Amy Gutmann, who taught at Princeton through the 1980s and 1990s, captured the logic of the era when she argued that “our primary moral allegiance is to no community,” national or otherwise, but rather “to justice” itself. The ideal at the time, and still for many today, was for a sort of disembodied morality, one unshackled from the inconvenient particularities of actual life. But this move toward the ethereal, the post-national, and the essentially academic has strained the moral capacity of our species.
