'THE MORAL position is irrelevant,' was Sinn Fein spokesman Danny Morrison's

chilling comment when asked after the Bright on bombing whether mass murder
was the; best way for the IRA to achieve its political aims.
For those of us who believe in parliamentary democracy with its admittedly
imperfect (and only occasional) accountability to a mass electorate, the idea that
people who use bombing and killing to gain their objectives do not feel
themselves accountable to even the most basic moral ground rules is particularly
frightening. The
'Legitimacy' is a popular Provisional concept, much more so than morality
'Legitimacy' is a popular Provisional concept, much more so than morality. Thus
Mervyn Simpson, the mechanical digger driver who had left the UDR three years
ago, was a 'legitimate target' when he was shot dead by the IRA in Dungannon
last month. Wives of members of the Conservative Party were 'legitimate targets'
(although Morrison was careful to stress that the maids in the Grand Hotel were
not). Jimmy Campbell, the petty criminal from the Lower Falls, was another such
target (see story on page 8) although evidently much more serious criminals with
Provis ional connections in the same area are not. Who decides when it is
legitimate to kill these people? Legit imate means lawful - a far narrower
meaning than moral, which has to do with the nature of good and evil - so under
what law are they condemned to die? Is it the 'law' that national self
determination is the highest good, a 'law' that was only starting to be recognised
150 years ago and is already coming into disrepute in many parts of the world?
'Legitimacy' is a popular Provisional concept, much more so than morality. Thus
Mervyn Simpson, the mechanical digger driver who had left the UDR three years
ago, was a 'legitimate target' when he was shot dead by the IRA in Dungannon
last month. Wives of members of the Conservative Party were 'legitimate targets'
(although Morrison was careful to stress that the maids in the Grand Hotel were
not). Jimmy Campbell, the petty criminal from the Lower Falls, was another such
target (see story on page 8) although evidently much more serious criminals with
Provis ional connections in the same area are not.
Who decides when it is legitimate to kill these people? Legit imate means lawful a far narrower meaning than moral, which has to do with the nature of good and
evil - so under what law are they condemned to die? Is it the 'law' that national
self determination is the highest good, a 'law' that was only starting to be
recognised 150 years ago and is already coming into disrepute in many parts of
the world?

IT IS NOW about seventy years since Tolstoy told us, in his eloquent essay What
Is Art, that art was genuine only when it "either evokes in men those feelings
which, through love of God and one's neighbor, draw them to greater and ever
greater union, and make them ready for and capa ble of such union; or evokes in
them those feelings which show them that they are al ready united in the joys
and sorrows of life."'l And it is in this same chapter that Tolstoy goes on to banish
the great works of Shakespeare, Moliere, Dante, and Beethoven, since these
works are not capable of bringing about the proper feelings in all men. Needless
to say, the history of criticism in the last seventy years has given little comfort to
anyone who wishes to judge art on such a basis.
The symbolist movement in literature and the formalist emphasis in aestheticsas well as almost all of the twentieth-century developments in painting and
music-have led us away from any attempt to enlist art in the service of a
common morality. Even in literature, the one art in which the limits of formalism
are most obvious, modern criticism has emphasized the autonomy of the
poem and the novel. The significance of a literary work has been found not so
much in the idea or the feeling which the artist expresses but in the image and
the struc ture which transforms the idea and the feel ing. We are concerned, as T.
S. Eliot phrased it, to see what "was not in exist ence before the poem was
completed."2 As a consequence of such an attitude toward lit erature, what did
exist before the work was completed, the ideas and beliefs of the writer, was
thought of as material, as part of the writer's donnee, and not part of the literary
significance of the work.

3
In the title essay the author sees the world in a moral abyss, from which various
writers have tried to extricate it by the polar approaches of social morality and
individual morality. The social moralists, he says, assume that the social
structure itself is reponsible for society's ills and that the way to improve society
is by "lift
This

In his book "Humanism and Terror," * Merleau-Ponty treats the central problem of
our time with extraordinary sensitivity, depth, realism, and balance
Sweeping away straw men, and defining the problem for what it is, MerleauPonty poses the question thus: Since, by virtue of the victory won by the

Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, confirmed and consolidated by the Allied victory in

World War II, Communist power now presents itself as a colossal state system,
which by definition (of the state, not Communism) means a massive system of
institutionalized violence, and since liberal power also presents itself as a
colosssal state system of institutionalized violence, the first choice, impossible
for anyone any where to avoid, is between these two systems, each of which is a
com plex of theory and practice . This means that each is a complex of hu
manism and violence, since each professes a deep devotion to various humanist
ideals and goals, while taking all sorts of actions admittedly contrary to humanist
norms, which actions each sytem tries to justify on the ground that its own are
the regrettable but historically necessary means to reach humanist goals which
will ultimately render such means unnecessary.