It’s a radical notion, to be sure, that force is always a corrupting power which blinds and deforms; that it makes anyone who is touched by it into things: both in the literal sense of a corpse and the analogous dehumanization of the corpse-maker. Weil’s supernatural ethics makes incredible, nearly impossible, demands of us. It asks us to acknowledge that violence is never justified and that revenge is never justice, not even for the socially powerless. It demands that we always experience violence as something incommensurate with truth. Perhaps most impossibly, it asks us to resist the urge ever to treat human beings as instruments for our own ends, however noble they may appear. At the heart of Weil’s supernatural ethics lies what may seem to be a contradiction: as Meaney describes it, “an absolute obligation is attached to a finite object.” But the contradiction forms the heart of her moral philosophy. Anyone who confuses what we owe each other, with what we owe nation, race or tribe, Weil considers to be involved in idolatry.
Scott Beauchamp, The problem of force
