Monbiot on altruism and philosophers

George Monbiot asserts that the Common Cause Foundation has made the 'transformative' discovery that people aren't very selfish.  Or maybe it's not so transformative because, he say, science knew that all along.  Consistency aside, we should shun "philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau" (among others) because their accounts were "catastrophically mistaken".

This is what you get when someone doesn't know the limits of his competence.  It's wrong about philosophers (and economists) in a number of ways, and the survey's findings can hardly be 'transformative'.

For a start, it is childish to make a big deal of this survey.  Yes, a large majority, when you ask, say nice things rather than nasty things.   That's not behaviour.  Only a biologist who knows nothing of surveys or psychology could be so clueless.  People who actually look at society (e.g. Robert Putnam) have pointed to a decreasing interest in public goods:  no 'transformative' bunch of verbal responses can undermine that finding.  And innate selfishness, regarding these researchers, is a straw man.  They don't go on about 'selfishness' but about the decay of institutions that have effects not at all attributed to innate human characteristics.

As for philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau...

First, every single social contract theorist and classic philosopher who's made assertions about self-interest has noted that self-interested  desires include other-regarding desires.   These are universally assumed to extend at least to immediate family, but could reach much further.   So no philosopher has asserted that people are 'selfish' in any relevant sense.

Second, all well-known social contract theorists have asserted that the state of nature is a construct within a thought experiment, a state of affairs which may or may not have occurred.  This can hardly be 'mistaken'.

Third, Rousseau came closest to seeing the state of nature as a reality but in the Discourse on Inequality he suggests that orangutans may be the original, natural man.  In other words he situates the state of nature in, well, nature, millions of years before the emergence of the genus homo, never mind homo sapiens.  Given that and an only very slightly generous reading of the text, he then makes pretty good sense.  Moreover he spends a great deal of time presenting his view on the emergence and decisive importance of sympathy and empathy.  By no stretch of the imagination does he conceive of the human beings who form societies as 'selfish'; quite the contrary.

Fourth, Hobbes and other social contract theorists do not assert that humans are naturally 'selfish' even in the broad sense that includes other-regarding desires.  To take Hobbes, he says that humans are set one against another, not because of innate selfishness or greed or aggression, but because they compete for an irreducibly scarce commodity - security. (Leviathan I.13)  And for Hobbes the state of nature is simply a state where contemporary humans lack government - for example, Yugoslavia in time of civil war.  This has nothing whatever to do with "our innate, ancestral characteristics", Monbiot's witless take on the state of nature.

Fifth, the theories about altruism with which I'm familiar are weak.  Game theorists (some in biology) note that altruism is 'logical' in the sense that those who simply retaliate do worse in a *series* of games than those who don't.  But, as other theorists have noted, this doesn't carry much weight because in the real world, retaliation can end the series of games.

Then there's David Gauthier, who argues that, in a certain population, socially minded 'constrained maximizers' do better than narrow, 'straightforward maximizers'.   But his reasoning sneaks in assumptions about the proportion of one to another, and about the trust that constrained maximizers are rational to afford one another.  These assumptions are accepted by approximately no one.  In any case, as already noted, straightforward maximizers may well have other-regarding desires.  Gandhi might well have counted as a straightforward maximizer.

Finally Monbiot might want to consider the varieties of 'altruism' before he gets enthusiastic about it.  If I go out of my way to help others, even make sacrifices for them, I may do so out of loyalty to my family or town or region or clan or tribe, my country or race or ethnic group or co-religionists.   (Animal loyalties, too, may not extend to their entire species.)   I might also, out of those same loyalties, harm 'outsiders' whom I see, rightly or wrongly, as a threat.  Or I might harm them simply to obtain some benefit for 'my' people.  A great many atrocities are committed largely out of altruistic love for others, that is, for certain others.

It is a shame that Monbiot deploys his rubbish to pronounce on serious matters like Syria.  That degrades rather than enhances an understanding of the horror that transpires there.

Sam Harris on Christian and Islamic Morality: Wrong on Both Counts

Rather proudly, Sam Harris offers up an email exchange with Noam Chomsky about morality, Islam and the West.  (Perhaps Harris isn't aware that Chomsky very tolerantly will exchange emails with almost anyone.)  In it are gems like this:

Any systematic approach to ethics, or to understanding the necessary underpinnings of a civil society, will find many Muslims standing eye deep in the red barbarity of the fourteenth century.

Civilized folks of course are not like these many Muslims.  They inhabit "contemporary democracies".  Others may speculate what this is code for.  Suffice it to say that

There is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence that is perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed by Muslim governments.

Long story short, Muslim barbarians kill innocents, and we're better than that for two reasons.

First, we feel just terrible about it, which yer many-Muslims don't.  We deplore deliberate crimes like My Lai, and regret the odd bit of criminal negligence:

What are the chances that Iraqi soldiers would have wept upon killing a carload of American civilians at a checkpoint unnecessarily?

Second, the bad stuff we don't feel quite as terrible about is just collateral damage, of which Harris says:

Nothing in Chomsky’s account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this “terrorism”), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this “collateral damage”). In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or states, could hardly be more distinct.

Chomsky might object that to knowingly place the life of a child in jeopardy is unacceptable in any case, but clearly this is not a principle we can follow. The makers of roller coasters know, for instance, that despite rigorous safety precautions, sometime, somewhere, a child will be killed by one of their contraptions. Makers of automobiles know this as well. So do makers of hockey sticks, baseball bats, plastic bags, swimming pools, chain-link fences, or nearly anything else that could conceivably contribute to the death of a child. There is a reason we do not refer to the inevitable deaths of children on our ski slopes as “skiing atrocities.” But you would not know this from reading Chomsky. For him, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all.

In his reference to a 'systematic approach to ethics', we find Harris considering himself a philosopher.  It's one of the things he calls himself on his web site.  Rest assured that this claim is almost as offensive to philosophers as his claim about Muslims is, presumably, to Muslims.

A philosopher, at least one minimally competent in ethics, will agree (*) to what follows.

First, pace Harris, (may we say) Western morality, indeed Christian morality, is quite capable of establishing the moral equivalence between intentional acts of, for short, terror, and the sort of collateral damage that has become a Western habit.  Harris' version of Christian morality would be in tatters after one minute in the confessional of a Jesuit-trained priest.

Second, push come to shove, if any morality is stuck in the 14th Century, it is Western and Christian morality.  'Systematic' ethics has another view, and it is the view of many whom Harris considers barbaric.  If there is a gap, not only between Islam and the West, but between anyone who doesn't like getting bombed and the West, an understanding of this fact might help bridge it.

Collateral Damage and Christian morality

Harris has at least one point which is not actually bad but irrelevant.  Yes, even manufacturing plastic bags will eventually contribute to the death of a child.  But that's ok, I think Harris says, because the killing isn't intended.

Two things about that.  First, it's not ok; we don't think children should be exposed to dangerous products.  But second, this isn't comparable the collateral damage inflicted by bombs.

The difference has to do with causality, a complicated matter.  Roughly, manufacturing a plastic bag is a necessary condition of a child being killed.  So is the existence of water on earth: necessary conditions are very far from qualifying as causes.  We consider certain sets of necessary conditions a background to the causal events which, in conjunction with these conditions, produce what we call an effect. (Poignantly this approach to causality is brilliantly systematized by Judea Pearl, the father of Daniel Pearl, victim of terror in Pakistan.)

Manufacturing a plastic bag, and its very existence, are background conditions to what sometimes causes the death of a child, that is, leaving a young child unattended around, say, dry cleaning bags.  The making of the bag is part of an environment; that alone never kills a child.  It takes some act of negligence, a later addition to that environment, to produce the death.  Dropping a bomb and killing an innocent is like leaving the child unattended; it too involves neglect.  We know the bombs can kill children, we know the children are around; we know they are defenceless; we know our bombs don't just hit what, in our infantile slang, we call "the bad guys".  All this belongs to the background or environment of the air strike.  The background conditions, alone, don't kill the child.  It takes the act of dropping a bomb to do that.

So no, the moral difference between collateral damage and terror is not, as Harris suggests, a matter of intention.  Intentions may matter, but not like that.  Whatever the intention, dropping the bomb, like setting off a terrorist bomb, plays the foreground causal role that manufacturing the plastic bag does not.

But does intention matter all the same?   Does it make the two sorts of actions morally distinctive?

The key consideration here is that we're not talking about mere collateral damage.   Such damage comes in two varieties, expected and unexpected. Unexpected collateral damage would occur, for instance, if a destroyer sunk in a naval battle was found to have been transporting civilian refugees. Expected collateral damage occurs when air strikes are called down on an enemy who doesn't operate in nicely isolated battlefields but in or near populated areas. In these cases the attackers fully expect to harm civilians. Is inflicting expected collateral damage better than terrorism?

When Harris appeals to intentions, he is invoking something like what in Christian casuistry is called the doctrine of double effect.  For example: a doctor operates on a woman and knowingly causes the death of her unborn child. For some, that's not sinful because the death of the child was intended only as an undesired consequence of the operation, not as its purpose. But those who inflict expected collateral damage are not like the doctor. Both high-level and tactical decisions to bomb are not made to attain some imminent, urgent goal, like saving a mother's life. The attackers' decision normally stems from concern, not for the lives of others, but for the lives of the attackers themselves.  That's why civilized nations prefer bombing to sending in ground troops, much less ground troops who take great risks to ensure civilians go unharmed. The doctor is concerned for another's life, not his own.

But suppose the attackers do want to save lives other than their own. Still their situation is not like the doctor's. If the doctor spares the child, he assures the death of the mother, and vice versa. He's not, in any practical sense, calculating risks. He is faced with a simple, stark decision, a choice between certainties. He is doing the only thing he can to avert the immediate and certain death of the woman lying before him.

The decision to use air strikes, on the other hand, is usually a choice involving many alternatives. Some mean a slower advance, some are less certain, some more expensive, some riskier - but they're there, and they introduce uncertainties. These uncertainties are not to be compared with the doctor's, whose decision is normally informed by scientific evidence. The decision-makers cannot confidently assert that air strikes are the best way to minimize the slaughter of innocents, or even the attackers' losses. In practice military men use air power largely because they fear that otherwise they'll take considerably more casualties, and because they'd rather not test unproven alternatives.

At no level, then, is the use of strategic or tactical air attacks simply a desperate measure to spare civilian lives. By no stretch of the imagination can our situation be confused with the doctor's. The doctrine of the double effect has questionable authority, but even unquestioned it does little to raise expected collateral damage above terror.

Indeed Harris' appeal to intentions is not an example of Christian morality but of its decline and corruption.  Christian moralists, real ones, examine the intentions and motives of actions with merciless precision.  They would not for a moment let someone off with the lame excuse that they meant well.  They would point out all the alternatives ignored, all the hasty assumptions, all the self-serving prejudices underlying those assumptions, all the weaknesses of character that went along with the conveniently sloppy decision-making.  They would  deliver a verdict of self-deception, willful ignorance, insolent posturing, cowardice and, most likely, mortal sin.

If you don't think so, ask yourself what are, after all, the intentions of pilots or strategists who inflict expected collateral damage.  Imagine something similar in civilian life, and consider the legal notion of intentional murder.  Suppose you intend to kill me by running me over as I stand in line for a movie.  You are driving a Hummer; you are quite sure you will kill some of those next to me as well: they are literally collateral damage. A lawyer friend informs me, emphatically, that you will have committed homicide against all those killed; you are taken to have intended their death. Even if you were acquitted of murdering me - perhaps because I had abused you, severely, for years - you will be guilty of killing those next to me. Their deaths were intended and therefore are inexcusable in law. That you were very reluctant to kill them would be no excuse either.

Who lives in the 14th Century?

So the morality of intention is quite capable of establishing the moral equivalence of civilized and barbaric slaughter of innocents.  (Remember the three million killed in Vietnam if you think that civilized slaughter is less consequential.)  But what of the notion that 'many Muslims', because they apparently ignore intentions and don't excuse civilized collateral damage, are stuck in the 14th Century?

Exactly the opposite is the case.  The morality of intention, as we have seen, is Christian. In Christianity everything - that is, salvation - depends on the condition of your soul.  Contemporary, 'systematic' moral philosophy, beginning in the 18th Century, typically assigns a subordinate role to intentions:  they may help to determine the goodness or badness of the agent, but not the rightness or wrongness of the act.  That's determined by the act's effect: roughly, whether it makes the world better or worse.

The 'many Muslims' Harris regards as barbaric are said to ignore intentions.  If so, particularly when in the West arm-waving about good intentions is thought enough to dismiss the most horrible damage to innocent human flesh, this alleged barbarism may involve a more mature attitude to moral responsibility.  Indeed when faced with big problems of unintentional damage in civilian life, for example the damage inflicted by faulty products, the law takes a similar tack.  It resorts of notions of "strict liability", where guilt and innocence are judged entirely in terms of acts and effects; intentions play no role at all.  If this reduces the suffering of the barbarian inflicted by the civilized, maybe it's not such a bad idea.

Harris and 'many non-Muslims' are not moralists, they are apologists.  They find in good intentions an advantage afforded by Christian morality, an excuse.  And it's not that they refuse to assume the heavy burden of Christian morality, which looks deeply into intentions and very rarely finds them genuinely good.  No, it's that they aren't even aware the burden exists.  For that there is no excuse from any perspective.

--------------------------

 (*)  How do I know?  The arguments here were made at a philosophy conference.  The audience turned out to include, somewhat to my dismay, a whole bunch of Israeli philosophers, who I expected to take offence at my claim that contemporary style air strikes and terrorism were, in many cases, morally indistinguishable.  Their reaction?  Sure, they said.  They were kind of bored.

A cannibal in Syria

This ought not to be an important subject - one crazed guy in a horrifying video and a disturbing interview.  Some insist that it takes attention away from far worse atrocities. That hasn't had much effect.  It takes more than morality and politics to explain the divergent reactions..

The vocabulary of the reports is suggestive.  In Foreign Policy, Peter Bouckaert asked Is This the Most Disgusting Atrocity Filmed in the Syrian Civil War?   There was another source of disgust, some jokes about the incident.  All these reactions testify to the special character of the atrocity.  Cannibalism is an act fundamentally unlike the torture and massacre that outrage morality.

The prohibition of cannibalism is not so much a fundamental moral principle as a deep, deep taboo.  The victim wasn't killed to be eaten; he'd died in battle.  Eating parts of already dead bodies harms no one - unlike killing torture, exploitation and virtually all 'normal' moral concerns.   We -  I include myself - very much want to think of cannibalism as terribly wrong, but the commentary is accurate:  really, it's terribly disgusting.  It gets special attention for that reason.  It deserves that attention, because it arouses fears that our efforts to civilize ourselves have failed.  It's supposed to be something animals might do, but not humans.   This certainly seems important whether or not anyone is harmed.

When people make jokes about cannibalism, it's not that they don't take it seriously; it's that they don't quite manage to see it as a moral outrage.  (Moral rules are broken all the time; taboos, very rarely.)   The video was literally a horror movie.   People laugh at horror movies for the same reason:  because they're thoroughly unsettling and humour is a kind of nervous reaction, a way to bring the horror down to size.  No one says:  "how can you laugh?  these acts are terribly wrong."

Everyone is right about the cannibalism video.  It's disgusting.  It needs to be taken seriously;  we just don't quite know how.  From a moral standpoint there are indeed  far more serious crimes.  Violating a taboo is very serious, but in a different way.

There is no settling this, but perhaps the spectators can understand one another.

Executions, Procedures and Justice

The same people who emphasize the disunity and lack of leadership among the FSA are eager to attribute summary executions to the FSA.     But summary executions pose problems beyond the mere attribution of responsibility.   There are issues about the laws and conventions invoked to condemn the executions - I've discussed these issues at excessive length in another post and will be very brief about them here.   Then there are questions about due process.   These require close examination because due process, 'procedural justice', has become an article of faith.   Maybe that's overdone.  Finally there are questions about justice in a viciously oppressive state.

Laws, conventions and their application

First, international laws and conventions are just good wishes.   Unlike the laws of a state, they're not backed by generally accepted tribunals or enforcement arms - if at all.  They're also not the product of anything like a democratic process.  So it doesn't do to go on about these laws and conventions as if they were the bedrock of civilization.

Second, the summary executions of the FSA, however similar, should not be equated with those of the régime.   The régime is supposedly a state,with an established criminal justice system and all its infrastructure.   The FSA has nothing of the sort.

Third,  the FSA is not a cohesive body.   It's a fragmented, undefined collection of wildly disparate groups.   Nothing can be attributed to that collection, including the excesses of FSA fighters.   Keep it simple and attribute responsibility to those who perform the acts.

The outrage at summary executions obscures a much more disturbing problem.   In settled societies where law and order generally prevails, the insistence on proper judicial procedure is extremely important:  we don't want vigilante justice because we have something we presume is much better.   And belief in the importance of procedural justice of course helps cement the supremacy of the government, which has a monopoly on these procedures.   But those who must live under tyrannical or nakedly unjust régimes - let alone rampantly murderous ones - might well take a different view.   They might ask some tough questions.

Due process in theory and practice

What does proper judicial procedure  have to do with being just?  In theory, nothing.   A fair procedure isn't sufficient to produce a just outcomes:  perhaps the innocent are mistakenly convicted, and the guilty mistakenly go free.   A fair procedure also isn't necessary:  an unfair procedure might, even consistently, produce just results.   Among these unfair procedures is summary justice.   Nowhere is it written that summary justice must fall on the innocent rather than the guilty.   One might even wonder if summary justice must always count as unfair:  what if there's overwhelming evidence the  person judged is guilty?

So much for the theory.  What then about the realities?  Take the US, with its nice constitutional rights and elaborate judicial apparatus.   Only now, when DNA testing has been employed by such movements as the Innocence Project, are we getting some idea of just how often the innocent are indeed found guilty, and in capital cases.  (Don't say, 'but in these cases the judicial process was defective'.  We're talking realities now, and these are the realities of procedural justice.)   But convicting the innocent is probably not even the greatest defect of procedural justice - there are also procedurally just convictions under unjust or stupid laws, like the drug laws which have done much to give the US the world's highest incarceration rate.   This is how procedural justice functions in a society most of the world can only envy.

Yet this is only half of what would concern those living under unjust governments enforcing their rule by brutal repression.   Anyone with any experience of such régimes will be struck by the utter impunity enjoyed by those on the right side of wealth and power.   They do what they like, and the authorities do far worse.   So what tends to concern those oppressed by the régime is not simply that the innocent are punished, but also that the guilty - so many of them, with such terrible crimes to their name - go free.

Someone who's lived this - and whose grandparents' grandparents have lived it - can have no rational expectation that procedural justice will produce just outcomes.  Now suppose that, at long last, the régime is challenged and its procedures are in tatters, while its erstwhile victims are fighting for their lives.   They capture some soldiers of the régime.  What now?

Justice in Syria

Is procedural justice a live option?  The Geneva Convention was formulated with national armies in mind.  National armies generally have the capacity to accommodate prisoners.   Fighters in desperate circumstances generally don't.   But suppose they can set something up.   What then?   They could establish tribunals but these, given the viciously partisan atmosphere, will inevitably and rightly  be termed 'kangaroo courts'.   Or they could wait until victory - assuming it will come, assuming the prisoners will remain prisoners until then, assuming the aftermath of victory will be - what a large assumption! - a just society in which high standards of procedural justice prevail.

And what then?   Even then, only the realities of procedural justice, not the ideal, can be expected.  There will likely be a new criminal code, and already that makes trial for offenses prior to the code procedurally dubious.    Then there will be the matter of evidence.   Will there be any?  collected by whom?  how long ago?  according to what approved procedures?   Under the circumstances, it's very unlikely that anything incriminating will stand up in court:  even international tribunals manage to prosecute only high officials about whom there will be a wealth of authenticated material.    The plain ordinary folks of the old régime - the torturers, the murderers and those complicit in their crimes - will likely have little to worry about, at least if proper procedures are in force.  On top of everything else, with tens of thousands deserving punishment, justice if it comes will take decades, or forever.  Once again, the fighters would have no rational grounds for expecting procedural justice to produce a just outcome.

This is where the hardest questions arise.   We cannot robotically insist on procedural justice, which so often is no justice at all.   Its very modest real-life virtues have to be weighed not only against its defects but against other imperatives:  that crimes are to be punished, and that the punishment must fit the crime.  These are not the principles of barbarians frothing at the mouth for revenge; they are respectable elements of academic jurisprudence.   What becomes of them when procedural justice, in so many ways, proves inadequate?    Does the record of our judicial systems suggest that a judicial apparatus is fairer or more accurate than the snap judgement of the executioners?

Yes, given the resources and security, the FSA could establish a nice-looking judicial system and put on an impressive display of juristic sophistication before it machine-gunned its captives.   Would that be better?   What if we had videos, not only of the summary executions, but of what is endured by the victims of judicial injustice?  When Khatib4FreeSyria (@machkhatib) writes, "Cluster-bombing, rape-and-butchering, child-throat-slitting, livestock-torching, city-leveling #Assad army deserves mercy?"  we need to admit that justice really is about what people deserve.   Perhaps better to criticize brutalities - and the opposition admits there is much to criticize - than to wax self-righteous over violations of judicial procedure.

Human Rights and Human Realities

Here's William Hague, telling the FSA they had a responsibility to respect human rights:

    "There have been reports of atrocities on the opposition side in Syria, which we condemn just as we condemn atrocities, the many atrocities carried out by the regime."

    "A British official said that one of the main messages Wilks had taken to FSA representatives in Istanbul was to urge them to focus on their human rights obligations. "It is important to send the message to the political arm of the FSA to say you have got responsibilities. We are saying: be careful, you are being watched very carefully."

Hague's impertinent preaching is a good starting point for looking who needs to do what about which of those rights -it is typical of the unreflective sanctimony that almost always infuses human rights talk.   An analysis of these rights leads to something less sanctimonious.

Human rights, both legal and moral, are real, but encounter severe limitations when they make the acquaintance of reality.   They are sometimes thought mandated or protected or  validated by international law.  They are also seen as moral imperatives.  These are at most half-truths.

Human rights as international laws

Something like international law is often invoked by the promoters of  human rights.  No surprises here:  laws are thought to have authority,  and authority commands respect in the sense of obedience.   But this sort of advocacy encounters an enemy, common sense.

The issue here is not whether human rights ought in some sense to be respected, but, specifically, whether the mere fact that they are mandated by international law supports this claim.   It does not, for several reasons.

For a start, international law doesn't have anything like the authority of national law.  National laws have authority because - and to the extent that - there is a well-functioning mechanism for their enforcement.    The enforcement mechanism is a government.   International laws benefit from no such mechanism.   There is no world government.

The UN may aspire to be such an institution but it seems that, the more it aspires, the more it brings itself into contempt.   Since its members are national governments, many themselves of dubious legitimacy, it cannot be considered representative of its purported citizens or subjects, the world's population.    Since it is controlled by the five permanent members of the Security Council, it cannot be considered representative even of the world's nations.   Since it is often laughably ineffective, it cannot even have the authority imparted by force.   It can't possibly lend significant authority to international law.

Since there is no world government, the various international courts and tribunals suffer from similar defects.    These tribunals are themselves upheld by agreements and conventions that certainly have not been endorsed by the world's population.   No authoritative body - such as a world government - has validated their procedures.   They are clearly dependent on the more powerful nations of the world, who also lack the legal and moral authority to validate such dependence.   So these institutions are no more capable of validating human rights than the UN.

This is not to say that the UN, or the international tribunals, are a bad idea.   It would be great if we had a legitimate world government and/or authoritative tribunals to protect the world's population.   Perhaps these imperfect institutions are a valuable step towards the real thing.  But this in itself can't lend authority to their proceedings.   A bunch of half-crazed vigilantes might also, in a post-apocalyptic world, be a valuable step towards restoring national law, but that wouldn't make their deliberations legitimate.

Even if international law were just as legitimate as national law, this wouldn't lend any moral authority to human rights.  Laws, whoever makes them and however legitimated, can be wise or idiotic, just or unjust, good or evil.   They can themselves contravene moral rights and they can have morally disastrous consequences.   Suppose that  some  international body was constituted by free and fair elections the world over.   Suppose too that, on the advice of respected jurists, it passed a law requiring the execution of redheads.  That law would have no noticeable moral authority.   Moreover we would certainly feel that moral authority trumped any other sort of authority the law might possess.   So the mere fact that international law mandated human rights could never of itself support the claim that those rights must be respected.

Human rights and international conventions

Since human rights can't really be validated by international law, they can be mandated only by various international conventions.  Like international tribunals and the UN, these conventions may be - probably are - a valuable first step towards the real thing, in this case genuine respect for some valid code of human rights.   But again, the mere fact that human rights are endorsed by these conventions can't support the claim that such rights must be respected.

International conventions have even less legitimacy than international law, for similar reasons.  The world leaders who endorse such conventions include, as we know, crooks, dictators, war criminals, and idiots.   What legitimacy could derive from the mere fact that they've agreed to something?

Even if the conventions were legitimate, they could not apply to such groups as the FSA.   Conventions and agreements apply only to their signatories.   The FSA was not a signatory, nor does it represent any country that signed.   So appeal to these conventions is misplaced.  In fact it's not clear that the FSA is any sort of entity that could be held responsible for anything.   As Julien Barnes-Dacey (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/10/britain-aid-syrian-opposition-groups) put it,  "There is no such thing as the FSA in any organisational form, just different groups on the ground that identity themselves as the FSA."    So there is no entity of the sort to which the conventions apply.

Again, maybe these conventions are a good start.   And maybe woman's kidnapping quickly produces a good marriage:  good starts don't necessarily confer legitimacy.    They are only beginning of a process that may or may not produce a legitimate outcome.

If human rights can't gain much standing from international laws and conventions, how do they fare as moral rules?

Rights have limits

The whole notion of human rights has been discredited by a deadly combination of two bad ideas - rights-inflation, where you get a right to everything nice, and the failure to acknowledge that even the most important human rights are not absolute.

Rights-inflation has conferred the status of a human right on virtually anything we might suppose all human beings out to have - education, for instance.    The problem here is not the idea that all humans should have access to education.  It's how this is to interact with other moral imperatives, like 'all humans should have enough to eat'.   When human rights are conceived as absolute, this can produce nothing but silly pieties: "oh, what a terrible dilemma, we need to educate our young people, yet others need food!"

So human rights need to be limited.   It's easiest to see this as rights having limited extent, rather than that they are stomped on by other rights.    My right to education does not extend to cases where it can be honoured only by violating the right of others to eat.

Once it's accepted that human rights must be limited, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the limitations have to do with the overall consequences of the choices that must be made.    Suppose, for instance, a right conflicts 'with itself'.   Here's a case where the nauseating righteousness of human rights discourse needs to go away.    What if it takes torture to make a secret police agent reveal the location of an interrogation centre where dozens of people, including small children, are horribly tortured to death, daily?   Anyone who refuses to accept that there really can be such a dilemma, and that a choice really has to be made, simply prefers his own illusions of purity over actual morality.   After all, if in this actual situation you 'refuse to chose', it means you have chosen to let the centre continue its operations.    And to pretend that such situations can't arise is nothing more than unfounded dogmatism about the real world.   The fact that people often violate human rights on the basis of false beliefs -  'this guy is a dangerous terrorist and hundreds of lives hinge on the information we can force out of him' - does nothing whatever to exclude the very real possibility that hard choices exist.   So, contrary to the preachy version of human rights, we really do have to limit them based on consequences, sometimes in very ugly ways.

Taking consequences into account isn't some descent to a lower form of ethics; it's just required to make ethics coherent.  Consequences include one thing even to the most saintly proponent of human rights must consider - violations of human rights.   What if, to respect my right to life, you must allow thousands of violations of others' right to life?  To insist on the observance of human rights regardless of consequences is to invite absurdity.

Once we uses consequences to determine when a right applies, why not just look at the act and say, according to its consequences, that it's right or wrong?   We could do this.   Speaking of rights is shorthand for something like:   "In our experience, the consequences of doing this  (e.g. killing someone) are almost-never/rarely/generally unacceptable, or (e.g. education) desirable."  "In our experience" is needed because the world could change radically and what is almost never acceptable/unacceptable becomes less or even more unacceptable.   The scope of a right depends on constantly changing facts about the world.

This doesn't mean that speaking of rights is unimportant.   It may be very necessary to give people the idea that certain types of actions are normally immoral, or that certain people morally ought to have certain things.  Maybe people behave better then.   But to preach rights is at least to oversimplify, possibly to deceive in a good cause.

Politics and human rights

Human rights are both more and less than alleged.   More, because they are no 'fraud' or 'sham' perpetrated by intervention-crazy neocons.   Less, because they are subject to limitations whose extent can only be determined by the consequences of particular decisions.   The political implications of this situation are extensive.

On the one hand, the poo-pooing of human rights by smarty-pants left-wing commentators is a foolish, even contemptible mistake.  It represents a complete abandonment of moral common sense.  The commentators apparently believe some things are right or wrong; why else do they condemn intervention?   But in their world, the worst sort of torture, conducted by régimes whose service to humanity is nil, gets a microsecond long cover-your-ass reference to 'atrocities', lost in long, snarky perorations on Western 'hypocrisy'.    One can only marvel at a sensibility which obsesses over a character defect in the face of assaults on the tissue and organs of living children.

Tellingly the foundation of this perverse outlook involves a patently dimwitted calculation of consequences.   The idea is that the West, which like every previous hegemony has committed various crimes at various times and places, is certain to commit more crimes even when it has no reason to do so.   No oil riches, no strategic necessities, no dreams of conquest need loom on the horizon; the bad character of world leaders is quite enough.   In a pinch, dark predictions about future sectarian slaughter are trotted out, claims which in other contexts these same commentators would ridicule as imperialist bunk.  This is weighed against a true certainty, horrible crimes actually committed in the world's eye.   If this is an honest assessment of consequences, it speaks volumes about the depths of self-deception that infuse much contemporary left-wing ideology.

On the other hand, the sanctification of human rights has produced a completely unbalanced reaction to the crimes 'of the FSA' - scare-quotes because there is no centralized authority to whom these crimes can reasonably be attributed.   This is partly a matter of harping on international conventions whose minimal authority extends to states, not resistance movements.   Yes, it is a good idea to promote such well-intentioned expressions of wishful thinking as the Geneva Convention, but to do so in these inappropriate contexts will simply bring the Convention into disrepute.   Some parts of the Convention, in effect exhortations against torture, would be better served simply by condemning torture.   Other parts, having to do with the treatment of prisoners, make sense only for nations which can fight wars in the old style.   Certainly the FSA should take prisoners wherever possible, but it is mere insolence to preach as if this luxury is always available to small groups of fighters in the most desperate circumstances.      Would these same preachers have been so quick to pass judgement on the Jewish resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto?  Or this this just the sort of thing you declaim against those bloodthirsty Arabs?   The preachers should bear in mind that the Syrian resistance arose and fights precisely to minimize human rights violations, which the régime perpetrates on the most massive scale.    The idea that the fighters should risk their lives and the success of the resistance to take prisoners even in the most desperate circumstances isn't high-minded moral sensibility.    It is immoral prissiness that would never have passed muster in the days of the Second World War.

To put it in strictly moral terms:  the Syrian people were faced with a choice to revolt or not to revolt.  What they ought to have chosen depended on what they could expect to happen.  When they chose revolt, if they had reasonable foresight, they knew that any such activity would inevitably involve, not simply human rights violations, but completely unjustified ones.   But they could also reasonably expect that a revolt would minimize human rights violations overall, because it would overthrow a régime for whom human rights were not even on the horizon.   (Yes, it was possible that what replaced the régime would be as bad, but those in revolt had no reason to assign a high probability to such an outcome.)   So even in terms of human rights, the decision to revolt, despite the fact that it would involve unjustified human  rights violations, was morally obligatory:  on reasonable expectations, it would have by far the best consequences.   (Another caveat:  yes, there would be terrible loss of life, but the same would be true if the Assad régime stayed in power.)   This is worth remembering when people moralize about the failings of the FSA.

Atheism is not about people

The sum total of atheism is:  God does not exist.   You can go on about what is covered by 'God', but let's just suppose it refers to supreme beings in any major world religion that has them.   Atheists are likely to believe that no lesser supernatural entities exist, but that's only a likelihood.

An atheist is someone who believes that God does not exist.   That's all, everything necessary and sufficient to be an atheist.  Perhaps some people are misled by the 'ism' to suppose that more is involved, but it isn't.

The world would be a little less irritating if people got this.  To be clear, from the fact that someone believes God does not exist, it does not follow that he has any particular moral or sociological or psychological beliefs.   In fact it does not follow that he has any other beliefs at all except for trivial logical implications of "God does not exist" like "God does not exist or cats eat tractors."  So there is no such thing an an atheist outlook or ethos, 'humanist' or otherwise.   Atheism is not about people.

Among the beliefs an atheist should not be supposed to have are any about religion, except that it contains a crucial and false premise, that God exists.   It's not just that the claim that God does not exist has no other implications for religion.   It's also that the arguments for the claim have no such implications.   The arguments, typically, have to do with abstract matters like the concept of God, and scientific matters like the structure and causality of nature.  Someone with competence, even expertise in these abstruse matters has no claim to expertise in anything about religion, except its false premise.   It is therefore a mystery why Richard Dawkins apparently thinks that his competence in zoology, a discipline which indeed helps make the case for atheism, should entitle him to hold forth about religion, about which he knows and apparently cares to learn very little indeed.   And then there was Christopher Hitchens, whose competence in....   what, exactly?

Why would anyone even want to tackle the claim that religion is a good thing, or a bad thing?   I'd think the answer is obvious:   sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, and until history ends, we won't know the balance between the two  - if then.   Besides, 'religion' encompasses such varied phenomena, at so many times and places, that no one is competent to talk about its overall effects.   The whole discussion should go away.

By now I fear and fear the reader will fear this is some plea for understanding between atheists and theists.   There have been many such pleas lately, for mutual respect, for civility, for a more nuanced approach to the whole debate.  What debate?  I'm not sure:  maybe about atheism or religion, or maybe the existence of God.   No, this is a plea for less nuance and understanding.   Atheists need to fuss less and be less open to polite discussion.

Here's what a real and pure atheist, not infected by 'humanism,' sounds like:

 Our problem is not that somehow we have failed to come up with a convincing proof of the existence of God or that the hypothesis of an afterlife remains in serious doubt, it is rather that in our deepest reflections we cannot take such opinions seriously.   When we encounter people who claim to believe such things, we may envy them to comfort and security they claim to derive from these beliefs, but at bottom we remain convinced that either they have not heard the news or they are in the grip of faith.   When I lectured on the mind-body problem in India and was assured by several members of my audience that my views must be mistaken, because they personally had existed in their earlier lives as frogs or elephants, etc., I did not think, "Here is evidence for an alternative world view,"or even "Who knows, perhaps they are right."  And my insensitivity was much more than mere cultural provincialism:  Given what I know about how the world works, I could not regard their views as serious candidates for truth.
-- Jonathan Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind. Cambridge, Mass. (Bradford Books, MIT Press) 1992, 90f.

Of course it's more than the existence of God one should be close-minded about; it's also the ridiculous debate over whether morality or being moral is compatible with atheism.    Keep your eye on the ball.   There are millions of ethical systems, and many very prominent ones, that do not mention God, so there is no question of compatibility.  There is no need have a God serve as the foundation of morality.  You can of course make wild generalizations about whether fear of God is essential to good behavior, but bear in mind that this is a strictly factual question, not an invitation to declaim.    And as a factual question, it is clear that some atheists do behave according to plausible moral codes on some occasions.   Beyond that lies a debate about how likely atheists are to behave well.   This involves many grand sociological and psychological assumptions - it's no more likely get resolved answer than the debate about religion's effects.   Can there really be a well-founded study which (a) considered all the atheists and theists who have ever and will ever live, and (b) determined which group is more likely to behave well?

As for civility, of course there's no need for name-calling or rudeness.   But please, no 'mutual respect' in any relevant sense, at least from the atheist side.    You can respect a religious person but what would it mean, other than polite reticence, to 'respect' one of his presumably key beliefs?   You know, the false one about how God exists?    Why should that get more respect than, say, the belief that Stalin invented the steam engine?    And yes, an atheist can have a faintly patronizing 'respect' for religion.   I greatly admire certain Christian theologians and, to an extent, the institutions within which they worked, because  these were brilliant men.   But Í also hold that their most fundamental beliefs, at least today, are not 'serious candidates for truth'.    So this respect is not, whatever else it may be, some basis for a respectful dialogue between atheists and theists.   Heaven forbid.

Immoral Moralizing

Sometimes preaching morality is, as you'd expect, the moral thing to do.   The English 19th anti-slavery movement affords an example.  There is a clear and direct link from Josiah Wedgwood's moralising to England's abolition of slavery.

There's also useless moralizing.   Many find it in the pronouncements of the UN, the West, or for  that matter Russia on Syria.    Condemning this or that, expressing outrage, is widely understood to have done no good at all.   Some go further.  They say the moralizing has actually made things worse, for instance by buying time for Assad.   But I have yet to hear an explicit claim that, if the facts are as alleged, this moralizing is actually immoral.   Why not?  If a voluntary action makes things worse, what else can be said?  Moralizing can indeed be immoral.

What then of moralizing about the FSA - I don't mean face-to-face criticism of wrong-doing, but a public dressing-down?  Some of the most bitter opponents of Assad almost jump at the chance to condemn the only  people who have any chance of stopping his atrocities.   The FSA violates human rights!  it executes people!  it's brutal!  it's 'dangerous'!

If the FSA were behaving like Assad - torturing the wounded in their hospital beds, mutilating and raping children, gouging out eyes, setting fire to living flesh - these condemnations would be welcome.   Many resistance movements have matched the brutality of their enemies.   Maybe moralizing about such atrocities would make things better, and could hardly make them worse.   But that's not the current situation, and that's not what drives moralizing about the FSA.

Some people, of course, moralize about the FSA because they support Assad.   But what about the opponents of Asad who moralize in the same vein?  These people, in many cases, don't know what it is to make a choice in terrible times.  Their moralizing isn't just some salutary moment of neutrality that shines a light on wrongdoing.   It's a real choice with real effects.  It can do more harm than good.  If so, the choice to moralize is immoral.

There are abstract cases where neutrality is really neutral in its effects.  I don't chose to support any Olympic team.   So what?  it would make no difference if I did.  If I don't join in a game, it makes no difference as long as there are equally effective or ineffective people willing to play.    But where Syria is concerned, any choice, if effective, helps one side or another.   This includes the choice to express outrage over FSA human rights violations, and even more, to condemn or denigrate the FSA for these acts.

The FSA certainly does 'violate' human rights, and it certainly will continue to do so.   Such violations are not necessarily even wrong, because the rights are not absolute.   There is, contrary to popular belief, no great moral dilemma here.   If I ' violate' your human right to free speech because failure to do so will in fact lead to a pogrom, that is not a Great Problem.   It is right for me to do so, and actually wrong for me not to.   Your right was never, in fact, violated; it simply did not extend to the situation.

The FSA is in desperate circumstances and in some cases, 'respecting' others' rights would actually be wrong, because the consequences would be as catastrophic as in the pogrom example.   But there are also cases where the FSA could well afford to respect rights, and fails to do so, and an acts wrongly.   Is it right to moralize about these cases?

No, not about the cases we know of, because that sort of thing will happen anyway.   We know this from all past experience of desperate warfare.   Only in some limited, gentlemanly conflicts such as occurred in 18th and 19th Century Europe were prisoners  never shot out of hand, and all the niceties of  human rights observed.   In total war, in civil war, in virtually every other kind of war, you will get some out-of-hand killing.   To say so is not to condone it, but to recognize the pointlessness of condemning it.

Highlighting the moral errors of the FSA isn't like preaching against slavery in 19th Century England.   It can do no good but quite a bit of harm.  A lot of fevered-hand-to-brow agonizing is circulating in newspapers and social media.  "Oh, what a terrible choice, Asad or the brutal FSA.  How our hopes have been betrayed!"   Or a milder version:   "The FSA is seriously fucking up.   They don't realize what a terrible effect their excesses have on their image.   They are losing their moral compass."   These pronouncements are sometimes explicit, sometimes insinuated.   Perhaps worst of all are the pseudo-calm, pseudo-balanced pronouncements on how 'both sides' have committed human rights violations and war crimes.

None of this can be proven to matter, but consider the effect it might have.  Syrians, at home and abroad, as well as activists of other nationalities, experience stress, exhaustion, disappointment.  They are bound to experience doubt - "are we doing the right thing?   is this worth it after all?   Are we blinding ourselves to the fact that both sides are, objectively speaking, pretty bad?"   Add to this the decisions of those on the brink of choosing a side, or staying out of the conflict, and it's no stretch to suppose that the FSA is seriously weakened by the moralizing.   The moral fastidiousness of those too naïve to realize what war is like would then be anything but moral.   It would strengthen a really unusually evil régime against a resistance guilty of no more than ordinary military sins.

The damage done by moralizing about the FSA is an outcome that reasonable people, considering the consequences of their action, should expect.   If they are high-minded, this isn't admirable.  It is destructive of the desperate hopes of thousand so innocent people.   Therefore, it is wrong.