Moral obtuseness in America

Earnest producers, writer, s and professors prove, over nine hours, that for some minds all questions are hard questions.

Our opinion-makers still look for answers, while apparently believing that justice is equivalent to the infield-fly rule.

THIS MELANCHOLY REPORT was offered, a few weeks ago, by a friend who teaches at the war college attached to one of our military services: 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 college students in the 1960s, and they had absorbed much of the secular religion that affected other young people at the time. They were, on the whole, skeptical of the notion of moral truths that held in all times and places. They had served their country in the military, but they were far from clear that there was anything about the American Republic that truly justified the risk of their lives. 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 and 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 "relative" to a particular "culture" or country. They would not claim, then, that the political regime in America was morally superior to that of the Soviet Union or Vietnam. They would settle for the far more modest claim that our political way of life was at least "ours." And on that basis, we were warranted in hazarding our lives to preserve it.

In this construction, of course, the principles that defined the character of the American Republic would be no different from the rules that marked tbe character of a club, or defined a regime of play. The rules of the American Constitution, in other words, were hardly distinguishable ftom 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 infield-fly rule or the "institution" of the designated hitter.

My friend agreed that such was indeed their understanding. The only thing he might say in their defense is that it is "our" infield-fly rule, and we are free to change it. And in any system of conventions, in any rules of the game, that is certainly true. We are free to decide that it will require five balls outside 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 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 "legislating" 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 because we have chosen to adopt them; rather, we have adopted them -we have made them "ours"-for the sovereign reason that they are compellingly true.

WHAT WE SEE at work here, in the case of our military officers, is the enduring tension between a morality that is merely conventional, and a morality that is rooted in the laws of reason, in the nature of things, or, as Kant put it, in the nature of "a rational creature as such." It is no small service for any teacher of moral philosophy to make his students alert to that distinction. This much can be said then, at least, for the editors and journalists who shaped the ten-part PBS series Ethics in America. It was quite evidently part of their design to bring out vividly to their viewers the tension between a morality merely of convention-a "morality" marked by professionals, cast in "roles"-and a morality that was constantly looking past the system of roles, and appealing to a more exacting moral standard.

From that tension, the designers of this series managed to produce its dramatic action, in the exchanges among the participants. And in that vein, there was probably no moment more dramatic than the moment just after Mr. Mike Wallace had waxed eloquent, by his own lights, in insisting on the integrity of his standards "as a journalist." The journalist in the hypothetical case under discussion had agreed to gauge the "other side" of a war in South Kosan (read: South Vietnam) by traveling with contingents of the North Kosanese. In that position, he might be able to encounter the atrocities committed by the South Kosanese and their American allies. The North Kosanese suddenly come upon a contingent of American troops, and they are about to ambush them. At this point, Mr. Peter Jennings allowed that he would not film the incident. In fact, he thought he might actually try to warn the American troops, even though that might be, altogether, bad manners toward his hosts, who had invited him along for this excursion. For this mild reflex of national loyalty, Mr. Wallace came down upon Mr. Jennings with a severe reproach: as a journalist, his responsibility was to the story. "You're a reporter," said Wallace. "Granted you're an American, but you're a reporter covering combat . . . and I'm at a loss to understand why . . . you would not have covered that story."