Morality and Power from the Individual to the Institution, with Joel Rosenthal

Starting more with interests and again thinking from a social science, international relations, or analytical perspective interests are often assumed: We know what our interests are. It is a variable that does not really change.

If there is one thing I could impart it would be: “No, interests are constructed. We decide where our interests are.” I hope that doesn’t sound too post-modern because I am not a post-modernist. However, upon reflection if you think about “acting on your interests,” you understand that your interests change and evolve over time and that there is actually some kind of hierarchy of values that goes into your interests. On a personal level it is probably not hard to think about that: Yes, my interests have changed over time because my values have changed. They have informed my interests.

If you want to look at it at a national level, the “national interests” of our state, those change and evolve over time too, and in the end they are what we decide they are. The community decides what those interests are.

KEVIN MALONEY: Thanks so much for that incredible framing, Joel. At Carnegie Council one of the ways we promote ethics in practice is through the process of managing difficult tradeoffs. In the end we are seeking ways for values and interests not to be in conflict but to complement one another whenever possible.

Building on your previous answer I would love hear a bit more about how one might approach this process in their personal life. I think about those who want to engage in a more ethical form of leadership or bring a more reflective and understanding version of themselves to work or school, so I would love to hear a little bit about that.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: To spend a little more time on the values side I think sometimes we tend to be absolutist about that. You have a principle, and that is good in a sense that it has some integrity as a principle, but when you go to apply it—you have already used the word “tradeoff”—it has to be applied in a context, and then you are into a more complex situation. I think that is sometimes why values and interests are seen in some kind of opposition when they shouldn’t be.

I like to think of values “conditioning” your interests. How do you decide what your interests are? Well, these are the values that come to mind and help you to decide what your interests are and to act in your interest in that way.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think this is a good moment to pivot from a discussion about one’s daily life to examine a little bit more how values and interests show up in the practice of international affairs, which in today’s interconnected world cuts across far more than just politicians and political institutions or the way that we as citizens might think about this concept of international affairs.

In your book Righteous Realists you reflect on the tension between morality and power as America emerged victorious from the Second World War and the institutions of this new liberal international order that were constructed in parallel to the rise of the United States. You write that political realism “can be more than just the opposite of idealism.” I assume you are alluding to a more measured space between an amoral approach to foreign policy and this version of an unobtainable utopia. I would love for you to walk our listeners through this and expand on this idea.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: There is a lot to unpack, so let me start with what prompted me down that road. This is a reflection on Hans Morgenthau; throughout his work is an elaboration on this tension. It is ironic that he was seen as the ultimate realist, but again this was what prompted my work, that there was a moral dimension to it.

You can track this thread through an article he wrote in 1950, “The Mainsprings of American Foreign Policy: The National Interest vs. Moral Abstractions,” and in his books In Defense of the National Interest and Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace.

The most famous quote I can extract that appears in all three places is: “The choice is not between moral principles and the national interest devoid of moral dignity but between one set of moral principles divorced from political reality and another set of moral principles derived from political reality.”

This is what he meant by moral “abstractions.” He finds the moral abstractions a diversion and potentially a negative consequence to the actual execution because you get caught up in the abstraction. He says, no, we have to see it in context. We have to see it actually work itself out. Remember, he says, “another set of moral principles derived from political reality,” so there are certain moral principles that are going to be in contest, and that is where he bears down.

When Morgenthau talks about power he talks about it in a very complex way. This was the source of my work because I thought he was misrepresented often as this arch-realist who didn’t have any time for morality. No, he said, actually morality provides two really important functions—you mentioned it when you talked about ends and means, but what is the end, power to what end?

Morgenthau cares about that. He opposes the Nazis, he opposes communist rule, and he is for open society. The end matters, and he talks later about the ends of politics, so you are connecting ends and means.

When it comes to means he thinks power needs to be limited in some way. The only way power is really effective is if you take seriously these moral propositions of duties and restraints. Another good quote from Morgenthau here is: “If we ask ourselves what statesmen and diplomats are capable of doing to further the power objectives of their respective nations and what they actually do, we realize they do less than they probably could and less than they actually did in other periods of history. They refuse to consider certain ends and to use certain means either altogether or under certain conditions, not because in light of expediency they appear impractical or unwise but because certain moral rules interpose an absolute barrier.” That is Hans Morgenthau.

Again, power is conditioned, and he thinks a lot about this to make power effective it has to have some degree of legitimacy, has to be seen as legitimate, and that is the connection of ends and means.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is incredibly interesting, Joel, especially around this idea of moral abstraction ironically as a hindrance to pursuing a more moral or ethical form of international relations.

We often encounter this problem at Carnegie Council. People see “ethics” in our institution’s name and can think we are only concerned with the moral abstraction or these high-level philosophical questions, when in reality for us these questions or ethics serve as a very practical guide and not some form of dogma that handcuffs us or limits applications in the real world. It is always a hill to get over for us. I think Morgenthau’s contribution to this approach is certainly felt at the Council, so much so that we literally have his portrait hanging at our Global Ethics Hub, so it is hard to miss his presence and influence.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: He is a very complex character because he also saw this problem with morality/ethics as being a mask or a cloak for power interests. You see everybody assume a moral argument for their power considerations, so you need to get underneath that. That is another dimension which is not easy to talk about in a sound bite.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is quite interesting I think to reflect on these ideas at this specific geopolitical moment. We are seeing political actors aggressively hijacking certain virtues, rebranding, and pushing alternative narratives on principles such as democracy and cooperation, and they are doing this for their own selfish ends. We are not seeing a balance between the values and interests equation.

While this certainly happened prior to this period in history—I don’t think we have blinders on here at the Council—this moment of disruption seems particularly insidious and purposeful, whether it is ethics washing by corporations or the rejection of established norms. Our Next-Gen Leadership Initiative Advisory Board member Professor Tanisha Fazal just outlined this development in a great piece for Foreign Affairs. We seem to be in a moment of global shift around the concepts of order and how to create that order.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: We see this a lot, especially in international relations, where you throw out terms like “democracy,” “sustainability,” or whatever. I think Morgenthau would say, “Okay, fine, but we need to look under the hood and what we’re really talking about.”

KEVIN MALONEY: Building upon the work of academics such as Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others, over the more recent years we have seen a number of scholars and practitioners try to examine this values and interests equation. One of my favorite contributions is from Harvard Professor Joe Nye. I recommend everybody check out his book, Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump.

In the book he proposes a framework to judge U.S. presidents and whether they acted in a moral manner. He proposes a three-dimensional ethical criteria that not only examines the means that they chose to achieve a certain policy and the ends, but he also looks at the intentions of that individual president. I think that is interesting, but I think in this moment we are seeing less of a willingness to engage in that reflection, both from personal and professional perspectives.

Joel, I would love to get your thoughts on that.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: That also gets to this theme, which I know will be a big theme in this series of conversations, of tradeoffs because when you are making tradeoffs it is an iterated game. As you are talking about the different presidents, their goals, and the tradeoffs they were willing to make through some very difficult times—world wars, the Cold War, etc.—reconciling ends and means, one way to look at it is, when a difficult decision is made what then follows? Is there some effort to mitigate or to—I don’t want to say “repair,” but at least take responsibility for a difficult decision that was made to maybe help victims or help those who may have lost out in that particular tradeoff over time. When you are talking about seeing things holistically I think that is important.

When I think about some of the Cold War history it is interesting. There were some difficult tradeoffs and some that are difficult to justify, although in the end there was a goal of achieving an open society versus the closed communist society, so it was a laudable goal, but you can as these tradeoffs were made what then followed. I think these are legitimate questions from an ethics in international affairs perspective.

KEVIN MALONEY: Traditionally politicians might allude to or signal that they at least considered the moral components of a decision but then will take an amoral action and justify it with the trope that the ends in this situation justify the means.

However, there is rarely in politics or geopolitics a self-prompted examination of unforeseen consequences. At Carnegie Council we try to stress that even those with the most “ethical intentions” cannot foresee every consequence of their actions. Therefore we think about a moral decision as not solely defined by whether it was “right” or “wrong” but by the willingness of the actor to take responsibility and address the consequences, whatever those may be. No one has a crystal ball around geopolitics and public life, and I think history has shown that those who embrace moral righteousness or absolutism find that it often produces irresponsible consequences for public and foreign policy.

I want to dig into the current moment in geopolitics a bit more, Joel. There seems to be something systemically palpable happening in many spaces across public life: We are seeing a de-prioritization of ethical reflection and an outward rejection of civic virtue as a prerequisite for leadership. How are you reading the geopolitical room at the moment? What are you seeing and what concerns you?

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I think what we are seeing is a winner-take-all mentality. The hyperpolarized nature of politics makes it so that it is very difficult to truly understand the interests of others. I think for this, the values and interests equation, to work and yield what we would consider a good, more ethical, and better result, part of it is a good-faith effort to understand the values and interests of others. This is I think what political realism, properly understood, really is.

The political realists valued pluralism very much. They valued equilibrium order and even, if we look on the domestic side, “ordered liberty.” What is ordered liberty? If you reflect on it, what it means is some degree of mutuality, some degree of respecting the standing of others, and that when you think about your own interests, whether it is personal or collective interests, it takes into account in some way the interests of others. That seems to be sorely lacking now.

This is a real problem in addition to probably some self-evident erosion of norms around civility, but again it is related to that. Why does the civility norm erode? I think it has to do with some lack of respect for the other side or what somebody else stands for or has to say. I feel the collapse of mutuality, a collapse of pluralism, and it goes along with a general coarsening of our discourse in our public space.

These things are coming together, and this goes to a leadership issue. I think we now are in a moment where that is the kind of leadership people already seem to be responding to globally, which leads to conflict over cooperation.

KEVIN MALONEY: While it is certainly important to take a realist accounting of the current situation geopolitically, I also don’t want to be all doom and gloom today, so perhaps we can shift to discuss the potential of values themselves, not just as a concept that informs and shapes our personal lives but, for lack of a better term, I want to talk about the “value” of embracing and defending universal values.

To help form this part of the discussion I want to get your reaction to a quote by Professor Amartya Sen, which he wrote in his 1999 article entitled “Democracy as a Universal Value.” In it he writes: “Universal consent is not required for something to be universal. Rather, the claim of a universal value is that people anywhere may have reason to see it as valuable.” Sen goes on to bring this to life by showcasing the universal value and appeal of nonviolence, specifically its use by Gandhi.

I think today we are seeing a lot of attempts to divide humanity by actors who see the concept of a universal value perhaps as a threat to their power and their ends. We are being flooded by disinformation and misinformation narratives that something cannot be a universal value simply because it originated in a certain part of the world or was said by a certain person or actor.

For us at the Council the universal principles of democracy, cooperation, and humanitarianism are not in and of themselves universal. We are not focused on a specific structure or brand of democracy, for example. We are focused on what these principles produce and provide access to, things like: Greater and more sustained peace, freedom of expression, and better health outcomes. Of course these things are imperfect, but I think at the Council these are organizing principles.

I believe what Sen was trying to say when he wrote this piece decades ago was just that, but I would like to get your views on how you might go about reflecting on values at a personal level and how that specific process might assist in strengthening and defending the more universal principles that I was previously discussing.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: That is well-said, and I am not sure I can improve on Professor Sen, sort of a north star for us at Carnegie Council proudly and also your interpretation of it.

I am glad you are mentioning that because much of what we do talk about begins with that recognition that there is something common in the human experience which goes to human dignity. We talk about the different language around human rights, and the question for us is how to manage differences. This gets to the heart of my understanding of pluralism, which is that we recognize something that is common in the human experience which, by the way, is across time. It is why we read classics. It is why we look at art or literature. It appeals to something that is literally universal across time and space that is human.

However, what life is actually about is difference: How do we manage our differences in a way that is peaceful or leads to better outcomes for everybody. I come back to that basic idea of mutuality and rallying around that.

To bring it to the present moment, one of the great challenges of this moment is the fragmentation that we see in our social, political, and cultural lives at exactly the same moment when the biggest challenges we are facing for humanity are collective: climate, health—the pandemic—and migration and movement.

In some ways the diagnosis is easy. I think everybody understands that we are living in these big global systems, so in some ways it does explain why people want control, so they are rebelling against it.

In the end, if you will, or in the intermediate to longer-term future, it is going to require some collective effort, some agreement on some basic, if not cooperative, coordinating principles to deal with some of these global-scale challenges. I think it is worth us exploring what those are and how to get there. It is not about trying to get everybody to be the same or everybody to be a democracy the way we like. It is more about: “Okay, these are common human challenges into the 21st century that will require some international cooperative arrangement,” so we need to think proactively about how to get there.

KEVIN MALONEY: Ironically in an interconnected world we find ourselves in a moment in which many groups and movements are drawing upon these ideas of the past. They are embracing nationalism, rejecting any sense of universality of humanity, and the goal is to create these new geopolitical spheres, these independent-operating spheres. To be reductive about it, it is basically: “We’ll take care of us, and you take care of you.”

For the Council—I think I speak for all of us—we see this as incompatible with current realities and our moral obligations as individuals as we leverage artificial intelligence more, as we automate weapons of war, as tech continues to accelerate, as the global economy becomes more interconnected, and as the threats of pandemics loom. These alter the very meaning of proximity for citizens and states. In an interconnected world it seems that values and interests can only effectively coexist through a commitment to the principle of international cooperation. It will be interesting to see this new paradigm play out over the next few years.

There is certainly a supply-and-demand issue at the moment in terms of ethics, and I think that is why I am so pleased we were able to have this discussion today. Perhaps you can respond and reflect to that framing geopolitically right now.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: That’s great. I am, too. Maybe I can leave you with another thought about that. We do think about the different places where we find power.

In international relations we traditionally think about the state, and it does begin and end with the state, but I think as you were suggesting it goes beyond that now. There are other forces, whether corporate or economic, beyond traditional interstate behavior that we have to try to understand. I think something we can do here at Carnegie Council is help people understand that a little bit better, especially as it relates to them personally and professionally, as citizens, consumers, and people. I hope we can help people to understand what we are looking at with some degree of, as you say, “realism,” but also some degree of optimism that we can create a better future.

KEVIN MALONEY: Joel, thanks so much for sitting down with us today at Carnegie Council, sharing your insight into the current geopolitical situation, and for sharing your wisdom with us and our listeners.

Because we are Carnegie Council I would be remiss not to turn the final question to that of Andrew Carnegie and what he might think of this moment in geopolitics and how he might look to respond, especially in light of the rise of this new brand of tech oligarchs we are seeing inserting themselves into public life.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: That is a great question. I think—and you hinted at it already—he would want to be creative. His philanthropy was in large scale about human institutions and social arrangements and how we organize society. This is what was behind the beginning of the public library system. This was a new idea that was systemic; it was institutional, like the whole idea of a League of Nations, World Court, and so on.

I don’t know specifically what he would be thinking, but he would be thinking big, he would be thinking structural and institutional, and he would be thinking not only about the institutions but also helping people to change the way they think. One of the most powerful instruments we have is to “change the frame,” and this is what he tried to do through his philanthropy so that people could see the world in a different way, and if they could see the world in a different way, they could act in a different way.

That is why organizations like this exist with the Carnegie name. He believed that it was not enough just to have new institutions and new arrangements but that it needed to be populated with people who were thinking in a new way. I think the challenge now is to think about our values and interests in a 21st-century way and figure out how to apply it.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think that is a great point to end on, Joel. Thank you so much for joining us on the inaugural episode of Values & Interests. We appreciate your time.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Thanks for the opportunity.