But to be wholly uninterested in the truth — simply for the sake of political expedience and, worse yet, based on a twisted definition of morality — is just as wrong. Real justice requires finding as much of the truth as we can; the middle ground between always believing the alleged victim and immediately exonerating the accused is to seek the full truth with clear-eyed persistence.

Prager insists that such an effort is not only unnecessary, but unacceptable in a moral society.

“I am not interested in whether Mrs. Ford, an anti-Trump activist, is telling the truth,” Prager writes. “Because even if true, what happened to her was clearly wrong, but it tells us nothing about Brett Kavanaugh since the age of 17.”

For one thing, 17-year-olds often are tried as adults when they commit serious crimes, and surely Prager knows this. More important, though, this argument — far from being a principle that undergirds a moral society — is a recipe for complete anarchy. How old does a man have to be before he can be held responsible for his actions? And even if some mistakes could rightly be categorized as youthful indiscretions, making that determination requires that we first know the truth about what occurred.