Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
December 22nd, 2019
Do Morals Matter? An Internet search shows surprisingly few books on how presidents’ moral views affected their foreign policies and how that affects our judgments of them.
As Michael Walzer (an important exception to the rule) described American graduate training after 1945, “moral argument was against the rules of the discipline as it was commonly practiced, although a few writers defended interest as the new morality.” A survey of the top three American academic journals on international relations over fifteen years found only four articles on the subject. As one author noted, “leading scholars…do not dedicate serious attention to investigating the influence of moral values on the conduct of nations."
Realist theorists like George Kennan long warned about the bad consequences of the American moralist-legalist tradition. International relations is the realm of anarchy with no world government to provide order. States must provide for their own defense, and when survival is at stake, the ends justify the means. Where there is no meaningful choice there can be no ethics. “Ought implies can”. Combining ethics and foreign policy is a category mistake, like asking if a knife sounds good rather than whether it cuts well. By this logic, in judging a president’s foreign policy, we should simply ask whether it worked, not also ask whether it was moral.
Such skepticism is common but it ducks hard questions by oversimplifying. The absence of world government does not mean the absence of all order. Some foreign policy issues relate to our survival as a nation, but most do not. Since World War II, the U.S. has been involved in several wars but none were necessary for our survival. And many important foreign policy choices about human rights or climate change or Internet freedom do not involve war at all.
Unfortunately, many judgments about ethics and foreign policy are haphazard or poorly thought through. Good moral reasoning should be three dimensional, weighing and balancing the intentions, the means and the consequences of presidents’ decisions. A moral foreign policy is not a matter of intentions vs. consequences but must involve both as well as the means that were used. Moreover, good moral reasoning must consider the consequences of general actions such as maintaining an institutional order that encourages moral interests as well as particular newsworthy actions such as helping a human rights dissident or a persecuted group in another country. And it is important to include the ethical consequences of “non-actions,” such as President Truman’s willingness to accept stalemate and domestic political punishment during the Korean War rather than follow General MacArthur’s recommendation to use nuclear weapons.
New foreign policies will be necessary to meet new challenges. As we debate such policies, ethics will be one part of the arguments that we will use. To pretend that ethics will play no role is as blind as to imagine that the sun will not rise tomorrow. Since we are going to use moral reasoning about foreign policy, we should learn to do it better.
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