Renowned public intellectual, Harvard University professor, and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Michael Ignatieff came to Macalester last week to deliver a lecture entitled "The Lesser Evil: Politics in an Age of Terror."

His visit was part of the Political Science Department’s annual Mitau Endowed Lectureship in Public Policy that is designed to honor the memory of celebrated Macalester professor Theodore Mitau.

His visit also included an afternoon lunch with students and a panel discussion with other professors in response to his lecture.

Macalester Professor of Political Science Frank Adler gave Ignatieff a warm and lengthy introduction in the Weyerhaeuser Memorial Chapel, which has filled with participants from around the region.

Ignatieff began by thanking Adler for practically giving his lecture for him and made a joking reference to the secular patron saint of Macalester, Kofi Annan.

He began his presentation by defining terrorism as the "greater evil" not because it deliberately targets civilians, but because it destroys "the very possibility of politics."

As one of the nation’s leading "liberal hawks" in academia who came out in support of preemptive war in Iraq, Ignatieff outlined his criteria for legitimate armed struggle: violence must be a last resort and it must target only the "agents of oppression," he said.

He criticized both the U.S. war on terror for the absence of defined boundaries for the curtailing of civil liberties and what he termed "human rights absolutism" for being "morally unrealistic."

Ignatieff said that terrorists "invariably turn to violence as a first resort," silencing the voices of those in whose name they claim to act, and for that reason "they must be crushed."

The legitimate grounds for eliminating international terrorism lies in "collective self-defense" for the protection of "our free societies." The real ethical question, he stated, was what type of "lesser evil" was justifiable in preventing the "greater evil." From the suspension of civil liberties to secret uses of executive power, the torture of suspects, targeted assassinations, and preemptive war, Ignatieff defined the "gradient of moral hazard" associated with the war on terror.

In a panel discussion the next day, Macalester Dean of International Studies Amhed Samatar was highly critical of Ignatieff’s perceived ethnocentrism, bringing up events ranging from the Crusades to contemporary U.S. foreign policy.

Ignatieff responded that he was unwilling to "take the rap for the Crusades" and acknowledged that there were irreconcilable differences between his and Samatar’s positions.

He concluded by warning that a "war on terror takes us into a dark moral realm which is outside the laws and customs of war and outside the easy certainties of human rights."