The Just War Tradition and the World after September 11

AMERICANS HAVE BEEN TELLING each other for a long time that our culture is awash to the gunwales in moral relativism. Some have applauded this, for reasons personal, political, or philosophical. Alan Wolfe, for example, has argued recently that the plurality of ethical systems and the wide disparity of moral judgments found in the contemporary United States are a natural and welcome development of democracy: a kind of evolutionary extension of our commitment to equal opportunity and to religious, racial, and ethnic diversity. ¹ Others have worried out loud about the very plurality Professor Wolfe applauds, asking how a democracy can function over the long haul if there is no common moral grammar to discipline and direct the public debate over public policy. Still others have deplored the moral relativism of our culture, seeing polymorphous perversity where Wolfe sees healthy plurality, and questioning whether a people incapable of governing their own appetites from within can govern themselves in the public realm. ²

But whether we applauded it, worried about it, or deplored it, many Americans over the past two decades have taken what might be called the Walter Cronkite-view of moral relativism: "That's the way it is . . ."

This bipartisan, ecumenical, and interreligious agreement about the pervasiveness of moral relativism in twenty-first century America collapsed on September 11, 2001.

In less than two hours, between the first attack on the World Trade Center and the crash of the fourth hijacked airliner in rural Pennsylvania, Americans discovered, or rediscovered, moral absolutes. Confronted by ruthless, well-planned, and deliberately executed mass murder for evil political ends, the teaching of Pope John Paul II on exceptionless moral norms (or "intrinsically evil acts"), which had caused intense controversy after the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, seemed self-evidently clear: some things are definitely "off the board." ³ Some things must be off the board if there is to be any civilized society. Some acts are evil in themselves, and no putatively mitigating combination of intentions and consequences can possible justify them. Or, as a shocked Yale undergraduate, a self-confessed product of an education designed to inculcate "tolerance" of "other values" as the summum bonum, put it in a Newsweek guest column, "We should recognize that some actions are objectively bad, despite differences in cultural standards and values." ⁴

Appeals to toleration, cultural diversity, epistemological modesty, the fact/value distinction, and other modern and postmodern arguments for moral relativism cut very little ice when the American people faced the smoldering wreckage in Lower Manhattan, the gaping hole in the Pentagon, and the deaths of more than three thousand innocents. If we were all relativists now, how could one condemn absolutely the attacks of September 11? On the other side of the coin of good and evil, if we were all relativists now, how could we comprehend the self-sacrificial sense of duty that led firefighters to their deaths in the Twin Towers, or the heroism that led doomed passengers on United Airlines flight 93 to deny the hijackers their goal of destroying the White House or the Capitol? There was good, and there was evil. We could tell the difference again, and we could use those words again.

This new moral realism is entirely welcome. It is welcome in itself as a matter of cultural hygiene. It is also essential for the future of the Republic. A society without "oughts" tethered to truths is going to find it difficult to defend itself against aggressors motivated by distorted "oughts." The response to lethally distorted concepts of the good must be a nobler, truer concept of the good; it cannot be a principled skepticism about our capacity to know the good, or a thoroughgoing relativism about possible human goods. ⁵ Where shall we find the materials with which to build, on this recently unearthed foundation of realist moral...