Morals Are Usually Relative
By Ben Sibelman '06

Like almost everything else, liberty is relative. Generally speaking, it's fine to say that all people should be free, but that can mean different things to different people. At the one extreme, liberty could mean "I do whatever I want," which would result in complete lawlessness; this is the libertarian ideal. On the other hand, the freedom to make your own choices about everything can be a heavy burden; having someone else to make them for you makes life easier and can even be liberating, if only in the limited sense of "freedom from." This is the authoritarian ideal. So you can have universal ideals, as long as you accept that their key terms can be redefined to fit different cultures.

However, United States foreign policy advocates a particular form of liberty that not everyone can actually agree on. For instance, our definition is individualist rather than collectivist, while in some societies, the question "What do I want?" is morally subordinate to the question "What do we want?" People from such cultures might point out that we Americans aren't free to elect a government that actually represents us as a nation, since our few choices for leaders are inevitably all from the rich upper class. They might say that even unelected leaders can sometimes have more concern for the freedom of their people to have food to eat than an American government that cuts off welfare for so many of its poor.

Of course, in many cases authoritarian leaders are tyrants who care little for their people, and whose actions are inexcusable from any moral standpoint. Killing is always wrong when there is any better alternative, and most tyrants spend no time looking for such alternatives. However, the Bush administration could also have spent more time looking for a better alternative to tyranny in Iraq than war. We have yet to see if it turns out to have been the best alternative in the long run. In particular, will we really give Iraqis the freedom to choose what their own government looks like, even if it disagrees with our concept of a free country? If not, what will the consequences be?