Moral Clarity

Moral clarity is a catchphrase associated with American political conservatives. Popularized by William J. Bennett's Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, the phrase was first used in its current context during the 1980s, in reference to the politics of Ronald Reagan.

The phrase moral clarity encodes a complex political argument that includes all of the following claims:

• The War on Terrorism, like some previous wars involving the United States (particularly World War II and the Cold War), is a conflict between good and evil.

• Traditional American values like democracy and freedom are universal human rights, worth promoting and defending through military intervention.

• Attempts to understand or explain the actions of anti-Western terrorists as justifiable responses to actions of the United States or Israel are a sign of moral weakness at best, and sympathy for the terrorists at worst, and will hamper efforts to defeat them.

• Though the actions of the United States and its allies may lead to civilian deaths or other forms of collateral damage, may require the use of means such as torture that would be condemned in other contexts, and may involve temporary alliances with undemocratic regimes, these actions are justified by the greater moral necessity of defeating terrorism and thus promoting American values and ensuring long-term U.S. security.

• Opponents of action against terrorists are guilty of promoting moral relativism or moral equivalence, in which the allegedly similar means of both anti-terrorists and terrorists are used to blur the moral differences between good and evil.