Morals and nuclear war

Extract

Morality is not immediately concerned with what happens but with what people do. The characteristic moral judgment is not ‘It would be better to have this happen than that’ but ‘It would be good to do this, better to do this other, and definitely bad to do that’.

It is important to restate this platitude because nearly all muddle in questions of morality comes from forgetting it. Take for example, the business of the population explosion and contraceptives: you can have an interesting discussion about whether the world would be a better place with a large population or a small one, whether a large population means too many mouths to feed or more hands to work, and so on. Such a discussion can be very interesting but is attended by a curious difficulty—apart from dogma and prejudice it is exceedingly difficult to rest the discussion on any firm basis at all. You get difficult exchanges like ‘If you do such and such, the human race will not survive’. ‘Why should the human race survive?’ ‘Well I just want it to’. Mr Evelyn Waugh’s famous and characteristic remark that he saw no objection to the destruction of the human race, especially if, as seems likely, it should happen accidentally, was taken as some kind of joke. But it is perfectly serious. Mr Evelyn Waugh sees no objection, if you are surprised it is up to you to think of an objection. One of the most interesting things about a discussion of this kind is that it brings you up against these curious puzzles.