Abandon the idea of intrinsically evil acts at your own peril
The brutal massacre of Israeli women and children by Hamas terrorists on October 7th momentarily shocked the world. What seemed to shock people even more was the almost immediate demonstrations of “solidarity” with the Hamas killers on American college campuses.
I wonder about those “spontaneous” demonstrations. I was on a bus the next day riding through Georgetown with a young lady who had apparently just come from the pro-Palestinian demonstration at the White House. I found it curious that—a day after the attacks and on a federal holiday weekend—she managed to have a professionally printed and neatly tacked to an appropriately long stick placard to express her “spontaneous” sympathies.
America’s reaction to those demonstrations was one of at least momentary disbelief. Writing in The New York Times October 17, Penn bioethics professor Ezekiel Emanuel opined: “We have failed.” When college students—nominally “educated” people—demonstrate in favor of killers, “we have failed.”
Yes, we have, but not for the reasons I suspect Emanuel thinks. The reason we have failed is that we have abandoned the idea of intrinsically evil acts.
There is no justification to kill innocent women and children. None. Period. Full stop.
Your politics, your historical grievances, your religion—none of it—justifies killing innocent women and children. There is not going to be any case that justifies that. That act in and of itself, regardless of any intentions behind it, can never be allowed. It is intrinsically evil.
I would like people to say that out loud. I would have liked to see Professor Emanuel say that. He gets close to it. “The Hamas massacre is the easiest of moral cases. … They killed babies and children … who could hardly be responsible for the decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence, as if that could be any justification.” So far, so good.
But I fear that’s when the confusion started setting in. “Ethics is rarely either/or ….” He believes “[t]his case offers an unambiguous base to elucidate clear, shared moral principles.” It could … but then Emanuel calls in John Rawls to help him explain how the “clarity of this easy example helps identify principles that allow us to wrestle through harder cases ….”
Maybe. But I wouldn’t take John Rawls as my mentor. More on that in a moment.
Emanuel staggers around in pursuit of a solution. Maybe requiring students to take two ethics courses—one general, one applied—would help. He explicitly salutes Catholic colleges for largely retaining such requirements in core curricula. He asks whether the minimalization of general education requirements have done away with forcing “hard questions.” He takes a backhanded swipe at contemporary wokeness, admitting today’s collegiate ethos “avoid[s] forcing [students] … to articulate and justify their opinions. All opinions are equally valid, we argue. We are fearful of offending them.”
