Chris Bertram

My friend and colleague Jimmy Doyle has a guest post on Normblog: “Human Agency and the London Bombings”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/08/human_agency_an.html . I hesitate to summarise Jimmy’s argument here, since it is stated with characteristic carefulness and precision, but among the more striking claims he endorses is that genuine human actions cannot figure among the causes of other human actions:

bq. human actions cannot be thought of as mere events in a causal chain of further events. This is expressed in the traditional legal doctrine of _novus actus interveniens_ , according to which a human action cuts short the chain of causally-connected events consequent upon any previous action. For the cause of a human action is not an event at all, but an agent: a person, a human being.

I am not putting a counter-argument, but merely making an observation, in saying that if Jimmy’s view is correct then much of social science and history rests on a mistake. Economics and psychology, for example, certainly presuppose that one person’s action can figure among the causal antecedents of another’s. And all those books on the “causes” of the First or Second World Wars would have to be pulped or substantially rewritten.

Jimmy advances this consideration in favour of his view:

bq. I should emphasize that I have not tried to show that what is presupposed in our ordinary thought and talk about human action is true. But if it turned out false, that would be a disaster; and we would very likely find it impossible to lead recognizably human lives consistent with such a realization.

I suspect that we would find it a good deal easier than he supposes to lead “recognizably human lives”, but let’s leave that to one side. The examples of history and social science show that whilst Jimmy may be right to say that we engage in much thought and talk about human action which rests on the very presuppositions he mentions, we also engage in a great deal of talk about human behaviour that rests on the causal view he rejects. Very likely we would find it hard to get along without that mode of thought and talk too.

The hapless Peter Wilby has a column — “The Responsiblity We All Share for Islamist Shock and Awe”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1542996,00.html — in the Guardian today about how citizens of democracies share responsibility for the actions of their leaders. Wilby it was who famously answered his own question about whether the victims of September 11th were innocent with a ‘yes and no’, as if somehow some of them were deserving of their fate( ‘In buildings thought indestructible’, New Statesman, 17 September 2001). There’s more of the same today, with a similar slide from the notion that we as citizens should take responsibility for our governments (with which I agree) and the claim that this somehow turns us all into legitimate objects of attack (which is garbage). Of course Wilby doesn’t actually say this, he sort-of says it and then he sort-of takes it back (well sort-of, in a Guardianish sort-of way).

It is hard to pick out a low point from the article, but if I were pushed I’d go for:

bq. … a home-grown suicide bomber, dreaming of 72 virgins for himself and “a painful doom” (in the Qur’an’s words) for his victims, seems an unpleasantly self-absorbed figure.

I googled the phrase “unpleasantly self-absorbed” and found it variously applied to a book by a management consultant, some characters from _Die Fledermaus_ , and the protagonists in Lars von Trier’s _The Idiots_ .

“Eve Garrard at Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/08/profiling_polic.html :

bq. The statistics suggest that the chances of a Muslim man being killed by the police are considerably less than the chances of a Muslim man being killed by suicide bombers, given that the latter make no effort to avoid killing Muslims. So assuming that these policies do indeed prevent some successful bombing attempts, then people who reject them in favour of ones which don’t impinge more on Muslims than on others are actually prioritizing policies which will save fewer Muslim lives over ones which will save more Muslim lives.

I suppose the conclusion might be true …. and I don’t suppose we actually have any statistics that would allow us to estimate the chance of a Muslim _man_ being killed by the police. There are about 1.3 million male Muslims in the country, and Garrard takes the chances of any person from the whole population being killed by being a suicide bomber as relevant to their chances of being killed in that way: 1 in a million? Is their prospect of being killed by police marksmen more remote than that? Anyway, “statistics suggest” that they are surely safer either than men carrying table legs in a suspicious manner in a public place or Brazilian electricians boarding tube trains.

The “Rousseau Association/Association Rousseau”:http://www.rousseauassociation.org/default.htm , which is a very fine bunch of scholars and a nice crowd of human beings, has “a new website”:http://www.rousseauassociation.org/default.htm thanks to Zev Trachtenberg at the University of Oklahoma. It is still in development but when finished it should be an important resource and marks a distinct improvement on the last version. Visitors can dowload works by Rousseau, follow links to other sites of interest, browse a selection of images and even “listen to some of the music”:http://www.rousseauassociation.org/aboutRousseau/musicalWorks.htm Jean-Jacques composed. (Full disclosure, I’m currently VP of the Association.)

I’ve just wheeled the latest issue of Imprints (8:3) to the post office and it will shortly be sent out to subscribers. Having just done this, I’ve noticed there’s *a typo on the cover* Crossland for Crosland — aargh!! Still, if you can get past that there’s a great deal of interest inside:

bq. * An interview with Joseph Raz
* Philip Bielby on equality and vulnerability in biomedical research
* Kevin Hickson on revisionism from Crosland to New Labour

and reviews by — cue drumroll — Crooked Timber stalwarts Harry Brighouse and Kieran Healy of, respectively, Anne Alstott’s “No Exit: What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195162366/junius-20 and Eric Klinenberg’s “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226443221/junius-20 . Kieran’s long-awaited “review was pre-published here on CT”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/22/hot-in-the-city/ .

Calling British lawyers! In the wake of the London bombings the British government has moved to get the Opposition to agree to “new laws”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4717959.stm :

bq. … including bans on preparing, inciting or training for terrorism.

Aren’t all these activities already illegal under the law of conspiracy? Weren’t IRA bombers regularly charged, for instance, with “conspiracy to cause explosions”? Informed answers only please.

Since the bomb attacks in London there have been a number of polls which, among other things, ask British Muslims whether or not they thought the attacks were justified. This then provides material for op-ed columnists and bloggers to scale up the number so as to argue that there are {insert large number} Muslims who are prepared to back the terrorists. Having looked at the detail of the latest poll, from “ICM as reported in the Guardian”:http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Politics/documents/2005/07/26/Muslim-Poll.pdf (pdf), I’m sceptical about any such conclusions given the strange combination of views apparently endorsed by respondents in Table 8.

Out of 500 Muslim respondents, 26 said the bombings were justified. Of those 26 bomb-justifiers, 7 declared they would vote Conservative if there were a general election tomorrow, 12 were potential Labour voters and just 2 backed the Liberal Democrats. Go figure.

The BBC showed “a programme the other day”:http://www.blackjackscience.com/bbc/BBC%20-%20Science%20&%20Nature%20-%20Horizon%20-%20transcript.htm about the history of card counting in blackjack and how the casinos eventually defeated the card counters using facial recognition technology. Having traced suspected card counters to MIT, Griffin Investigations, the agency employed by the casinos, then fed the faces from the MIT yearbooks into their databases. When a face appeared in a casino and the software matched it to a suspect, that person was shown the door. The relevant bit of the transcript:

NARRATOR: It was then that Beverley noticed something unusual. Many of the big winners had given addresses from around the same area, Boston. Then she noticed something else, most of her suspects played only at weekends, and they were all around college age. Beverley made the connection. Could these card counting team members be students at M.I.T.? To find out Beverley checked the M.I.T. student year books.

BEVERLEY GRIFFIN: And lo and behold there they were. Looking all scholarly and serious and not at all like a card counter.

NARRATOR: The M.I.T. yearbooks viewed like a rogue’s gallery of team counters. Beverley now realised she was up against some of the smartest minds in America. So the casinos began to develop facial recognition technology, for quick and accurate identification of team play suspects. The basis for the database were the M.I.T. yearbooks. From the moment a suspected counter entered a casino they could be monitored by the hundreds of cameras on the casino floor. Snapshots could then be downloaded for computer analysis.

TRAVIS MILLER: Each time he moves I try to see which shot is going to be the best for him, that we can use to match him up further down the road. This would be the perfect shot, he’s directly in the centre of the photo, all we see is his face, he’s looking straight ahead in to the shot.

NARRATOR: Facial recognition software analysed the relative position of over eighty coordinates on a suspects face. As individual as a fingerprint this information could be run through the Griffin database of suspected card counters, and an identification made.

I’m guessing that if casinos can do this with MIT students then states and security agencies could certainly employ the same technology to keep anyone photographed at a “Hizb ut-Tahrir”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hizb_ut-Tahrir meeting (or similar) off the London Underground or Heathrow Airport. As soon as a match appeared, they could be stopped.

I hasten to state that the civil liberties implications of any such system are horrendous. But my interest here is in whether it would be technologically feasible. Could it work for a large system? How many false positives and false negatives would there be? Any answers?

It is always a mistake to pick fights with people when you are about to be away from a computer and so will be unable to take part in further iterations of the argument. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the position I find myself in with respect to “a post from Norman Geras and Eve Garrard”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/bertrams_quibbl.html responding to “my attribution to them”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/14/battle-lines/ of the view that only the immediate perpetrators of bad deeds can be blamed for those deeds. They deny that they hold the view I pinned on them, and say that I should have seen that if I’d read more carefully. I’m happy to receive the correction.

Now comes the “but” bit ….

Nevertheless, my belief that they hold a view like that was not based only on that single post but on many others, especially concerning Iraq. In particular, Norman has often argued against the view that Bush and Blair should be held responsible for the continuing carnage in Iraq, stressing, rather, that the immediate perpetrators of (most of) that carnage, the Iraqi “resistance” should be blamed and that Bush and Blair should not be. Norman and Eve’s latest post quotes an interesting earlier paragraph in this respect, which counts — as they insist — against my attribution.

bq. The fact that something someone else does contributes causally to a crime or atrocity, doesn’t show that they, as well as the direct agent(s), are morally responsible for that crime or atrocity, if what they have contributed causally is not itself wrong and doesn’t serve to justify it.

There is, I think, doublethink going on here. Norman wants to tell us that the Iraq war was justified because of the many bad things Saddam did and would continue to do to his people if he remained in power. Critics of the war (like me) want to say that we should also take account of the bad consequences of overthrowing Saddam, including the carnage caused by the “resistance”, the many many thousands of excess dead (see the Lancet report …), etc. Norman and Eve’s restrictive clause enables them to argue that, even if things are actually worse, their worseness can’t be blamed on the initiators of the war, because their actions were not in themselves wrong (because justified by stopping Saddam) and don’t serve to justify the Iraqi “resistance” (agreed, they don’t). In other words, Norman helps himself to an essentially consequentialist justification for the Iraq war, but, faced with bad consequences, uses a non-consequentialist discourse of responsibility to filter them out of the consequentialist calculus. At least, that’s what seems to me to be going on.

On Tuesday night I went to see the “Bottle Rockets”:http://www.bottlerocketsmusic.com/ , supported by “Romney Leigh Getty”:http://www.romneygetty.com/ , play at the social club attached to my local RC church. Very good they were too (review “here”:http://tinyurl.com/9uzw3 ). But I write not to praise the Bottle Rockets but to wonder how the whole thing makes economic sense. Here are four guys, who have travelled to Europe from St. Louis, Missouri (plus the two Canadians in the support act). They have to meet their expenses, pay their entourage, agent, manager etc. They have to pay the cost of travel. The people who run the club have to break even, etc etc., the bar has to sell enough beer. My guess is that there were 50 people in the audience who all paid 10 pounds (and some of them bought CDs for another tenner). Maximum income for the night is therefore 700 pounds. Sure, touring sells CDs and builds name recognition, but how much difference does it make? Enough? This is the sort of thing which “Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ has probably got an opinion on.

Following the London bombings, the British “left” pro-war sites “are”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/apologists_amon.html “busy”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/07/14/kingdom_of_the_blind.php “drawing”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/07/14/the_problem_we_face_in_a_nutshell.php “battle lines”. The line they are concerned to draw is between themselves and the likes of Seumas Milne of the Guardian. David T at Harry’s Place goes so far as to call Milne a Quisling. (Given who Quisling was, I think this would make David T a Holocaust denier if the argument of “this”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/11/talking_down_th.html Eve Garrard post at normblog were correct. But since it isn’t, it doesn’t.)

“Dickhead” and “idiot” are two of the politer epithets I’m inclined to apply to the hapless and unpleasant Milne and those like him such as our regular commenter abb1, but since there are lines to be drawn, and it is important that we do so, I’d prefer not to draw them there. We now know, that there are Muslim extremists in the UK who are willing to kill us in large numbers. If we are to stop them we need a politics that isolates them from their co-religionists rather than providing them with an environment to swim in. That means talking to, and trying to include on “our” side, all kinds of figures from within that community. That means doing what the Metropolitan Police have done in inviting Tariq Ramadan to speak. That means engaging with a whole bunch of people who have repellent views on topics from Israel to homosexuality. We should say what we think of those views, but we should talk, we should include. Because an isolated and frightened Muslim community, unwilling to talk to the police, unwilling to engage with wider British society would provide a place for the real nutters to hide and recruit, whereas a Muslim community with whom bonds of trust exist provides our best means of fighting the crazies. Ken Livingstone has come in for a lot of flak for his meetings with Sheikh al-Qaradawi. Maybe some of it was justified. But Ken, with a political sureness of touch that eludes the bloggers I mentioned at least know both that we need to draw some lines and draws them in the right place: between those who are disposed to plant bombs on the tube and those who can help us to stop them.

Addendum:
Norman Geras and Eve Garrard, in the course of treating us to “a lecture on drawing battle lines against Milne et al”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/apologists_amon.html , also attempt a lesson on blame and moral responsibility. Since I agree with them that the terrorists who planted the bombs are responsible for those bombs and that Blair is not, I am reluctant to quibble overmuch. But as a general rule it seems to me wrong to rule out a priori that those who create the conditions under which bad things are done share responsibility for those bad things. One of their examples concerns rape. Of course rapists are responsible for what they do, but suppose a university campus with bad lighting has a history of attacks on women and the university authorities can, at minimal cost, greatly improve the night-time illumination but choose not to do so for penny-pinching reasons. Suppose the pattern of assaults continues in the darkened area: do Geras and Garrard really want to say that the university penny-pinchers should not be blamed for what happens subsquently? At all? I think not.

This morning’s post brought with it a package from Cambridge University Press containing a copy of “The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521609097/junius-20 , co-edited by Crooked Timberite Harry Brighouse (with Gillian Brock) and including papers by both me and Jon Mandle. With such a heavy contribution from this blog, I hardly need point out that it is the duty of all regular readers to buy themselves a copy (as well as supplementary copies for friends and family)!

The usual suspects are getting exercised again about the fact that the “BBC’s guidelines”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/edguide/war/mandatoryreferr.shtml tell its reporters not to use the word “terrorist” as part of a factual report unless it is in the mouth of someone else. Melanie Phillips goes one better and “accuses them of censoring”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001320.html Tony Blair’s use of the word:

bq. The BBC’s censorship of the ‘t’ word gets worse and worse. In his statement to the Commons today, the Prime Minister repeatedly referred to terrorism. BBC Online’s account of this speech excised those references almost entirely, with only one reference in a quote to ‘the moment of terror striking’.

Perhaps she should have checked whether Blair speech is “reproduced in full on the BBC website”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4673221.stm , as it is, before sounding off.

From the (not at all anti-American) “Daily Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/12/nusaf12.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/07/12/ixportal.html :

bq. All 12,000 American airmen based in Britain have been banned from going near London because of the bombings.

bq. The directive, issued on Friday, indefinitely bans USAF personnel, most of them based at the huge airfields at Lakenheath and Mildenhall in Suffolk, from going inside the M25.

bq. Families of the servicemen and women are being “highly encouraged” to stay away, too.

bq. While Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, was boarding an Underground train yesterday and declaring that “we don’t let a small group of terrorists change the way we live”, a USAF spokesman said the ban was “a prudent measure”. Its aim was to ensure “the security and safety of our airmen, civilians, their families and our resources”.

bq. Westminster city council accused the Americans of playing into the terrorists’ hands.

UPDATE: The “ban has now been lifted”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4673987.stm .