The U.S. had better decide what it wants to be 50 years from now.

When I took Mike Sandel’s “Justice” course at Harvard, he was quite young and not yet the professorial rock star that he is today. We learned about Kant’s categorical imperative: an unconditional moral command that dictates how we must act through reason, regardless of our personal desires or the outcomes. We learned of such things as children through Star Trek. Kirk and friends often found themselves with two competing imperatives. The “Prime Directive” stated that the Enterprise crew could not interfere with the culture or natural development of the lifeforms on planets they visited. But they also had an imperative not to die. What happens when such obligations cannot both be fulfilled?

The U.S. actually faced such a situation after the Second Gulf War. In areas under U.S. administration, courts were created. The U.S. had two major imperatives that ended up being totally incompatible:

Respect the local culture; ours is not superior.

All people are equal, men and women included.

So, the U.S. set up courts, and some of the judges were women — trained as lawyers in Saddam’s more permissive Muslim Iraqi society. Well, some men brought before the courts absolutely refused to listen to a word that the female judges said. Islamic courts do not have lady jurists, and the locals were not going to have some woman tell them to pay a fine or go to jail. So they openly stated that they would not respect the courts and even at times threatened the new judges. What should the U.S. have done: continue its Western women-equal-men policy or bow to Islamic local tradition and make judges men only? There was a similar event during Desert Storm when a Saudi pilot refused to receive instructions from a female American air traffic controller.

I bring up these TV and real-world examples because the U.S. is facing a........

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