Rights, permissions, duties ….

The great merit of arguments from first principles is that they provide some check against the pervasive human vice of self-deception, an “idol of the tribe” that has more or less free rein in utilitarian pragmatism. We are all inclined to “fix the facts around the policy”; call it the Dearlove principle. You can always kid yourself that the crime you are about to commit is a lesser evil.

Simply running Aquinas’ just war tests, an antique piece of theory kit, over the arguments being put forward in February 2003 for the Iraq invasion sufficed to show there was probably something seriously wrong. And lo, there was.

‘Philosophers often move too quickly from principles dreamed up for an abstract world to real policy prescriptions.

…

Note: The intellectual vices described in this post don’t actually apply to any real philosophers.’

As J.L. Austen said of analytic philosophy:

‘There’s the bit when you say it, and the bit where you take it back.’

As someone who’s got a fairly small dog in this fight, I think you should name your targets, rather than go in for this kind of weaselling.

I am full agreement with the premise of this and the previous post. Graduate school is like a boot camp or dog obedience school conditioning students to think only thoughts allowed by their discipline. Ten or twenty years after someone leaves graduate school, you could tell what discipline they were trained in by wiring them up to a lie detector and finding out which forbidden words made them flinch.

Weaselling? I thought it was a joke, implying that ALL of them do it….

didn’t stanley fish just publish a book arguing the same thing?

To summarize: teach your students how to think. Don’t tell them how to vote.

Sk

Of course, one alternative is to say that philosophy shouldn’t aspire to be action guiding or be useful for evaluating states of affairs in the world as it is. I’m not willing to defend that position.

This is a very welcome post. Hopefully this kind of post signals a groundswell of deep dissatisfaction in political philosophy, and the beginning of the end for the mysterious Rawlsian ascendancy found in so many quarters. I also hope that part of this disquiet might reflect some awareness that contemporary political philosophy is far too preoccupied with the normative or prescriptive side of political philosophy, and not nearly as preoccupied as it should be with understanding human beings, with the descriptive study and analysis of individual and collective human behavior, and with reflection on the conceptual underpinnings of that study. The ongoing effort to improve our understanding of ourselves, to identify what, at the deepest levels, we actually want, and the way we actually behave, ought to be seen as an essential foundation for any normative reflections about what we ought to do and any prescribed improvements in the way we organize our common life.

This is something that is deeply lacking in the Kantian and Rawlsian approaches to political philosophy, with their typical disparagement of the relevance of the contingencies of actual human nature. It’s as though the medical academy were thoroughly dominated by a whole school of people writing on the normative principles and ethical conundrums related to medical treatment of human beings, but in a way that is divorced entirely from the scientific study of the actual human body, and concerned primarily with discussions of how ideal nowhere doctors on an ideal nowhere planets should formulate principles for treating the members of an ideal nowhere species, whose actual physiology, fundamental drives and functional organization are obscured behind a veil of ignorance.

A notion that must be strongly resisted is the idea that the weaknesses and limits of the Rawlsian approach to political philosophy are the limits of philosophy itself, as opposed to other areas of inquiry. Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Marx and many others grounded their political thinking in the study of actual human beings. There is no reason at all to think the normative philosophical foundations of political thought must be confined to abstract, formal principles from nowhere. There is even less reason to think that normative political philosophy should consist in deducing or adducing imaginary subsidiary norms from the imaginary charter of an imaginary society.

I recently had an internet political debate with a nice, sensible person who happens to be an analytic philosopher. I found his opinion unrealistic and objectionable and accused him of being a mad-dog-realist of the act-utilitarian type. He confessed to the act-utilitarianism. As the discussion progressed, others becoming involved too, it came to seem that what he was saying would only be convincing to other act utilitarians. In other words, his training had made it difficult for him to communicate with anyone outside his particular sub-specialty an tendency (together with non-specialists who were act-utilitarians by personal inclination). This seemed rather disempowering.

I feel much the same about Peter Singer. I read his animal rights book, and he seemed to assume that pain-minimization was the fundamental principle of ethics. For anyone whose ethics were of some other kind (e.g. me) his book said little.

Chris, why the own goal: “Contrast this with the economists’ way of approaching matters: will intervening do more harm than good? Would this law or that do more harm than good?” That’s straight-up philosophy, though of the utilitarian and pragmatist (Dewey and Putnam more than Rorty afaict) style. Economists are more likely to talk about principal/agent problems, resource constraints and, if we’re lucky, specific relevant economic facts of the case. There is plenty of analytic philosophy concerned with setting priorities – abstract but usable. There are lots of tenured professors of philosophy and political theory who talk about practical concerns without embarrassing themselves too much – Pogge, Buchanan, Putnam, Scanlon, etc. We might be in Rawls’ shadow but that doesn’t mean there is no light from outside.

Alex, technical terms don’t require crystal clear extension to be theoretically useful. Some judicious stipulation allows us to talk about things and events in general terms by cutting down on complexity–it need not deny that such complexity exists. It’s not like there are any such “things” as abstract, ideal-type “intellectual enterprises,” “points of departure,” or “horrible possibilities” either.

Moreover, even if all things “humanitarian intervention” fell within the purview of just war theory, which they don’t, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that the just war tradition presents something like a coherent, unified account of the morality of war, which it doesn’t. For that matter, the questions just war theorists address are considerably more interesting and difficult than deciding whether or not Iraq is a disaster.

Just because you aren’t interested in a subject doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t talk about it. Frankly, there are many intellectual enterprises we need less than just war theory, and blog commentary about which intellectual enterprises are worthwhile is one of them.

David Miller, in his new book _National Responsibility and Global Justice_ discusses some of these ideas in a quite interesting and useful (if not completely right, I think) way. He doesn’t offer a fully worked out view, of course, and it’s not the place of philosophers to offer particular policy recommendations, but he does start working out an interesting account of when, how, and to what degree various types of intervention can be required. It’s quite a good book over all- much more careful than a lot of work on global justice- and worth looking at, especially, perhaps, for those inclined not to agree with him. (On at least some things that includes me.)

Chris Bertram:

“So, in asking what the policy of a liberal state should be, we proceed as if the actual states in which we live “liberal democracies” approximate that moral ideal rather closely. (They don’t.) ”

The Cold War is long gone and these kids don’t have a memory of it and how bad the West behaved in the name of fighting Communism. Some people are just stuck in the 60s.

And these kids are idealistic and see the older generation and the government as complacent.

I fucking hate the name “Decent.”

The abstract, philosophical theory of justice in war contains conditions about, e.g. proportionality, which say the resort to force is unjust if it will cause harm out of proportion to the relevant good it will secure. Applying that condition requires, and is known to require, all sorts of real-world information.

The philosophical literature on humanitarian intervention has mostly addressed the prior question of whether, proportionality apart, such intervention is in principle forbidden (as e.g. the UN Charter claims) or can in certain circumstances be permitted.

But the latter question has always been discussed with the caveat “proportionality and other similar conditions permitting,” and it’s been understood that whether those conditions are satisfied isn’t something philosophers can settle.

You can believe (I certainly do) that humanitarian intervention is in principle permitted, i.e. can be a just cause for war, even though many and even most such real-world interventions would be unjust because they would cause excessive or unnecessary harm. And I think most philosophers writing on the topic have been perfectly aware of that.

Chris:

Fair enough, and I’ll agree that philosopher friends have been far too confident in their off-the-cuff judgements about particular wars. I was writing a newspaper column at the time of the 1991 Gulf War and felt compelled to have an opinion about it, which I found very difficult because the kinds of balancing required to decide whether the war was proportional and/or a last resort demanded a kind of skill in judgement, let alone knowledge of the facts, that I as a professional philosopher didn’t think I had.

You may not agree with this example, but I think Michael Walzer, though not (as he himself admits) the greatest abstract philosopher, often shows very good judgement on these types of questions.

@32, alas, taking the logic evident there to its conclusion, no defensive alliance between two sovereign states should exist, or be acted upon, because however great the suffering inflicted by one country upon another, it will always be more likely that such suffering will grow if a third party is involved. And therefore, so long as one is the ruler of a strong state, one can confidently go about seizing and pillaging weaker states, safe in the knowledge that theorists have proved that anyone trying to stop you will just make things worse.

War is indeed, as general Sherman had it, all Hell, but there are circles of Hell, and I am fairly certain that the one containing cowards who stood by and justified a refusal to act against atrocities, under any circumstances, on the grounds that ‘it will just make things worse’ is a deep pit indeed. But perhaps you didn’t quite mean that?

p.s., I was unaware that, for example, the liberation of France in 1944 involved widespread rape and torture by the advancing allies. Evidence appreciated.