Principle of Moral Universality

The Principle of Moral Universality is the rule that an action cannot be right for one actor and wrong for another merely because of who performs it. In Noam Chomsky’s argument, this is not an abstract appeal to consistency: it tests whether the United States and its allies accept the same limits on violence that they invoke against their adversaries. Applied to the response to the September 11 attacks, the principle challenges retaliation and preventive force, and points instead toward evidence, lawful proceedings, and common standards of judgment.

The rule and its stakes

Chomsky states the principle in reciprocal terms: if an action is right when performed by “us,” it must also be right when performed by others; if it is wrong for others, it is wrong for “us.” The rule makes identity and power irrelevant to the basic moral judgment. Those who reject it, he argues, are effectively saying that power itself makes actions permissible and removes them from serious discussion of right and wrong.

The standard also puts the rhetoric of a “just war” under pressure. Chomsky suggests that adopting even this elementary test would alter the debate over the response to the September 11 attacks, because arguments that rely on a special exemption for the United States would no longer suffice. Rather than treating universal morality as a slogan, he uses it to ask whether the same proposed action could be accepted if its target and perpetrator were reversed.

Legal limits and the alternative to reprisal

The principle is reinforced by the international legal framework established after the Second World War. Chomsky describes the United Nations Charter as excluding the use of force except in self-defense against an armed attack, or through action by the Security Council to protect international peace and security. Reprisals, in particular, are prohibited. He argues that the September 11 attacks did not constitute an armed attack in the sense required by Article 51, so that provision could not justify a response unless its standards were applied to the United States as well as to states it opposed.

That legal distinction matters to the proposed response. Chomsky does not treat arrest and trial as equivalent to bombing or retaliation: he argues that if evidence established the culpability of Osama bin Laden and his associates, international legal institutions would likely support efforts to apprehend and prosecute them, including the use of force if necessary. He notes that nearly the whole world had asked the United States for evidence of bin Laden’s involvement and that such evidence could have secured support for an international operation under United Nations auspices. The Taliban, he says, had indicated possible diplomatic avenues, but those proposals were rejected in favor of force.

The point is not that crimes should go unanswered, but that the response should fit both the evidence and the law. Chomsky draws on the precedent of the Oklahoma City bombing: once investigators found that its instigators were in the United States, the response was to identify, try, and convict those responsible, not to bomb a distant region. He argues that crimes have motives that may merit attention, and that there are lawful means of addressing them whatever their scale. This example makes domestic law enforcement a contrast to collective punishment and military reprisal.

Historical tests of consistency

Chomsky tests the principle against the United States’ own record. In 1986, the International Court of Justice condemned the United States for unlawful force against Nicaragua; the United States then vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to comply with international law. The sequence matters in his argument: the court supplied a legal judgment, while the veto showed how a powerful state could block collective action calling for compliance.

The Nicaragua case also supplies a contrast in how an injured country can respond. During the 1980s, the United States attacked Nicaragua and waged a devastating economic war. Chomsky says the combined toll included tens of thousands of deaths and destruction from which the country might never recover. Nicaragua did not answer by bombing Washington. It went to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in its favor and ordered the United States to stop its actions and pay substantial reparations. The United States rejected the ruling and intensified its attacks. Nicaragua then turned to the Security Council, where the United States alone vetoed a resolution urging respect for international law, and to the General Assembly, which adopted a similar resolution by a majority. The United States and Israel voted against it two years running; El Salvador joined them once. For Chomsky, this history exposes the gap between a legal remedy urged on others and the conduct of a state able to disregard an adverse decision.

He places Nicaragua alongside Cuba and South Vietnam to challenge the maxim that an attacked country should simply strike back. Under that principle, he argues, those countries and others would have been entitled to bomb Washington and other American cities. Yet such retaliation is not accepted as a right for them. His examples of United States policy toward Cuba and Nicaragua sharpen the asymmetry: the United States had pursued terror against Cuba after the failed invasion of the island and waged a destructive war against Nicaragua under Ronald Reagan, but neither country was understood to have a right to bomb Washington or assassinate American officials.

The same test extends to the bombing of Afghanistan by the United States and Britain. Chomsky observes that the stated aim at the beginning of the bombing was to compel the Taliban to hand over men suspected of crimes, while the announced aim shifted weeks later to overthrowing the Taliban leadership. Under a universal standard, he argues, those changing objectives do not by themselves establish a right to bomb Afghans. The moral question is not settled by the identity of the state using force, or by the confidence with which its objectives are stated.

Preventive force and the power to define exceptions

The Principle of Moral Universality also challenges the doctrine of preventive strikes. Chomsky notes that preventive action had precedents: planners associated with the Reagan administration had defended the 1986 bombing of Libya as self-defense against a future attack, and advisers to Bill Clinton had advocated a preventive response that could include a nuclear attack. What he identifies as new is the open assertion that preventive strikes should be recognized as lawful, alongside public indications that the doctrine might be applied to Iraq.

The reciprocal implication is stark. If the United States may claim a right to use preventive terror against a possible threat, then Iraq would, by the same standard, have a right to use preventive terror against the United States. Chomsky emphasizes that this conclusion is not accepted. That refusal, in his view, reveals the doctrine’s selective structure: it grants permission to those powerful enough to act while disregarding what the same rule would authorize for others. The burden of proof, he argues, rests on those who advocate or tolerate a threat of violence.

A further test comes from the United States’ legal designation of foreign terrorist organizations. The designation criteria include whether an organization’s activities threaten the security of American nationals or the national security of the United States, including its defense, foreign affairs, or economic interests. Chomsky’s universal standard raises the question of how security claims and definitions of terrorism are applied: a rule cannot count as neutral if its moral force depends on the identity and power of the state invoking it.

Selective morality and political consequences

Chomsky describes a common answer to such comparisons: “WE are good, and THEY are evil.” In his account, that assumption often remains unargued in public commentary and specialist work. When observers bring historical evidence to bear on it, the resulting backlash helps reveal which standards are treated as cultural common sense and which comparisons are dismissed as unacceptable. The principle thus operates not only as a test of state action but also as a method for examining how public argument distributes responsibility.

He connects the problem of selective judgment to the consequences of the post-September 11 response. The United States’ bombing of Afghanistan, he suggests, may have communicated a warning about what would happen to states that did not follow the rules set by the United States. He compares this interpretation with the NATO bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had described in terms of ensuring NATO’s credibility. In both cases, the claimed strategic purpose places the authority and standing of a powerful actor at the center; universality asks whether the same logic would be accepted when invoked by a weaker state.

The resulting principle is demanding because it denies the powerful an automatic exemption. It does not settle every disputed question about evidence, jurisdiction, or a proportionate response, but it specifies the standard by which those questions must be approached: the same rules for allies and adversaries, for the injured and the powerful. In Chomsky’s argument, lawful accountability and moral consistency are not obstacles to addressing terrorism. They are what distinguish a response to crime from the reproduction of violence under a different name.