Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. To submit a question, email Sigal at sigal.samuel@vox.com or fill out this anonymous form. Either way, if we choose your question, it’ll be anonymized. Here’s this week’s question, condensed and edited for clarity:

I work for the federal government in a policy role. I took the job before President Trump won the election and I didn’t expect that he would triumph. Since he’s come into power, I’ve been wrestling with the question of whether to quit or stay.

I strongly disagree with this administration’s politics and don’t want to be complicit in them. But I think I’m doing good and valuable work in my particular lane — work that could improve things for people in this country and abroad. How do you decide whether to participate in an admin you disagree with or whether to walk away in protest?

Dear Concerned About Complicity,

Why did you choose this career to begin with? It sounds like it was because you — like lots of other people who go into government — sincerely care about doing good. So let’s use that as our lodestar here.

If your goal is to do good, the most obvious potential reason to stay in your job is that you believe it still gives you a unique opportunity to do just that. Even though you disagree with this administration’s politics, it’s possible that you can still do more good by staying put than you could do by leaving government and avoiding the taint of politics.

There are a number of ways that could be true. One is if your particular role is relatively removed from the administration’s more controversial moves: if you work for the Environmental Protection Agency, say, not the Justice Department. Another is if you believe you can create positive impact from within — for example, by making the case for better policies at critical moments — in a way that wouldn’t happen if you resigned and got replaced.

And then there’s the simple fact that, well, this is how the system of liberal democracy works. When a president is democratically elected, it’s the job of government employees to heed the president’s decisions, and not just the ones they personally agree with.

There are really good reasons to want to uphold that system. One of liberal democracy’s great defenders, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, argued in his essay “

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