What about people who deny that? NC: Does anyone actually, literally, deny that? JM: . . . Not, I suppose, without shifting out of the moral domain. NC: What people would say, I think, is that yes, we keep to universal principles, but the special circumstances are such that . . . JM: . . . Wait a minute; the people we’re dealing with are not real people? NC: . . . No, they are – like Henry Kissinger or somebody. There are people who say that it can’t be universalized. But if you asked Kissinger, who does have the honesty to say it rather than just accept it when it is convenient, he would say that of course, really, at some other level, it is universalized. But it's a deeper principle that is universalized, one that exempts us from the restriction against, say, aggressive war. So the deeper universal principle is, say, that you have to act to make the world the best possible world, but a special case of that is that we have to be exempt from every moral principle. So it's still universalized: immoral, of course, but universalized.[C] Actually, there's an interesting paper that I don’t understand, but it's interesting.
