Fredric Smoler in American Heritage has a thoughtful review of A.C. Grayling's new book, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan. Dr. Grayling was born after World War II, in 1949… But I'm not sure even being alive during the Blitz would have made him appreciate its real significance. After all, his sort of presumptuous, ungrateful, just-short-of-pacifism- emasculated caricature of Just War theory has a long pedigree in analytic philosophy. The philosopher G.E. Anscombe similarly protested against Oxford's granting of an honorary degree to President Truman in 1956, who in her eyes was a "mass murderer".
Before John Rawls wrote his Theory of Justice analytic philosophers stayed largely aloof from actual, real life policy disputes, generally adopting a vague, leftism when they did so enter. The tone was still often aloof and theoretical– one example that comes to mind is Bertrand Russell's calling for the U.S. to bomb the Soviet Union out of existence with nukes, then later calling for the U.S. to totally eliminate its own nuclear stockpile. Anscombe herself was in many ways a great philosopher who made virtue ethics respectable again within analytic philosophy. But she failed to heed the lessons of the founder of virtue ethics in this case.
Aristotle refused to give moral rules as absolutes for any given situation, because he recognized what Kant did not– that at some point, one might have to lie– for instance, to save an Anne Frank, the whereabouts of whom are being asked about by Nazis. Instead, Aristotle said that one must inculcate instincts based upon the great and small virtues as best as one can and then act upon those instincts. After Rawls published his opus, some of the Olympian Ivory tower attitude of analytic philosophy started to fade as philosophers became "applied philosophers"— people who tried to use philosophy to solve real-life problems and became advisors in the government and even the private sector at times and therefore had to have a more realistic take than Mrs. Anscombe had. However, much of it still obviously remains and A.C. Grayling is proof of that. In fact, his reflexive leftism appears to have been strengthened by experiences such as being a Davos World Economic fellow.
A typical conclusion from Grayling would and does go something like this: "European capitalism is much more efficient than the Anglo-American model, if you look at the larger, fuller picture"– a conclusion he is able to establish only by looking at a much more narrow, smaller picture than exists. In short, he is an academic peacock, driven by what he wishes were so rather than reality. What else is new?
