Hang up my hairshirt, put my scourge in place, and pray, Laurent, for Heaven's perpetual grace. I'm going to the prison now, to share my last few coins with the wretches there.
  --  MOLIERE, Tartuffe

      Spotting moralizers and attempting to puncture their inflated claims is not only pleasurable but also essential, lest they go unchallenged and inflict the harm of which realists rightly warn. To call people moralizers is to reject the surface meaning of what they say and to point to the incongruity between their high-flown talk and their squalid, insensitive, often brutal behavior.*

      Among moralizers, hypocrites make the easiest targets, with their pompous intoning of moral standards that they are the first to break. In his portrait of Tartuffe, Moliere depicts such a figure to perfection, one who speaks of very little except morality while scheming to defraud his unsuspecting host and to seduce his wife. Every age has its own archetypal hypocrites, yet they call forth the same responses. The falsehearted kiss of a Judas, the pious fraud of venal TV evangelists, the thundering rejection of drug trafficking or deals with terrorists by those who support such practices in secret--once the discrepancy between word and deed becomes known, derision and distrust are utterly reasonable responses.

      A second type of moralizer is the individual who is high-handed in the face of human complexity--someone who brings simplistic remedies to bear where they have no place. Such people distort reality, either to make their simple precepts fit or to convince themselves that even their most dubious actions have solid moral foundations. In this category fall priests who, in their zeal to condemn contraception, wax lyrical about the joys of motherhood to women watching their children starve. So do isolationists who still believe it possible to protect their nation from foreign wars, drugs, and epidemics simply by sealing off its borders; as well as those who hope that some mass transformation of human consciousness will eliminate war. Woodrow Wilson's critics thought that he was a moralizer in both senses of the word: he did not live up to the standards that he proclaimed to others, and he appeared to apply overly simple homilies to a world situation requiring far subtler understanding.

      Yet a third type of moralizing overlaps with the second. Those who fall in this category seem excessively strict and uncompromising, given the circumstances, and too eager to punish the slightest infraction of a rule as a severe moral crime. In this category, too, fall those who do not appear to realize when moral discourse is out of place--who sermonize to children too young to understand what is at issue, or who intrude their judgment where they have no right to do so. Parents, teachers, and judges have to guard against such tendencies; the activities of censors and book burners of every era show how dangerous it is to succumb to moralizing of this kind. Aristotle points out that is far from easy to do or say what one thinks is called for "to the right person, in the right amount, at the right time, for the right end, and in the right way .... nor can everyone do it." Those who are clumsiest--at times blindest--in misjudging to whom, when, and how to bring up moral issues are all moralizers of this type.

      A fourth type of moralizer, finally, and often the most dangerous, is so obsessed by the desire to combat what he or she takes to be some particular evil as to ride roughshod over other moral principles. The stalker of sexual transgressions who tramples all respect for privacy, the Spanish Inquisitors or Chinese Red Guards willing to betray, torture, and kill in order to eradicate what they saw as doctrinal deviance, and zealots of every kind fall into this category. Fanaticism, as Jeremy Bentham points out, "never sleeps, is never glutted.., it is never stopped by conscience for it has pressed conscience into its service."

      The four types of moralizing sometimes overlap. In each, what is said or done is at odds with what the situation calls for. Moralizers do not seem to perceive themselves, or those to whom or about whom they are speaking, in anything like a realistic way; and since their perception is inadequate, their response is bound to be flawed. Their appeals to morality, as a result, seem to spin in the void, except for those unfortunate enough to be their victims.

      Humor and, above all, satire is the quintessential means for stripping away the pretense of such talk, exposing it as what La Rochefoucauld called "the homage that vice pays to virtue." Such irreverence is indispensable for learning to understand oneself and others; for achieving the humility without which, as La Rochefoucauld also wrote, "we perpetuate all our vices"; and for coming to know in whom one can and cannot place trust.

      When such perspective is lacking, efforts to guard against moralizing merely provide a ready-made excuse for rejecting all criticism of one's conduct. It is commonplace for those on one side of a dispute to deride those on the other as hypocritical, unseeing, and overzealous conveyors of simplistic homilies, while characterizing themselves as realistic. As Bertrand Russell said, "A Realist is a man who confirms the prejudices of the man who is speaking." The Nazis were masters at thus dismissing their critics as moralizers. Hans Fritzsche, for example, a prominent propagandist for Nazi Germany during the Second World War, regularly castigated the British on these grounds during his radio broadcasts. England, he said, could be likened to a "moralizing tea-drinking governess who faints if anyone treads on the tail of her lapdog."

      Singling out one's opponents as moralizers and stressing the realism of one's own views can therefore itself be far too simplistic. Like moralizing in its own right, it, too, can represent a distortion of perception--a failure fully to see oneself and those to whom or about whom one speaks, so as not to have to feel, imagine, or think about what might be at issue. The more rigid one's beliefs, the greater one's temptation to see all who dare to criticize them as not only wrong but knowingly, hypocritically wrong. And if these others seem to embrace their error sincerely, then the temptation is strong to dismiss them as self-deceived--another epithet too easily flung at opponents.

      This attitude is common among those whose religious or political commitments are so strong that they take all who disagree with them to be deluded. It can also afflict persons so immersed in practical affairs, and so certain of the wise judgment that long experience has honed in them, that they begin to discount opposing views too quickly. It then represents the collapse, on the plane of debate, of the broad and informed perspective that many realist critics of moralizing have rightly stressed. It turns into yet another form of partisanship. Just as the adoption of a relentlessly moralistic tone can prevent leaders from seeing a conflict from different points of view and responding to it appropriately, so the corresponding zeal against their moralizing can have the same effect.

      Instead of merely dismissing those who disagree with them as moralizers, public officials need to consider the evidence for judging someone hypocritical, simplistic, uncompromising, or perhaps fanatical. To steer clear of such attitudes, they might try to avoid breaching in practice the principles that they proclaim, lest they be thought hypocrites; to reach for an expanded perspective and sober practical judgment in order not to appear simplistic; to entertain the possibility of exceptions rather than open themselves to the charge of undue severity; and to accept the whole framework of four constraints rather than just one or two, so as to avoid the risk of excessive zeal or fanaticism.

      For a view of the combination of sensitivity and practical diplomatic experience that avoids either moralizing or judging all one's critics to be moralizers, it is worth turning to a work by the British diplomat and author Harold Nicolson. In Peacemaking, 1919, he looks back at having gone to the Paris Conference as a young man burning with idealism, eager to be of help, however minimal, in curing the ills brought on by war. He describes his growing awareness of the difficulties that stood in the way of achieving a lasting peace. Some were in his view altogether inevitable, such as the emotions, so soon after the war, of the public and the press in each of the participating countries; others seemed to him unavoidable given the failure of vision and sense of direction of the world's leaders at the time; still others, such as the flaws and imprecisions in the armistice agreement, the delay in beginning the talks, and the confusion attending the debates, could in his view have been averted with a little forethought. If there is to be a lasting peace, those who prepare for it will need to achieve a perspective endowed with the vision, direction, and foresight that Nicolson found so deplorably absent at the conference.

      But more than perspective was at issue at the conference as described by Nicolson. Seeing President Wilson's passionate advocacy of certain moral principles as necessary to the peace process, he shows how the president's increasing physical and mental disability and his tragic errors at the negotiations contributed to the betrayal of his ideals. And yet Nicolson held fast to what he considered the fundamental core of rightness in Wilson's ideals, and so could not go along with the simplistic forms of condemnation that were so tempting at the time and for decades afterwards. Looking back in 1933 at Wilson's advocacy of fundamental moral principles, Nicolson writes:

      In the main tenets of his political philosophy I believed with fervent credulity. In spite of bitter disillusionment I believe in them today. I believed, with him, that the standard of political and international conduct should be as high, as sensitive, as the standard of personal conduct. I believed, and I still believe, that the only true patriotism is an active desire that one's own tribe or country should in every particular minister to that ideal. I shared with him a hatred of violence in any form, and a loathing of despotism in any form. I conceived, as he conceived, that this hatred was common to the great mass of humanity...

      Nicolson wrote his book in part to offer advice for later efforts at peacemaking and governing more generally. He showed how public officials can be alert to the risks of moralizing that Wilson exemplified without falling prey to the disillusioned rejection of all moral guidelines. Only by adopting a perspective that helps them to guard against a partial and skewed understanding of the situation before them can they have a chance to think it through and negotiate about it with the care it deserves.

      Even if government officials achieve such a perspective, however, another difficulty confronts them: how should they respond to a situation in which they find themselves forced to choose between two evils? A situation, for instance, in which they have to break one promise in order to honor another, or expose innocent people to the risk of death in order to minimize the risk of a massacre? I considered such dilemmas in Chapter IV. The practical conflicts that they raise for public servants have long been discussed under the heading of "dirty hands."


* The noun "moralizer" and the verb "to moralize" have only recently acquired this negative meaning. (The same is true to a lesser but still significant extent of "moralist.") In earlier centuries, "moralize" had one of two other meanings, both descriptive rather than critical. In the first sense, "moralize" simply meant to interpret something morally or to make something the subject of moral reflection--the activity of anyone who speaks or writes about moral issues. Second, "moralize" was used in the sense of speaking didactically, so as to improve the morals of others. But again, this meaning was descriptive, rather than signaling something inherently problematic. After all, was not such improvement the avowed purpose of moral and religious discourse? Fables ended in a "moral"; so did many cautionary tales. It has taken the growing questioning of such activities to help shift the meaning of the word "moralize" to a third sense: that of using moral language inappropriately, manipulatively, often exploitatively.