I’ve been thinking about old Winston Churchill.

Churchill loved to smoke cigars. He was boisterous, often unpleasant, sometimes a bit callous and rude including to his loved ones. He was, in many ways, a bit of a pain in the neck!

There are probably many small adjustments that Churchill could’ve made to his habits and his daily life that would also have improved the lives of others. For example, Churchill could have stopped smoking around people; he could have worked on becoming more pleasant and agreeable; he could have stopped eating meat.

But Churchill’s country had given him a mission: win the bloody war.

Churchill, in fact, did win the war. He succeeded in this mission.

If you approached Churchill and said “Hey mate, if you stop smoking / being such a belligerent jackass / eating meat / yelling at the waiter / whatever, then this would be a morally good choice. You would be improving the lives of others at a negligible cost to your own wellbeing, thus bringing about a net improvement in the state of the universe.”

You could even go further and say something like “In fact, I know you have a very hard job, and you’re working very hard for the good of your country. But if you use that as an excuse not to stop smoking / being a jackass / whatever, then you would be engaging in moral licensing, which is irrational.”

Had Churchill’s patience survived to this point, he probably would have said something like “Shove off, I’ve just been in 14 hours of non-stop meetings and war preparations. I need a smoke, and I’m going to have a bloody smoke.”

Now, I’m not even trying to argue that Churchill’s cigar smoking / jackassery was part of some fifth-dimensional moral calculus that is actually morally justified by virtue of being a relaxing activity, thus replenishing this man’s energy for the next day’s trials.

I’m just trying to say: this guy had a mission, and he succeeded. Everything else is details. Strictly speaking, you can make the case that people ought to act morally, and that using their other moral strengths to justify the occasional moral weakness is a case of moral licensing. This is, strictly speaking, correct. But I think it’s silly!

Churchill won the war. He probably annoyed his wife and may have even increased the risk of lung cancer in the people in his immediate surroundings. But history would have taken no notice of these minor failings if not for the fact that he actually achieved the single thing that was asked of him.

(Now, I hesitated to give a military example for this blog post. I am, it should go without saying, no fan of Hitler. It’s just that I find all violence to be deeply tragic. Indeed, when I visited the Imperial War Museum in London—I was there for the Holocaust galleries, which were a truly worthwhile and deeply moving experience—there was certainly a bit of glorification and hero worship for Churchill going on. In the gift shop, you could buy posters of Churchill making the famous “V” hand gesture. After I got back to the flat where I was staying, I had an interesting discussion with a colleague, who is German and was raised in Germany, about how they find this glorification a bit jarring. But I digress! I’m using Churchill as an example here not because I think fighting a war against Germany was moral necessarily—answering that question is a hard sudoku—but simply because Churchill’s life happens to illustrate a point.)