Against Moral Clarity

On Sunday, June 7, 2020, about two weeks after the murder of George Floyd set off nationwide protests, the New York Times editorial-page editor James Bennet resigned under significant internal and public pressure. His offense was signing off on an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton that advocated deploying the military into cities where protests had descended into rioting. One journalist who had pushed for Bennet’s ouster was Wesley Lowery, who had made his name covering the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., following the killing of Michael Brown. After the Cotton op-ed appeared, Lowery declared he was canceling his Times subscription and called for Bennet to step down.

For Lowery, providing Cotton with a platform exposed the limitations of “American view-from-nowhere, ‘objectivity’-obsessed, both-sides journalism.” The lesson of the Bennet affair was that “we need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.” A few weeks later, Lowery took to the Times op-ed page to defend his role, which he framed as part of a “reckoning over objectivity led by Black journalists.” He again deployed the term “moral clarity,” suggesting it was something Bennet’s editorial stance had lacked.

This past Saturday witnessed another momentous resignation at an elite American institution: that of the University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill. The occasion this time was a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. Magill, along with the Harvard president Claudine Gay and the MIT president Sally Kornbluth, was questioned over whether “calls for the genocide of Jews” would violate their university codes of conduct; all three replied that it would depend on the context. That response — and the failure to offer a resolute condemnation — came across as frustratingly legalistic and evasive, even if it was strictly true, and Magill took the fall under severe internal and public pressure.

What many found lacking in Magill’s testimony was the same thing Lowery found lacking in the Times’s decision to let Cotton weigh in on the George Floyd protests: “moral clarity.” That, indeed, was the phrase used by Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, who described Magill’s “lack of moral clarity” as “simply unacceptable.” Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania likewise declared: “Leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, and Liz Magill failed to meet that simple test.” A New York Times post-mortem echoed that phrasing: “Ms. Magill’s remarks failed to meet a moment of moral clarity for many of the university’s Jewish students, faculty, and alumni.”

The parallels between the Bennet and Magill resignations are unmistakable. In both cases, an institutional leader was forced out after permitting the expression of views decried as threatening and harmful to a minority group within the institution. An internal constituency mobilized allies in the broader public, especially online, which brought external pressure to bear on the institution. Defenders of both the Times editor and the Penn president invoked procedural neutrality and viewpoint diversity. But the resounding calls for “moral clarity” issued by the opposing side ultimately won out over appeals to longstanding institutional values.

Several striking reversals were also on view. The speech deemed offensive in the Times case was an op-ed written by a conservative member of Congress; in the Penn incident, by contrast, it was a conservative member of Congress who called attention to the offensive speech of student activists. Although in both cases, the public was enlisted in a pressure campaign, those appealing to “moral clarity” in the first instance were a group of upstart journalists challenging their higher-ups, whereas those making the same appeal in the second case were top officials (Emhoff and Shapiro) as well as Penn trustees and donors. More broadly, although Democratic politicians played important roles, this year it was congressional Republicans leading the charge against left-wing activists and those standing for their right to speak. At the Times in 2020 the roles had been exactly the inverse, with activists denouncing the speech of a Republican congressman and demanding the resignation of those who had given him a platform.

The shift in the political valence of “moral clarity” — deployed on behalf of the left in 2020 and against the left in 2023 — is just the latest such reversal around this concept. Since Lowery’s interventions of 2020, many have come to associate the term with leading American institutions’ overt endorsements of the progressive agenda, but the usual ideological connotations of the term over the prior decades were quite different. Consider the title of William Bennett’s 2002 book promoting the Bush administration’s post-9/11 foreign policy, Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism. The enemies of moral clarity, for Bennett, were left-wing intellectuals whose values had been distorted by “political correctness and pseudosophisticated relativism.” As Frank Guan noted in a prescient 2019 New York Times Magazine essay, Bennett’s appeal was of a piece with Cold War-era conservative rhetoric: “For decades, moral clarity functioned as a shibboleth, an efficient means of discovering, then assailing, anyone too weak-willed to wage war against America’s ideological foes.”

In this sense, conservatives’ and centrist liberals’ recent bludgeoning of elite academics with demands for “moral clarity” marks a reversion to the historical norm. Indeed, all the way back in 2009, just a few years into Hamas’s control of Gaza, the Harvard law professor and ardent Zionist Alan Dershowitz wrote a broadside under a title that might lead us to imagine it had been published in the past two months: The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas, and Gaza. In the view shared by Bennett, Dershowitz, and those who have lately pilloried Magill and the other college presidents, what is morally clear is that we — America and our allies — are the good guys, and our enemies — terrorists and the regimes that enable them — are the bad guys. Anyone who questions or attempts to nuance such judgments, or stands up for the right of others to do so, should be considered a “fifth column.” That was the phrase used by the blogger Andrew Sullivan in 2001 in reference to the “decadent left” incapable of condemning the 9/11 attacks. (As it happens, Sullivan later wrote a notable critique of Lowery’s appeal to “moral clarity.”)

How did Lowery and other progressives come to embrace a term so often marshaled against them by the right? Writing in 2019, over a year before George Floyd’s murder, Guan found that shift already underway. For instance, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won the Democratic primary over the incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley, she declared: “There is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.” Over the prior decade or so, liberal intellectuals had made various attempts to reclaim the language of morality from the right. Examples included the work of the linguist George Lakoff, who argued that progressives could win by making a resolute moral case for the policies they advocated, and the philosopher Susan Neiman, who titled her 2008 book on the subject — what else? — Moral Clarity. Neiman, curiously enough, took on some of the same targets as Bennett: She pilloried postmodern moral relativists, although not for destroying tradition but for hindering the march of moral progress begun in the Enlightenment.

The congressional hearing seemed to highlight not only the reassertion of moral clarity on the right and center but also the retreat of the left from those prior attempts to lay claim to it. In contrast to the high point of the Black Lives Matter moment of 2020, when activists successfully lobbied for the removal of powerful institutional players and the altering of norms, advocates of today’s most visible left cause — Palestine — fall back on institutional commitments to freedom of speech.

In reality, though, the left hasn’t entirely retreated from its attempt to seize the moral high ground. On the contrary, when protesters denounce what is happening in Gaza as a “genocide,” they are adopting precisely the stance of “moral clarity” that was demanded of the college presidents. Indeed, the left’s moral rhetoric since October 7 has often resembled an inverted mirror image of its right-wing antagonists’. For many progressives, it seems, America and its allies are simply the bad guys, which means anyone who opposes them — Hamas included — must be good. Atrocities are understandable if committed by the good guys, condemnable when done by the bad guys. The positions are opposed, but the simplistic moral accountancy is the same.

The problem, then, isn’t that progressives have imbibed a moral relativism that makes them incapable of denouncing genocide. It is that progressives, centrists, and conservatives disagree over, for instance, what counts as “genocide” or a call for it, even as they echo one another’s reductive rhetoric. The commitment to moral clarity, which is presented as conversation-ending, is in fact what makes debate interminable and unproductive.

Any institution claiming to be guided by values like open debate and viewpoint diversity should therefore treat assertions of moral clarity as inimical to those values. The difference between 2020 and 2023 is who has been able to marshal the fervor of constituents to override norms that might otherwise limit the triumph of one camp’s convictions. Calls for moral clarity merely reflect the certitude of those issuing them. There are settings where such certitude may be appropriate and desirable, but universities and newspapers aren’t among them.