The Pretensions of Moral Expertise

Moral philosophy and professional ethics have long treated war as one of their most challenging concerns. They have given shape to various ways of thinking about the morality of war in abstract ways, while also returning, time and again, to wars as they unfold in the world. Across nearly every major conflict of the past century, philosophers have reflected on the permissibility of resorting to war and have examined the conduct of those who fight it. In the context of the Gaza war, some have emphasized that they have spent their “lives thinking about events such as these,” thereby claiming a special moral authority. From this self-conception, influential figures within the discipline have urged others to enter the debate, casting silence as a moral failure and treating restraint—whether born of uncertainty about the facts or of doubts about one’s standing to offer a well-grounded judgment—as a refusal to stand with causes taken to be “overwhelmingly just.”

Yet what is so described often amounts to little more than a position already familiar from contemporary commentary, which tends to settle into sweeping and one-sided condemnations of Israel. Closely tied to this posture are repeated exhortations not to remain silent. Such interventions—whether they admonish ethicists to speak out or lament the field’s supposed silence—read less like contributions to argument than like calls to enlistment. The discipline, of course, has never been silent, at least not in the sense lamented by those who insist that it has. As early as October 20, 2023, a group of Oxford scholars—including several prominent ethicists and just war theorists—issued a statement proclaiming what, “in the fullness of history, will be obvious to all”: that Israel’s military campaign is a “morally disastrous exercise,” an “onslaught on the civilian population of Gaza,” and an instance of “terrorism’s central practice: collective punishment.” Others invoked the now-familiar grammar of colonial moralization, casting Israel as a uniquely malignant “ethno-supremacist state,” the singular obstacle to “Palestinian liberation,” while portraying the latter as unavoidably bound to “struggle against apartheid and occupation.”

Many philosophers have not hesitated to let their speculation drift into what can only be described as libelous hostility. Cambridge emeritus and eminent political philosopher Raymond Geuss stands as a paradigmatic example. Why, he asks, has Israel not “finished the job” in Gaza? Geuss argues that “there is one thing Jews cannot do in London, New York or Paris, but can do in Israel, and that is show contempt for and actively mistreat a stigmatized and subject population without fearing any negative consequences,” portraying Israelis as sadists who “do not wish for the object of their sadism to disappear, because if it does, their desires are no longer fulfilled […]. Israelis may begin by dehumanizing the Palestinians to be able to oppress and eradicate them, but find themselves enjoying the process of dehumanization itself.”

Commentary of this kind—even in its more measured forms—by self-styled “moral experts” offers little of value to a non-specialist audience. As David Enoch has aptly observed, “if there’s a point to intellectual interventions in public discourse, surely it is to help make people—perhaps including those who have spent at least some of their lives doing other things—appreciate the relevant complexities.” Yet many such contributions seem animated by precisely the opposite ambition: “in hiding complexities from plain view, in keeping public discourse (to which it hopes to contribute) simplistic.” It is as though bioethicists intervening in debates over abortion were to restrict themselves to repeating slogans such as “life begins at conception.” Such claims may express a political position, and even one that some philosophers sincerely hold. But they bypass the distinctive task for which philosophical expertise is supposed to matter at all: sustained, careful engagement with the moral, conceptual, and empirical complexities that structure these disputes.

The Manufacture of Moral Certainty

While open letters and op-eds in major news outlets may be intelligible as expressions of their authors’ political preoccupations, or as reflections of editorial leanings, one might reasonably expect a higher degree of intellectual discipline and diversity of judgment in peer-reviewed journals and other genuinely academic venues. The recent barrage of publications by moral philosophers, however, suggests that in the case of the Gaza war, the boundaries of acceptable argument are determined less by reasoned assessment than by the palate of the publisher. The titles of many articles—such as “Is it genocide? Yes, it is” or “Israel’s war against Gazans”—reveal not only the precarious thinness of argumentative force but also the predominance of performative expertise: a trite reshaping of theory and fact to suit a foregone verdict.

Consider, for example, Oxford emeritus Jeff McMahan, arguably not only one of the world’s leading moral philosophers, but the most influential contemporary war ethicist. Across his various contributions to the war, McMahan advances a striking reversal of moral culpability. Israel is blamed for failing to fulfill its “duties of justice to the Palestinians” by withholding statehood; condemned militarily for not having stationed “combat-ready forces along the border with Gaza”; and its political leadership is described in terms of moral monstrosity, with Netanyahu portrayed as “as evil as any human being could possibly be.”

To establish that Israel’s war is unjust, McMahan advances a form of reasoning remarkable both for its moral idiosyncrasy and its tenuous connection to reality. Drawing on the trolley problem—a familiar thought experiment used to illuminate marginal cases of side-effect killing—and appealing to special obligations to one’s compatriots, he proposes a one-to-five ratio: the saving of one life may justify the death of five opposing innocents. He then extrapolates this ratio across discrete military operations and overall casualty figures, concluding that Israel’s war fails the test of proportionality and is therefore unjust. This conception of proportionality conflicts not only with international humanitarian law and centuries of just war theory, but with nearly every other contemporary account in war ethics. Nor is McMahan’s understanding of conditions on the ground any less eccentric. Of Hamas’s systematic use of human shields he writes: “Since Hamas members cannot leave Gaza, which is densely populated with civilians, one wonders where else can they embed themselves.” One might almost picture Gaza as an uninterrupted corridor of hospitals, schools, and mosques, its terrorists merely victims of unfortunate urban planning.

McMahan, however, is not an outlier. One may select almost any philosophy journal at random, scan its recent abstracts, or systematically survey the past two years of publications on the topic, and the pattern is unmistakable: an overwhelming number of contributions culminate in ritualized condemnations of Israel, exemplified by injunctions such as “we must oppose and condemn Israel’s deliberate production of health scarcity by every means available to us.” This is not merely a matter of tone or argumentative quality, but of sheer imbalance in volume and emphasis. Take, for example, the Journal Bioethics: since October 7, 2023, nearly all articles addressing the war—most framed as analyses of medical ethics—cast Israel in an uncharitable light, to put it mildly, with only a single published rebuttal among them (my own). This is but one illustration of a broader pattern. The same asymmetry recurs across virtually all comparable venues. Some permit slightly more room for rebuttal than others, yet none escape the underlying uniformity.

Ethics as Narration

While pieces like McMahan’s and a handful of others remain, despite their selective sourcing and extravagant reasoning, at least in principle open to argumentative disagreement—that is, they still operate within the rules of ethical inquiry—other contributions appear to sidestep, or even abandon, the field altogether, ending in moral narration, stipulation, or performative moral gestures. “Amid explosions in Gaza, the silence from the bioethics community is deafening,” reads the headline of one philosophy journal article. Another goes further, asserting that the discipline has forfeited its credibility entirely, its ostensible silence on “the Gaza genocide” revealing a deeper crisis at the heart of professional ethics. Revealingly, the authors speculate about possible explanations for this silence, only to dismiss them all. Among these is “lack of expertise,” which many might regard as a perfectly sound reason not to rush into sweeping moral condemnations. Not so for the authors. Instead, they champion an approach that conflates the mere existence of suffering with moral wrongdoing, treating causation as equivalent to culpability and foreclosing the kind of careful, context-sensitive reasoning central to just war or proportionality analysis.

They offer as a corrective the elevation of moral narration, the “lived experiences” of those affected by violence, into a normative trump card. In this framework, ethical reasoning becomes secondary to performative moral expression. That is, the act of speaking, bearing witness, or signaling outrage replaces the disciplined adjudication of complex moral conundrums. Objectivity, they argue, “conceals willing, reluctant, or unnoticed complicity with dominant social structures.” Likewise, restraint in deploying terms like “apartheid, racism, and genocide in the name of neutrality” is read not as caution or scholarly prudence, but as alignment with power. A different route is taken in a recent commentary ostensibly concerned with semantic rigor in war, which reduces ethics to a practice of limitation incapable of ever “justifying the escalation of force.” By this impoverished reconceptualization, any judgment about resort to violence is rendered unintelligible, automatically foreclosing debate and declaring any war unjust by default, without a moment of reflection. These contributions reveal a discipline increasingly oriented toward moral performance, political advocacy, and expressive solidarity, rather than the painstaking ethical analysis it claims to practice. Tragedy is equated with wrongdoing, causation with culpability, and narrative supplants reasoning. The rigorous interrogation of responsibility and proportionality is replaced with stipulations that foreclose nuanced judgment, leaving bioethics simultaneously loud in expression and impotent in addressing the real ethical complexities of war.

What also stands out is a strikingly selective portrayal of the factual record, presented as though it were clear-cut and uniformly detrimental to Israel, even while authors insist that their assumptions are “highly favorable” or even “unrealistically favorable” to Israel. Data are repeatedly invoked in ways that reinforce predetermined conclusions, while their scope, limitations, and potential biases are largely neglected. In many cases, sources are cited that had already been substantially disqualified or effectively withdrawn at the time of writing. McMahan, for example, engages casualty figures by treating them as underestimates, drawing on sources circulated in academic venues such as by Rasha Khatib and colleagues, who suggested figures of up to 186,000 deaths, numbers later acknowledged to be “purely illustrative” and widely criticized for misrepresentation and unreliable sourcing. The resulting factual framing across these papers is deeply misleading, presenting a complex and contested body of evidence in a consistently and conspicuously uncharitable light toward Israel.

More troubling still are the numerous subtle omissions and tacit insinuations that pervade many analyses. McMahan, for example, writes that “Hamas has, between the time that it came to power in Gaza in 2006 and 2025, been able to kill only 99 Israeli civilians who were not at the time in Palestinian lands, dispossessing the inhabitants.” This formulation quietly subtracts 106 Israeli civilians—those described as “settlers in the West Bank”—from the total of at least 205 civilian deaths, thereby implicitly suggesting that their deaths carry diminished moral weight, if any at all. The maneuver is never defended, let alone acknowledged. Yet its normative implication is unmistakable: certain civilian lives are rendered morally negligible by definitional fiat rather than by argument. Others lend implicit credibility to Hamas by emphasizing that it is a “proscribed terrorist organization in the countries whose citizens and institutions dominate bioethics,” thereby reinforcing a moral narrative in which ethical judgment is tacitly indexed to Western legal and institutional consensus and thus rendered normatively hollow, tracking relations of power rather than moral reasoning.

Editorial Power and Ideological Capture

One is left to wonder how articles of this sort pass through peer review at all. No appeal to conspiratorial thinking is required to acknowledge the now well-documented extent of misreporting and structural bias that has shaped coverage of the conflict, including within otherwise reputable news organizations such as the BBC. It is at least plausible that analogous dynamics exert an influence on academic publishing as well. In such a climate, certain perspectives may encounter a form of quiet exclusion—a “hidden boycott” of sorts—akin to the obstacles reported by scholars whose views are discounted simply because they are expressed by individuals who are Jewish or have Israeli affiliations. Consider, for example, the BMJ Publishing Group, which oversees several influential ethics journals and has repeatedly distinguished itself by a conspicuous anti-Israel tilt. Editorials and articles proliferate that trade argument for insinuation, with little apparent regard for even minimal academic standards. The handling of responses and critical commentaries only deepens the impression of institutional bias. This pattern is hardly unique to BMJ. Across leading medical journals, the majority of published contributions portray Israel in an uncharitable light. It is difficult to see how such an environment could foster genuine intellectual dissent, especially when dissenting views, where they surface, have been met with unfairness and prejudice.

Further anecdotal evidence of ideological capture—among editors and reviewers alike—emerges across multiple journals. At Analyse & Kritik, an editor reportedly conditioned consideration of a submission on the requirement that it include explicit “commenting on the destruction of Gaza,” a demand that functions less as scholarly guidance than as ideological gatekeeping. Reviewers at the same journal made little effort to conceal their posture, employing openly ad hominem language, most notably characterizing the author’s arguments as those of “Netanyahu apologists.” This closely mirrors my own experience at that journal. In May 2025, I submitted a manuscript to Analyse & Kritik that proceeded through peer review and received what I understood to be requests for relatively minor revisions. The subsequent rejection, however, was explicitly not grounded in concerns about the quality of the work. Instead, I was informed that it reflected a shift in editorial orientation. According to this revised stance, any discussion of Israel’s conduct in the war was now deemed irrelevant unless framed in accordance with what the editors characterized as Israel’s “new war goals,” a campaign directed against civilians and a project of ethnic cleansing, described as the “minimization and displacement of the Palestinian population.”

In another instance, a paper of mine was initially accepted “as is” within about six weeks, requiring no revisions, and accompanied by two exceptionally positive reviews—the most glowing I have ever received for any submitted piece. One reviewer noted that “the author provides a unique voice in the debate—one that is […] genuinely searching for more honest and rigorous moral assessments,” praised the work for its “intellectual courage, expressed with scholarly rigor,” and described it as “a compelling contribution to the field of the ethics of armed conflict.” Yet, to my surprise, while the manuscript had already been sent to production, it was soon “un-accepted.” I was informed, with bureaucratic courtesy, that “with all the papers on this topic, [the editors] are required to check with the publisher’s content team before sending the papers to production.” This body, evidently ignorant of basic political theory and war ethics, suggested revisions or even the removal of passages deemed “incendiary,” passages that, in fact, presented key examples supporting my argument and portrayed Israel’s military activity in a more charitable light.

In various reviews, I was persistently reminded of how supposedly mistaken I was about the facts and how “deeply problematic” the implications of my claims were. The stark asymmetry in prisoner-for-hostage exchanges that I had noted in one manuscript, I was told, “in fact” reflects power imbalances in negotiations and “how many people the respective parties incarcerate.” Israel, it was pointed out, has greater leverage in “locking them up” and possesses “more resources to materially express that devaluation [of Palestinians].” The reviews went further, suggesting that “a great many Israelis have been recorded celebrating the deaths of Palestinians,” and that “this is in part why Maccabi Tel Aviv FC fans are not allowed to attend the upcoming match against Aston Villa,” implying that such incidents should be treated as evidence of moral equivalence between the parties, in terms of how each values the lives of innocents.

The same posture reappeared at the editorial level. When I inquired whether my manuscript might be considered, one editor insisted that I was mistaken about the facts, which, in their view, rendered my reasoning and interpretation defective from the outset. My attribution to Hamas of an intention to eliminate the Jews of Israel was dismissed as factually incorrect; the organization, I was told, is “merely antizionist,” a claim defended by reference to revisions of its political charter. Other responses were more openly ad hominem. One editor suggested that my analysis—offered, as they put it, “as a bystander, let alone from Germany”—ought itself to become “a point of discussion,” implying that the historical burden of German guilt compelled me to defend Israel uncritically and thereby disqualified my judgment as irredeemably biased.

Accounts shared by colleagues help to situate these encounters within a broader pattern: articles rejected without commentary despite overall favorable reviews; admonitions to “get the facts right” or accusations of ignorance regarding history and contemporary realities; and, in some cases, ad hominem attacks and outright hostility. Reviewer reports have at times employed sidelong or euphemistic language, declining even to use the name “Israel,” substituting instead phrases such as “the settler-colonial entity,” drawing comparisons to Nazi Germany, or depicting Israel—echoing rhetoric of the sort employed by Raymond Geuss—as a polity whose very “foundations” rest on the “dehumanization of others.” Authors, in turn, have been accused of “excelling” in genocide denial.

One might reasonably ask how such openly hostile language—far beyond what one would assume to be academically acceptable—can pass peer review, and why it is not corrected by editors whose role is to evaluate the quality of commentary and reviews. A closer look at some of these gatekeepers offers at least a partial explanation. In several cases, political bias is not merely implicit but openly declared, reflected in public statements or prior writings, giving rise to what would ordinarily count, at minimum, as a conflict of interest. Some editors are publicly engaged in activism against Israel outside their editorial roles. For example, Arianne Shahvisi, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics, has repeatedly expressed strongly hostile views toward Israel while shaping the journal’s direction through highly polemical editorials. Similarly, the special issue “Bioethical Aspects of the War in Gaza” in Bioethics illustrates the limits of editorial neutrality. One of its guest editors, Zohar Lederman, has authored a series of sharp condemnations of Israel, including rebuttals directed at articles that were themselves critical but judged insufficiently sweeping or unequivocal. The cumulative effect is an environment in which submissions aligned with a prevailing orthodoxy seem to advance with relative ease, while dissenting perspectives are at best quietly discouraged, and at worst treated as morally suspect from the outset.

When Philosophy Fails Morality

The discipline may indeed be in a state of numbing failure, but in a manner quite different from what philosophers imagine when lamenting the purported silence of their peers. David DeGrazia, one of the most respected figures in contemporary animal ethics, inadvertently offers a curious self-diagnosis. In an academic contribution, he explains why philosophers—particularly American philosophers—should condemn Israel. His rationale? “Without American support, Israel’s apartheid system would probably long ago have gone the way of South Africa’s original Apartheid regime.” Withdraw US support, and a serene South Africa, he suggests, will bloom between the river and the sea. Why, he wonders, do not more people speak out? The explanations, he offers, are “very poor at moral reasoning (due to youth or low intelligence), uninformed, brainwashed by conspiracy theories, or comatose.” There you have it: a taxonomy of moral failure, reflected wryly not only in the author and in those who canonized his claims, but in a discipline increasingly devoted to performative expertise and the trite reshaping of theory and fact to fit a foregone verdict.

Yet this failure is not merely a lapse confined to matters of armchair contemplation. It is far more serious. It consists in laundering activism and public polemic through academic prose, thereby conferring philosophical authority on what would otherwise appear as ideological agitation. In doing so, resentment, hatred, and even the legitimation of violence are endowed with the prestige of moral expertise. What, one is left to ask, is to be done with—as Raymond Geuss put it—“sadistic” Jews “in London, New York, or Paris” who allegedly “find themselves enjoying the process of dehumanization” of others, restrained only by the contingency of not living in Israel? Or with a political leader whom Jeff McMahan describes as “as evil as any human being could possibly be”? Such formulations are not merely intemperate rhetoric. They amount to something far worse: an almost exemplary invitation to political violence. And such invitations, as recent history grimly reminds us—Colorado, Washington, Manchester, Bondi—do not fall on deaf ears. Through their obsessive fixation on Israel—not in the spirit of fair and discriminating criticism, but within the moralized idiom of activism and denunciation—and through the recklessness of their language, these philosophers bear substantial responsibility for the consequences of their words. This is not a matter of theoretical disagreement. It is a matter of moral failure. They should be deeply ashamed of themselves.