Why study the philosophy of science?

‘The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.’ – Richard Feynman

So why should you study the philosophy of science, then? In particular, if you’re a scientist  then what is to gain from all this metatheory? How does it impact upon your day to day practice of research and theorising and so-forth?

Well, I can’t speak for you but I can speak a little bit about why I have found it helpful. Mind-altering, even.

So normally, most people think of science as trying to make valid causal inferences: the search for cause and effect. This is thought to occur via something called The Scientific Method whereby the scientist proposes a hypothesis and runs an experiment to see if the hypothesis ‘comes true’. If it doesn’t come true, the hypothesis is falsified and discarded. If the hypothesis seems really robust, we can start to call it a theory or even a law of nature. Even if one’s attitude isn’t quite so narrow as to what constitutes ‘science’, most still view prediction by induction to be the raison d’etre of scientific enquiry, where the subject of that enquiry are a reality that we can approximate in our theories and which exists in more or less the same form regardless of our ideas about it (eg when the tree falls in the forest and nobody is around, it sill makes a sound).

I am a social scientist. This means that I study what people do as part of society, and what sort of things characterise and constitute that society. It follows from the above definition of science that I should be looking for the causes and effects of social activity, and for general patterns of the type ‘whenever A happens, B follows‘. But people are really, really complex, and the methodologies available for studying them – those rules of analysis and problems or questions of interest that together define a research agenda – vary widely between fields and within them. Should I be trying to falsify hypotheses? Should I be using economic models? Should I be, I don’t know, just asking people to tell me why they do the things they do?

Let me give you an example of one of the puzzles that social scientists face; something that gives us cause to wonder if many of our common explanations involve some deeply paradoxical or counterintuitive assumptions. Consider the notion of social structures: if social structures affect our actions, but social structures only exist because of the actions of individual people, then doesn’t that mean that we’re both cause and effect? And if structures are more than the sum of their parts – us – how is that metaphysically possible? Isn’t that like saying 1+1=3? And if structures are nothing more than us, and can’t influence us, then what do they do? I’m not actually going to try to answer these puzzles – though I do have some ideas about them – but I do think they give you just a small glimpse into some of the conceptual difficulties that social scientists must face.

There is a critical immediacy to discussions on how to conceptualise notions like truth, causality, observation, explanation, and scientific progress when it comes to social science that don’t seem as pressing in the so-called ‘natural’ or ‘experimental’ sciences. That doesn’t mean they don’t matter deep down, but there doesn’t seem to be as much choice between radically different methods and assumptions for studying the same general thing. Some philosophers of science have suggested that the mark of a ‘mature’ science is this sort of methodological uniformity, but if that were true, then it would be grim news for social scientists, because I have the distinct sense that we’ll never get there. Or at least, we’ll get there only by radically changing the way we talk about people, in potentially impractical ways.

I think that a basic understanding of the philosophy of science – which I’ve already said is particularly important in social science – should consist of an understanding of the various debates on the following (interconnected!) issues:

• What are facts and what is a true statement?
• How do we find facts or determine whether a statement is true?
• What is the link between observation, theory, evidence, and truth? What gives us warrant to assert a claim?
• What is an explanation?
• How do we develop more ‘knowledge’ or make progress on our understanding and explaining?
• What does it mean to ‘do science’?

These are hard questions. Very hard questions. Of course, we will need to take up certain substantive positions on them if we are going to support our particular choice of methodologies, and of course I have my own opinions on them, but the only way to take a reasonable position is to know the basics of the various options, and to have some idea of where those options take you.

I won’t go into many specifics of who to read and why – at least not extensively – but  some excellent starting choices are Alexander Rosenberg‘s concise and cogent introductions to science and social science, Larry Laudan’s pragmatic theory of scientific progress, Laudan’s ‘Confutation of Convergent Realism‘ (for the slightly more advanced), and Peter Winch‘s short but powerful  ‘The Idea of a Social Science‘ (note: link is to an ebook and its only 160 pages!). I would highly recommend to anyone else in International Relations and political science to at the very least read Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s book on how philosophy of science pertains to the field, though Jackson’s book would be a good start even for sociologists, anthropologists, critical theorists, etc simply for its breadth. Or just go through the readings in an introductory syllabus and see where they take you.

If you’re looking for some key insights right away, let me share a few with you:

• There are more ways to do science than to make hypotheses and test them by seeing if their predictions come true. While experiments of this nature can give us powerful ways of controlling the world, they may not give us the right kind of answer to other sorts of questions. For example, instead of determining which independent variables are stronger ’causes’ than others for ‘dependent variable’ effects, an event or outcome may be best understood as occurring when a whole set of factors come together in just the right way as to produce an effect. In other words, rather than a set of possible causes to find the real ones, the scientist studies one situation that they know was the real cause, and looks to see how it created the effect – in short, a search for causal mechanisms.
• The above alternative to the hypothetico-deductive method – ie experiments and hypothesis testing – is particularly pertinent to looking at very complex things, such as society or certain kinds of biology. That is because there are many causal factors, and it is very hard to know just precisely how they came together. Some of them might only need to be present, but others might do different things depending on their quantities and ratios. In a sense, some causal structures simply make something possible while others are part of a sequence in the process that leads to it happening in the way that it did.
• In the social sciences, quite often the sort of ‘explanation’ we are looking for is an answer to ‘why did X find it reasonable or appropriate to do what they did?’ This kind of explanation requires us to try to understand X’s situation in the same way X did, and look for the rules of behaviour or thinking that influenced X’s judgement. Often we can only really get an answer by deep, narrative study of X and X’s relation to their environment.
• There are powerful challenges to the notion that we could ever describe a kind of objective reality, not just in terms of cognitive biases but in principle. These challenges come from the nature of language (ebook), of consciousness, and of causality and metaphysics itself. They are worth studying in detail, because deciding how to deal with them is necessary to produce a coherent methodology. One way out is to be entirely instrumentalist, but this escape comes at great cost.

Even though my main area of study is International Relations and political sociology, I have found that studying the philosophy of (social) science has helped me think about how to view things like ‘states’ or ‘politics’ or ‘rhetoric’ or ‘power’ in hugely relevant ways, and to figure out what I can contribute in studying them.

The Skeptics Movement and Terrorism

I’m being ‘interviewed’ by a friend of a friend. Via email. My interviewer’s project is on:

…“marginalia on skeptical thinking” in which I will interview and interrogate different thinkers who adopt various postures in regards to science as a means of knowing, skepticism as a means to philosophical inquiry, and doubt as a part of a dialectical project.

Skepoet (his internet handle) is interviewing me because my friend touted me as an unusually well informed thinker and writer on issues of terrorism, religious extremism, and security within the Skeptics Movement. While it seems as though Skepoet will likely want to take the discussion into quite philosophical territory, his first question was simple and practical:

What do you think the key problems are there with a lot of the assertions one sees about terrorism from [Skeptics such as] Pat Condell or Sam Harris?

My answer was very long-winded, and will almost certainly be truncated and edited when Skepoet posts it on his blog. However, I also think it functions well as a stand-alone essay that is well suited to the themes of my blog. So here it is in full:

Terrorism and the Skeptics

So the Skeptics are a fairly well informed bunch when it comes to international goings-on. They – we – read the news and enjoy discussing events of significant political or human importance taking place in the Middle East or in Europe, and so-on. And so, of course, Skeptics read about stuff which reasonably carries the label ‘terrorism’. It is the interest of the Skeptics to address and combat bad critical thinking and its harmful consequences, particularly as an apparent result of religious doctrine. Terrorism, as we encounter it, thus seems to be the perfect exemplar of flawed, religious beliefs leading to terribly harmful consequences. And it has escaped no-one’s notice that most of that stuff we call terrorism, insofar as it is reported in our mainstream media, is done by Muslims, and often justified in explicitly Islamic language. This is the context within which we should understand the perspectives of intellectual leaders of the Skeptics community such as Sam Harris.

The Sam Harris School, in which I think we can include Pat Condell along with quite a few other Skeptics, seems to hold the following views on terrorism:
1. Terrorism is caused by extremist, irrational beliefs, usually of a religious character.
2. Islamic scripture and doctrine is essentially conducive to terrorism, to a greater degree than other religion’s texts and doctrines; a moderate Muslim is simply not a very pious Muslim, and is not practicing their own faith in a committed way.
3. Islam as its widely practiced today is particularly conducive to terrorism, with adherents comprising ‘death cults’ and espousing violent cultural chauvinism.
4. Terrorists, by virtue of their extremism and commitment to irrational religious doctrines, cannot be reasoned or bargained with, and should be dealt with via hawikish counterterrorism policies.

All of these views are undermined, to varying but generally substantial degrees, by the history and social science scholarship on terrorism, extremism, religious fundamentalism, and the intersections between ideology and violence. They are undermined in ways that should be understandable to anyone, and their flaws should be apparent to more than just experts in the field.

I will explain how this is the case.

1. There is a robust debate amongst experts as to the causes of terrorism, but that debate has, almost comprehensively, taken it as a given that relevant factors include political freedom, economic development, social structure, government effectiveness, and human security. For at least three decades, scholars on terrorism have considered both ‘underlying’ and ‘proximate’ causes, and specified a relationship between background forces that make terrorism more likely, and ‘triggers’ which push a person or a community into using terrorism. Now, of course these factors influence one-another in complex ways, and the religious or ideological beliefs held by members of a society both influence and are influenced by all these other things. Notably, though perhaps largely as a result of methodological concerns and as a legacy of behaviourism, religion is treated by many experts as epiphenomenal or as an intermediate factor which is caused by other things and serves only to enable immediate moral justification for action. It isn’t often assigned a causal role at all. While I won’t  endorse  this position, I will say that there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that our beliefs concerning legitimate targets and forms of violence, and on tolerance of difference within our community, are strongly shaped by precisely those material and structural forces I previously named. This brings me to number two.

2. Islam isn’t a thing. While there is undeniably bellicose language within Islamic texts, the meaning of those texts is determined solely through human interpretation. Why do so, so many Skeptics seem not to realise this? Some argue that certain kinds of statements terms are harder to interpret in a way that supports liberal values, and are more likely to lead to chauvinism or violence, but there are so many examples of even the most bloodthirsty or misogynist of biblical passages being ‘contextualised away’ by Christians here in North America and the UK which should be immediately available to recall. Many skeptics tend to look upon this process of contextualisation with contempt, noting that these passages are plainly awful and that theological gymnastics are a pathetic attempt to deny the obvious evil of the dogma in question. Other Skeptics argue for some kind of exceptionalism, suggesting that Christianity has a liberal tradition which Islam lacks, perhaps because Islam is hundreds of years younger and just hasn’t had its reformation yet. Well, the first argument is not only narrow-minded but ironic: Skeptics who see biblical literalism as more sound or apt are engaging in amateur theology of their own, and in the process are endorsing the notion that there are certain interpretations of religious texts which are more authoritative or accurate. I think this happens because we come from a tradition in which texts contain fairly clear arguments, penned by philosophers who make full use of modern language to ensure that their ideas are as unequivocal as possible precisely because they are committed to the kind of analytic reason which serves as the foundation to the Skeptics’ ideology. As for the second argument…

3. There are many examples of Muslim groups whose message appears very liberal and tolerant, as well as very pious.There are groups such as Imaan or al-Faitha, which campaign for greater acceptance for LGBT persons within Muslim communities on the basis of extensive theological argument. There are political parties such as Hizb al-Wasat, whose platform endorses liberal democracy of a type quite similar to what we enjoy here, in religious langauge and with reference to religious norms and principles. I published an article last year on Islamic norms and liberal democracy, as it happens. Anyway, the point is that while there is undoubtedly a powerful, global conservative movement in Islam, and while most Muslim communities in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East – and their young diasporas in Europe – would not be what I’d call liberal, this does not mean that those Muslims who are liberal are necessarily any worse at being Muslim. Nor does it mean that Islam just hasn’t yet had its reformation. Remember what I wrote earlier about religious beliefs being strongly shaped by material and structural forces? One doesn’t need to spend long comparing the conditions of primarily Muslim countries to Canada, the US, or the UK to see why something other than a failure to reach the requisite theological epoch could be behind Islam’s apparent conservatism. At the same time, one is likely to find greater similarities between Islam and Christianity as its practiced in, say, many African countries, compared to similarities between Christianity there and Christianity here. Again, this is not an argument for crass material determinism – and the powerful conservative religious movements amongst US Christians and British Muslims alike would be two prima facie confounding examples – but for the recognition that belief systems aren’t objects that endure unaffected by the world in which they dwell, exerting causal influences but receiving none from elsewhere.

4. I’ll make this short, since I appear to have rambled and ranted quite a lot. Terrorism is not some kind of extension of religiously driven rage, nor is it the inevitable and cathartic shucking of shackles by the colonised. It is a strategic response, an attempt to connect means to ends in an appropriate and efficient way. Without a doubt, individuals committing acts of terrorism believe that the harm they cause is justified, and thus from our perspective they are likely to be quite ‘extreme’ in their beliefs. WIthout a doubt, the moral principles by which those who use terrorism justify their actions are quite often expressed in religious langauge, and makes reference to the grievences – whether legitimate or not – of the colonised and the oppressed. But if terrorists didn’t think that terrorism would serve their goals, they wouldn’t be terrorists because they wouldn’t use terrorism. We might very reasonably think that the cost of bargaining with groups that hold highly illiberal social goals is too high, but there is no necessary reason why we should come to that conclusion. We might decide, after careful consideration of its associated benefits and costs, that hawkish counterterrorism is the best way to go, but that decision should be both contextually contingent and tentative. It may be a tired maxim, but very often, violence begets more violence.

PTJ’s Conduct of Inquiry: a belated few words

About five months ago I read Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s excellent book The Conduct of Inquiry, which is a discussion of the ‘philosophy of science’ as it pertains to the discipline of International Relations. I have no real criticisms of PTJ’s work – none worthy of or ready for articulation, anyway – and it was a major contributing factor in the nevertheless probably overdetermined journey I’ve since made into the philosophy of science and social science. I’ll probably reread his book before starting my PhD programme, too, as I’ll likely get more out of it now that I’m more conversant with the subject matter.

However, I have since formed one…not quite a criticism, but an alternative perspective on PTJ’s subject matter and the 2×2 matrix – the hallmark of social science! – he used to sort enquiry in my discipline into explicitly ideal-typical categories.

Basically, this was his model:

The Neopositivists blithely H-D their way to ever more robust conjunctions – oh the Hume-anity! – perhaps while singing this.

The Critical Realists figure out what must be the case through a sort of NeoKantian ‘transcendental argumentation’, in which they use abductive reasoning - which contrary to what you might expect, does not mean that they will kidnap your mind -  to determine the shape of really real ontological entities. Basically: ‘given what the data show, [entity] must exist, and possess [causal dispositions], because otherwise our theories, to use Searle’s favourite word, would just be absurd’.

The Analyticists build ideal-typical models and doesn’t afraid of anything because they’re badass pragmatists who realise that while there’s more to science than prediction, Critical Realism is…(you guessed it) absurd. Analyticists try to capture certain salient aspects of their subject matter in order to make it intelligible. A model might have predictive power, but its main function is as a cognitive guide. Like a map, it is not meant to be fully isomorphic to really real reality, but rather to help the thinker navigate.

The Reflexivists handwave. Ok, ignore that. The Reflexivists try to discover how occupying a certain position – usually social – grants privileged access to certain kinds of knowledge, is necessary for the possession of certain kinds of conceptual categories, or indeed entails its own truths that might even contradict other truths. They are the only bunch likely to utter the words ‘true for whom?’ in a non-ironic way.

Now, I really like this model. I think that it captures the main methodological paradigms in my discipline, and highlights the deeper ontological and (in some cases) epistemological wagers in which they are grounded (often unselfconsciously). But I don’t think these paradigms are necessarily incommensurable if they’re taken solely on their methodological merits. I wouldn’t dream of claiming to have anywhere near PTJ’s familiarity with the sort of claims that people in my field make, nor of the value in systematically highlighting their deeper ontological and epistemological underpinnings. So what follows is merely the product of my thinking about what wagers or positions on this issue are possible, and how they might look.

Consider this alternative two-level model.

At the first level we divide people into epistemological* Realists and Pragmatists.

Level One: R or P

[R] Realists believe that there exists some kind of method[ology] which will give us access to the really real entities that comprise reality, and reveal their powers.

[P] Pragmatists believe that no method[ology] will give us access to really real reality, and thus our theories are merely cognitive tools.

Level Two: Types of R or P

[Rp] Some Realists are methodolgical positivists, and believe that when an extremely robust conjunction of A and B obtains, there really is something real going on wherein A is causally linked to B, even if they can go no further.

[Re] Some Realists are entity realists. They rely on ‘inference to the best explanation’ to develop a really real ontology. A conjuction is, for them, a good clue, but not firm evidence as there could be undetected additional entities whose potential goes unrealised due to various countervailing influences.

[Rs] Some Realists are standpoint theorists. They are engaged in largely critical enterprise of bringing in additional perspectives on really real reality because those additional perspectives lead to a more complete scientific/theoretical ontology.

[Rnowayjose] Probably, ideal-typification is not really compatible with Realism.

[Pp] Some Pragmatists are methodological positivists. They think that, for the most part, testing hypotheses via the H-D method is a good way to keep science moving along. They probably care mainly about predictions. And shiny things.

[Pm] Some Pragmatists are ideal-typical modelers. They care about more than prediction, and think that models can be normatively useful, or help spot interesting areas for further study when they find substantial discrepancies between the predictions of a supposedly verisimilitudenous (is that even a word?) model and empirical reality.

[Ps] Some Pragmatists are standpoint theorists. They think that a diversity of perspectives allows for a more robust critical discourse. Arendt you convinced already?

[Pe] Some pragmatists could specify a diverse ontology of entities, though I wonder if this wouldn’t be subsumed within [Pm]

Another way to put it is that standpoint theorists and entity realists describe entities themselves, while positivists and modelers focus on making sense of phenomena. So the 2×2 matrix, which I haven’t bothered to make, would have ‘pragmatist’ and ‘realist’ as one distinction, and ‘phenomalism’ and ‘entity…ism’ as the other.

Thus, this alternative of mine works at two levels: the first level is that of epistemological wager, and the second is that of preferred methodology, or perhaps of one’s opinion as to the limits of methodology. Basically, the above model shows that one can employ similar method[ologie]s but treat the results of one’s enquiries as indicating different things. Generally speaking, Realists are trying to learn facts and access really real reality, while Pragmatists are engaged in a whole host of tasks from prediction to normative evaluation to sandbox exploration (something possible with computational simulations). Given the undeniable success of the H-D method in many aspects of science, for example, both a Realist and a Pragmatist could conceivably find a great deal of value in it.

And yes, there is an obvious asymmetry between the Realists and Pragmatists, in that the Realist must specify in rigorous terms why their preferred method[ology] allows for true statements or the specification of real causal relations, or entities, etc, while the Pragmatist just needs to defend their choice as an appropriate means to their ends. Of course, the Pragmatist purchases their easy ride at great cost.

The benefit of a model such as the one that I’ve provided is that it allows for methodolgical alliances between scholars holding competing epistemological positions. For example, I generally consider myself to be a Pragmatist. Overarchingly, I think that any theory is really just an ideal-typical model. But I need not alienate myself from [Rp]s if our research interests overlap. We can both collaborate on the same project, and find value in running the same analyses of the same data. Until I got very bored, and started run a ‘regression’ to a childlike state in which I play with my food and make animal noises to stay amused.

Anyway, this was my two cents. I’m sure this made sense to very few readers, and not necessarily because of ‘obscure’ subject material.

*I’m deliberately assuming that we beginning from, at minimum, a kind of External Realism. ER is, according to Searle, the belief that there is a world independent of our representations of it. That is, a state of affairs comprising some set of primitive ontological entities exists whether or not we try to talk about it. Searle thinks that this position is a presupposition of language itself – using NeoKantian transcendental argumentation, incidentally – and I’m inclined to agree with him. So we’re all Realists in a trivial way, and thus we can all talk about epistemology: how, if its even possible, can we learn about those really real things?

My talk: ‘Is Humanism a Religion?’

Embedded here is the video for my talk, ‘Is Humanism a Religion?’, soon to be followed with a transcript to my written lecture.

Some thoughts:

• This is the last time I ever read a prepared lecture. This method might be appropriate for presenting a paper at an academic conference, but it is boring and overly dense for a public talk;
• The audience spent way too much time in discussion period on whether or not Humanists have sacred principles and not nearly enough on discussing the implications of identifying as ‘religious’;
  • I am a bit surprised, because I think it’s boringly obvious that Humanists treat the intrinsic value of human wellbeing/flourishing/happiness as sacred: anyone who does not affirm this value, at least through decisions and behaviour, is very unlikely to be part of a Humanist community, and while there is discourse as to what wellbeing looks like, there is no debate over whether or not this value obtains;
  • Several discussions afterwards with audience members suggested that for those who were quite willing to accept that humanists have sacred values, this was insufficient to shift some of them from a definition of ‘religion’ focusing on supernatural beliefs;
  •  I will probably change the way I approach definitions and terms in the future to avoid running afoul of our distaste for the very idea of identifying as ‘religious’;
  • In the future, it might help to have a moderated discussion period, rather than an open one;
• I should’ve spent more time talking about how the process of interpreting the meaning of that value in practice is analogous to what [other] religious groups such as Christians or Muslims are doing with their holy books, and less about the socio-structural determination of sacred principles. I thought this would illustrate how it is far more salient to talk about social function rather than metaphysics when trying to understand religion, but this just ended up being distracting;
• Did I mention that reading a dense essay was bad form? Oy. I will definitely restructure this entirely for future iterations.
• I speak too quickly.

Terrorism is not a tactic.

This is going to be brief, and entirely unlike the usual format my posts here tend to take – that is, a sort of longer, exploratory essay usually dealing with ethics in some way. Oh and I have no clue about the picture, but it’s silly and I like it.

I’ve been trying to get a better grasp of North American, and particularly US-based, political science scholarship on civil wars, insurgencies, and terrorism, mostly for a project creating a simulation of loyalty shifts during civil wars. Most of my prior reading has been of scholarship that takes a very qualitative, historical, anthropological, and discursive approach to studying these things. I’ve encountered some fantastic pieces of work since I’ve begun this project – such as Stathis Kalyvas’ amazing book on the logic of violence in civil war – but I’ve also noticed a trend, particularly in quantitative or computational research: concepts like terrorism, insurgency, and guerrilla warfare are often defined and arrayed  – coded, to use the lingo – as scalar variants of the same thing.

My withered little King’s-War-Studies-trained heart contracts in anguish and moral despair! My history instructors of degrees past loom in my mind bearing disappointed faces. They have sads. All the sads!

I think that defining terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and insurgency as manifestations of the same thing at three different levels of magnitude deprives these words of most of their depth, richness, and analytical usefulness. Furthermore, while definitions serve particular purposes, and if your model needs a scale of violence and you like the sound of ‘insurgency’ better than ‘nurgleflurf’ as a term for one category on that scale there’s no objective reason why you shouldn’t use it, ignoring the wider and more complex connotations that the words often have and the nuanced relationships between their concepts can confuse or misinform readers.

Here are my definitions.

‘Insurgency’ describes an episode of political contention. An insurgency is a conflict between an incumbent, such as a government, and a contender: the insurgent. The insurgent uses a wide array of methods to subvert, overcome, and ultimately usurp the incumbent’s power. Maybe this is to secede and form a new break-away ethnic state, as occurred in Sri Lanka? Maybe this is to bring about a socialist revolution, as occurred in China? Maybe this is to defeat the socialist revolution, as occurred in Nicaragua? The point is, ‘insurgency’ in no way refers to one particular set of actions or methods. It refers to the relationship between two competing actors and their aspirations.

Military seem to get this. For example, the latest field manual on counterinsurgency produced by the United Kingdom defines insurgency as ‘An organised, violent subversion used to effect or prevent political control, as a challenge to established authority…[using] a mixture of subversion, propaganda, terrorism and armed force to achieve their objectives[.]’ The US military and the CIA use similar definitions. I have some academic writings on this, which are in preparation for an actual reviewed article and which are therefore top-secret – because I’m so afraid of being scooped – and while I find that these practitioner definitions tend to focus a bit overmuch on a certain incarnation of insurgency, I think they’re generally pretty sound.

‘Terrorism’ is a strategy of insurgency. It is a way to connect means to ends. It is not a tactic, as some people suggest. Suicide bombing is a tactic. Spree shooting is a tactic. Laying IEDs or mines is a tactic. Sharpshooting is a tactic. Terrorism is a way to use these kinds of tactics. In particular, it is a way to use violent tactics in order to generate fear within a target audience, thereby influencing their political behaviour along certain lines. This is a very general definition, and covers a huge amount, so why not check out a more refined version complete with citations in an article that I wrote?

‘Guerrilla warfare‘ generally describes a method of fighting where small bands of fighters launch surprise attacks at weak enemy locations, then retreat before they can be shattered by superior force in a counterattack. It is a method of harassment and attrition. It’s not a strategy, really. It’s more of an umbrella-term for a set of tactics, and guerrilla warfare can be employed in the pursuit of any number of strategies, including terrorism, as it surely requires little imagination to see.

Future peers and colleagues (who surely now find me a smart-a[r]ssed nudnik): I know you like to make models. I too used to play with lego. I’m even doing it now (modeling, that is). I know you like to arrange variables into scales and plot stuff on them. It’s parsimonious and you can do some pretty matrices or graphs.  Who doesn’t like those? But please lets try to retain the power of our terms to categorise stuff that is connected to other stuff in complex, multi-leveled, and non-dichotomous ways.

Rant over. Thanks for your patience.

We need a more nuanced definition of religion.

[Or, as I might prefer to say, 'Religion is NOT the opposite of atheism.' And a beliefs-centred definition of religion is insufficient for our analytical and political goals.]

‘It’s a delusion’, comes the pronouncement. ‘Nothing but superstition.’

This appears to be the attitude that many activists within the humanist and atheist movement have towards religion. Consider the following quote by Greta Christina, in one of her favourite (and in my opinion, excellent) essays:

Religion is ultimately dependent on belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. It therefore has no reality check.

A few short paragraphs later, she clarifies this understanding of religion:

The thing that uniquely defines religion, the thing that sets it apart from every other ideology or hypothesis or social network, is the belief in unverifiable supernatural entities.

The purpose of her essay is ultimately to argue that religion is uniquely armoured against criticism, in contrast to other ideologies, and that armour is provided by the unverifiability of religion’s teleological claims. In her own words:

Religion, and its unverifiability, actively promotes the idea that the invisible afterlife is more important than the life we know exists….What matters isn’t disease and death in this life. What matters is the next life. What matters is God’s will…which therefore, by the horrible freakish paradox of the armor of God, gets priority.

Another popular figure in the atheist movement, PZ Myers, has a similar view of religion. He sums it up in an unusually vitriolic fashion in one recent blog post:

Religion is not some mild happy recreational activity; it is a poison of the brain that taints the vast majority of humanity. It is bad shit….we’ve got the moderate academic types who like to tell us it’s mostly harmless and we’ll never be able to get rid of it, anyway; to them I’d say that, as people who are supposedly dedicated to learning the truth, you ought to be the first to deny religion because a) it’s wrong, and b) it’s a fallacious way of learning about the world.

Both Greta Christina and PZ Myers have written many excellent things analysing and critiquing the harms of certain religious beliefs, and I consider them both to be highly respectable and worthy members of the movement. And their definition for religion is certainly in line with common-language usage of the term, viz., that religion is (1) a set of immutable or dogmatic beliefs about the world that (2) posit and invoke supernatural (that is, ungoverned by normal physical laws as we know them) entities which (3) carry metaphysical authority, and can thus specify right conduct or command obedience. Let’s call this the Supernatural Propositions (SP) definition.

As far as serving as a tool for identifying a set of ideologies with effects on society that they, I, and many others would probably classify as bad, it’s not a bad definition. It is, in a sense, the opposite of atheism. But it informs certain overall goals, too. Consider  Greta Christina’s overall thesis in her essay on the goals of the atheist movement:

For many atheists, the primary goal of atheist activism is to reduce anti-atheist bigotry and discrimination, and to work towards more complete separation of church and state. Their main goal is to get people to see atheists as happy, ethical, productive members of society, with full and equal rights and responsibilities. They want to counter myths and misconceptions about atheists. And they see angry, confrontational, firebrand atheists as feeding into those myths, and alienating religious believers, and thus making everyone’s job harder.

But not all atheists see this as their main goal.

For many atheists, our main goal is persuading the world out of religion….Many of us don’t just want a world where believers and atheists get along and let each other practice their religion or lack thereof in peace. Many of us want a world where there’s no religion.

Here is where I think that the SP definition is starting to lose its efficacy. Focusing on the propositional aspect of religion helps us identify specific claims that can be falsified, or specific epistemologies that can be criticised, but it fails to specify a good target for activism with the goal of total elimination.

There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that dogmatic sets of beliefs commanding metaphysical authority are not unique to religions describable by the SP definition, but are components of other ideologies which we might also charactise as harmful. Dogmatic Leninism or Randianism might arguably evince similar ‘unverifiability’ in its basic doctrine, lack any ‘reality check’, and specify similarly absolutist versions of right and wrong, or of natural law, etc – just like (3) in the SP definition. If we view (1) and (3) in the SP definition as non-unique to religion, then we are left with only the bit about supernatural entities. While we can dream of educating everyone so well in the methods of scepticism that they stop believing in such absurd things, this isn’t really our main goal. Actually, it’s a means to an end, and that end is to minimise (1) and (3): dogmatic beliefs about right and wrong which aren’t amenable to negotiation, discourse, or alteration.

In short, the stuff people like me, hopefully you, Greta and PZ hate most about religion under the SP definition is the stuff that is non-unique to it.

This brings us to the second problem with the SP definition, which is that it doesn’t give us a social account of religion. As I argued rather more pedantically in a previous blog post, belief and practice are mutually constitutive. In plain language: what a person believes and what a person does are mutually reinforcing. Furthermore, when we look at the appeal that religious practice seems to hold for people, we see that it is not merely the comfortable explanation of the unknown through supernatural propositions, but identity-building activities that foster a sense of community, give meaning to interpersonal relationships, and offer a structure to life which informs daily habits.

These things which we call religion offer deeply satisfying, perhaps even necessary narratives that go beyond ideas – important ideas that comprise a frame of reference for one’s experience of the world – and into real social goods. Destroying religions thus means destroying entire ways of life, with all the complexities and fundamental identities they contain.

I’m one of those ‘moderate academic types’ lampooned by PZ Myers. I don’t think it is even possible to do this. I don’t think these things called religions can be extracted from their cultural contexts and eradicated. But I do think that beliefs in interventionist supernatural powers can be eradicated. Which leaves us with a very important point – those of us who use the common-language, SP definition for religion, anyway:

We need a more nuanced definition of religion.

St. Derrida’s Ontological Argument

1. All human relations are power relations

2. All power relations are oppressive

3. All oppression serves the interests of the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed

4. It follows that if a power relation exists, an oppressor exists

5. Therefore the deconstruction of language into a  human relation is sufficient to prove the existence of an oppressor

Rebuttal:

1. Logic is only true for you

2. And who gets to define the rules of inference anyway?

I realise this is not strictly an ontological argument, but it’s close enough…

Musings on the talk I just gave

Last saturday morning I gave a talk on ‘fundamentalism and violence’, to Cafe Inquiry - a sort of philosopher’s cafe group affiliated with CFI that hosts speakers to give short lectures and moderate discussion sessions on various interesting subjects. The talk went well, in that I seemed to engage my audience and both inform and encourage some fascinating discussion afterwards. Unfortunately, in a moment of deja vu, my slides once again did not work out, so I’m including them here. I’m also going to share some of my thoughts on how it went.

First, I want to comment on my own performance as a speaker and moderator. My short lecture seemed to go over well, but I have the vague sense that even had my slides been working, I could have done more to offer a simpler explanation of the relationships between fundamentalism and violence. I’m worried I was a bit academic. I also think I should have posed some specific questions for discussion, rather than just opened the floor, and perhaps even offered some specific prescriptions of my own for people to critique.

Most of the ‘discussion period’ seemed to involve audience members posing questions and prompts to me, and my trying to give good answers. I feel as though I did well on this. It seemed like the subject was meaty and complex, and a major role for me was simply to act as a source of examples, references, and rebuttals to common themes, myths, and dilemmas. Luckily my audience was already quite well informed.

I think I really goofed on the gender aspect. In talking about a predominantly masculine sample (violent political extremists) to a predominantly masculine audience, I used gender-specific language far too often simply out of habit and intuition. I used phrases like ‘Jack-the-Lad’ or described the image boost that many violent activists seek as ‘impressing pretty girls’. While I think these are relevant phrases or examples, I will try in the future to contextualise them better and to offer more gender-neutral explications of theory. I owe a lot to two women in the crowd who consistently drew attention to cases or relationships affecting women, such as Chechnya’s ‘Black Widows‘. I think I’ll also use the example of the Mujaheddin e-Khalq during my lecture, too.

Ultimately, I’m ecstatic about the way the talk went, and I feel it was very productive. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to think that after all my academic study, I have something useful to disseminate to a non-academic audience.

If anyone who attended the talk is reading this, I would appreciate some feedback, critical or positive.

And now, the slides:

Habermasturbation: A Summary of ‘Three Normative Models of Democracy’

For a seminar on democracy and the public sphere that I am taking, I was assigned to summarise ‘Three Normative Models of Democracy’, a chapter of an anthology in which famed theorist-of-everything-I-give-a-damn-about Jürgen Habermas chats political theory. I am sharing that summary here.

Habermas critiques both the Liberal and Republican conceptions of democracy, and offers as an alternative the concept of ‘deliberative democracy’, which he believes to lack the flaws of the other two.

Liberals conceive of government as a mediator between private interests, serving solely as a guarantor of market security and opportunity, such that private individuals may interact safely and effectively according to their will. Democracy in the Liberal vision is a system of institutions which aggregate the collective will of all citizens into proportionally representative blocs, and translates it into policy that compromises or synthesises accordingly.

According to Habermas, this is deeply flawed in that it will not produce a polity; that is, an aggregation of private wills bound together only by institutional process and collective self-interest will never coalesce into a group with shared ethical norms and a unified sense of community. Democracy, says Habermas, requires that a polity exist, and thus the Liberal vision will never be truly democratic.

Republicans conceive of government as the redistributive and activist arm of a unified political community already in possession of a single set of social goals and ethical norms. Government under the Republican vision is essentially teleological: the fundamental role of political institutions in society is not as guardians of the market but as mechanisms for generating social change. Democracy is thus the form of government that legitimately reflects and sufficiently pursues the ends of the Polity.

Habermas appreciates the ethical element to the Republican tradition, but finds it flawed for operating under the presumption that any community could hold in common one set of social goals such that it could comprise a polity with a unitary, stable will. A society without a substantial plurality of blocs pursuing irreconcilable political ends is impossible, says Habermas. Hence Republicanism is hopelessly idealistic, and more likely to produce a ‘tyranny of the majority’ than a democracy.

Habermas suggests that democracy be achieved through the establishment of a formal deliberative sphere, sanitised of the power imbalances contained within society as a whole, in which individuals reach normative consensus based on the principles of reason alone. The outcomes of this discourse can then be translated into policy, and carried out by the institutions of government. This system keeps the Republican focus on communal norms but preserves the recognition of individual rights and evaluative neutrality characteristic of Liberalism – an ideal balance between the two.

Humanism and the dilemmas of contemporary warfare

Below is the transcript and slides for my public lecture, ‘Humanism and the Dilemmas of Contemporary Warfare’, hosted by the B.C. Humanists, on 3 October 2011, at the Burnaby Public Library, McGill Branch.

1. Introduction

War permeates the public consciousness. It features frequently on the news and in discussions of foreign or defence policy. It even forms a huge part of our entertainment industry. War – that is, a state of intentional and widespread armed conflict between political communities – is thus a constant and important subject of  social discourse. One reason for this is that war is among the most contentious and difficult subjects of moral debate. War causes immense suffering, and leads to mass killings, destroyed families, shattered communities, and years of future instability.

As long as war continues to be a social phenomenon, thinking about how to minimise the harm it causes is thus something that a morally conscious and politically interested person is likely to spend at least some time doing.

Broadly speaking, one’s position on war is likely to fall into one of three categories: realist, pacifist, or what I call ‘ethicist’. Realists are sceptical of the value in trying to offer any kind of moral prescriptions in considering international affairs. Once a war has begun, says the realist, one should do whatever it takes to win it as efficiently as possible. Pacifists reject most or all wars as inherently wrong. War, says the pacifist, is never justifiable and perhaps even never excusable. Ethicists on war think that some wars can be justified, or at least permissible, so long as they fulfill some set of criteria.

My sense is that most humanists are not likely to be realists, as abandoning morality during a period when one’s actions could have the worst effects imaginable seems anathema to the principle of compassion or the pursuit of universal human well-being. My sense is also that most humanists are not pacifists in the absolute sense of believing that no war is ever justified. While I think  that most humanists view most proposed justifications for war with considerable scepticism if not prima facie dismissal, I think that most humanists are willing to view self-defence and perhaps the defence of others as, theoretically, a just cause for war. Yet to be an ethicist when it comes to war – to engage in ethical calculations that may or may not justify the use of military force – is obviously a difficult task.

If we do think that a war could potentially be justified morally, but that those at war should still hold themselves to some set of moral obligations, we must find answers to a long set of ethical questions. When is it permissible or justified to go to war? Is it only acceptable to go to war for anything other than an existential threat to one’s own community? Is it acceptable to go to war to defend the populations of other countries? How can we practically measure the thresholds past which war is justified? How should force be used during war? What considerations should be given to the welfare of both combatants and noncombatants, if indeed these are useful categories? Any one of these questions could occupy a lifetime of contemplation, and the answers any two persons might offer could differ vastly based on their meta-ethical starting points, even if they remained within the general sphere of humanism.

I am not going to offer my answers to these questions, such as I have any to give.  Instead, I will simply introduce very briefly the current  frameworks for analysis and general conclusions present in most contemporary thought on the ethics of war, and then discuss five contemporary cases which are particularly challenging to them: intervention, terrorism, torture, assassination, and collective punishment. My hope is that in doing so, I will at least stimulate discussion over the right issues, shatter a few myths and bypass a few common red herrings, and move people to consider seriously the ramifications of their views.

2. Just War Theory

Just War Theory has served as the basis for most international laws and conventions pertaining to armed conflict today. Essentially, Just War theory offers a set of criteria for determining when going to war is justified, and specifies limitations on how force may permissibly be used during. It is divided into the categories of jus ad bellum, which discusses the justice of any decision to initiate war, and jus in bello, which discusses the justice of conduct in war. Basically, this theory states that one may not go to war except under the following six conditions:

1. Just cause, conventionally considered to be an invasion of the sovereignty of one’s own territory or that of an ally
2. Right authority, conventionally considered to be the government of a state, but increasingly also thought to include UN approval or some standard of domestic legitimacy
3. Right intention, conventionally considered to be the defence of sovereignty
4. Reasonable chance of success, such that the war is not a futile effort.
5. Proportionality, such that the gains of going to war don’t outstrip the harm it causes.
6. Last resort, such that all other options for resolving the crisis have been reasonably exhausted

Once at war, any use of force must be sufficiently proportionate to the military value of a successful action and discriminate between combatant and noncombatant.  A word of caution, though:  discrimination in this case only requires that the direct target of force be military in nature. The ‘doctrine of double-effect’ is typically interpreted to allow for noncombatants casualties, so long as their deaths are not the immediate intention or goal of military action. While some philosophers such as Michael Walzer argue in favour of a ‘doctrine of double-intention’ in which military force be specifically intended to minimise noncombatant casualties, that view is contentious for many more traditional thinkers in the field. Conventional thought on jus in bello is that a combatant who follows its criteria has committed no transgression, even if the conditions of jus ad bellum do not obtain for the party on whose behalf he or she fights. As Walzer puts it, the two are ‘logically independent’. However, thinkers such as Jeff McMahan have challenged this ontological separation, arguing that if a party initiates an unjust war, no use of military force  in that war by its servants can be just, regardless of how discriminating or proportionate it appears to be.

Just War Theory isn’t so much a ‘theory’ in the explanatory, scientific sense, but a framework for assessing wars and the use of military force. Its principles can be subject to wide interpretation,  and it is only through formal institutional processes that the international community has even a minimal sense of how to apply it universally and realistically. Those processes owe to the efforts of dedicated politicians and brilliant moral and legal thinkers.  While Just War Theory remains a powerful tool of ethical analysis, the challenges offered to it by humanitarian intervention, terrorism, torture, assassination, and collective punishment force us to consider ways to apply our standards of assessment innovatively.

3. Intervention

Humanitarian military intervention is a contentious but emerging international norm. Proponents are likely to be encouraged by the so-far positive outcome of the NATO intervention in Libya. Certainly from a humanist standpoint, it seems obvious and essential that those with power to help alleviate the suffering of human beings should do so, including in situations of tyranny or predation. If we are justified in going to war to protect ourselves, then we must also in some cases be justified in going to war to protect others. Yet intervention may require that we compromise on certain principles which are deeply embedded within our current understandings of liberal rights: it could mean violating the sovereignty of another state, it could mean choosing one side of a civil war, it could mean going where we’re not wanted by any party because we think we can help anyway, and it could mean occupying another territory for the foreseeable future.  An intervention may cost the lives of our own personnel, particularly given the risk of ‘mission creep’, whereby an intervening force becomes mired in increasingly complex and long-term commitments. These possibilities do not, I think, make intervention essentially unjustifiable from a humanist perspective, but they do mean that we must be particularly careful in deciding to stage one.

One is likely to encounter troubling questions in trying to apply the framework of Just War theory to the subject of intervention. Just cause can be adapted to refer not to the invasion of our own territory or that of an ally but to some transgression upon the rights of another group. But should we intervene only to avert ongoing atrocities of an extraordinarily repugnant character, such as genocide, or should we also intervene to aid secessionist movements or a population suffering under an oppressive government? We may prefer that ‘right authority’ lie with a supernational entity such as the UN, and that it require the consent of those whom we propose to help through our actions, but what if it seems that the only way to build the will for an intervention is to ‘go it alone’ or through a narrow and independent coalition? The criterion of ‘reasonable chance of success’  is particularly difficult to fill. Intervening to avert a genocide may only serve to delay it or to prompt another, and intervening to support a secessionist movement or one side of a civil war may lead to the establishment of a tyranny or the commission of atrocities by the very group whose victory we helped secure. While there are many politicians, scholars, and lobbyists working to find a satisfactory answer to these questions, we should not take it for granted that there are good answers.

I also suggest that intervention enthusiasts not be too quick to view the Libyan case as vindication for their views. First of all, we have yet to see what the fate of that country will be. It seems difficult to imagine that it will be worse than it was during the long rule of Qaddafi, but such an eventuality is not impossible. The ongoing attacks against black African migrant workers, driven by hatred for Qaddafi’s sub-Saharan mercenaries, is one example of a very worrying and tragic human rights abuse. I don’t imagine civil war is an orderly affair, and revolutions seem likely to include retributory persecution, but it is nevertheless an early black mark. More importantly, the Libyan case was an unusual example of an intervention. It is probably rare that we will be presented with a diplomatically isolated, geographically open country embroiled in an ongoing civil war with one side credibly threatening a massacre and the other asking only for air support for its soldiers. This is a case that had no risk of dead American soldiers or of ugly images of blue-helmeted peacekeepers failing to stop knife-wielding  mobs from murdering cowering villagers. Though we may see that the intervention in Libya achieved great good, and the National Transitional Council has shown an encouraging commitment to developing good post-war governance, we should be very careful about generalising many aspects of it into lessons for the future.

In short, while I think it is certainly in keeping with humanistic morality to explore ways to make interventions effective, I urge scepticism and sensitivity to the possibility of great unforeseen harm.

4. Terrorism

Terrorism as a word is for many people as likely to evoke images of manipulative politicians as it is of 9/11 or of bombs in cafes and clubs. It certainly could qualify as one of the most ‘loaded’ terms in the English language today. Nobody accepts it as a label for their own actions, and many are quick to deploy it against the actions of their opponents. Yet when we talk about terrorism, we do have some ideas in mind. We think about suicide bombings in places of leisure or in government offices. We think of killing sprees on the streets of Mumbai, and of the London or Madrid attacks. And of course, we think of jetliners flying into buildings. I think most of us consider such violence morally unjustifiable in most if not all situations, but if we want to contrast it to other kinds of political violence, we need a more rigorous sense of what terrorism is.

The definition I encourage people to start with comes from strategic theory, and conceives of terrorism as a way of connecting a certain set of means to a certain set of ends. Terrorism is, generally, the deliberate generation of fear, usually through violence or the threat of it, within a political community in order to change its behaviour. Terrorists and terrorist groups are thus people and organisations that actively use terrorism as a strategy of activism. I think this definition lends itself best to talking about non-state actors, but could conceivably be used to discuss the actions of formal governments as well. The terror bombings carried out by the Allies during the Second World War might be a good example of this.  The advantage to this definition is that it doesn’t specify any particular means. It might be possible to generate fear by attacking uniformed soldiers on duty. It might be possible to generate fear by using non-lethal violence. It might be possible to generate fear by threatening material interests, which could fit under some broader definitions of ‘violence’. From a humanist perspective, the anxiety and stress that fear produces is concerning, but if terrorism can take other forms that don’t harm noncombatants, it may be difficult to condemn it categorically.

We can, of course, look to history for some clues as to how terrorism works, politically and psychologically. To quote one of the better discussions of it, by M.L.R. Smith and Peter Neumann, people or groups using a terrorist strategy generally seek to (1) disorientate people from their government, (2) provoke a certain response, and (3) based on that response transfer legitimacy from the government to their own agenda. One very effective way to disorientate people from their government is to attack them in their homes, schools, or places of leisure. Another might be to simply get very good at planting roadside bombs, and ensure that images of the destruction caused makes their way into the media. We live in a ‘post-heroic’ age of war, wherein every time we hear about one of our soldiers dying we feel greater discomfort and sceptisim for our government’s policies. Terrorism can be used to intimidate a group into making concessions, or it can be used to provoke an indiscriminate response from the target that drives those who suffer from it towards supporting the ideology of the terrorists. Whether one is trying for the former or the latter is likely to affect decisions on the level of brutality or focus of terrorist means. On might even apply this model to the strategy of ‘sit-ins’ or of political street theatre, insofar as it disorients, provokes, and transfers legitimacy. My point is that the label ‘terrorism’ should, according to the definition I’m giving, apply to actions based on their intended consequences rather than their tactics.

Despite our current conception of terrorists as paranoid lone-wolves or cells of revolutionary radicals, militaries have often used terrorism. One good example can be found in stories I’ve heard of the Rhodesian military using terrorism during the Rhodesian Bush War. The Selous Scouts – an elite combat reconnaissance unit capable of long-term excursions into the jungle – would ambush guerrilla encampments at night, silently moving into tents and cutting the throats of ZANU and ZAPU fighters as they slept. Killing in this way doesn’t merely inflict enemy casualties, but generates massive fear amongst enemy ranks. Imagine what might have happened when guerrilla HQ sent troops to find out why their encampment had suddenly gone silent. Ten men head out, but only eight return, with stories of their comrades found dead in their beds, their bodies booby-trapped. During the Vietnam War, the Vietcong used similar methods against U.S. forces, prompting indiscriminate and savage reprisals that turned the local  population against the American presence. The effect that such stories can have on the moral of a military force is devastating. What if it could shatter the will to continue fighting, and end a war?

While I think it that terrorism should not be condemned categorically, I encourage scepticism of some particularly common defences of it. Michael Walzer once wrote an article entitled ‘Terrorism: a Critique of Excuses’. In it he identifies four commonly offered excuses for the sort of terrorism we probably don’t like – that is, attacks on ‘innocents’. The first is that it is a last resort. He suggests, and I agree, that he many examples of successful ‘nonviolent resistance’ comprise real alternatives to, say, guerrilla warfare or suicide bombing, so long as one’s cause has sufficient popular support. Related to this is the excuse that terrorism is the only resort available to liberation movements struggling against powerful regimes. Yet, as Walzer also argued, if those movements truly represent their constituencies then I think they should be capable of mobilising the numbers necessary to use nonviolent methods, even if doing so is more difficult or dangerous in the short term. The third excuse Walzer attacks is that terrorism is excusable on the grounds that it is effective, and that it achieves emancipation for the oppressed without requiring their participation. Walzer counters that efficacy alone does not justify an action unless other conditions obtain – such as those already discussed – but I think we might respond to his critique by saying that it is not necessary for terrorism to be a last or only resort, so long as it harms only combatants. The fourth excuse Walzer attacks is that it is hypocritical to condemn terrorism, as all politics is essentially terrorism. Walzer points out that this cynicism may not be justified in considering the activities presumably legitimate governments. I would simply encourage a focus on condemning certain terrorist tactics, rather than terrorist strategies as a whole, which may, as I have already said, not transgress upon our humanistic principles.

Finally, I want to make one further remark on the difficulties of assessing target legitimacy in using terrorism. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who hosts an enormously popular programme on al-Jazeera. offers fatawa – Islamic legal judgements – on a wide array of issues facing Muslims today, including those of conflict and war. He has argued that attacks upon any Israeli, at any place and time, are justified acts of Palestinian resistance. Israeli men and women are both subject to conscription, and may be called upon for reserve duty throughout much of their life. They are all legitimate targets. Israeli children will grow up to be soldiers, and thus they too may be targeted to pre-empt this eventuality. These arguments are not essentially theological, and therefore dismissible by any non-adherent, but rely upon a rationale and framework contained within Just War theory. If we do not accept them, we need to clearly delineate the standards of that rejection, and apply them consistently to other uses of force.

5. Torture

Most of us are familiar with the ‘ticking time-bomb scenario’: a hypothetical case in which a captured bomber refuses to divulge the location of his attack, and his interrogators  have almost no time to use any special techniques other than, perhaps, torture. We can thank John Stuart Mill for this thought-experiment, and certainly it has given us the entertaining antics of Jack Bauer and Dick Cheney. Alan Dershowitz, a well-known Harvard law professor and libertarian legal philosopher, has often supported the case for torture in this scenario. Conversely,there are some people who will say that torture is essentially unjustifiable. Forget any practical question as to its efficacy, no amount of lives saved can make acceptable it to torture another human being. But I think most people will agree that, theoretically, there is some point at which torturing one person can be justified if it will save many others. We can make that point absurdly extreme- torture one person to avert global thermonuclear war! – but once we’ve agreed to this, we’ve opened the door to a very important debate over the extent to which our security services should be permitted to abuse a prisoner in an effort to get information.

Of course, like ‘terrorism’ the word ‘torture’ is a hugely politicised term. There are many who insist that water-boarding is not torture (they may or may not be aware that it was used by the Khmer Rouge and by the Spanish Inquisition). There are many who insist that solitary confinement and sleep deprivation are not torture. The U.N. Convention Against Torture basically defines it as the inflicting of severe mental or physical pain and suffering in order to solicit information, punish, or intimidate, carried out by a public official and excluding the effects of lawful sanctions. Even setting aside this huge exception for ‘lawful sanctions’, this is a vague definition. While it would seem unreasonable to label all situations that cause any discomfort at all to a prisoner as torture, finding a threshold of severity is very difficult.

All I will say on this is that I think torture is best defined positively and negatively. We can, through empirical enquiry, say that such things as physical beatings, prolongued solitary confinement, and water-boarding cause severe and acute distress not from some crisis of conscience but because they directly wreck havoc on the human body. We can expand this list as necessary, and rule out these actions. We could also try to say what torture is not, in order to better regulate interrogations. We can say that torture is not shouting questions at someone from a distance greater than, say, one foot. We could say that torture is not insulting a person or criticising their intellectual and moral character. We might reach a point where the boundaries are vague, but I am confident that we can categorise sufficiently well through ongoing deliberation and oversight.

In the ‘ticking time-bomb scenario’ we’re usually accepting that at a certain point, any abuse is justified. And when we accept that, we prompt many key questions. Most importantly, what is the threshold? How do we decide to torture in an accountable way? Should we use a system of ‘torture warrants’, as Dershowitz has argued, or should we leave it up to the interrogator’s discretion? Should our security services have people specially trained in torture? Should we prefer torture that leaves no lasting physical damage, as Dershowitz suggests? How should we treat someone once we’ve tortured them, in terms of allowing their story to ‘get out’ and potentially cause great harm? One might simply prefer to bypass these difficult questions and categorically condemn torture because it is impractical to do otherwise, to punish anyone who uses torture regardless of outcome, and to argue that an interrogator who wants to abuse his prisoner in order to save lives can join his charge in martyrdom.

Except this entire discussion is a red herring. Even if you accept in theory that torture could be justified, it it is likely to be less effective (or counterproductive) compared to other methods. This appears to be a consensus view of professional interrogators themselves. Studies from the fields of neuroscience and psychology back this up: extreme pain and stress can actually impair one’s ability to tell the truth, and people can become accustomed to a certain level of pain very quickly. Perhaps if a certain set of conditions obtain, where any piece of information given during interrogation can be immediately checked for veracity, such that false information offers no reprieve from the pain, then torture might work well. But those conditions are absurdly specific and unlikely. They require a comprehensive existing intelligence picture and mechanisms for assessing information so efficient that I honestly can’t imagine them existing outside of laboratory conditions. In short, the ‘ticking time-bomb scenario’ should be dismissed as unworthy of serious discussion, except perhaps as a manipulative way of forcing someone to endorse the abstract validity of consequentialism.

There is one case in which the morality of torture is not at all a red herring, however. What if the only way to educe information from a person is through a secondary medium, and that medium is almost certain to use torture? The option of choosing a non-violent interrogation method does not exist. Furthermore, in many cases there is a good chance that the detained individual will be tortured anyway. Imagine that you’re an intelligence professional, and word comes to you from a colleague in a country where torture is common: we have a prisoner and she has information you’re likely to want. If you send your colleague some questions to ask, or even accept unsolicited information from her, you are conceivably complicit in torture. When your only options are either ‘information+torture’ or ‘no information’, almost all of those difficult questions we try to avoid come back into the picture.

But I think that it is important enough to establish that when we’re the ones doing interrogating, torture never the best option.

6. Assassination

Assassination – the premeditated killing of a specific individual to realise political objectives -  has become an increasingly prevalent way for states to use military force. The  ‘drone strikes’ carried out by the U.S. – bombings of militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere by U.S.-operated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) – and the killings of Palestinian activists in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by the Israel Defence Force, are two prominent examples. These assassinations – often referred to as ‘targeted killings’ – are acknowledged by their perpetrators and debated morally and strategically in the public and political spheres. In other words, the notion that state-sponsored assassination can be a legitimate and prudent security action has become widespread.

Assassination is both essentially and incidentally morally troubling for many people. As a use of force, it contains ambiguities missing in the classic idea of killing that takes place on a battlefield. Is hunting down and killing a specific person an act of execution? Should a target only be killed while engaged in active hostilities, or are pre-emptive or preventive strikes justifiable? Should we restrict assassination only to those geographic areas where an armed conflict is taking place or kill our enemies wherever is convenient? Is the assassination of combatants a moral slippery slope towards noncombatant activists, such as political leaders, given that the people we kill in this way are often members of organisations that lack formal distinctions between the two? How can a target surrender? What if a target is also a citizen of the country responsible for killing him? One example of this would be the recent killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, by the armed forces of his own government. Does that not edge too close to the killing of dissidents by oppressive regimes, such as in the case of the assassinations of Ruth First, by Apartheid South Africa,  and of Leon Trotsky, by Stalin’s Soviet Union? Given that assassinations require enormous amounts of secret intelligence, which when used often costs the lives of sources, can governments be held accountable for the harm to its own employees caused by its use or misuse?

One might simply respond to these questions by suggesting that assassination stay ‘off the table’ as a tactic of war. Yet this attitude ignores some of the ways in which assassination might be a more compassionate option in today’s armed conflicts. In cases where distinguishing between combatant and non-combatant becomes more difficult, the high level of discrimination assassination allows may be a desirable alternative to less discriminatory acts of force which harm entire populations. In a war where combatants hide amidst a large noncombatant populations, and emerge only to mount surprise attacks which themselves may even specifically target noncombatants, the options available to a military are to wait for the enemy to make contact – a difficult thing to ask of any soldier – a targeted raid, or something as brutal as collective punishment or population transfer. It goes without saying that the first two options seem considerably less harmful than the last. But when it comes to the conventions of war, ‘harm’ has long-term connotations which may not be apparent in the short-term. And it goes without saying that assassination may not be most efficient military action, even if it seems like an easy answer to the difficulties in targeting an elusive foe.

Much of my own research has looked at the way the State of Israel has used assassination. My masters thesis focused on the period between 2000-2005, usually known as the Second, or Aqsa, Intifada, during which time Israel assassinated large numbers of Palestinian activists thought to be involved in violence. In candid interviews the security professionals responsible for designing and implementing Israel’s ‘assassination policy’ justified their choices not only in pragmatic terms but also in moral ones, particularly regarding decisions on the time, place, and ordinance used in an operation. For example, in defending his decision to use a smaller bomb in an assassination attempt on the collected leadership of Hamas in 2003, the notably hawkish Chief of Staff at the time, Shaul Mofaz, cited the risk a larger bomb would present to surrounding residents and claimed ‘it is against our norms to kill innocent people.’ In defending the assassination of Salah Shehadah, which resulted in thirteen bystander deaths, former Defence Minister Giora Eiland referred to the operation as a ‘fuck-up’ which he wouldn’t have approved had he not been given faulty intelligence that Shehadeh was alone but for his wife. While one could very easily be cynical of the extent to which moral considerations drive Israeli security policies, the discourse on assassination is clearly not limited to utilitarian justifications.

Even if we think that assassination is potentially justifiable, we must ask whether it is practically justifiable. Even if it fulfills the two conditions of jus in bello – it is sufficiently discriminating and proportionate – there is still a robust debate over its efficacy: whether or not it actually can succeed strategically. If it does not, it fails to satisfy the criterion of necessity, and merely contributes to the death toll – an outcome unlikely to meet with humanist approval.

7. Collective Punishment

The last dilemma of contemporary warfare I want to discuss is the issue of collective punishment. The logic is simple: punishing a group for the misbehaviour of some of its individuals will make that misbehaviour far less likely, either through general social pressure or particular guilt. Today it is broadly seen as unjust. The convention against it is one of the most essential parts of modern international humanitarian law. And at first glance, it seems utterly counter to humanist principles of individual moral autonomy and compassion. Historically it has been a common method for an occupying force or a tyrannical regime to maintain social order and obedience, with the entire family or even the entire settlement of the transgressor subject to abuse or execution. The mass bombings of London, Tokyo, and Dresden, during the Second World War, are modern examples that immediately come to mind.  One might even view economic sanctions as collective punishment, as their effects cause entire populations to suffer for the objectionable policies of their governments. But if collective punishment deters misbehaviour, could it not be justified on utilitarian grounds? And if a liberal and democratic state is one in which the people are ultimately responsible for the actions of its government, can all people be legitimate targets for punishment? Or perhaps even a more fundamental moral question: if people can influence the behaviour of others but choose not to do so, to what extent are they responsible for that behaviour? These questions can complicate a blanket condemnation of collective punishment.

Returning to my own research, I want to present an interesting case which will tie together several other themes I’ve discussed besides that of collective punishment. I am aware that some facts of this case are contested, and so while I have tried to offer a balanced and careful presentation, I suggest that any contentious aspects of my presentation be accepted for the sake of my argument. In the interests of time and focus, I am deliberately avoiding a larger engagement with the context of this case, but I am acutely aware that its precipitants and consequences have moral bearing. My goal is illustrative rather than persuasive.

In January 2009 the Israeli government invaded the Gaza Strip and waged a month-long war with Hamas, the government of that territory. The case for the war, allegedly, is the constant barrage of unguided, short range, rockets launched from the Strip by Hamas and its allies, which harassed and occasionally maimed or killed residents of surrounding Israeli towns. The IDF killed 709 fighters from Hamas and its affiliates -according to both the Israeli government and Hamas – and between 450 to 740 Palestinian civilians. Ten Israeli soldiers and three Israeli civilians also died. While the munitions Israel used were, for the most part, among the most technologically precise in existence, the scale of infrastuctural destruction and noncombatant casualties they caused has led many people to condemn Israel’s use of force as excessive.The headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was hit, as was the territory’s sewage treatment plant and flour mill. The IDF used shells containing white phosphorus, banned by international convention as a weapon for the horrible burns it can cause but permitted for use in battle as a smoke-screen producer, in a way deemed ‘reckless’ by a later UN investigation. At first glance many people are likely to view Israel’s use of force as grossly disproportionate and indiscriminate, regardless of whether going to war in the first place was justified.

There may circumstances which may mitigate at least to some degree the condemnation one might offer for Israel’s tactics. There is substantial photographic and video evidence indicating that Hamas fights wore civilian clothing, moved amidst groups of civilians serving as willing or unwilling shields, and fought from particularly densely populated areas. IDF and Gazan witnesses report that Hamas fighters at times wore medical uniforms and used medical vehicles for military purpose, and used hospitals as interrogation centres and even as execution grounds for the punishment of suspected collaborators with Israel. The IDF has defended its tactics on the grounds that they took sufficient account of the need to protect civilians, despite the high number of noncombatant deaths that those tactics caused. Colonal Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, stated that, ‘During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces [sic] did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.’ Certainly there is some evidence of this: the IDF dropped leaflets, made phone calls, and sent text messages to the inhabitants of buildings and areas it intended to bomb, giving both civilians and fighters the chance to escape to safety. Yet the extent to which all these things excuse or justify Israel’s use of force is still much debated.

Entirely aside from Israel’s tactics, though, is its overall strategy. That strategy is doubtlessly multifaceted, but in examining Israeli action and the justifications offered by its security establishment, it appears as though one facet was to inflict suffering on the population of the Gaza Strip. I do not think this was to be achieved by killing – I think the evidence strongly sugggests that Israeli forces tried to minimise civilian deaths – but I do think that it was to be achieved by instilling a pervasive sense of insecurity and a certain level of material misery. The loss of one’s home might not be fatal, but it is still traumatic. In considering the blockade of the Strip that Israel has since mounted and only recently relented slightly upon, I see further evidence of this strategy. There is a message to it: ‘as long as Hamas launches its rockets and refuses to recognise the legitimacy of the State of Israel, you will all suffer because your are Hamas’ constituency.’

Since January 2009 Hamas and Israel have had no major confrontations, and there have been only a handful of minor and short escalations. Generally, Hamas has avoided launching rockets into Israel, and has stopped any other group from doing so. Is this a deterrence brought on by the war? It’s hard to say. It seems that several attacks by Hamas cells in the West Bank have been recently averted by Israeli security forces, so it seems unlikely that the group is avoiding violence entirely. But if Hamas is deterred, at least from launching rockets, is that because of the bloody nose that Israel gave them, or is it because of the hostility that their constituency feels towards any strategy of contention with Israel that is likely to increase their suffering once more? And if it is the latter, does that justify collective punishment?

8. Conclusion

I realise that, in my discussion of the dilemmas in applying a humanist perspective to war, I’ve asked many questions but offered few answers. At best, I’ve refuted one or two myths. I do hope that I’ve demonstrated what a challenge war poses for ethicists and political philosophers. Beware of anyone who claims that they have a simple solution. But I am not a pessimist. Quite the contrary, I am optimistic that we will find ways to wage war that balance the inevitability of violent conflict against our desire to minimise its occurrence and limit the suffering it causes. I think that we can certainly progress towards this goal by developing more precise weapons technology, or means of coercion which are nonviolent or at least nonlethal. Above all, though, I think we will progress towards this goal by maintaining an open, sceptical, and self-critical discourse on war, and by constantly demanding rigorous justification for any real or proposed act of political violence.

I also encourage greater support for academics involved in studying the strategy, norms, and ethics of war, though I admit some self-interest in doing so.