Historical Parallels

"I was just following orders." Such was the excuse offered by many Nazi military and political underlings later put on trial for their actions during the Second World War. This "Nuremberg defense" was judged then -- and has been repeatedly judged since -- as possessing little if any moral or legal validity; the military academy at West Point, for example, teaches that the obedience necessary to any effective fighting force does NOT mean that an American infantryman must sacrifice his or her own moral code, that soldiers must do whatever their commanders insist, no questions asked. Why should employees of the CIA be held to lesser standards? Yes, those who drafted the policies legitimating waterboarding, prolonged sleep-deprivation, and other practices now deemed immoral, illegal, or both should bear primary culpability for their subsequent implementation. And yes, the fight against terrorism has far more to recommend it -- morally and otherwise -- than an attempt to exterminate an entire people. But to condemn the architects of a given policy while, in effect, condoning the individuals who actually executed that policy seems ethically somewhat dubious: a real-life murderer, after all, may be sentenced to death, while someone who merely plots murder may win many a parlor game centered around killing. If torture is wrong, then anyone who acted as though they believed differently, whether they wielded the thumbscrews themselves or else encouraged others to do so, should be punished. If torture is acceptable (as indeed it may be in certain cases), neither promulgators nor practitioners deserve censure. Unless, of course, like Alfred Doolittle in Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, you believe that the same moral rules need not apply to the same groups of people (e.g., "the leaders" and "the led").

Hypocrisy

In lifting the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, Barack Obama has not only demonstrated a respect for scientific pursuits unfettered by particularistic ideological or religious constraints (the same sort of constraints that lay behind the trial of Galileo in the 17th century, the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, and innumerable other efforts to suppress all speculations in potential conflict with The Truth as promulgated by this or that "higher authority"). He has also given his partisan (as opposed to principled) critics a fresh opportunity to demonstrate anew their underlying hypocrisy. While on the one hand they bemoan his "unprecedented" expansion of the federal government (unprecedented, at any rate, since the reign of his predecessor), on the other they insist that government has a "God-given" responsibility to oversee what goes on in the country's universities, laboratories, libraries, and museums. This in turn points to the fundamental (or should I say fundamentalist?) dichotomy that has plagued the American right (nowadays a.k.a. the Republican Party) at least since the days of Ronald Reagan. For the right's mantra against "big government," against "obtrusive government regulation," is limited exclusively to matters economic, to measures that would somehow interfere with every American's "God-given" right to make as much money as possible. When it comes to issues of privacy, of civil liberties, of freedom to pursue activities (such as scientific research) that do not yield immediate and monetarily measurable profit to someone to one or more individuals, today's Republicans (along with many conservative Democrats) are second to none in calling for a degree of government control that, at least in intent, would have done Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin proud (though these latter figures were admittedly far more ruthless -- or, if you prefer, far more forthright -- than their American kindred of either left or right). Reversing the ban on federally-funded stem cell research is one small but important step in countering such an "un-American" (or should I say "all-too-American"?) tendency toward government-imposed conformity. Expect a far bigger -- and more strident -- battle when the legislative/legal fight over abortion is rejoined.