Do Morals Matter?

At dinner with a group of friends, one asked what I had been doing lately. When I said I was writing a book on presidents, ethics and foreign policy, she quipped it must be a short book." Another added more seriously, "I didn't think ethics played muchof a role." That conventional wisdom marks not only dinner discussions, but political analyses as well. 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." It is not a career-enhancing topic for a young scholar, but has long intrigued me as an old practitioner and student of American foreign policy. The reasons for skepticism seem obvious to many. While historians have written about American exceptionalism and moralism, diplomats and 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. As philosophers say, "ought implies can". No-one can fault you for not doing the impossible"--