Moral Equivalence

Moral equivalence

One of the oddest aspects of the conservative approach to foreign policy is its insistence upon the moral superiority of the USA. They place great weight on the notion that the USA is the good guy and its enemies are bad guys. They express deep contempt for what they call "the assumption of moral equivalence". They get quite emotional over this issue.

I don't deny the basic moral superiority of the US over many tyrannies in this world. There's no question that the USA is a better and nobler country than Mr. Kim's North Korea, Mr. Hussein's Iraq, or Mr. Putin's Russia. My objections are three:

1. That doesn't make us lily-white. While the USA has done many fine and noble things, it has also perpetrated some heinous crimes. We practiced ethnic cleansing against the Indians. We have broken treaties, tortured and murdered innocent people, invaded small nations for invidious reasons, and subverted legitimate governments whose foreign policy we oppose. We're still better than a lot of other countries, but we shouldn't get carried away polishing our halos.

2. That doesn't give us the right to commit crimes. Two wrongs don't make a right. The fact that Mr. Hussein killed a million Iraqis doesn't justify our killing a hundred thousand Iraqis.

3. But this is my most important objection: it's irrelevant. Every foreign policy decision we make must be decided on its own merits. It doesn't matter whether the shooter wears a white hat or a black hat; the only way to judge the shooting is by its actual results, not the moral worth of the shooter. If a policy decision is stupid, our virtue does not override its stupidity. Even if the murderer is a saint, it's still murder, and the past holiness of the saint does nothing to excuse the present iniquity of the murder.

Twenty years ago, my geopolitical game, Balance of Power, was criticized by conservatives because it didn't take into account the moral superiority of the USA over the USSR. Both sides had the same set of policy options: sending weapons to support governments or insurgencies, providing economic assistance to weak governments, and so forth. Both sides pursued their geopolitical goals using the same methods. And conservatives were indignant about this symmetry. They seemed to want the USA to have some special "Moral Superiority" magic wand that it could wave to make evil communists cringe in defeat. None of them ever articulated any suggestion as to how the fundamental moral superiority of the USA should be factored into a geopolitical simulation game. They just complained that I hadn't done so.

Another symptom of this is the refusal to compare the unintentional killing of innocents by friendly forces with the intentional killing of innocents by enemies. When American forces bomb a village in Afghanistan and kill innocent civilians, conservatives shrug their shoulders and dismiss these deaths as "collateral damage" -- excusable because it was unintentional. But they deceive themselves when they claim it was unintentional. The pilot who dropped the bomb didn't launch it accidentally; he had every intention of dropping that bomb on that village. His commanders intentionally ordered him to fly that mission. And their political masters intentionally ordered the military to carry out the operations that led to the killings. There was no accident here -- everything that happened was intentional.

It is true, of course, that none of the participants in the decision-making process desired to kill innocent civilians. They desired to kill evil terrorists, not innocent civilians. But that doesn't eliminate their moral culpability in the deaths of the innocents. Any reasonable person knows that, when you bomb a village, you will probably kill innocent people. The act does not constitute murder, because there was no desire to kill innocents. It does, however, constitute manslaughter: a disregard for the safety of other people that leads to their deaths. Of course, I don't blame the pilot, because he is obeying the lawful orders of his superiors. I blame the body politic that sent him on that mission. I blame the USA.

So yes, I acknowledge a distinction between terrorists and the USA: they are guilty of murder where we are guilty only of manslaughter. But conservatives insist that we are entirely innocent, that there is no blood on our hands. I disagree.