a philosophical question

 I have this buddy John, and for the last five, ten, years, we meet every other Wednesday for brunch and mostly for a long conversation.  Do you guys remember a movie from the 80's, My Dinner with Andre?  It's about two hours long and it consists entirely of these two guys talking to each other over dinner.  It got good reviews but I didn't see it for some time, I mean just two guys talking over dinner?  C'mon Man.  But eventually I did see it, and I liked a lot.

I like to think that my brunch with John is something like that, probably not, but they are pretty good, philosophical and touching on a variety of topics, but these last four years they have been tainted.

By Trump of course.  No matter how well the conversation started it would veer off into Trump, seemingly within minutes, and once in the gutter beside the road of high-mindedness, it would just sputter along there until finally one of us would bonk themselves on the forehead and change the subject.  Even then like as not, we would find ourselves back in the ditch within minutes.

But yesterday in over three hours of conversation, Trump came up only a couple times for only a few minutes, and then for the last twenty minutes but only in the context of how pleasant it was not to be talking about him.  

But out of habit I had CNN on when I came back from my dinner with John, and it was the dems presenting their case, but I was reading the paper and stuff and listened with less than half an ear.  Sure Trump was guilty, but I had heard this all so many times before (the videos were pretty good though), and everybody knows the dems will never get 17 reps on their side to convict him, so nothing will happen, so why bother?

I can think of two reasons which I will call the utilitarian and the stoical, roughly after two schools of philosophy.   The utilitarian reason would be to hurt the republican party.  These senators are worried sick about which fork (McConnell or Trump) the republican river will take and don't want to be in the smaller fork, so they have been straddling for some time and would like to continue until the answer is clearer but their vote in this manner will make them choose one side or the other.  This would be a boon for the dems.

The stoical reason is less strategic, it just wants revenge.  Trump is a bad man and he needs to be punished, just because.  

Here is the question.  There is a very bad man who has done bad things, let's say murder, but he has escaped, escaped to a distant wilderness from which he will never return to do his bad deeds again.  We could raise up a small army and pursue him, but it would cost a lot of money and doubtless some of the soldiers will lose their lives.  Do we pursue him or do we not pursue him?