Given the nature of the decision-making process in modern institutions, those concerned with normative questions must sharpen these questions. And they must learn to express them in terms which will be meaningful to those concerned with the technical aspects of the policy and planning process and also to the experienced concerns of the polity. This translation of ethical questions into political form requires that ethics take its place in the dialogue which already is going on in the disciplines of the social sciences. The task for ethics in this conversation is to be able to maintain its own integrity—its own agenda—without falling victim to the illusion that integrity means autonomy.

The main issue I wish to raise here is not that the rhetoric of recent discussion of foreign policy (which was petulant from the first.teach-in) became outrageously reckless and uncivil. It is, rather, that emotion- laden speech too often contains a category-mistake or wrongly uses a term. The first betrayal in moral and political discourse is always a betrayal of the language through which men seek understanding. It is not the fury of disagreement, though no doubt the former fuels the latter.