Q + A: The Rev. J. Bryan Hehir
RESEARCH | The Rev. J. Bryan Hehir is a Catholic priest, the secretary for health care and social services in the Archdiocese of Boston, and the Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at HKS. He has been dean of Harvard Divinity School, president of Catholic Charities USA, and director of the office of international affairs of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops. In the past 20 years Hehir has thought and written extensively on the moral dimensions of military intervention.
Q In what way has the field of international relations changed in the past 20 years from the perspective of someone concerned with ethics?
In the 1990s, moralists were really trying to make a moral argument in places like Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone that force ought to be used because of the nature of the human rights violations happening there. So most of us who had worked on the ethics of just war, about what states ought to do to use force or restrain force, had to try to develop an ethic of intervention arguing that there were certain circumstances where, even though the classical category of national interest wouldn’t be very involved, in fact there were moral and perhaps legal reasons to use force. That’s still an unfinished story — one reason being that 9/11 took us in a completely different direction.
Q What are the main repercussions of the turn U.S. foreign policy took after 9/11?
When you are the leading military power in the world and you set up a justifiable case for preemption as a strategic doctrine, meaning we will respond in times and places of our own choosing — I think that tilts the whole international system toward a preemptive mode. If the strongest power in the world can do it, when you don’t necessarily have an imminent threat, you’re implicitly giving permission to others to do it.
Q You are an educator, a scholar, an administrator, and of course a priest. What connects all that you do?
The pieces of my life, while they’re diverse, have a kind of inner unity, at least as I try to live them. I’ve always lived in a parish. That keeps you in contact with people at a specific level. If you work in a social service agency, you have some direct experience of the consequences of the policies you are dealing with. And when I worked at the Bishops Conference, I had the chance to see consequences of harmful policies in the lives of people of different parts of the world: Latin America, South Africa, East Asia. To some degree, the teaching and writing and the administrative work are connected to an awareness of the impacts of that on people’s lives.