increasingly scarce resources, it's not morally defensible for either individuals or collectives to reproduce or grow without limit. In fact, if you ask me there are already way too many people on the planet. Those who have learned the virtues of containing population growth shouldn't be punished for it. Of course, many who've learned to control their birth rates haven't yet learned to control their rates of consumption. And their failure to do so, may provide some grounds for constraining their right to restrict immigration. The extent to which a collective's contemporary and historical misconduct has compelled the immigration into its domain may also militate against its right to refuse it.

So, the ethics of migration, it seems, must achieve a sort of balance. On the one hand people should maximally enjoy the liberty to live where they wish. But their doing so will be affected by considerations related to the control of population growth, the control of consumption, environmental impacts, the rectification of historical and contemporary wrongs that force migration, and the stability and security of valuable social collectives.

As you might expect, the answer to your question depends on what conception of justice you hold. One sort of utilitarian maintains, for example, that the right distribution will be the one that maximizes the greatest amount of welfare over the long run. So it will be permissible to have short-term inequalities if they promote welfare overall. If equity is a factor in welfare, then on this view it is OK to have short-term inequities in order to gain long-term equity. It is unclear, however, to what extent equity is important to maximize welfare. Another approach, then, would be to accept a consequentialist view that does not focus entirely on welfare, but recommends maximizing other goods, such as equity.

However, one complaint about utilitarianism, and consequentialism generally, is that it ignores the rights of individuals. So it is important to consider the sorts of things being distributed. For example, would it be permissible to deny voting rights to some people now if doing so would promote long-term equity, e.g., perhaps there is a subordinated group that has been denied education. If they are allowed to vote they will vote for someone who will support their continued subordination, but they don't realize this. If they are not allowed to vote, a more egalitarian candidate will win. Should they be denied the vote? Most non-consequentialist theories, I think, would say that the violation of their civil rights is not permissible, even in the name of greater equity. Other measures must be taken, in such cases, to inform them of the dangers of electing the candidate, etc.

One strategy that has been proposed for thinking about what short-term inequalities are permissible is to start by guaranteeing individuals their rights, and then to consider whether the individual getting the short end of the stick could reasonably assent to the scheme of distribution that gave them less. So you can't deny me my rights for long-term equity, but you can set up a scheme that gives me less stuff, if a well-informed and reasonable person could consent to being put in that position. This is still very vague because it isn't clear exactly what a well-informed and reasonable person could consent to. But it captures two important conditions: (i) individuals have some rights against being sacrificed or used for the greater good, even greater equity; and (2) beyond those rights, efforts should be made to guard against exploitation by only allowing those structures that those disadvantaged by them can (reasonably) endorse. This would allow inequalities in distributions of stuff (wealth, income, etc) if it could be justified to those who get less, e.g., by suggesting that they would get more this way than they would if there were an equal distribution because unequal distributions provide incentives for greater production.

This points to an interesting moral question concerning the formulation of moral rules. It seems to me that your question concerns over-simplified (you call them 'glib') moral rules. The assumption (by those who authorised the signs) must be that the rule holds good most of the time, or that if it is followed all the time that the result will be better than if it is not followed. Presumably there is a vaguely utilitarian calculation going on. However, when formulated in this over-simplified manner, there may result individual undesirable consequences -- your mother's situation may be an example. (Similarly, even 'Do not kill' is a good moral rule, but because over-simplified comes into conflict with the possibility of self-defense or just war.)

The rule might be better formulated as 'You should vote, unless you genuinely do not understand the issue you are voting on'. However, even this may not cover all the possible objections. More importantly, it is not as forceful a piece of rhetoric as the original 'you must vote'. Therefore, it may have fewer negative consequences, but will also have fewer positive ones.

It seems likely that no rule could be formulated so precisely as to escape simplistic interpretations. The use of moral rules in discourse assumes a faculty of judgement on the part of the moral agent, by which the rule is understood in context and in its relationship with other rules.

First of all, the question of what grounds private ownership applies to all goods, not just land. So I'm going to treat the question as the more general one about how one can come to own anything. There are two basic approaches to this question: a "natural rights" approach and a "social institution" approach. On the former approach, people have rights to own goods in the same sense in which they have other basic rights, such a right not to have their bodily integrity violated by others. The question for such an approach is how one acquires a property right in any particular good, which amounts to the right to exclusive use of the good and a correlative duty on the part of others to not interfere with the owner's use of the good. The most common answer to this question derives from Locke, and it divides the question into two: how does an unowned good come to be owned by someone, and how can ownership of an already-owned good be rightfully transferred. The answer to the second question is fairly straightforward. If the parties consent to the transfer, and all the usual qualifications about non-coercion, full information, etc. are present, then the ownership transfer is a success. As for the first, the original acquisition question, Locke's idea is that if one "mixed one's labor" with the good - in the case of land, worked the land to grow crops, say - then one's labor on the good gave one a right to own it. Locke included a very famous "proviso", however, to the effect that when one mixes one's labor with land, this yields ownership of the land only if one has left "as much and as good for others". What the import of this proviso is, and whether one should take it seriously, is a matter of much controversy. For a very interesting discussion of Locke's theory and of the proviso in particular, take a look at C. B. Macpherson's The Theory of Possessive Individualism. Another classic discussion, from a libertarian viewpoint, is Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

On the social institution approach, property rights - again, in anything, whether land, small durable goods, or stocks - arise from the legal framework that establishes a society. One has a right to whatever the laws say one has a right to. What makes one's ownership of property just is the justice of the legal/social framework that grounds it. I myself favor this approach. John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, is perhaps the most important modern proponent of this idea. Certain important consequences of this approach, especially for the controversial topic of taxation, are developed in Thomas Nagel and Liam Murphy, The Myth of Ownership. They argue that to think of taxes as taking away what's yours initially, is to fail to see that without social institutions, which require taxation to exist, there could be no property in the first place. Hence there is nothing sacred about one's right to pre-tax earnings.

I'm inclined to agree that there's something strange in asking politicians to recuse themselves from personal integrity (which is how such compartmentalization might be characterized).

One interpetation of the politician's statement that he's able to separate his religious belief from his work in office is that his policy justification for X will not rely on his religious beliefs, even though his religious beliefs happen to endorse X; he will offer justification that a democratic majority is able to accept, one that doesn't violate any constitutional principles. I don't think this poses any threat to personal integrity. There may certainly be more than one reason for believing X, not all of them religious. A different case occurs when the politician endorses something incompatible with X. Then I'm inclined to agree with your last statement...although a single belief system may entail X but also the belief that it is wrong to force someone to act against his/her conscience, which the politician might judge would be the result of enforcing X as a matter of public policy. Most belief systems are hierarchical, and whether belief in X or belief in (say) freedom of conscience is more fundamental would probably determine whether the politician could in fact separate his belief in X from his work in office without impugning his personal integrity.

On your first question, in its general form: No, it is not the case that you should do as much as you can to make right what you believe is wrong. First, there are wrongs that you can make right only by committing serious wrongs of your own. Second, your resources (time, money, energy) are limited, and it is simply impossible for you to do as much as you can with regard to every wrong you perceive. (For example, doing all you can to make right a trivial wrong may prevent you from making right a much greater wrong.) Third, you are not morally required to do all you can to right the wrongs of the world you live in -- some wrongs are not your responsibility (e.g., a blatant injustice in the Danish tax code), and you are morally entitled to devote some of your resources to things other than the righting of wrongs. Fourth, you may not be sure that what you believe to be wrong is wrong, and you may then have reason not to act on your judgment. (For example, when many people whose judgment you respect do not share your belief, you may conclude that perhaps you should not act on it when doing so might also cause a lot of harm. The fact that opinions are very divided about abortion gives those who believe it permissible a reason not to have one and also gives those who believe abortion to be murder a reason not to use the kind of violence against abortion clinics that one might well use against extermination camps.)

On the more specific question, concerning poverty and income inequality, I share your belief that these are very great wrongs, especially when we are thinking about the world as a whole rather than merely our own country. We affluent have arranged this world so that the bottom half of humankind live in life-threatening poverty, on roughly 2% of global income, with one third of all deaths each year (ca. 18 million) due to entirely avoidable poverty-related causes. Yes, this sort of radical inequality is a very major wrong, and each of us ought to do quite a bit toward making it right.

What exactly to do depends on five sets of factors: Your talents and capabilities, your motivations and interests, your opportunities, your analysis of the poverty problem, and your assessment of what like-minded others are doing. Let me run through these in order.

Your talents and capabilities matter insofar as there may be effective contributions you are simply unable to make. You may not be able to become a successful business person, or an effective politician, or a good nurse or physician; and you may then have reason to contribute in some other way.

Your motivations and interests matter insofar as you will end up contributing much less if you find what you do revolting, boring, or even just unexciting. Ideally, you would find a contribution that really suits you and engages your whole being over long stretches of your life. Many careers have this potential -- writer, business person, politician, doctor, NGO worker, etc. But chances are that only a few of these careers have the potential of captivating you in this way. Still, one career is all you need. And it is quite likely that you can find one that is personally fulfilling and also enables you to do (with high and lasting motivation) a great deal of good. If you can achieve this happy combination, you're a long way toward what your final question is inquiring about: the good life.

Your opportunities matter insofar as they may give you a headstart in certain careers relative to others. For instance, if a rich uncle can set you up with an interesting business you'd be excited to run, then this may well tip the scales in favor of this career as against working for a non-profit organization or trying to work your way up in politics.

Your analysis of the poverty problem matters insofar as it affects what you see as the most promising contribution possibilities. Once you have a sense of what the key obstacles are that prevent the poor from working their way out of poverty, then you can intelligently focus your efforts at the removal of abstacles that you can remove most cost-effectively.

Your assessment of what like-minded others are doing matters insofar as you want to take advantage of coordination. Weak coordination is passive: you note that enough people are already involved in a certain effort and so you direct your energies somewhere else where too little effort is as yet applied. An even better way of "improving the mix" of efforts being made is through strong coordination, which is active: you get together with others and work together with them as a team -- perhaps within one non-profit or company or political party, or perhaps even across various such entities.