Other people are regarded as taking responsibility. Then they can be blamed for it. The existential fact of doing one thing rather than another is on their hands for reasons always inexplicable and after the fact. My mother and her sister decided to leave Poland for the United States in 1939 knowing things were going bad but also knowing that they would never see their families again and must find work and people in a new life. That was the bravest thing they ever did though it seemed to them to be doing the natural thing, how fearful they were of the Germans. It seemed to them obvious self interest and, anyway, being servants and shopgirls in Poland did not seem to be an appealing future and so making a decision was like following water down an inclined street. It was bound to happen; it was the thing to do, even if their friends and relatives stayed put and were eradicated by the Germans.. People from their own mind’s eye make decisions easily and in a flash, not agonizing, even if they agonize later, as if they were contemplating other people for whom decisions in those other minds always seem paradoxical and unrequired.
Another moral event of an everyday sort that is in keeping with one’s characters and interests and so eminently explicable was when my father thought that he was just doing his duty by paying off his father’s loans while his brothers thought that fact memorable and going beyond his duty and so admirable and something they might not have done while, to his mind, however burdensome it might be, he quickly calculated whether he had the money on hand to pay for it. Calculations are quick but decisions are even quicker, though you might think that people will agonize about who to marry but they decide soon enough whether some one or another is courting is a good match and then think maybe for years about whether that other person, the thie you in the past, may have made a better match. I suggest that people who divorce can sense the person only after the fact offering reasons for why a person did so while seeing the likelihood for a long time even if the decision finally made was in response to a precipitating cause, such as adultery. People can weather that distress and remain married unless they have always had a sense that such would be a dealbreaker, the natural way to handle such events.
This view of morality as posing the two alternative and opposing views of the decider and the observers to the decider, including some future state whereby the decider is now the one who observes what he or she had once decided, is a very different point of view than the one offered by Jean Paul Sartre who thought the decision itself, such as whether to join the Resistance or not, was always problematic and perplexing and so a leap into the unknown, a person only after the fact giving reasons--really, rationalizations-- for having decided to do one or the other. But the Sartre problem renders morality a bit magical, a creation out of nothingness, rather than the outcome of a person’s character and interests, however agonizing can be moments of decision made on the margin or largely balanced that are often taken to be the hallmarks of morality when morality precedes every day without much strain, for otherwise people would forever be Balaam’s ass, starving because of being unable to go to the left or the right to get their equidistant straws. Morality has to be easy if it is to be that kind of thing and so beware of Leibniz or others who ponder how it is impossible to do simple things. Giraffes are not impossible even if evolutionists have not yet figured out how the hydraulic system that pushes up the blood into their brain came to develop. It had to because it did and similarly people make moral decisions all the time because they have to just to get through the day as when they decide not to challenge a boss or a wife or decide not to join bowling night even though it might marginally hurt the feelings of their friends.
Here is a minor and then a major moral event, my own so minor that it hardly qualifies as moral at all and risks seeming self-serving rather than revealing of what happens in ordinary life. I was living in Brooklyn and a friend of mine of longstanding was living in Westchester. He had physical ailments which prevented the two of us meeting every few weeks for lunch around Grand Central Station, somewhat halfway between. I decided to visit him in Westchester and quickly calculated it would be a two hour subway and train trip one way, and not much of a burden to me because I don’t mind subways and trains and, as a retiree, there is no reason not to kill a day so as to see an old friend and to show him I cared. So I went and we chatted about nothing much, such as the state of sociology forty years before, but he and his wife had noticed that I had gone to the bother and so thought well of me for having done so. He died a few years later and I was glad that I had done it. Is this a moral issue? I think so because I put up with what seemed to the external people to be a considerable inconvenience just to show his friendship mattered to me. Not quite Damon and Pithias, but it will do. To me, it was a day’s outing, a cheap way to show an expression of friendship which I truly did feel and so the expression of which was the overt inconvenience of making the trip. I felt obliged to do it though that is not the right word because there was no rule to make an inconvenient visit, just the sign of it recognizing my friendship. I will not dwell on similar circumstances when I fell short.
Here is another decision of greater moment which is treated as a matter of obligation when it can be thought of better as following water downhill. Joe Biden might be considered a tough customer, no wishy washy Liberal he, about how he has dealt with Afghanistan. He looked simply about what are the interests of America and decided that there is no reason to pursue the war. His goals were abolished long ago and so there is no reason to lose a single American in defending the country even if the country falls to the Taliban as it just did even though the Kabul government might have fought on its own and Biden had thought that it would for at least a little longer.That the government fell so quickly was just additional evidence that there was no future in trying to nation build in Afghanistan. But people ask whether there is any responsibility for the United States abandoning the country to its inheritors, especially given how much in the past the Taliban have dealt with women and girls brutally. Some have said that maintaining some American presence was useful just to keep the Taliban from committing mayhem.Yes, there might be some American lives, but it would be worth it to achieve humanitarian ends. But no, foreign policy applies only to American interests, as has been the case since Thucydides proposed the equivalent of what the Germans call “realpolitik”, which is that interests alone determine foreign policy. Foreign policy is not for the squeamish. Maybe the United Nations might have envisioned and in fact did think that an international army might police troublespots and defeat scurrilous dictators who persecute their people, but that didn’t happen and so nations are on their own each one calculating their own decisions for their own ends. Afghani women are no one's responsibility but those of the Afghani.
One exception to the rule that nations further only their own self interests is genocide. Ever since the Second World War, nations, and particularly the United States, has intervened in foreign nations so as to defer or eliminate genocide. Truman violated American self interest in cultivating the Arab states so as to recognize Israel as the survivors of the Holocaust even though Gorge Marshall argued that it would lead to no end of troubles, which it did. Bill Clinton interfered with the dismemberment of Yugoslavia by interfering with concentration camp conditions and massacres in Srebrenica on the pretext that there would be no ethnic cleansing any longer in Europe. Clinton said that his most serious failing in foreign policy was a failure to interfere in the genocide going on in Ruanda even though it would have been difficult to project American power because that landlocked country was so far away from American seapower. Samantha Power was elevated to Obama’s cabinet team because of her book about genocide. Obama wanted a person to monitor that. But what do we do when genocide is not the issue? When regimes are reprehensible but something short of genocide? We need a new moral apparatus to deal with it.
The problem with realpolitik is that it is a version of the theory of obligation, which works well enough with officeholders or other roles clearly defined, like mothers or baseball players. You are required to do what the rules say you are supposed to do, such as not to lie to police officers, or so Kant thought. Kant thought that freely chosen preferences come into a different category than morality. As to foreign policy, nations are required to consult their self interests and failing to do so is a blemish, as would have been the case if Truman had failed to use an A bomb against Japan when one was available,, and would have ridden him out of office did the American people had gotten wind of that in the 1948 election. But what to do with concerns or engagements with foreign policy that are not interests as such? What is Biden to do about the women and girls?
Look away from the theory of obligation and consider the morality of emotions--or, what is the same thing, the sociology of emotions. Look at the universal rather than national condition of being pathetic, someone whom you feel sorry for. This is a minor virtue in that not very much is required so as to recognize a fellow creature who is in some way lamed and so has difficulties with managing life. You can feel sorry for an old lady who hobbles around even if you are not particularly generous to women as a gender. All you have to do is acknowledge sympathy to make yourself become humane and all you may have to do is offer her a hand or even offer her a cane. Government can provide, or at least charities can. The key distinction is that a pathetic person has a condition that is adverse without it disabling the nature of the personality so as to make that person very different and perhaps alien, while a person in an aborigine tribe or a Nazi is such that one does not feel those creatures are pathetic and so all too human but are so different as to be strange or adversarial. As George Patton would put it, we still have to kill those poor German bastards who got in our way.
Now I am willing to raise the ante and think that charity can be raised to an obligation in that I think that government should supply canes and wheelchairs and old age living allowances and free pre-k childhood education so as to get people through or to give them the tools to prosper and the reason for that are the same as when it has to do with be the Afghani girls and women are like the old ladies who need a ccharity in that the government like the person helping someone cross the street is easily doable, such having the economy developed to the point that it produces immense wealth while some people have very little. It is worth noting that obligations very difficult to meet are quickly reduced to being non-obligatory. You don’t have the obligation to make someone else a better person even if it is worth giving it a try. Similarly, you can’t help the Chinese because they are so vast and powerful, so don’t take on the task of dealing with the concentration camps in western China, just maybe Ruanda.
So maybe the Afghani girls and women are like the old lady who needs a cane. They are pathetic and so we should offer assistance. But girls and women are not pathetic. They are something else entirely, which is a category of being that complement and oppose women and have done so for thousands of years and only the non-Islamic world recognizes them as required to not have equal rights. Should the United States intrude wherever women’s rights are threatened? Or intervene with any number of categories that are short of subject to genocide but where discrimination takes place? That would be a major burden, nothing like the appeal of the pathetic.
Now put aside the theory of obligation and the theory of emotions and all the difficulties that they lead to and consider the Biden decision to evacuate from Afghanistan as an easy one in the sense of being part of the natural course of things, however much external people will ponder this as a very weighty moral decision having to do with abandoning girls and women to their fate. Joe Biden, as is true of most politicians, is not a deep thinker, but he is a very clear one. He has burdened his reconciliation bill with a number of longstanding issues that have concerned the liberal wing of his party and has put them together as providing the social infrastructure that will make the nation prosperous. These include the idea of pre-k education because that will give people a head start on their education and free community college so as to get people well paying middle class jobs. His view is not controversial in his circles; it is just the next logical step and Biden is to be surprised for having thought so big about it.
The same is true about Biden’s foreign policy. Biden has long been opposed to foreign interventionism. He wanted to cut back in Afghanistan during the Obama Administration and he was against intervening with Syria by opposing Assad when Hillary Clinton would have preferred to intervene, giving us another middle east war. So Biden thought that the choice to get out of Afghanistan was just a matter of cleaning house, just tidying the end of that twenty year war. The U.S. military thought the government military forces could hold out on their own for a little or a lot longer and the U. S. could make some arrangement with the Taliban so that they would not be too brutal and so get foreign aid. The hope was and remains, as I write, that the Taliban want to organize a regular government rather than remain an insurgent group and so they will have to act more sensibly than they did twenty years ago.The Taliban need women doctors and other technicians to provide people for the government and the institutions of the society if they want to run a regular government rather than just remain an insurgent group and so will have to act more rationally-- which means in their self interests. We will see what we will see. Their moral choices are unclear but are likely to show themselves soon enough, while Biden did what seemed obvious and now has to scramble to keep up with the unfolding events rather than, from the start, having had to make a momentous decision. I know that McKinley agonized and prayed over whether to get into the Spanish American War, but the writing to keep the Philippines from falling into the Japanese was already written on the wall. Truman knew he had to go into Korea as soon as he heard of the invasion from the north. Maybe only Lincoln agonized about his choices and maybe that is why we honor him so much in that he did not have to assist Fort Sumter and he did, knowing its consequences for the rest of American history. Lincoln bears the burden and the rest of us are onlookers.