Introduction

This chapter and the following one engage in ethical analysis of certain aspects of the 1912–23 period: the violent conflicts in this chapter, policy and political issues in the following chapter. In neither do I attempt a full historical outline or explanation of the conflicts or the political elements. I aim at providing analysis of their ethically significant aspects.

In Chapter 1, I referred to Nietzsche's distinction between monumentalist (heroic), antiquarian (academic) and critical types of history. In Chapter 2, history as an academic discipline with self-conscious distancing from ethical and political causes was central. Ethical analysis of the past brings us into the zones of monumentalist and critical types of history.

At the outset, it is important to distinguish between the two main concepts in ethics: the Right and the Good (Rawls 1999, 21). The Right has to do with morality narrowly understood, concerned with the moral law or the rightness and wrongness of actions. It typically proposes relatively rigid universal norms or rules governing it, differentiating between obligatory, prohibited and permitted acts.

Commonly, this is what people assume ethics is about. Unsurprisingly, historians think that such a focus has little applicability in understanding past events. The one historical area in which universalisable moral rules for action are relevant is that of war, genocide and violent civil conflict. Forming militias (such as the Ulster Volunteers and the Irish Volunteers in 1913), importing arms and launching uprisings are open to such ethical analysis. But character, values or policies cannot be illuminatingly evaluated in a rule-governed ethic.