The Leader's Imperative: Ethics, Integrity, and Responsibility

Purdue University Purdue University

Purdue e-Pubs Purdue e-Pubs

Purdue University Press Books Purdue University Press

Summer 6-1-2001

The Leader’s Imperative: Ethics, Integrity, and Responsibility The Leader’s Imperative: Ethics, Integrity, and Responsibility

J. C. Ficarrotta

Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_ebooks

Part of the Organizational Communication Commons, and the Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public

Administration Commons

Recommended Citation Recommended Citation

Ficarrotta, J. C., "The Leader’s Imperative: Ethics, Integrity, and Responsibility" (2001).

Purdue University

Press Books

. 6.

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_ebooks/6

This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries.

Please contact [email protected] for additional information.

The Leader’s Imperative

Ethics, Integrity, and

Responsibility

◆

Edited by J. Carl Ficarrotta

Purdue University Press

West Lafayette, Indiana

05 04 03 02 01 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National

Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,

ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The leader’s imperative : ethics, integrity, and responsibility / edited by J. Carl

Ficarrotta.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-55753-184-6 (alk. paper)

1. Military ethics. 2. Leadership. 3. Integrity. 4. Responsibility. 5. Com-

mand of troops. 6. United States—Armed Forces—Of¤cers—Conduct of life.

I. Ficarrotta, J. Carl, 1957–

U22 .L36 2000

355.3'3041—DC21 00-008224

Contents

Preface

vii

First Things

Three Moral Certainties

John T. Noonan, Jr. 3

“Turning” Backward: The Erosion of Moral Sensibility

John J. McDermott 15

The Mission of the Military and

the Question of “the Regime”

Hadley Arkes 29

Why Serve the State?

Moral Foundations of Military Of¤cership

Martin L. Cook 56

Integrity

Some Personal Re¶ections on Integrity

General George Lee Butler 73

Decisions of Leaders and Commanders—Ethics Counts

Lieutenant General Bradley C. Hosmer 84

Professional Integrity

Brigadier General Malham M. Wakin 95

Ethical Problems of Warfare

The Just-War Idea and the Ethics of Intervention

James Turner Johnson 107

Emergency Ethics

Michael Walzer 126

◆

◆◆

◆

Contents

Terrorism and the Military Professional

Manuel M. Davenport 140

Unchosen Evil and the Responsibility of War Criminals

Peter A. French 155

The Core Values in Combat

General Ronald R. Fogleman 167

The Just War Tradition and

Moral Problems Outside Warfare

The War Metaphor in Public Policy: Some Moral Re¶ections

James F. Childress 181

The Control of Violence, Foreign and Domestic:

Ethical Lessons from Law Enforcement

Reverend Edward A. Malloy, C.S.C. 198

Thinking about Hard Cases

When Integrity Is Not Enough:

Guidelines for Responding to Unethical Adversaries

Richard T. De George 213

Conscience and Authority

Thomas E. Hill, Jr. 228

In the Line of Duty: The Complexity of Military Obligation

Nicholas Rescher 243

Traditions in Moral Education

The Education of Character

William J. Bennett 255

Liberal Education and Its Enemies

Allan Bloom 272

The Hazards of Repudiating Tradition

Christina Hoff Sommers 283

Contributors

297

Index

303

vii

Preface

ilitary academies aim to educate for leadership. As a nation, we hope that

even those graduates who do not serve full careers in the military will even-

tually assume positions of leadership in other institutions. The essays in this vol-

ume are a complete collection of the distinguished lectures in ethics given at

the U.S. Air Force Academy from the fall of 1988 to the spring of 1999. While

there is no single theme that runs through the entire collection, each essay has

a common purpose: each lecturer was, in his or her own way, attempting to con-

tribute to the ethical education of our nation’s future leaders. The contributors

come from a variety of backgrounds (the series has enjoyed the participation of

distinguished academics, high-ranking military of¤cers, judges, university ad-

ministrators, and political of¤ce holders) and in this volume we can read what

some leading thinkers from these various backgrounds have to offer on the sub-

ject of ethics and leadership.

The two lectures are managed by the Academy’s Department of Philoso-

phy. The Joseph A. Reich, Sr., Distinguished Lecture on War, Morality and the

Military Profession began in 1988 and is delivered each fall. The late Joseph

A. Reich, Sr. was a distinguished and long-time resident of Colorado Springs,

Colorado, and was instrumental in bringing the Air Force Academy to that

city. The Reich lecture series is supported though an endowment fund from

Mr. Reich and his family, which is administered by the Air Force Academy As-

sociation of Graduates. It honors “Papa Joe,” as he was affectionately known,

for his many years of dedicated service to the Academy, the Colorado Springs

community, and the United States. The Alice McDermott Memorial Lecture

in Applied Ethics has been given each spring, beginning in 1991. The McDer-

mott lectures are in memory of Alice Patricia McDermott, deceased wife of

the Academy’s ¤rst Dean of the Faculty, retired Brigadier General Robert F.

McDermott. Mrs. McDermott was intensely involved in the lives of cadets

viii

◆

◆◆

◆

Preface

and was a strong, positive role model for all the young people that knew her.

When General McDermott assumed the presidency of USAA, the McDer-

motts moved to San Antonio, where she continued her tireless volunteer ef-

forts with St. Luke’s Hospital, the Cancer Center Council, The Southwest

Foundation Forum, Ronald McDonald House, the San Antonio Symphony

League, and Project ABC. The McDermott series is funded by the Major Gen-

eral William Lyon Chair in Professional Ethics.

The Leader’s Imperative

First Things

Three Moral Certainties

John T. Noonan, Jr.

hat do I mean by “moral certainties”? I mean things that we are sure of

by means other than mathematical calculation or logical deduction,

where following the rules of the system assures certainty, and other than physi-

cal sensation, where we trust our senses to know that we have two hands and

walk on earth. We are morally certain that there is a Julius Caesar and morally

certain that there is an Uzbekistan. On a personal level most of us are morally

certain that our parents love us. Moral certainty depends on experience, but

the certainty exceeds the experience. To be morally certain of something is not

to be infallibly right but to be sure enough of it to act con¤dently in the belief

that it exists. We have, obviously, a multitude of moral certainties. I should like

to elaborate on three moral certainties that we have in our moral life. These

certainties are in a double sense moral. They affect our moral life, and they

have a certainty of the kind I call moral.

I will begin with a story. In 1942 the German army was occupying Poland.

Far behind the lines was the small Polish city of Józefów. In June, Police Bat-

talion 101, a unit of ¤ve hundred men of the occupying force, received orders

to round up and kill every Jew in Józefów.

Every Jew meant every Jew, regard-

less of gender, health, or age. The order was carried out. The Jews were taken

from their homes to the town square and methodically shot. Babies were bay-

oneted. In all over twelve thousand persons were put to death.

These killings

are described with documentary detail by Daniel Joseph Goldhagen in his

book Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

◆

◆◆

◆

John T. Noonan, Jr.

Focusing on particular events Goldhagen highlights the personal decisions

of those who took human lives in the course of the Holocaust, a mass event

whose enormity, the destruction of over ¤ve million Jews, is such that it may

blunt our sensibilities or cause us to blank out. Just as it may be far easier to

understand the expenditure of $1,000 than the expenditure of $1,000,000,000,

so the smaller killings can be better grasped. So Goldhagen takes pains to de-

scribe the action of Police Battalion 101’s commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp,

who told his men that anyone who did not think himself able to engage in the

killing would be excused without reprimand.

Several men took advantage of

this order. The rest were willing executioners.

What is one’s ¤rst reaction on reading or hearing of this event? I am not

sure, but I think it is to ask, “Had the Germans discovered some sabotage

going on in Józefów or had there been some guerilla action against the Ger-

man invaders for which this response was deemed appropriate reprisal?” Inex-

cusable as such massive retaliation would have been, whatever the stimulus,

we still do not want to believe that it did not have the slightest military

justi¤cation. Nothing of a military nature had, in fact, occurred. The Jews of

Józefów were not different from other civilians in the occupied area. They

were killed because of deliberate Nazi policy.

When we ¤nd on such investigation that the victims were totally blame-

less and that the order to kill was deliberate policy, we think—nearly all people

will think—that the killings were murder, the intentional taking of human

lives without justi¤cation. The killings were acts of evil. We do not need to

know the international law of war or the law of the Third Reich to reach this

conclusion. We are morally certain. That certainty is part of a larger moral cer-

tainty: evil acts are done in the world.

Let me drive home this large and simple truth with other examples of mass

murder from this century. In the period from 1916 to 1918 the government of

Turkey turned against the Armenians, a minority of 2,000,000 persons distin-

guished by religion, ethnicity, and culture from the Moslem majority. The Ar-

menians had lived for centuries within the Ottoman Empire. Still, 320,000 were

killed intentionally; another 680,000 or more died as a result of starvation.

Over

half of the Armenians in the empire did not escape death, a fact that the Turkish

government still does not admit.

In the period 1926 to 1953 of Josef Stalin’s rule of the Soviet Union the Com-

munist regime killed purposefully at least 1,000,000 persons; another 19,000,000

died of starvation.

The victims of the killings were enemies identi¤ed by social

Three Moral Certainties

◆

◆◆

◆

class or status or political opinion and, in the case of Polish and Ukrainian vic-

tims, by ethnic difference.

In 1994 in Rwanda the Hutu government organized a three-month massacre

of the Tutsi population. The Tutsis looked different from the Hutus, were alleged

to be racially different, and had been the Hutus’ social superiors. Of a Tutsi popu-

lation of 930,000, this brief campaign of killing put to death 850,000.

According

to Gérard Prunier, this was “one of the highest casualty rates of population in his-

tory from non-natural causes.”

I do not need to be exhaustive—to detail the Japanese rape of Nanking and

killing of more than 260,000 Chinese,

the Cultural Revolution in China and

the killing of 7.7 million Chinese,

the regime of the Khmer Rouge and the

deaths of 1.5 million Cambodians.

Morbid fascination may be the result of this catalogue of horrors that has

marked the twentieth century, most of them in my lifetime; but they are hor-

rible to dwell upon, and memory of them—the atrocities against the Arme-

nians, for example—fades. I recall these events now to ask, “Is not each of

these events evil? Does not any human being hearing of them judge them to

be aberrations from humanity, fanatic explosions, massacre on a massive scale?

If the killing of the Jews of Józefów demonstrated deeds of evil, are not all of

these unjusti¤ed killings the amplest possible con¤rmation that evil exists and

can be recognized as existing?”

Mass murder, it is now evident, knows no boundaries, is not the province

of any particular ethnic, religious, national, or ideological group. Turkey, the

Soviet Union, Germany, and Rwanda nurtured and harbored the murderers.

Nazis and Communists, entrenched imperialists and tribal juntas, have alike

been guilty. Some of these slaughters took place against the background of a war

(the killing of the Armenians and of the Jews), but none of them was necessary

to ¤ghting the war, none was occasioned by military necessity. The motives for

the murders were varied—religious and ethnic in Turkey, ideological and class

in the Soviet Union, ethnic and ideological in Germany, ethnic and class in

Rwanda. Characteristic of each case is the marking of the victims as different

from their murderers. A sign was put upon them—literally in Germany, ¤gura-

tively in the other cases—declaring the difference: “They are not us.” It has been

essential to mark the victims in this way so that the murderers will not see them

as human beings like themselves. Not see them as themselves—that is the trick,

if “trick” is not too trivial a description of the act by which a species of subhu-

manity is created. The “not seeing” is easier if the victims are physically out of

◆

◆◆

◆

John T. Noonan, Jr.

sight, but essentially the “not seeing” is a mental act by which those to be killed

are no longer regarded as human beings like the killers. Creation of a species of

subhumans has been the way the killers have salved or sti¶ed their consciences.

For I have no doubt that the killers, like their victims, had consciences. I am

sure that the killers had consciences because they were human beings. If you

and I recognize that their acts were evil, it is because our human consciences

convey this judgment to us. Because they were human beings, the killers must

have had the same basic human equipment for detecting evil.

If they failed to

do so as they entered on mass slaughter, it must have been that in delusion or

self-deceit they took their victims to be subhumans they could kill at will.

Have I gone too far and too fast in assuming that you will agree that these

deeds were deeds of monstrous evil and that it is your conscience that tells you

so? Let me go back to the story I started with and Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s

Willing Executioners, from which the story comes, because the book gives me

pause. The book ¤rst appeared in the United States and, when reviewed in Ger-

many, caused a furor. Who was this American to pass moral judgment on Ger-

man soldiers? For the German translation Goldhagen wrote a special foreword,

disclaiming moral judgment. He wrote, “It is because the task of this investiga-

tion is historical explanation, not moral evaluation, that issues of moral guilt

and responsibility are never directly addressed.”

As if he were making no moral

judgments all the time he described the killings! He went on to note that after

the war a court of the Federal Republic of Germany had tried the killers of

Józefów and had found them guilty under German criminal law.

The judg-

ment, then, was the law’s, not his. In the same spirit he wrote of other Ger-

mans—those who were not at Józefów but who may have in their hearts approved

the deeds—that the moral judgment “is to be left to each individual who wants

to render moral judgments, just as each individual today is left to evaluate his

or her contemporaries who harbor reprehensible views and tendencies.”

There

you see what is at work: he makes the moral judgment that the views are repre-

hensible, but he does not make a moral judgment for anyone else, it is up to each

individual. In that hesitancy I see the modern problem.

Goldhagen does not say what a believing Jew or Christian would say: The

deeds of the men of Police Battalion 101 were sins. They were offenses against

God and against neighbor. They violated God’s commandment, “You shall not

murder.”

Similarly, a believer would say that those who harbored in their hearts

the desire to destroy the Jews were sinners, their thoughts were known to God

and hateful to God.

So at the end of the twentieth century, in the face of moral evils of unspeak-

Three Moral Certainties

◆

◆◆

◆

able horror, of which the killing of the Jews of Józefów is a specimen, an author

who has the courage to describe the evil deeds and chart the evil thoughts does

not condemn the deeds and the thoughts in unconditional terms. He leaves the

evaluation of the thoughts to each individual.

Who can fault Goldhagen? In our secular society, what else has authority

except the law and one’s own sense of rightness? Goldhagen seems to speak for

his generation. In 1997, Richard Posner, a representative spokesman of an earlier

generation, a distinguished graduate of Yale, gave the Holmes Lectures at Har-

vard Law School, attacking “academic moralists” and deriding their preten-

sions.

All morals, Posner maintains, are local; none are so universal as to be

applied across the board.

Posner disavows being an amoralist or nihilist; he ad-

mits to having his own local morals,

those appropriate to a graduate of Yale

College and Harvard Law School and the chief judge of a federal appeals court

in Chicago. But he will not claim that his morals are better than another’s. As

to whose morals are better, he is neutral. As a corollary of this neutrality, he ar-

gues that law must be kept clear of the contamination that comes from taking

morals “too seriously.”

The purity of law, unaffected by moral content, appears

as a desideratum. Posner’s ¤ne lectures are a splendid presentation of a position

in which God is unmentioned and relativism reigns. His approach to moral judg-

ments coincides with Goldhagen’s. Moral certainties disappear.

Yet G oldhag en and Posn er are possessed of moral certainties. Posner, as

much as Goldhagen, wants to condemn the conduct of the Nazis. At one point

he describes our “revulsion” against the Nazis, which he attempts to relativize

as “understandable without reference to morality, being based on altruism for

the victims and fear of the perpetrators.”

(I do not understand why he excludes

altruism from morality.) At another point he maintains that Hitler can be con-

demned because his regime failed; Posner takes the failure to be proof of the

lack of functionality in his system and sees this lack as a moral failure.

Posner

relies on the retrospective judgment that the Nazi regime was immoral because

it did not survive. He uses the same kind o f argument to show that Communism

in Russia was wrong: it ¤nally collapsed.

The dif¤culty with this sort of argument is that no regime, no society, no

way of life survives forever. Hitler’s regime had a dozen years of life, Soviet

Communism seventy, the slaveholding South two and a half centuries. Was

each regime immune from criticism while the society lasted and then shown

to be immoral by its failure to be immortal? There is little demonstrable con-

nection between social morality and social mortality.

Goldhagen’s use of the law of Germany suffers from the same weakness as

◆

◆◆

◆

John T. Noonan, Jr.

Posner’s criterion of survival. If Hitler had won the war, German law would not

have condemned the men of Police Battalion 101. It was only Hitler’s failure

that brought a different reading of the law into play. The condemnation of their

conduct is made, in Goldhagen’s presentation, to rest on a result as arbitrary as

the survival of the regime, for the result he relies on came about only by the

destruction of the regime.

Inadequate as their criteria are, Goldhagen and Posner are clear in their

judgment of the Nazis and expect their readers to share their judgment. Does

not each silently appeal to a standard of judgment that is not local and relative,

that is more stable than shifts in a regime? I infer that they must, or they could

not speak with the moral certainty they do in condemning Nazi barbarism and

wickedness. Indeed, would they speak at all if their moral judgments were

merely private preferences?

They speak—they voice positions—because they

share these positions with what they hope is humanity.

Let me support that inference further in Goldhagen’s case by his conviction

that the thoughts of those Germans who wanted the Jews dead were reprehensible.

On what criterion does his own clear judgment rest? One reason for morally con-

demning thoughts that have resulted in actions is that they predispose to action.

Wish a particular group or class dead, and if the opportunity occurs, one may help

effect the wish by killing or by not impeding killing. If the killing is bad, then the

predisposing thoughts that facilitate it must be bad. Although law condemns only

the act, not the predisposition, a good moralist will condemn both.

Predisposition, however, does not always lead to action or culpable inaction.

The thought held as wish, as morbid fantasy, may never have the chance to affect

conduct. Neither Goldhagen nor we can say with con¤dence how many Ger-

mans held these thoughts that never ripened in any way. Yet Goldhagen says

with moral certainty—and invites his readers to join him in saying—that the

thoughts were “reprehensible.” Why? Why should those harboring the bad

thoughts be morally condemned for thinking?

Before offering an answer to that question, let me offer three propositions

that are relevant to an answer:

There is no judgment without a judge.

There is no judge without a law.

There is no law without a lawgiver.

Albert Camus’s La Chute

may be taken as an elaborate demonstration of the

Three Moral Certainties

◆

◆◆

◆

truth of these propositions. Its protagonist is a lawyer, Jean-Baptiste Clamence,

who describes himself as a judge-penitent. He is conscious of guilt for something

he has done or not done, either killing his mistress or not preventing her suicide.

But his judgment on himself is vacuous and his penitence is unavailing. His judg-

ment on himself is empty because judgment requires impartiality; no one can be

a judge in his own case. His penitence is unavailing, for there is no one to whom

he can say he is sorry. His regret hangs meaninglessly in the air. There is only his

fall. There is no judge to judge him, there is no law to empower a judge to judge

him, there is no lawgiver to give such a law. Camus’s judge-penitent is in the posi-

tion of those who would condemn the Nazis and have only local, retrospective,

state-made criminal law on which to rely. They have in effect neither judge nor

law nor lawgiver.

The ultimate thrust of my argument, as by now may be obvious, is that

the foundation of our moral certainty about moral evil comes from the exist-

ence of a law written in our hearts and known by our consciences; and if there

is a law, there is a lawgiver. The extensive existence of evil is taken by some to

be evidence that the world is a chaos formed by chance, without rhyme or rea-

son; that it is, as an irreverent German movie title puts it, a case of “every man

for himself and god against all.”

I argue to the contrary. The extensive exist-

ence of evil proves the existence of a God who has given human beings a law.

Without that law we would not recognize at once and without dif¤culty the

evil of mass murder whoever its perpetrators are, whoever its victims are. No

local transient custom, no special bias, accounts for the universal condemna-

tion. Our moral certainty of the evil points to the second moral certainty I

hold we have in the realm of morals: that our acts and thoughts are subject to

a law established by a lawgiver who is not human.

In the context of our civilization, for Jews and for Christians, the name of

that lawgiver is God. Our morals begin with the commandments attributed to

God. In that context, the most relevant is the commandment sometimes trans-

lated, “You shall not kill,” but better translated, “You shall not murder.”

The

people to whom the commandment was originally addressed, and to whose care

its preservation is owed, engaged in various kinds of killing without compunc-

tion. They ate animals, they practiced capital punishment, they conducted

wars.

“You shall not murder” was how the commandment was understood.

The commandment was reinforced by the story that opens the Hebrew

Bible: The Creator creates human beings in the image of the Creator.

In a met-

aphor that is obscure but illuminating, human beings are presented as

◆

◆◆

◆

John T. Noonan, Jr.

re¶ections of a divinity. For that reason their dignity, including the life of each,

is special.

What constitutes murder, on what occasions the taking of human life is

morally justi¤ed, underwent development in the biblical context

and has un-

dergone development in the course of civilization. American law, for example,

carefully distinguishes degrees of malice in killing and treats criminal negli-

gence in bringing about a death as less than reckless indifference resulting in

death, and each less than intentional killing, although all are species of homi-

cide.

The necessity of capital punishment has been sharply criticized.

All

morals have a dynamic capacity to develop and to interact with human law.

The moral certainty that the unjusti¤ed taking of human life is evil, the moral

certainty that a law inscribed in our being condemns it—these two moral cer-

tainties remain.

Admitting the fact of moral development that judges what kind of killing

constitutes murder appears to reveal a weak point in my argument. I have as-

sumed that each of the mass killings I condemn was not justi¤ed. But were the

killings not justi¤ed in the eyes of the killers? Innocent as the victims appear to

us, would their killers not have justi¤ed dispatching the victims in terms of na-

tional security or the class struggle? In every age and in all parts of the world there

have been killings organized and carried out by governments—killings not re-

garded as murder because they were regarded by the state as justi¤ed. In this way

in medieval Europe incorrigible heretics were thought to be rightly punished by

death; even in seventeenth-century Boston Quakers were hanged on Boston

Common because they were heretics who, contrary to law, had returned to Mas-

sachusetts.

In this way in the nineteenth century American Indians were dis-

possessed and killed if they resisted too much. In this way today in California and

thirty-six other states criminals are executed for their bloody deeds.

No one who

kills on behalf of the state is regarded as a murderer; the state has decided that

the killing is justi¤ed. Justi¤cation for the killing—not the killing itself—appears

to be at the nub of the moral judgment of whether or not a killing is murder.

I agree that as to justi¤cation there has been development and as to some

justi¤cations no universal human agreement exists. Nonetheless I argue that

common human characteristics—age, gender, physical condition, mental capac-

ity—can never be justi¤cation for killing. These characteristics never suf¤ciently

distinguish one group of human beings from another. It would be irrational any-

where to kill those under ¤ve feet or all the redheads. By a parity of reasoning it

is irrational to kill those identi¤ed by other characteristics they cannot change,

such as ethnicity. If ethnicity is an excuse for killing, then every section of the

Three Moral Certainties

◆

◆◆

◆

human race is eligible for extermination. Finally I argue that experience has

taught us that to enforce religious faith by death is to contradict the foundation

of faith and that to achieve justice in the social structure by death is to be unjust.

In sum, the justi¤cations advanced for the massacres of our century do not bear

rational examination. To accept these justi¤cations in the light of the law in-

scribed and developed within us is to violate that law.

I speak of a law inscribed in our being, and I come to the third moral cer-

tainty I want to set before you today: that our moral life is conducted in our

minds. I spoke earlier of a law written in our hearts, as I just now spoke of a law

inscribed in our being. Clearly, these references are metaphorical. You can take

the heart out of a human body and hold it in your hand, as a cardiac surgeon

does during surgery, and you will ¤nd no text on its surface. You can examine

the anatomy of our being without ¤nding a single inscription. You can look at

every movement in our brain without being able to detect a moral thought.

In the last twenty years the neurosciences have made extraordinary progress

in the mapping of the brain, locating, for example, the amygdala as the place

where emotions of anger and anxiety are processed, and charting the effect of

dopamine on certain synapses. Analogies with the workings of computers have

aided these scienti¤c endeavors in understanding the neural connections and

processes. These successes, and the greater successes they promise, have encour-

aged some to conclude that eventually the mind will be explained as a complex

of interacting neurons—or rather, the mind will be dropped from the explana-

tion as unnecessary. With the disappearance of mind will go such notions as the

will, intention, and thought, already concepts linguistically relegated by aggres-

sive materialists to the category of “folk psychology.”

As this intellectual battle over the implications of the neurosciences takes

shape, it is obvious that our morals, like our law, are vitally dependent on intan-

gible dynamisms, including will, intention, thought, and conscience. None of

the processes by which law measures our acts, by which moral judgments are

made, are identical with the physical processes of the brain. To look for them in

the brain is like Khrushchev asking if the cosmonauts found God beyond the

atmosphere. Neither God nor a human intention is a measurable physical sub-

stance. That we so easily use metaphors to describe the mind—that we must use

metaphors to describe the mind—is some evidence that neither our law nor our

morals depend on the conviction that the mind and the brain are identical. Why

do we speak of the law in our hearts unless we are using metaphor to capture

invisible realities not capturable by quantitative measurements?

The criminal law is insistent that it judges acts, not thoughts; but there is

◆

◆◆

◆

John T. Noonan, Jr.

no human act unless a thought determines it.

Purpose is joined by thought

to physical movement to form a human act that the criminal law can judge.

The same is true of morals. A physical movement—a letting go of one’s hands,

for example—is not a moral act. It is only when thought provides purpose that

moral judgment is possible. Then, for example, pulling the trigger on a gun

can constitute murder or lawful self-defense; it depends in great part on the

purpose of the action.

Going even further, I maintain that in morals, thoughts by themselves can

be judged. They can be judged because they predispose one to later actions.

They can be judged because they themselves violate the law inscribed in our

being. To think that all the Jews or Armenians or capitalists or Tutsi should be

killed is already to dehumanize them; to hate to the point of desiring extermi-

nation of the hated humans is to commit murder in the heart. The offense,

invisible to others, is seen by the invisible giver of the law, who is also its judge.

That is the third moral certainty I offer to you.

In capsule, I have shown four large instances of killing where the creation

of a subhuman class for living human beings no longer seen as human consti-

tutes irrational justi¤cation, and that every human being can recognize the kill-

ing of them as evil; that unlike the unnecessarily reticent Goldhagen, the

relativizing Posner, and the frustrated judge-penitent of Camus, I believe the evil

is recognized because it violates an interior, invisible law of our being; and that

that law has been provided by a lawgiver, who will judge the violations of the law,

be they purposeful murder or the thought of purposeful murder. We are morally

certain of the evil, of the law, of the lawgiver-judge of our hearts.

Notes

1. David Jonah Goldhagen,

Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and

the Holocaust

(New York: Knopf, 1996; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 211.

2. Ibid., 219.

3. I b i d . , 2 1 4.

4. Ibid., 212.

5. Ro b e r t F. M e l s o n ,

Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian

Genocide and the Holocaust

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 147.

6. Steven Wheatcroft, “The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repres-

sions and Mass Killings, 1930–45,”

Europe-Asia Studies

48 (1996): 1319.

7. Gérard Prunier,

The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide

(New York: Colum-

bia University Press, 1995), 264–65.

Three Moral Certainties

◆

◆◆

◆

8. Ibid., 265.

9. Iris Chang,

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II

(New York: BasicBooks, 1997), 4.

10. Rudolf J. Rummel,

Death by Government

(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction

Publishers, 1994), 100.

11. Ben Kiernan,

The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia

under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79

(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 460.

12. See Goldhagen’s discussion of the moral objections that the men of Police

Battalion 101 had to the mass slaughter of Poles and to the presence of an of¤cer’s

pregnant wife at a mass killing of Jews in Miedzyrzec (239–43).

13. Goldhagen, 481 (included as appendix 3 in the Vintage Paperback edition).

14. Ibid., 546–47.

15. Ibid., 482.

16. “ You shall not murder” (Deuteronomy 5:17, Revised Standard Version).

17. “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not mur-

der’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are

angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother

or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable

to the hell of ¤re” (Matthew 5: 21–22, RSV). “Indeed, the word of God is living and

active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit,

joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (He-

brews 4:12, RSV).

18. Richard A. Posner, “The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory,”

Harvard

Law Review

111 (1998): 1637, 1639–40. See also Richard A. Posner,

The Problematics

of Moral and Legal Theory

(Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 1999).

19. Posner, “The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory,” 1640.

20. Ibid., 1644.

21. Ibid., 1695.

22. Ibid., 1692.

23. Ibid., 1653–54.

24. See ibid., 1655 (Posner’s response to this objection).

25. See, for example, Stanley Hauerwas’s work, relying on Aristotle and Aquinas

to emphasize the importance of the development of character, or right dispositions, to

the moral life. Stanley Hauerwas,

Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theo-

logical Ethics

(Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 70: “Aristotle and

Aquinas were using the word ‘habit’ in quite a different way than current usage dic-

tates. For Aristotle a habit is a characteristic (

hexis

) possessed inwardly by man, de¤ned

as ‘the condition either good or bad in which we are, in relation to our emotions.’

These characteristics which form the virtues are dispositions to act in particular ways.”

26. Albert Camus,

The Fall,

trans. Justin O’Brien (1956; New York: Vintage Inter-

national, 1991).

◆

◆◆

◆

John T. Noonan, Jr.

27.

Every Man for Himself and God against All

(1975) (director Werner Herzog).

28. Deuteronomy 5:17, RSV.

29. “From among all the land animals, these are the creatures that you may eat . . .”

(Leviticus 11:2, RSV). “Whoever strikes a person mortally shall be put to death” (Exodus

21:12, RSV). “Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city,

both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys” (Joshua 6:21, RSV).

30. “This is the list of the descendants of Adam. When God created humankind,

he made them in the likeness of God” (Genesis 5:1, RSV).

31. Brevard S. Childs,

The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary

(Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster Press, 1974), 419–21.

32. See, e.g., McKinney’s

Consolidated Laws of New York,

Penal Code §125.10 (St.

Paul: West, 1999): “A person is guilty of criminally negligent homicide when, with

criminal negligence, he causes the death of another person.”; Penal Code §15.05: “4.

‘Criminal negligence.’ A person acts with criminal negligence with respect to a result

or to a circumstance described by a statute de¤ning an offense when he fails to perceive

a substantial and unjusti¤able risk that such result will occur or that such circumstance

exists. The risk must be of such nature and degree that the failure to perceive it con-

stitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would ob-

serve in the situation.”

33. See, e.g., John Megivern,

The Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological

Survey

(New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 5.

34. John T. Noonan,

The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Re-

ligious Freedom

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 51–54.

35. Center for Capital Punishment Studies, London,

The International Source-

book on Capital Punishment, 1997 Edition

(Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University

Press, 1997), 247.

36. See John Searle, “What’s Wrong with the Philosophy of Mind,” in

The Mind-

Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate,

edited by Richard Warner and Tadeusz

Szubka (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 281.

37. See, e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Philosophical Investigations,

trans. G. E. M.

Anscombe, 3d ed. (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1958), 217: “The intention

with which

one acts does not ‘accompany’ the action any more than the thought ‘accompanies’

speech. Thought and intention are neither ‘articulated’ nor ‘non-articulated’; to be

compared neither with a single note which sounds during the acting or speaking, nor

with a tune.”; Hauerwas, 67: “The intention becomes morally signi¤cant only because

by it we are formed as agents of the act. . . . For Aristotle and Aquinas the ethics of

character is bound up with the ability of men to give reasons for their actions. For

them the reasons given for an action cannot be incidental to the action.”

“Turning” Backward

The Erosion of Moral Sensibility

John J. McDermott

have to say that I am aware that my presentation of a stand-up, belt-it-out

in public lecture at this time has the odor of a troglodyte. We seem to be

caught between two depressing “stools” (the pun is intended); the ¤rst features

the glitz of pop-culture, showboat sports and preening politicians. The second

features the dreary data-bases of academic analyses and in-house jargonic puff.

In the ¤rst, eros has degenerated into ahistorical sleaze and in the second, eros

has disappeared. For those among us who believe in intellectual passion rather

than settling for intellectual inquiry, I say that we are a remnant and as such,

so be it, for we believe that the integrity of the journey is all that we share so

as to live, move and have our being.

The remarks which follow have as their ambience my having to re-think

and thereby re-live my tried and assumedly true assumptions as a result of

being savagely derailed from the neat clicking wheels of a life onward and up-

ward. Some ten years ago having, as they say, bottomed out, one is then faced

with the other side of the Janus directly, asking not just second questions but

even third questions. Life, as philosophy, echoing William James, is the habit

of always seeing an alternative. A life and person threatening experience (they

are not identical—each of us needs both at some time) effects a profound

transformation of what one already “knew” to be so but did not “know” to be

so. The American poet, Wallace Stevens has it best:

◆

◆◆

◆

John J. McDermott

You have a blue guitar

You do not play things as they are

. . . Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar

And so, I offer here, some comments on the obvious, the quotidian, put

suf¤ciently different, I trust, so as to prompt you to ask at least a second question.

Preamble

Remember that in life you ought to behave as at a Banquet.

—Epictetus, The Enchiridion - XV

In a relievedly brief vein, I offer here my personal stance as a context for the di-

agnosis to follow. I am not a Cassandra, who in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus,

stands in the chariot facing the great doors of the palace which homes the House

of Atreus, and issues her prophecy of doom. Although I can be Cassandra-like,

especially on the vexing problem of world population, I keep going in the hope

of better times. Conversely, I am not the eighth dwarf who awakes every morning

singing, “Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, it’s off to work we go” and then proceeding to tell us

that if you sing all day long, your troubles will go! Work may save, but it can also

punish. Consequently, please hear my remarks tonight as neither pessimistic nor

optimistic. Rather, take them as melioristic, a sort of moral dew-line, an early

(late?) warning system for me and for thee!

In the parlance of medical practice, it is now virtually a truism that com-

passionate care in the face of serious medical illness requires the presence of a

wounded healer. The analogy to the moral question has not been forthcoming

but it is pertinent and overdue. I put it this way. Moral pedagogy requires the

presence of a judge-penitent, in the telling phrase of Albert Camus. Different

from the self-destructive protagonist of Camus’ last novel, The Fall, my em-

phasis is on “penitent,” and who among us is not one of those or one who

should admit to being one of those, thereby obviating the besetting sin of cast-

ing the stone. Moral outrage frequently masks systemic hypocrisy. See, for ex-

ample, the of¤cial rhetoric during the war in Vietnam, in which the moral

posturing on behalf of democracy was in fact a cover-up for jingoistic scape-

goating. Try one closer to our time, that is, now, alas. Many ill veterans of the

Gulf War have been accosted with the moralistic attitude that they are actually

“Turning” Backward

◆

◆◆

◆

hypochondriacal and medical malingerers. Despite these bravado pronounce-

ments from paragons of of¤cial dissemblement, with each passing day it be-

comes both startling and obvious that once again the public moral take is but

a smokescreen, blocking us from the malodorous underbelly. Put directly, the

word in question is not dissembling. It is lying. There is a difference and, once

more, if you have lied, you know what I mean. (For every gloss here—I am just

as aware as you, that there exist exceptions. They are just that, exceptions. Fur-

ther they are used in the manipulative form of co-optation, namely, to throw

us off track, off the scent. It is the bad faith of an appeal to boot-strapping by

those who have no such experience.)

It goes something like this or with Kurt Vonnegut, “and so it goes.” Hey

there, John J., Have you ever done anything wrong? Have you ever ¶outed,

¶aunted, trashed, ignored or violated the moral law? First response: Who me?

Not me? Second response, well, perhaps, a time or two. Third response, Yes,

Big time. Now and only now can I suggest that there may be a better way. To

sustain this proposal of the wounded moralist, you reach for St. Augustine

who offers to the in¤nite God, that “if we had not sinned, you would not have

loved us.” Or you can appeal to the antique and deeply Christian moral tradi-

tion of the “felix culpa,” the happy fault which sees sin as the way to grace. A

more recent invocation would be that of John Dewey for whom we lived by

the funded experiences of our personal and collective historical past, learning

equally from the negative and damaging. Whatever, however, the paradox is

that unless I say I am sorry, unless I apologize, I am not in any position to offer

advice let alone wallow in moral outrage. Parenthetically, I trust that you have

noticed this form of authorial confessional critique is noticeably absent in the

long history of ethical theory.

So, having said that I am sorry on more than one occasion, I set forth on

the text in hand.

The American Setting: A Tale

I was a young child in the bleak decade of the American 1930’s. Three of my

grandparents were dead. My paternal grandfather was buried on the nasty Janu-

ary day that I was born in 1932. My remaining grandparent was my maternal

grandmother, known in our family as Nana. Widowed at an early age, with three

young children, she made a living for them by scrubbing ¤re-house ¶oors and

sewing men’s ties. She was a follower of the New York Giants of John McGraw

◆

◆◆

◆

John J. McDermott

and a whiz at pinochle. My entire extended family was shanty Irish. We had

nothing, except the American dream, Irish style.

I correct myself, for I should not say “nothing.” For the shanty Irish did man-

age to obtain, grab or perhaps even purloin one precious possession, lace curtains,

to be had no doubt in de¤ance of our often offensive and patronizing peers, the

lace-curtain Irish. My Nana had such a set of curtains. Each spring they would

be ceremoniously washed, starched and tacked to a long, nail-pronged stretcher.

For decades, I helped to do that. And then, as she failed in strength I did them

for her. Some thirty years ago, when she was in her eighties, I said to her, “time

for the curtains.” Nana replied, not this year. What! Why not? They were thread-

bare. A stretch was beyond their reach. They would fray and the threads would

unravel, spinning dizzily out of control, dangling, footless, homeless, anomic and

pathetically lonely, each and all of them, lonely together.

Nana Kelly was dead within the year.

I think here of America, our “strand” of hope and I ask do we still have that

long-standing, self-announcing con¤dence in our ability to meet and match our

foes, of any and every stripe, political, economic, natural, and, above all, spiritual,

arising from without and within our commonwealth? I do not ask this as a rhe-

torical question but rather one of direct, existential contemporaneity, the inten-

tion of which is to elicit an equally direct response. For most of my life, even

through the turbulent and bewildering decade of the 1960’s, I would answer, yes.

Subsequently, my reply became halting and had the responding cloak of “maybe”

about it. Of late, I carry with me, resonant of many others among us, a lamen-

table dubiety about whether, in fact, we are still able to tap that eros of commu-

nity, which has served us so well for the past three centuries.

This dubiety does not trace to events so much as to mood. To be sure, events

such as the Oklahoma City bombing and the escalating, precipitous rise in acts

of violence as traceable to the increasing presence of estrangement, and onto-

logical rather than functional frustration, is of central moment. The issue in

question, however, cuts deeper and may presage our having lost the capacity to

rework and reconstitute the viability of a pluralistic and mosaic communal fab-

ric which, in truth, is simply quintessential if we are to survive as a nation.

Taking heed of botanical and physiological metaphors, far more helpful

in telling us what is happening than is the language of logic and conceptual

schemas, I hear the following conversations. After an ice storm, a ¶ood, a ¤re

or just the constant, searing sun of the Texas summer, one asks of the tree, the

plant, the bush, or perhaps a tendril or two, can it come back, will it come

back? I do not know. There exists a line of viability, for the most part invisible

“Turning” Backward

◆

◆◆

◆

and even, despite modern science, mysterious. Cross that line and the leaves

wither, announcing the death of the botanical life form.

So, also, with physiological metaphors. We speak of atrophy, as when a mus-

cle loses its febrility. The common watch in our mediated society is for the ram-

pant, destructive cell, as in cancer. Far more present, however, is the malodorous

activity of inanition, wasting away, loss of tone, in short, he, she seems to be

failing. In what, of what we ask? I do not know, just failing, in general. You can

tell! The many diseases of the central nervous system carry on by via negativa.

Neurons do not ¤re. Cellular messages are not sent or if sent are not received,

or if received, not heeded, as in the biblical admonition, they who have eyes, but

do not see, they who have ears, but do not hear. The terror of addiction and

Alzheimer’s disease is that we do not know how far to go with it until it is too

late and we cannot turn back for a fresh start.

“ Turning” Backward: The Erosion of Moral Sensibility

It is best to begin by glossing the title. The meaning of “turning” descends from

the Jewish notion of Teshuvah, from the Hebrew, to recover, as being in recov-

ery. It is a turn of the heart, not simply of the mind, even if there be such a

phenomenon as mind, on its own. A “teshuvah” is not primarily an enlighten-

ment as when John Dewey ¤rst read The Principles of Psychology by William

James. Nor is it akin to the “dream” of Descartes or to the separate, but equiva-

lent, intellectually shattering discovery of Kant’s Prolegomena by Nicholas Ber-

dyaev and Martin Buber. We come closer if we think of the “tolle lege” episode

in Augustine’s life or Kierkegaard’s decision to “make trouble” as his Point of

View. Further, we ¤nd proximity to a “teshuvah” in William James’s reading of

Charles Renouvier and patently in Josiah Royce’s retrospective version of his

de¤ning moment in the mining camp of his California childhood.

Versions of this experience of turning abound in our lives, in yours I hope

and trust. I could extemporaneously offer one or more of these “turnings” in

the life of each of my children. These events, these explosive stories are trans-

forming of our deepest sensibility and in Spinoza’s version, they are constitu-

tive of an “emendatione,” a healing of the preternatural wounds that for some

reason come with our coming to consciousness.

Lamentably, the “teshuvah” is not necessarily permanent. In the language

of addiction recovery therapy, one can and often does, relapse. Further, a sec-

ond turning is dif¤cult to come by for disappointment, self-abnegation and

◆

◆◆

◆

John J. McDermott

skepticism dog the second effort. Still, even given these obstacles, a deep per-

sonal struggle can generate a return to the original turning.

At issue here, however, is an event, personal or culturally systemic, which

is more foreboding by far and largely unsung, namely a “turn” backward. This

baleful undoing of the moral fabric is unsung because it rarely, if ever, is ac-

companied by an announcement, a pronouncement or even an acknowledg-

ment that it has taken place. Actually, the turn backward is a form of spiritual

arteriosclerosis, accompanied by a hardening of the heart. The remonstrances

of the “everyday” echo here in these “deading” walls of the chambers of the

heart, as in, he has no heart, she is heartless, can’t you ¤nd it in your heart to,

don’t you have a heart, please, please have a heart, they are hard of heart and

as famously wailed by Bert Lahr in his lion persona, paraphrased as “if they

only had a heart.”

The downshot of this hardening of our hearts is the existential instantia-

tion of amorality. This is the Pontius Pilate syndrome, made infamous by Ad-

olph Eichmann and now found planetary-wide in response to one or the other

frequenting atrocities that pollute the human landscape of our epoch. It is of

baleful and sour note that even creative moral pedagogy is helpless when faced

with amorality.

The “turn” backward is most often quite subtle and instead of being char-

acterized by a decisive and personal-public event, its etiology re¶ects rather the

post-colonic phrase in our title, namely, the erosion of moral affection. The

word at issue here is erosion, not implosion or explosion. Erosion is subtle and

masks its foreboding of catastrophe. By contemporary example, you can re-

place millions of coconut trees but you cannot replace any of the Paci¤c black

coral now being foraged for commercial trinkets. In time the island-dwelling

merchants of this egregious theft will be under water.

When the eroded is gone, it is gone. Forever? Hard to say for sure, but

probably. We ask of others (rarely, of ourselves) will he ever “turn” around. She

seems to have “turned” around, but I have my doubts. He, she, is hopeless. The

recidivist rate in turns of attitude is constant, high and seemingly de¤ant of

moral pedagogy, assuming that such a distinctively human effort still exists

other than in isolated precincts of the culture. The present discussion is of

moral sensibility and not of ethics. The latter, ethics, in our time has become

bowdlerized of the patterns of human affectivity. The teaching of contempo-

rary ethics features the use of wooden case studies often introduced by the

hapless phrase, “let us suppose.” Let us suppose she is pregnant—let us suppose

you have end-stage renal failure—or pancreatic cancer, or you are HIV posi-

“Turning” Backward

◆

◆◆

◆

tive—positively. Or let us suppose that you are a clinical alcoholic—Who me?

For those of us who have received one or more of these “announcements”

among others extant, the use of “suppose” takes on the dull face of abstraction.

The absence of existential, experiential affections in these discussions wilts

the eros of imagination and turns the moral question into a game of checkers,

or for self-announced really smart philosophers, a game of chess. Antique ethics,

of whatever culture, the Analects, the Tao Te Ching, the Enchiridion and Native

American moral pedagogy have ethical prescriptions and proscriptions but they

are entailed within a living and affective cultural setting. In the words of

Jonathan Edwards, they have to do with “holy practice.” One thinks here of the

Stoic ethics as found in Book II of the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. He tells

us that no matter how long we live, even for thousands of years, we live only the

life we live. And of that human life, he offers

the time is a point, and the substance is in a ¶ux, and the perception dull,

and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the

soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judg-

ment. And, to say all in a word, everything which belongs to the body is a

stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapour, and life is a

warfare and a stranger’s sojourn, and after-fame is oblivion.

Well, what of the Aurelian “take” on being in, of and about the world? Is

this an ethical position? I think not. Rather, it is a matter of attitude, of sen-

sibility. The American apothegm tells us that you cannot legislate morality.

Fair enough, but that phrasing is an emptying derivation from the far richer

original line of the Roman, Horace: “quid leges sine moribus vanae pro¤ciunt.”

That is, no use of idle laws in the absence of moral civics. What could be more

enervating to a human life than to have little or no moral affections and at the

same time to have parental, familial, societal and legislated moral dicta hang-

ing around one’s neck?

If we were to come clean on the issue, we could ask ourselves who among

us makes ethical decisions? Who among us, when faced with the travails of

living seek out ethical principles, weighs the options and then acts? I never did,

I don’t and I hope I never do. If we live shallow lives then we shall act shallowly.

If we live deep lives in which the moral question is one of sensibility rather

than one of rule, we shall act accordingly. You say, no way. Cannot happen. We

have to rein in the instincts. We have to get this straight once and for all. It is

said that moral attitudes are too murky. The affective life lacks objectivity.

◆

◆◆

◆

John J. McDermott

Feelings are not to be trusted. It is said, as well, there is a clear right and clear

wrong and that distinction must prevail in everyone’s life. (Except in my own

life.) The classic question is “can virtue be taught?” My question is “can com-

passion be taught?” The above approach is not an issue of moral pedagogy. To

the contrary it is an issue of law and authority, a moral regulae. Yet, if you peel

away this self-righteous rhetoric on behalf of getting things straight on the

moral business, once and for all, you look directly into the underlying “atti-

tude,” one of cynicism about the possibility of moral sensibility, moral growth

and, above all, moral transformation, that is, the possibility of a “turning.” The

erosion of this belief in the “turn” is of paramount importance in any diagno-

sis of contemporary American culture. How has this happened? Why has this

happened? How could it be that collectively we seem to have lived the life of

the fabled Mr. Jones of the Bob Dylan lyric, around whom the wind was blow-

ing, but he did not know it. So, a word or two here, about the wind.

Losing Our Way

Over against the modus vivendi of affection and compassion, we seem to be slip-

ping into a modus moriendi, willing victims of the virus of cynicism in what I

think to be an obviating of our once deeply held commitment to the possibility

of possibility.

If I were to ask the following question as I frequently do, “How is it with

you, America? ” or better, “How is it with me, America?”, diagnostically I come

up with a dolorous intake. It is very important to ask such questions, constantly,

for one powerful characteristic of a culture awash in cynicism, is the abandon-

ment of self-re¶ection, let alone self-critique. The need for our doing this intake

was nailed to my forehead by a down-home, homely, brief story. While scouring

America this last spring and summer, I found myself on Northern Boulevard in

Nassau County of the State of New York. Not surprising, I had left my gas cap

at the last ¤lling station. So, in transit, I was delighted to ¤nd an old-fashioned

autoparts, hardware store. In our transaction, I mentioned to “mister hardware”

that last night some wise guy keyed the side of my rental car, a sort of rhetorical

wonder about just what is happening here. He said, happens all the time and last

week “they” (who, by the way, are they?) blew up the telephone booths on North-

ern Boulevard. I was leaving with the ironically cheering news that I was not

alone, so to speak, when he opined, “Something has gone wrong along the way.”

Indeed! And just what has gone wrong such that the way is no longer a Tao, nor

“Turning” Backward

◆

◆◆

◆

even a journey, so much as it is the pursuit of a basset hound for the mechanical

rabbit. In short, no cigar!

If we were to scan the recent decades of this cluttered trip we are taking,

a sort of spiritual MRI of how we have lost our way, I suggest that the follow-

ing culturally palpable signs, in fact, are mis-directions, deceiving directions

or no directions at all. Every wayfarer should take some time at a wayside so

as to re¶ect from whence they have come, where they are heading and, as they

say, how is it going. Well then, how is it going?

First, I believe that we are witnessing the collapse of inherited expectations,

especially those which were appropriate only as a shell game or three-card monte.

And this holds, whether the expectation emerged from the religious motif, that

all will go well for those who love God; the political motif, that democracy will

bring both equity and peace; or the economic motif, that in time everyone will

have their needs ful¤lled. (This last motif now has escalated to having our wants

ful¤lled.) So penetrating in the American psyche were these expectations, they

soon began to function as assumptions, or remarkably as eschatological redemp-

tive clots to happen in our very own generation. Surely, however, even the casual

observer, let alone those more re¶ective, cannot fail to see that these promises

are bogus. For us, they are broken promises. The ensuing malady comes about

in our inversion of the usual phrasing, that is, we see, yet we do not believe. In

consequence, we become disconnected from our experiences, from our empir-

ical, affective sensibilities and continue to chase a chimera. Sorry about this, but

we are not going to live forever. More, it is not simply that we shall die. We are

going to be zapped out of existence. Non-being awaits us. No, we are not going

to be remembered beyond a generation or so, if that. No, America is not eternal.

No, the planet Earth is not eternal. Worse, far worse, baseball is no longer a

game. It is a business. Of equal pathos, or should we say bathos, the university

is no longer a cathedral of learning, a birthing of sensibility. See it rather as a

placement center with athletic teams.

And so it goes. How quaint now is the earlier refrain, “Where have all the

¶owers gone?” or more foreboding, “Where do the children play?”. Think about

that one. As we prep in “expectation” of the global economy for the twenty-¤rst

century, hard census data ¤gures reveal that millions of American children do

not have suf¤cient food to eat and are trapped in what can be appropriately called

an ontological cycle of poverty.

Too strong? I think not. Take some substantial time and monitor all that

advertising that comes your way, by print, by radio, by video, by billboard, by

the Web and the Net, by whatever. Does it not promise more than most of us

◆

◆◆

◆

John J. McDermott

can have, ever? And does not this unctuous farrago of promises have as the

thematic hook, that we deserve to have, to be, to experience the object of the

pitch? Does not this mode of communication move from announcement to

expectation and self-deceivingly to birthright?

The spiritual message here is crystal-clear. As the biblical admonition

warns us, in time our foot will slide. Either we become totally consumed by the

chase, thereby losing our bearings, our way, or we fail to be requited and turn

bitter. Worse still, we become envious and jealous, the most destructive of the

human vices.

Second, it is this ressentiment, in the language of Nietzsche, which feeds the

media frenzy to expose cynically those who are successful in whatever way. If I

can’t have it, then you can’t have it. Bring them down. The time-honored assump-

tion that all of us have feet of clay, are penitents for one reason or another is now

escalated to the judgment (in Journalism, I trust you note, there are few penitents)

that anyone who steps forward has feet of rotting clay. These naked public ¤gures

are then judged retroactively and punished presently. Although a penitent in

some areas of my life, I am basically a decent fellow and could conceivably be of

some public help. Yet, if I were to announce for public of¤ce, it would not take

longer than ¤fteen minutes and a few phone calls to obtain enough allegedly

damaging information suf¤cient to destroy me, my family and those close to me.

The cynicism here pertains to the erosion of belief in penitence, recovery and

growth. The affectionate childhood phrase, give them another chance, has dis-

appeared under the intentional onslaught on behalf of bringing everyone down.

A third source for this cynicism can be found in the fraying of even the

bronze parachutes. We no longer trust the viability of those social programs

constructed precisely to prevent our being subject to the catastrophic in our

lives. I refer here to the post-hoc disappearing pension, the savage inequities in

our health-care delivery system, the threat to both Medicare and Social Secu-

rity and the terrifying future for an ever-increasing, exponentially, geriatric

population. A word about the latter collective and widespread fear. Retirement

homes, well appointed, are available to the very few who have substantial re-

sources after retirement. We are speaking of at least $30,000 per year. Although

there are exceptions, nursing homes are often a euphemism for warehouses. A

battle taking place at present between operators of nursing homes and state

regulatory of¤cials is revealing. The state of Texas, for example, has banned

the use of the anti-paranoid drug Haldol from use in nursing homes. The rea-

son is simple and instructive. Haldol was being used, indiscriminately, to ren-

der the residents of the nursing home as zombies. This is convenient but cruel

“Turning” Backward

◆

◆◆

◆

and clearly dehumanizing. Yet, without such a drug the trapped, often aban-

doned aged population, acts out and creates a situation of institutional dys-

function. One might ask, not rhetorically I trust, how did we get ourselves into

this situation? Quite directly, it descends from the diagnosis sketched above.

If a society is trapped in the chase, those who worked with us and for us are

exiled as soon as they are no longer in harness. Most of us live lives as ¶otsam,

carried by forces not of our own making, a sort of second-hand living. When

aged, we ¤nd ourselves hooked, impaled or simply wrapped around one jutting

stream branch or another, now only jetsam.

Listen to Mary Tyrone in O’Neill’s Long Days Journey Into Night:

But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can’t help it. None of us

can help things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and

once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything

comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self

forever.

We should not be surprised at any of this if we focus on the following,

startling irony, one mentioned to me by dozens of persons from most walks of

life. As we “downsize” personnel, tossing them out on the street, we are asked

contemporaneously to celebrate the entailing fact that the stock market is con-

sequently healthier, richer and dare I say it, more secure. If that does not gen-

erate cynicism, nothing will. For many among us, it does! What we indulge

here is a Dow—not a Tao.

These signs have nefarious companions, which I have discussed elsewhere.

One could consider the af¶ictions of public school education, the inequities,

the frequent shabbiness, the embattled teachers, the de facto segregation, and

the drop-out rate. Or, one could discuss the epidemic facts of mindless vio-

lence and, if I may, the bizarre move to legalizing concealed weapons. And

riding well beneath the surface, yet perilous, nonetheless, is the decades-long

failure to maintain our infrastructure: bridges, tunnels and water-quality. We

seem to be heading, inexorably as it were, towards a bottom, in which we no

longer care about the things we care about. One can never claim to care about

something or someone if they do not care for that someone or something. We

note a systemic state of personal depression hidden by a pasty smile. In his

Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, Jonathan Edwards offers twelve

signs of conversion. Forebodingly to the contrary, we are moving towards

twelve signs of reversion to a form of moral acedia, an inner decay.

◆

◆◆

◆

John J. McDermott

I tell you a story. When my son, David, was with the Peace Corps in the

Kingdom of Tonga, a group of islands on the International Date Line in the

Paci¤c Ocean, he had occasion to educate the children in matters environ-

mental. At one point, with the children in the last remaining rain forest on

Tongatapu, he told them that their trees had a disease. They were astonished

and said how could that be, Tevita, for there is no industrial pollution of any

kind in Tonga. Taking his vaunted knife, David slit open the bark of a tree to

show them the fetid presence of disease. He then taught them about acid rain

and global wind currents. The decay was hidden but, believe me, palpable and

lethal.

At the Turning

What to do! Is it too late? Is this dew-line already hanging shards over a moral

landscape which has undergone the tipping phenomenon, the algae of cyni-

cism everywhere?

Recall your reading of the opening pages of The Plague by Albert Camus,

pp. 7–10 to be exact. One rat appears and then three rats. The concierge, M.

Michel, is adamant, “there weren’t no rat here.” So begins the plague of Oran.

Do you remember that line from your childhood? I smell a rat. Think about

that line, once again. Think about it. In the face of our denial, the rats revealed

that something had gone wrong along the way!

Well, now let us make a turn ourselves. The above jeremiad is in place. What

to do! First, I tell you a story from the life of Martin Buber. After speaking to a

group of students in an adult education program held in Jerusalem in 1947,

Buber is accosted by one listener, a tough guy, a warrior in those fractious, dan-

gerous early days of the modern Israel. The man chided Buber for his seemingly

ethereal thoughts and asked, aggressively, how could he possibly be expected to

achieve that sensibility, that form of affectionate relations with nature, with per-

sons, and especially with profound ideas. Buber heard this outcry of frustrated

rage but did not respond in kind. To the accoster, Buber said simply and directly,

“You are really able.” You can do it for you have the strength.

Note that Buber did not chastise this man for his feelings of contempt. He

had these feelings. They do not lie. They can, however, be turned around and

for that turn, Buber believed him to be “able.” Clearly, the task here was to un-

dergo a “teshuva” and the pedagogy was not one of admonition or instruction.

The pedagogy was that of the midwife, a mediator, of one who appeals to the

“Turning” Backward

◆

◆◆

◆

dormant but not dead energies and strength of the other. Martin Buber assumed

to be so what Josiah Royce had written earlier, that “the popular mind is deep

and means a thousand times more than it explicitly knows.” Buber asks us to live

pedagogically in the creative zone of the zwischenmenschen, that between each

of us, free of manipulation, nominal authority and the patronizing. In effect,

can I help you? How can I help? Let me try to help you. And, by the way, can

you help me?

The “turn” I question here has to do with the awareness of human fragil-

ity, ontologically. Your fragility and my fragility. This gives rise to virtues not

of the legalistic type, those falling under the rubric of justice, important

though that be, but ¶owing from caritas, which I render as caring, for and

about, with affection. The moral pedagogy would then direct itself to the nur-

turing of compassion, gratitude and loyalty. In so doing, we would drop, or at

least mute the acquisitive chase and turn towards healing. The assumption

here, as I have written elsewhere, is that by the very nature of being human,

we are disconnected, personally and systemically lonely, ontologically. The

pursuit of inherited, societally-driven expectations which now characterize

most of our lives, mine included, is a journey without nectar and without an

awareness, let alone a celebration of the sacrament of the moment. Proximate

goals are necessary and can even be salutary as we forge our own version of

being in the world, on this trip. Ultimate goals and goals beyond our reach,

beyond our means, beyond our abilities, turn out to be manacles dragging us

forward in a manner that causes us to be oblivious to the very experiences we

are now having. Following Kafka, as we should, the “castle” of our dreams

turns out to be a burrow in which we are self-entombed.

In The Myth of Sisyphus (no myth, that), Camus writes “I want to know

whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.” Subsequently, in The

Rebel, he tells us that we are the only creatures who refuse to be what we are.

What, then, are we? We are creatures in need, ever, always. Josiah Royce has it

right. The most dangerous among us is the “detached individual,” that person

who comes to realize, to say to himself, to herself, “I have nowhere to turn.”

A person comes to have nowhere to turn if they have “lost the way to turn.”

Ironically, sadly, threateningly, these detached individuals, lacking a way to

turn, then “turn on others.” Why has she “turned on me?” He is “turning on”

everyone around him. Why are they “turning so?” It is because they have “lost

the way to turn.”

And given our cultural penchant for obsolescence it is surprising that as

with most of these depressing cultural trends, there is more here than meets our

◆

◆◆

◆

John J. McDermott

complaining eye. Although always somewhat characteristic of American society,

the nefarious instantiation of obsolescence as a modus vivendi is now both rife

and systemic. If I come to consciousness with the belief that if something is out

of sync, toss it; or if I subscribe to the now common attitude that on the face of

it, new is better; or if my puerile philosophy of history is of the linear vein by

which the march forward is cannibalistic, eating its past and hopelessly naïve

about its future, then I stand bereft of roots, aesthetic comparisons and, in short,

become an “isolated individual” among hordes of “isolated individuals.”

Now it is precisely the task of moral pedagogy to assist in having us “turn”

toward compassion, affection, gratitude and loyalty and away from turning back-

ward, scapegoating in response to our journey going sour, as if it must be deriva-

tive of false and second-hand expectations.

Centuries ago, Jean Jacques Rousseau told us that if you are not free, then

I cannot be free. Recasting this admonition, if I am not compassionate, if I am

not loyal, then I cannot expect others to so be. As ye sow, so shall “we” reap.

Speaking in November of 1951, to a group of young persons in New York City,

Martin Buber said that we were “at the turning.” Buber asked:

Where does the world stand? Is the ax laid to the roots of the trees—as the

Jew on the Jordan once said, rightly and yet wrongly, that it was in his

day—today, at another turn of the ages? And if it is, what is the condition

of the roots themselves? Are they still healthy enough to send fresh sap

into the remaining stump and to produce a fresh shoot from it? Can the

roots be saved? How can they be saved? Who can save them? In whose

charge are they?

Let us recognize ourselves: we, in whom, and in whom alone, that

mysterious af¤rmation and negation of civilization—af¤rmation and ne-

gation in one—was implanted at the origin of our existence, we are the

keepers of the roots.

We are? How can we become it? How can we become what we are?

My version of this turning was written some thirty years ago as a passage

in which I still believe, only more so, with the scars to sustain that belief. Do

not await salvation while the parade passes by. Surprise and mystery lurk in our

experiencing the obvious, the ordinary. Salvation may be illusory, but salving

experiences can occur day by day.

The Mission of the Military and the

Question of “the Regime”

Hadley Arkes

have taken it as a part of my mission in recent years to point up the critical

connection between comedy and philosophy. It could be said that the come-

dians and the philosophers make their livings in the same way, by playing off

the shades of meaning and logic contained in our language. Henny Youngman

would say, “My wife will buy anything that’s marked down. She brought home

an escalator.” I used to say that my favorite epistemologist was Lou Costello,

because in one of his skits, when his partner, Bud Abbott, came up with an

apt idea, Costello remarked, “That’s an excellent thought—I was just going to

think of it myself.”

At times, the laughs mark contradictions that run to the core of what some

people affect to regard as the anchoring princi ples of their lives. And so we recall,

in this vein, Bertrand Russell’s joke about Christine Franklyn-Ladd, who was a

“solipsist.” That is, she earnestly professed that she could not know for sure that

there was anyone in the world apart from herself—though she lamented, at the

same time, that she couldn’t ¤nd other solipsists, to come to meetings.

That line elicits a laugh unfailingly, and I have suggested that if our ears

were properly tuned, we would react in the same way to this line, which has

become quite familiar to us—indeed, it has become one of the most widely trav-

eled fallacies in what passes as our public discourse: “If there really were moral

◆

◆◆

◆

Hadley Arkes

truths, grounded in logic, and therefore true in all places, then why aren’t they

acknowledged in all places? The fact that we ¤nd so much disagreement in the

world, such a wide variety of opinions about right and wrong, would seem to

argue powerfully in another direction: namely, that there are no such universal

moral truths. It is more reasonable to assume that notions of right and wrong

will vary from place to place, according to the opinions or the ‘culture’ that is

dominant in any place.”

As I say, this has become one of the most familiar lines in our public dis-

course, and yet it is also, quite simply and patently, a fallacy: It stands in the

class of what the philosophers would call “self-refuting” propositions, and it

collapses in contradiction in a matter of seconds. As I have tried to explain in

another place,

the argument here reduces to this proposition: The presence of

disagreement—the absence of consensus—on any question of moral conse-

quence is suf¤cient to establish that there is no truth of the matter. Now, I

would be obliged to record my own disagreement with that proposition (that

the presence of disagreement indicates the absence of truth), and by its own

terms, that should be quite enough to establish its falsity.

That refutation can be unfolded in about twelve seconds, and there is no trick

here, no play on words. It is simply a matter of uncovering the self-contradiction.

And when we are in the presence of propositions that can be contradicted only by

propositions that are self-contradictory, that is a telling sign that we are in the pres-

ence of what the Founders understood as self-evident, or necessary, truths (or what

Kant referred to as “apodictic,” or logically necessary, truths). In this case, the prop-

osition in question is that there are indeed “truths,” true propositions, and that cer-

tain truths will indeed be true in all places. Once we understand, say, the truth of

the Pythagorean theorem, no one supposes that the theorem refers only to “Greek

triangles,” or that it would be true only in Greece.

And yet a number of prominent people in the professions have been able

to build whole careers on the simple fallacy that the presence of disagreement,

on matters of moral consequence, indicates the absence of truth. Justice Harry

Blackmun even managed to found a new branch of our jurisprudence on this

vacuity. In the hands of Blackmun, in the famous case of Roe v. Wade, the

proposition came out in this form:

[There is no] need to resolve the dif¤cult question of when life begins.

When those trained in . . . medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable

to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development

of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.

The Mission of the Military and the Question of “the Regime”

◆

◆◆

◆

On the strength of nothing more than this logical fallacy, Blackmun pro-

claimed nothing less than a “right to abortion,” and the law would cease then

to cast its protections over the lives of children in the womb. In the domain

of foreign policy, Blackmun’s cliché takes the form of the cultural relativist ar-

gument that we heard so often during the war in Vietnam: “Who are we to

say just which form of government is better or worse for people in another

place?” The question of what is the good or just regime is indeed a moral ques-

tion, and in the standard refrain of the period, moral judgments must always

be relative to the culture or the country in which they are held.

There is of course nothing novel in this argument, or this fallacy; it has

been with us since the beginning of political philosophy and the beginning of

our own republic. But it is a matter of persisting importance for us to recall

the way in which this question had been posed to us during the gravest crisis

in our political history, the crisis of our “house divided.” This question was at

the heart of the famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Dou-

glas, and the problem was framed in this way: When the Founders had pro-

claimed, in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal,”

did they in fact mean all men, black as well as white? Or did they really mean,

as Douglas argued, “all white men”? Were they merely proclaiming the equal

rights of Englishmen, or the rights of those people who shared a common,

British culture? Lincoln thought that the Founders did in fact mean “all men,”

as an abstract, universal proposition; and indeed he managed to show that any

other construction would fall into a kind of gibberish of incoherence. As Lin-

coln quickly explained, the Founders never argued that all men were equally

intelligent, equally beautiful, equally virtuous. But as beings possessed of rea-

son, they had a claim at least to be governed with their own consent; they did

not deserve to be ruled in the way that men rule dogs and horses.

Lincoln argued, then, on the ground of “natural right.” His contention in

the debate with Douglas was that the rights mentioned in the Declaration of

Independence had a “natural” foundation: they were grounded in the things

that separated human beings from other animals, and those rights would re-

main the same in all places where human nature remained the same and men

were still distinguishable from animals. If it were not right to rule human be-

ings as though they were horses or cattle, slavery would be wrong wherever hu-

mans were still distinguishable from horses and cattle.

Lincoln left us, altogether, a masterful restatement of the understanding of

the American Founders on natural rights and moral truths; and yet the irony in

our own day is that the teaching in our schools of law has been far closer to the

◆

◆◆

◆

Hadley Arkes

doctrines of Douglas. In fact, the cultural relativism of Douglas is far closer to

the slogans of “multiculturalism” that now prevail on the campuses of America.

But even beyond the law schools, Lincoln and the Founders would seem to stand

now in an adversarial relation to the orthodoxies that have become dominant in

American colleges and universities. In these new orthodoxies, there are no “nat-

ural rights” because there are no moral truths and, for that matter, no “nature.”

The proponents of “postmodernism” and “feminism” now insist that the doc-

trines of “natural rights” were merely an ideology to cover “patriarchalism” and

the rule of white men. The postmodernists insist that there is no “nature,” that

even gender, or the difference between men and women, is “socially con-

structed” from one place to another according to the vagaries of the local cul-

ture. And since there are no rights grounded in nature, there is of course no basis

for casting moral judgments across cultures or pronouncing on the rightness or

wrongness of political regimes in other places.

And yet, the curious thing about the people offering these arguments is that

they continue to cast such judgments, across cultures, on arrangements and re-

gimes in other places. They condemned a regime of apartheid in South Africa,

and the violation of “human rights” in countries such as China. In fact, these

commentators seem able to detect the injustices done to women in all countries

of the world, in cultures other than their own, and indeed they seem to betray

no want of con¤dence in their ability to identify “women” in other cultures.

And so, in our own time, we have arrived at this paradox: In the world of the

Left on American campuses, there are “human rights” to be vindicated in all

parts of the globe, but strictly speaking there are no “humans,” for there is no

distinctly “human nature.” And since there are no truths, there are, strictly

speaking, no “rights.” There may be claims and arguments about rights, but no

claims that are “rightful,” because there are no claims to rights that are actually

“true.”

Now I would put all of this in place for the sake of understanding what

was truly melancholy in a report that was offered to me several years ago by a

friend who was teaching at the war college attached to one of our military ser-

vices. His students were all seasoned veterans in their forties. They had all seen

military action; but they were still, twenty years later, the people who had been

students in college in the 1960s, and they had absorbed much of the secular

religion that affected other young people in the ’60s. They had served their

country in the military, but they were far from clear that there was anything

about the American republic that truly justi¤ed the risk of their lives. For they

were, on the whole, skeptical of the notion of moral truths that held in all

The Mission of the Military and the Question of “the Regime”

◆

◆◆

◆

times and places. They could not really say, with Lincoln, that the right of

human beings to govern themselves was a right that was “applicable to all men

at all times.” These soldiers of their country were more disposed to believe,

with other people their age, that the understanding of what was right and

wrong was always contingent, always “relative” to the “culture” or the country

in which it is held. They would not claim, then, that the political regime in

America was morally superior to the institutions in the Soviet Union or Viet-

nam. They would settle for the far more modest claim that our political way

of life was at least “ours”: It was consistent with our traditions—it was “right,”

we might say, for us, and on that basis, we were warranted in hazarding our

lives to preserve it.

But in this construction, the principles that de¤ned the character of the

American republic would be no different from the rules that marked the char-

acter of a club or the rules that de¤ned a regime of play: the rules of the Ameri-

can Constitution were hardly distinguishable then from the “rules of baseball”

or the “rules of chess.” In that event, I offered this proposition to my friend

at the war college: The willingness of his students to risk their lives for the

rules of the American republic apparently stood on the same moral plane as

a willingness to risk one’s life to preserve the in¤eld ¶y rule or the institution

of the designated hitter. My friend agreed that such was indeed their under-

standing. The only redeeming thing he might say in their defense is that it is

“our” in¤eld ¶y rule, and we are free to change it. And in any system of con-

ventions, in any rules of the game, that is certainly true. We are free to decide

that it will require ¤ve balls wide of the strike zone to constitute a base on

balls. But are we really free, in the same way, to alter these axioms of the law:

that people should not be held blameworthy or responsible for acts they were

powerless to affect; that like cases should be treated in a like fashion; that

people accused of a crime should be presumed innocent until proven guilty;

that beings who are capable of understanding reasons deserve to be ruled

only with their own consent? We would be far more reserved about “legislat-

ing” a change in propositions of this kind. For even the dimmest of us may

suspect that these truths are not merely conventional: They are not ours be-

cause we have chosen to adopt them; rather, we have adopted them—we have

made them “ours”—for the sovereign reason that they happen to be compel-

lingly true.

In striking contrast, of course, the men who founded the American re-

public were not cultural relativists. And for that reason, the principles they

set forth, in founding a new republic, they did not regard as distinctly, or

◆

◆◆

◆

Hadley Arkes

exclusively, American. When they spoke of natural rights or the principles of

justice, they were invoking principles that they respected because those princi-

ples could claim to be true of necessity in all places. And so, for example, the

principle of “ex post facto laws” barred the practice of making something illegal

after the fact or treating as criminal an act that was regarded as legal at the time

it was committed. The Founders recognized that principle as one of the endur-

ing “principles of law,” which existed long before they came to shape the Ameri-

can Constitution. The provision on ex post facto laws would not depend for its

validity on the fact that it was mentioned in the Constitution. Rather, it was

mentioned in the Constitution because it was simply respected by the Founders

as a principle of law that was true in its own terms, true in itself.

I mentioned in passing, earlier, the Pythagorean theorem—that the square

of the hypotenuse of the right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of

the two adjacent sides. This theorem had been articulated by Pythagoras, a

Greek, and no doubt he was aided by a tradition of re¶ection on mathematics

and philosophy in his own country. It could be said, I suppose, that Pythago-

ras’s contribution was something that emerged more readily within Greece as

an outgrowth of the Greek culture. And yet, as I remarked earlier, there seems

to be no tendency to assume that it is a theorem about Greek triangles. We do

not spring to that inference because we do not think for a moment that the

postulates or axioms on which that theorem is founded could possibly be

con¤ned to Greece. And it would be silly to hear someone say that he “be-

lieved” in the Pythagorean theorem, for its truth does not depend in the slight-

est degree on what anyone happens to believe. But in the same way, the

Founders would have regarded it as quite as ludicrous if someone declared that

he “believed” that “all men are created equal” or that “human beings deserved

to be ruled only within their own consent.” The Founders would have regarded

that report as ludicrous because they would have seen an attempt to reduce to

a matter merely of opinion or personal belief what should have the standing

of an axiom or a necessary truth. It was bizarre to think that beings who could

give and understand reasons did not deserve to be ruled in a manner quite dif-

ferent from the manner in which we rule beings who were incapable of giving

and understanding reasons. For the Founders, the principles that established

the rightness or wrongness, the goodness or badness, of political regimes were

as ¤rmly grounded in the axioms of human understanding as the axioms of

mathematics. Plato and Aristotle understood the matter in that way, and Al-

exander Hamilton made the point quite explicit and clear in his opening para-

graph in The Federalist #31:

The Mission of the Military and the Question of “the Regime”

◆

◆◆

◆

In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or ¤rst prin-

ciples, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend. These contain

an internal evidence which, antecedent to all re¶ection or combination,

commands the assent of the mind. . . . Of this nature are the maxims in

geometry that the whole is greater than its parts; that things equal to the

same are equal to one another; that two straight lines cannot enclose a

space; and that all right angles are equal to each other. Of the same nature

are these other maxims in ethics and politics, that there cannot be an ef-

fect without a cause; that the means ought to be proportioned to the end;

that every power ought to be commensurate with its object; that there

ought to be no limitation of a power destined to effect a purpose which is

itself incapable of limitation.

I linger with this matter of axioms and the political regime because there

seems to be a critical falling away these days, a critical act of forgetting, that

the question of the “political regime” provides the central touchstone in esti-

mating our national interests in foreign and military policy.

The concern for

“the regime” summarizes the moral core of our interests in politics, and it

provides the grounds of our practical judgment. After all, if the Nazis had

taken over in this country during the Second World War, there would proba-

bly still be baseball and hotdogs and many of our familiar entertainments

(though probably not jazz and swing music, fostered by black people, or the

work of Jewish comedians). There probably would have been little loss of life,

and certainly there would have been no danger to the lives of our Scandina-

vian population, or to those people with blond hair and blue eyes in Minne-

sota. The Jews and certain Slavic people might have been endangered, and yet

if the matter were measured according to some utilitarian calculus, it could

not have been in our interest to accept a war with about 30 million deaths for

the sake of saving several million Jews and blacks and Slavs. As Michael

Walzer once remarked, the danger represented by a Nazi victory ran well be-

yond the calculus of the lives risked and saved; it involved the resistance to an

“immeasurable evil.”

The fabric of daily life might have looked familiar in

America under a Nazi puppet regime, but it would no longer have been a gov-

ernment based on free elections, with independent courts that could restrain

the power of the government. And there would have been a noticeable ab-

sence of the many ways in which that principle of “all men are created equal”

tends to diffuse itself and affect the manners and character of our people in

our daily lives. To capture the matter in a phrase, what would have changed

◆

◆◆

◆

Hadley Arkes

in America was our “way of life,” or the notions summed up in the concept

of the “political regime.”

As Aristotle said in the Politics, we do not have political life solely for the

sake of preserving our lives, though that is one of the principal ends of the pol-

ity—to protect life from unjusti¤ed assaults. But we have polity or laws, as Aris-

totle taught, for the sake of cultivating in our people a good character of life.

Politics involves the capacity to make decisions that are binding on the popula-

tion with the force of law. But politics never occurs merely in general. There is

always a character to it. If we follow Aristotle again, that character is measured

along two dimensions: ¤rst, in the distribution of power, whether it is dispersed

widely among the people in a popular government with elections, or whether it

is concentrated, say, in a single person acting without the restraints of law. The

second dimension involves the character or the ends of government:

Is it a government that seeks to protect its people and enhance their well-

being, or a government that seeks to satisfy the private interests of the rul-

ers themselves?

Is it a government that respects zones of privacy, in the family or the

church, beyond the reach of political power, or is it a totalitarian regime

that seeks to control everything and suspects everything it does not control?

Is it a government that seeks to preserve the same laws or the same rules as

the conditions of fairness or equity, or a government that is always trying

to tilt the rules in order to bene¤t some people at the expense of others?

Is it a government more inclined then to keep itself at a wholesome remove

through the discipline of uniform rules or principles, or is it more inclined

to interfere in the private arrangements of our lives for the sake of trying

to assure that the incomes of people are more and more the same?

These are the kinds of differences that matter profoundly in our daily

lives, and they are the kinds of differences that we have associated with the

nature of political regimes. Those differences are seen in the difference be-

tween Germany under Hitler and the constitutional government that has gov-

erned in Germany, especially in West Germany, since the end of the war. Or

it is seen in the difference between the Soviet regime and the regime that

emerged with the collapse of communism, the Russian republic with free elec-

tions and an economy with private ownership, a polity in which it is legitimate

to make use of the press and the media and oppose the government in public.

The Mission of the Military and the Question of “the Regime”

◆

◆◆

◆

If we did not understand what was morally signi¤cant about these differ-

ences, we could hardly understand the justi¤cation for any foreign or military

policies that were built around these differences. The statesmen of the Found-

ing generation could give an account of why a constitutional government, or

a government by consent, was morally better than despotism. Lincoln could

remark later that “the doctrine of self-government is right—absolutely and

eternally right.” But if we cannot summon that conviction and give that ac-

count, then we cannot explain, in principle, why the American regime is one

that deserves to be preserved: Why would we be justi¤ed in taking the lives of

our adversaries and sacri¤cing the lives of our own people for the sake of de-

fending it?

This question was taken to the moral root by Plato in his dialogue the

Laches, in which Socrates winds through a conversation with Laches, a fa-

mous general, about the nature of courage. There is a temptation for people

to identify courage with bravery, in the sense of a willingness to court dangers

or show a disregard for one’s own safety. But lions or other animals may be fe-

rocious, and we would not impute bravery or courage to them. “Courage” is

not merely a descriptive term, a label used to describe a person who acts in a

swashbuckling way with a heedlessness or contempt for his own safety. “Cour-

age” is a moral term: To say that someone is courageous rather than cowardly

is to commend that person, to hold him up for emulation, to suggest that the

world would be a better place if other people acted on his example. But we can-

not commend somebody as good or admirable if he does not understand what

he is doing, or if he does not understand the ends that justify his acts. If a child

runs up a hill braving the ¤re of an enemy, can we assume that the child knows

why he is acting thus, any more than the lion, or the wild animal, would know?

As the dialogue unfolds in the Laches, Socrates leads his interlocutors to see

that courage cannot be de¤ned through formulas that have nothing to do with

moral purpose. For example, courage cannot inhere simply in staying at one’s

post, never running away, for that may involve only a “foolish endurance” that

imperils one’s men and oneself. And it cannot inhere simply in showing spir-

itedness in charging up a hill or charging into danger, for the commander who

leads his men up a hill in a reckless charge without hope of success may merely

be squandering their lives. As the inquiry moves on, it must move toward this

end: Courage must involve an understanding of the ends that alone could jus-

tify the risk of one’s life and the lives of one’s men. As Nicias comes to say in

the dialogue, courage must require an understanding of whether “suffering or

non-suffering . . . will be best for a man.”

Or to put it another way, it will have

◆

◆◆

◆

Hadley Arkes

to encompass an understanding of the grounds on which sacri¤ce would be

justi¤ed. It must depend ¤nally on an understanding of just what ends are wor-

thy of the commitment of decent people, and whether they would justify the

risk of death.

As I noted in my book First Things, in the annals of warfare, few armies

have fought with as much cohesion as the German Wehrmacht in the Second

World War, and that cohesion was preserved largely through the commitment

and leadership of German of¤cers. Those men risked their lives and offered

uncommon examples of dedication to their cause. Yet, can we regard them as

courageous? As I have suggested, we cannot really regard them as courageous

unless we are prepared to commend them, and we can hardly commend them

unless we are prepared to commend the ends for which they fought. But how

can we coherently commend people who have chosen to expend their valor,

risk their lives, and inspire the sacri¤ce of others in the service of a regime of

genocide, of ends that were thoroughly evil?

This understanding of the matter was borne out poignantly by General

Grant, in his memoirs, when he recalled his meeting with General Lee at Ap-

pomatox. The two soldiers reminisced together about their service during the

war with Mexico, though Grant, as a junior of¤cer, had seen Lee only from afar

and known this senior ¤gure through his reputation. As Grant took in the full

presence of Lee now at Appomatox—as he noted Lee’s bearing and dignity—

Grant’s satisfaction was touched by sadness. There was a pity to be felt, as Grant

said, for “the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had

suffered so much for a cause.” But he was quick to add—“though that cause was,

I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which

there was the least excuse.”

Grant’s respect for valor could not be detached

from the principles of moral judgment on which respect was properly offered.

He could not extend the ¤nal measure of his respect unless he had been willing

to blind himself to those ends for which Lee was willing to expend his valor.

Grant came closer to Plato’s understanding in the Laches, for he re¶ected seri-

ously on the ends that justi¤ed war and determined, as Plato had Nicias say,

whether “suffering or non-suffering . . . will be best for a man.”

In 1977, two years after American helicopters had lifted off the roof of the

American embassy in Saigon and North Vietnamese troops had come rolling

through the streets to ¤nish the war, there appeared in American papers an “Ap-

peal to the Government of North Vietnam.” The appeal was made by a cast of

some of the most celebrated opponents of the war in Vietnam: Joan Baez, the

singer, and Aryeh Neier of the American Civil Liberties Union. But now these

The Mission of the Military and the Question of “the Regime”

◆

◆◆

◆

people, who presumably had some experience in the world, were affecting a cer-

tain naiveté and surprise. They sounded rather like the Claude Raines character

in Casablanca: they professed to be “shocked—shocked” to discover that there

was no political or religious freedom in communist Vietnam: There was no right

to publish in a free press and no right of a political opposition to organize and

run candidates, for of course there were no free elections. And people who per-

sisted in their religious practice as Catholics or Buddhists ran the risk of being

imprisoned, as religion was suppressed. The protesters announced gravely that

this was not what they had been led to expect from a movement that had been

aimed at national liberation.

But that movement had always been under the direction of communists in

North Vietnam, and it was aided by fraternal parties in China and the Soviet

Union. Did the protestors not understand that if that movement was victorious,

the result would be a communist regime in Vietnam? To be sure, there would

be certain ¶avorings, re¶ecting the local cuisine or the local culture, but the

outcome was still bound to be a communist regime in its essential structure.

And did the protestors know of any regime constituted on Marxist-Leninist

principles that had free elections as part of its way of life? Or that contained

serious, constitutional restraints on the government? Why had they expected

things to be different in Vietnam?

As the protestors curiously, and strikingly, “explained” in their protest, they

had been offered assurances by the leaders in