Morally ambiguous.

That’s how some people have described situations like those portrayed in ‘Runaway Jury’. The crux of the movie, the crux of the theme in the movie, boils down to my favourite scene, a confrontation between Wendell Rohr and Rankin Fitch (Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman). Rankin Fitch is a ‘jury consultant’ hired by gun industry big wigs to defend a case brought forward by the widow of a gun-violence victim represented by Wendell Rohr. The scene takes place just after the prosecution’s main witness is “disappeared”.

The camera shows Fitch in the bathroom, a zoomed out over-the-shoulder view, washing his hands as Hoffman’s Rohr enters. The scene then shifts to a shot encapsulating the breadth of the bathroom with both combatants on either side.

The dialogue in this scene is electric, lasting about 2 to 3 mintues, but well worth the wait; world-weary, triumphalist scorn vs. world-weary, informed idealism, and both Hoffman and Hackman play their parts to the hilt. The movie building up to this scene is pretty bland, nothing spectacular and I thought John Cusack and Rachel Weisz could’ve done better, but maybe it’s the function of the script.

As I was watching the movie today, I was reminded of a recent discussion on moral justification here. I hope I’m reading that article right, but the conclusion appears to be that all moral justification is wrong because, firstly, it gives one who can make a moral justification for any act the license to commit said act. Secondly, it gives one the opportunity to ‘get oneself off the hook’, to ’silence moral qualms’.

I was about to reply to the post when I considered the responses and felt that I couldn’t add anything better to the discussion.

In any case, without clear clarification on what the author means by ‘moral justification’, the author confuses between moral justification per se and the instrumentality of moral justifications in the first place. The implication made by the author, of course, is that such moral justifications are divorced from the ethical considerations of acts themselves. In other words, what’s in consideration for example, is not the ethical considerations of X, but the act of justifying X under this or that moral system.

This may seem like running backwards, but there have been occassions when acts have been committed, and then justification sought for those acts. Rationales like ‘Removing a dictator and, for the first time, having democratic elections in Iraq’ will fall under this category of acts justified. In this instance, removing a dictator to allow democratic elections is used as a ‘moral justification’ for the invasion. Worse is, such a justification has a rhetorical slant: for those who disagree with said justification, the implied charge is that you support dictatorships and tyranny.

I don’t think that a useful response to the article is to separate the issue or act from the justification in the first place. Because there are different kinds of justifications available, we can differentiate between whether the justification is on the basis of geopolitical security, threat assessments or the morality of such an act.

That still doesn’t solve the problem of the instrumentality of moral justifications. When I say “instrumentality”, I’m refering to the pragmatic use of idea/theory A to justify action P, implying that the veracity of theory A is not important, only its lending itself to be used to justify carrying out P is important. Another implication is that theory A is not indispensable, or rather, different versions or systems of the same type as theory A are dispensible so long as the ends are met.

This is a more cynical view, and I think difficult to run away from if the accusation is levelled at you.

I’ve not formulated a proper response that wouldn’t run into major problems, but it’s food for thought.