Moral clarity

Moral clarity is a catch-phrase associated with American political conservatives. Popularized by William J. Bennett's Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, the phrase moral clarity encodes a complex political argument that includes all of the following claims:

The War on Terrorism, like previous struggles between the United States and its adversaries, is a conflict between an unambiguously good United States and its unambiguously evil opponents.
Attempts to understand or explain the actions of anti-Western terrorists as responses to actions of the United States or Israel are a sign of moral weakness at best and sympathy for the terrorists at worst, and will hamper efforts to defeat them.
Though the actions of the United States and its allies may lead to civilian deaths or other forms of collateral damage, may involve temporary alliances with undemocratic regimes, or may appear to contradict Western ideals of freedom, these actions are justified by the greater moral necessity of protecting the lives of U.S. citizens by defeating terrorists.
Opponents of action against terrorists are guilty of promoting moral relativism or moral equivalence, in which the allegedly similar means of both anti-terrorists and terrorists are used to blur the moral differences between the anti-terrorist and terrorist causes.

Opposing views

For opponents of the notion of moral clarity, dividing the world into good and evil does not lend itself to coherent foreign policy. For example, within the doctrine of moral clarity it becomes difficult for the United States to justify not attacking North Korea (an oppressive dictatorship which has publicly declared itself to be arming itself with nuclear weapons) while attacking Iraq (a similar regime which appears not to have had any weapons of mass distruction, according to opponents of moral clarity and others). Such apparent contradictions are used to argue that proponents are guilty of hypocrisy or special pleading, and that the slogan of moral clarity is designed to evade moral reasoning rather than further it.

Opponents of the notion of moral clarity also note that organizations such as al Qaida and neo-Nazis also see their own point of view from a similar viewpoint of "moral clarity" in which they alone represent the forces of good, and that they also feel that they are therefore entitled to take whatever action they feel necessary against what they see as the "forces of evil".

Thus, opponents of the notion of moral clarity assert that, but for the accident of their country and culture of birth, the proponents of "moral clarity" might well be on the opposite side of the battle they claim to be fighting, holding the same absolutist views. They argue that, in this way, the doctrine of "moral clarity" is actually an argument that truly represents the moral dangers of moral equivalence, held by those who are unable to see it, and that U.S. interests would best be served by U.S. Brigadier General Carl Schurz' doctrine of

"Our country right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right."