It’s got to a point now where people no longer care about being called an anti-Semite because they know that is just a bit of name calling that no longer has any relevance or meaning. People are now very much aware that those that criticise right-wing Israeli politics and right-wing Zionism are going to be labelled by those that are being criticised as anti-Semites, just as a matter of course. It has become expected. But now everyone knows that really they are not anti-Semites but just critics of right-wing Israeli politics and right-wing Zionism. The right-wing Zionists have clearly failed in their attempt to introduce criticism of right-wing Israeli politics and right-wing Zionism as the ‘New anti-Semitism’.

The real anti-Semites are those that have been around for centuries. These are the racists and white supremacists that have always been there. They are the ones that were totally discredited at the end of World War Two as the world realised that their blind hatred had resulted in the systematic deaths of millions of those that they hated. There are a few still around but, thankfully, not in any significant numbers. These people don’t hate because they dislike right-wing Israelis or right-wing Zionists. They just hate Jews because, well, just because they are Jews. The hatred that real anti-Semites have has nothing to do with politics. And the politics of anti-right-wing Israeli Zionism has absolutely nothing to do with race.

Yes I agree. My major concern was with the suggestion that the views you endorse are what liberals “should say”. (I realize that that was just a casual suggestion and not central to your main point.) If the point of our saying anything at all is to nudge the world in a positive direction, then it’s not clear to me in what contexts endorsing these views of patriotism within the bounds of justice alone would be beneficial. In the US, these views simply find little traction in the public sphere, and are widely disparaged. Articulating them can possibly do more harm than good.

As for the actual truth of the views, I have no strong opinion. I do have some concern, though, that theories in moral philosophy that are so much in conflict with actual practice may be “too high for humanity”. Perhaps they fail to take sufficient account of certain features of human nature that are responsible for the practices. On the other hand, maybe the current practices are not due to human nature, but only reflect a depraved understanding resulting from inadequate socialization and education. This seems to be a perennial question in moral philosophy.

Just a word about the distinction you draw between interests generally and power interests as conceived by realists: The international sphere, while certainly not a Hobbesian “state of nature”, is still a much more perilous, competitive and combative arena for action than exists for individuals living inside a secure, peaceful and well-governed state. In such a fraught situation, it is not clear to me that one really can promote a nation’s interests without promoting its power interests.

Wouldn’t the Boeing like Airbus factories bombed and destroyed? Doesn’t the GMC CEO hate Honda?

Ref Brendan, comment 3:

B> we now have a world of nation states (not
B> Empires as we did in the past)

I’d dispute that.

We certainly have a world of nation states, but they agglomerate into superstructures. What the US runs is an empire in all but name; the same was true of the USSR, and is true of China.

Also, the age of the nation state is reaching the end of its sell by date. Nation states will no longer continue to exist, but as globalisation proceeds their key importance in geopolitics is eroding by the day.

As for people not being “angels” (or “saints,” as George Orwell puts it in his essay on Gandhi), I agree with Orwell that there is something more than a little offputting in the very idea of “sainthood”—the idea, that is, of not doing more for our own children and indeed for anyone we profess to love that we would do for a global “humanity.”

Of course, in actual practice, some citizens have much more influence on these government employees than other citizens. And government officials are able to create some additional freedom of action for themselves by dissembling, or lying or otherwise shielding their actions or the motives for their actions from public scrutiny. The Bush administration’s employment of secrecy and deception is particularly egregious, but it is a major factor in all US administrations.

In the case of corporations, the prohibitions you mention mainly exist in the form of law. Law is a mechanism by which rules of action seen as publicly beneficial are given force by attaching sanctions to them, and turning them into requirements of prudence. The chief executive of a company then justifies his obedience to these rules not on altruistic moral grounds, but on the ground of legal requirement. Because disobedience carries penalties, the company’s self-interest aligns with the law.

The other force that can move a company in the direction of acting in accordance with justice is, as you mention, non-legally binding public expectations. If a company acts in a way that brings widespread discredit and disapproval, the negative views may hurt its business. And then once again, the chief executive can justify acting in accordance with certain publicly esteemed rules or principles, because failure to do so will harm the compnay’s own interests. However, whether the incentive of public expectations really is a force for justice depends on whether the public is just.

What do the “stockholders” demand of their government? I can’t speak about other countries, but only about what seems to me to be the case here in the US. There are lots of different kinds of Americans, driven by lots of different kinds of enthusiams, and they would all severally like to government to pursue various moral and ideological causes around the world: Christianity, liberalism, free trade, etc. But the diversity of these causes means that they tend to cancel each other out, and resolve themselves into a wary and practical resultant consensus based on prudential principles. And where they do have an effect, the effect is a temporary one that does not extend beyond a transient burst of partisan ideological enthusiasm. The more persistant, enduring public expectation in the realm of foreign policy is that the government will work to (i) make them richer, (ii) uphold the laws that protect their interests and liberties and (iii) keep them safe from foreign threats. In general, US citizens want the government to maintain the country’s military power because that power is seen as the chief guarantee of security. In contrast to many elite opinion leaders of the right and left, most citizens tend to have a live and let live attitude toward the affairs of other countries, but can be persuaded to act aggressively when they see the aggressive action as a pro-active security measure. Once they believe the threat is no longer there, the support for force disappears.

There is some disposition to support pro bono military action, where the action is seen as relatively pain free. But as the example of Somalia shows, the support for pure altruism tends to dissipate suddenly in the face of even modest losses.

Similarly, any members of the Israel lobby in the United States who might be tempted to defend themselves against the Mearsheimer and Walt paper by saying “we are under no duty to promote the interests of the United States in terms of its relative prosperity and military power” would be guilty of an extraordinary political ineptitude. For all the good it would do them, they might as well say “we are traitors who wrote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Consider any work in the business world. One might sympathize with the moral notion that the employees of a company are required above all to promote justice, and that they are not required to promote the competitive interests of their own company. But the fact is that it is part of their jobs to promote those competitive interests, and they will be fired for failing to to their jobs.

Some companies attempt to implement social responsibility agendas, or green agendas. But if they are publicly owned, then their directors are legally bound by the terms of their obligations to their stockholders to promote their own companies’ competitive interests. They must constantly justify their claim that the “progressive” agenda enhances the bottom line. If they can’t justify it, they are removed.

Government is also a business – it is the business of administering a state, and those who assume places in the government are typically charged with advancing the interests of that state in fairly conventional economic and security terms. Their scope for action is strongly constrained by the legal and institutional responsibilities of the positions they hold. If they pursue progressive global agendas, they are required to defend those agendas as enlightened pursuit of national self-interest. If their pursuit of these agendas noticeably damages the country’s bottom line, they are usually removed.

In a democracy, in principle, the government can do whatever the people who elected them want them to do, subject to Constitutional restraints that cannot be overridden. So in principle they can even follow moral policies which damage the country’s interests in terms of prosperity and power. In principle. But in practice, the moral aspirations of the public are so diverse, and so tenuous, and so variable, that the interests of power and prosperity continually assert themselves as the chief governing principle and least common denominator for practice. The rulers serve at the pleasure of those who have secured for them their positions – that is, coalitions of voters and powerful economic interests. And these very large groups tend to act as a group, whatever the moral preferences of their individual members, as self-regarding leviathans seeking their own interests.

tim—yes, I liked hurka’s piece too. As to Cohen; part of me just thinks it is obvious that what you say must be right…but, I suspect (and that’s all I can do without looking back pretty carefully, which I haven’t time to do) that he can evade your attribution! Still, I see the point.

Certainly the last half century was littered with the bloody mistakes of governments that thought they were pragmatically forwarding their country’s interests and turned out to be doing things quite different.

The view mentioned by Hurka (and attributed to Chris Bertram) mentions starving children, so it seems to even rule out, as too strong to be plausible, views of justice requiring the sufficient meeting of people’s needs. Cohen’s view of justice is even more egalitarian than anything brought up so far. I bet that any hedges Cohen puts around his view would qualify his extensive egalitarianism; they would not, in effect, bring him below a sufficiency floor. I think Cohen (if he is a cosmopolitan) would not say that the personal space is so large that we can refuse to feed starving kids. The end result, I would think, is that his demands would be more stringent than the view Hurksa says no one believes. In sum, Cohen’s qualification of his egalitarianism still makes him more demanding than a suffiency view.

Suppose everyone’s basic needs were met and/or their human rights were protected adequately.*
Someone could claim that, beyond that floor, we are permitted to keep an unequal amount of stuff. But Hurka seemed to go farther than that.

• This need not mean that no violations occur. See, for example, Thomas Pogge on one take on what ‘adequately’ means.