Epistemic Spelunking

When out shopping for a moral license to do as we will rather than as we should, one of our common human tactics is to hide the morality of the desired act in an epistemic cave. Because only I can know the interior moral dimensions of my act, this approach holds, only I can tell whether or not my act was good. “Judge not” means that the moral nature of an act is utterly mysterious to everyone except God and the person who performs the act. Therefore nobody is in a position to criticize an act other than the person who actually performs it (unless God personally speaks on the matter, of course).

Naturally everyone who takes this approach does so selectively, only with respect to whatever particular sorts of acts they want to protect from public moral critique. But it is such a commonplace tactic that it doesn’t fool anyone other than the acutely slow-witted and the person himself, hiding in his epistemic cave: “I may be wrong but you can’t know that I am wrong.”

Feh.

This approach isn’t limited to those on the political and social left, out fishing in their usual places for moral and political licences to commit consequence-free fornication, adultery, sodomy, murder, divorce, and other moral crimes.

When it comes to the Iraq war, one of the common claims in comment boxes (here is the blog post to which the comments are attached) is that we as laypeople are not qualified to judge the justice of the war because we are not the competent authority. Only George W. Bush truly knows whether the war is just, because he is the competent authority charged with making the prudential judgement about whether the war is just. That is, it is GWB’s role, and only his role, to apply the Just War criteria to the facts and make the definitive and binding determination of whether the war is just or not. Anyone who states as a fact “the Iraq war was just” or “the Iraq war was unjust” independent of the President’s judgement is making an outrageous presumption, on this epistemically peculiar view.

Even as well (and rightly) respected a Catholic figure as George Weigel falls into this self-deceptive trap:

Finally, the criterion of “competent authority” involves the “location” of moral judgment in matters of war and peace. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is quite explicit: “the evaluation of these [just war] conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good” [No. 2309]. Responsible public authorities make the call. Religious leaders and religious intellectuals must teach the relevant moral principles, insist that they inform public and governmental debate and bring their best prudential judgments to bear in those debates. But the call is made by others.

The equivocation is breathtakingly obvious, and is unworthy of a man of Weigel’s intellectual stature. Yes, the nation-state and specifically the President are the competent authority, and it is his responsibility to make the decision whether or not to go to war. The war would necessarily be unjust if it were waged by someone other than the competent authority. But that doesn’t mean it is epistemically impossible for the poor incompetent rest of us to determine as a matter of fact whether or not the decision to wage war was just. Even though I was not the duly elected Chancellor of the Reich during World War II I am perfectly comfortable saying that Germany’s war on the allies was unjust. And I am perfectly comfortable saying this not as an uncertain opinion but as an unequivocal fact: that only someone with a terribly damaged ability to reason or a complete ignorance of the facts could possibly disagree.