there was a fundamental difference between that sort of terrorism and the question at hand. Let’s explore this a little further. It is a problem of the relationship between motives (i.e. the mind) and actions. In its essence the study of ethics seeks to define what can be considered right and wrong, or “good” and “evil,” in human beings. If we consider the concept of murder, when we only look at the resultant act, it is evil. Surely eve-ryone accepts this. However, there must be cases when, depending on the motive, it wouldn’t be considered outright evil. An example of this could be when a parent kills an attacker to save their child. If we think about this on a governmental level, if someone killed a king who was oppressing his subjects it might not necessarily be considered evil because it was done in order to save the people. This is the stance of Muirhead, the British ethicist who wrote the textbook on ethics that Nakajima used in his class. Consequently, this is exactly what the student wrote on his exam paper. In other words, he repro-duced the content of the textbook in his answers, and this is what caused the problem. In the eyes of the Ministry, Katō’s answer—i.e. Muirhead’s way of thinking—raised the question of whether political terrorism could be seen as acceptable given the right circumstances. Taken to extremes this logic could lead to the simplistic idea that it is not evil to murder the emperor if he were considered problematic. Thus, a single answer to a graduation exam would lead to the sus-pension of accreditation privileges by the Ministry over the school’s educational content. On November seventh one week after the completion of the grad-uation exams a graduation ceremony was held for the four students 128
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