Last week, the presidents of three Ivy League universities—Harvard, MIT, and Penn—appeared before Congress to address the issue of anti-Semitism on their campuses, in the wake of the conflict between Hamas and the state of Israel. In their formal statements as well as in the conversation with the congressional committee members, they acknowledged the tension between free speech and the legitimate regulation of certain types of provocative rhetoric. But as the dialogue unfolded, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, became increasingly impatient with what she took to be the presidents’ diffidence regarding extreme forms of anti-Semitic speech at their universities. She finally pressed each one of them: “Would calling for the genocide of Jews constitute a violation of the code of conduct at your school, yes or no?” Astonishingly, each of them balked, insisting that it depended upon the context.
All three women have justifiably faced massive blowback and calls for their resignations, due to the baffling lack of moral clarity in their statements. I should like to explore, however briefly, what has made this kind of moral opaqueness and muddle-headedness possible. First, in the minds of far too many people today, the category of the intrinsically evil act has disappeared. In classical moral philosophy, an intrinsically evil act is one that is, by its very nature, so disordered that it could never be justified or permitted. Good examples of this include slavery, rape, the direct killing of the innocent, and acts of terrorism. Nothing in the circumstances surrounding such acts or in the intentionality of the one performing them could ever turn them into something morally praiseworthy. When we lose a sensitivity to the intrinsically evil, we fall, automatically, into a moral relativism, whereby even the most egregiously wicked act can be justified or explained away. To give just one obvious example, abortion, which involves the direct killing of the innocent, is justified by millions today on account of its purportedly positive effects.
When we lose a sensitivity to the intrinsically evil, we fall, automatically, into a moral relativism . . .