A Humanist Remembrance Day

It’s been quite some time since I’ve written anything on this blog, both because the first year of a PhD programme in political science is apparently a bit busy but also because I haven’t really felt the urge to ‘get anything out’, at least not in this format. I try hard not to be too trivial in what I post, and I’m not particularly interested in saying something that others have already said better in easily accessible formats. But I do think I have a few thoughts worth sharing now. I can’t vouch for them being particularly insightful, though. Treat them as prompts more than assertive claims.

Remembrance Day was on the 11 November. Veteran’s Day, its US analog, was also on the 11th. On these days and in the days prior, we encountered many stories of the acts of wartime courage committed by military personnel and we commemorated both the sacrifices that soldiers make and the traumatic horror of war, and in particular the two World Wars. But some of us were not fully comfortable with the way Remembrance is done. We worry that the celebration of veterans both glorifies war and pays only perfunctory respect to the reality of their experiences. We wonder if cloaking veterans in the mantle of heroism and glorious sacrifice obscures the true savagery of combat and produces enthusiasm rather than apprehension for conflict.

I’m going to remain largely agnostic, at least here, as to the validity of these concerns. Instead, I’m going to suggest a model for what I’d call a truly Humanist Remembrance Day.

A Humanist Remembrance Day would see us affirm the following principles and propositions:

1. We’re all affected by war. A recent article on Foreign Policy made the point that civilians in warzones are often just as familiar with battle as those fighting, and are often no less scarred or affected by it than soldiers; that they, too, are veterans. Yet even we here, safe and sound, are veterans of a sort. People of my generation or younger grew up in an age where images of war and security paranoia were everywhere. And they still are. As I discovered recently, it is hard to find a nineteen year old student taking an international relations course who is actually willing to hold out for the possibility of something like a democratic peace. I found one out of forty, in fact. In the years during which we are supposed to be most idealistic, these young people are cynics about the most noble idealism I could imagine. And while this isn’t quite the same as the cynicism of an actual veteran of the same age, I don’t think it’s just the sort of fashionable cynicism we all try to affect when we’re young. I think it truly comes from an absence of hope for a world ever free of war. Meanwhile, people of a slightly older generation grew up fearing nuclear holocaust. Those even older may have fought in Vietnam.

War touches all of us. It touches some of us a more profoundly and traumatically than it does others, and our experiences of it may vary, but we must engage with it as a people and as a society. War is something we all do, and not just those in the military or those trapped in the crossfire.

2. War is always a choice. That doesn’t mean that it might not sometimes be the right choice, nor that our other options might be truly unpalatable, but it is not something we simply find ourselves doing. It’s not a habit. It’s not some kind of determined phenomenon, at least not on a case by case basis. When we make war, as individuals and as groups, we’re choosing to initiate devastating violent courses of action. We all must bear some responsibility for the choice to war, and we must reflect on what that responsibility entails.

3. War is politics. War is an instrument of policy, even as it is also something deeply affective and emotional. As such, war is something we do in order to achieve a social outcome: some change to society, some change to government. As Humanists, we should be willing to make use of every political instrument available to us, including war, but we should also make use of all of our sciences and technologies to ensure that we choose the best tool for the task. And the more tools we have in the box, the better we can do this.

One example of this from my own research interests would be the potential of military assassination – aka ‘targeted killing’ – to permit particularly discriminating uses of violence that minimise the harm caused to non-combatants.

4. War is a human tragedy. It is a tragedy for everyone. We should mourn every loss of life in war, regardless of whose life it is. We can imagine a world in which our enemies were our best friends, where a different set of social structures, a different set of policies and politicians, and a different view of right and wrong simply did not lead to a conflict between us and them. Even if we adamantly believe that a war is justified, we must acknowledge that the conditions which make it just are contingent.

5. Our heroes are victims. As courageous as many of our most heroic veterans have been – those winners of Victoria Crosses and those people who risked their own life many times to save the lives of others – they are also victims of a terrible set of circumstances. Nobody should have to risk their life to save others. And those who have deserve our sympathy as well as our respect. We should remember this as we consider what sort of reception to give to those returning from war, and what sort of support services are available to veterans.

Well, that’s it for now. Feel free to add or contend these principles as you see fit.

Nihilism and Privilege

It has been observed, in a discussion amongst my friends, that most moral nihilists appear to be very privileged, socially. They tend to be men, white, middle-class or higher, very well educated, and otherwise at – if not the zenith – a fairly substantial level of comfort and security.

This is an interesting observation, because it seems consistent with much of the social science scholarship I’ve read on sacred principles, morality, group identity, and political struggle.

There are two reasons why privilege might be, generally, a precondition for nihilism. One is the conditions of life and whether they allow for the time to be philosophical and abstract. If you’re working all day with your hands, and the availability of food, rest, and safety from violence is an ever-present concern, asking ‘what does it all mean?’ is just too self-indulgent. And the other is the pressing urgency of morality – understood as a community feature and process, rather than a sphere of enquiry – to political struggle. If your life is a struggle, you don’t have the ability to question your principles or closely-held beliefs. But we’ll also see this in non-liberal societies. In kinship-based societies or ones held by powerful nationalisms, people can’t question the principles that tie together the community and warrant in-group chauvinism. So we not only need economic privilege of a certain degree, but a liberal mode of subjectivity where the individual is the centre of personhood and moral activity.

What are the implications of this? Well, I can think of a few. First of all, nihilism is not sustainable. If we collectively hold that nothing matters, we will fall apart as a community. Yes, we might still pursue mechanisms of personal security and interest aggregation, but the sorts of cultural commonplaces that give us meaning in our lives will eventually dry up. Anomie will consume us. Luckily, I don’t think this is even possible simply because I think that people are, usually, unable to actually be true nihilists. But we should be willing to think utopian for a moment, to imagine certain ideal states of affairs that follow from our moral reasoning. In following that reasoning, we come to the conclusion that nihilism is not desirable except perhaps to provide a critical voice by a few tragic philosophers. Second, we can see that many of our liberal principles have the potential to lead to nihilism once they are generalised and once the aspirations they entail are achieved throughout society. We want liberal subjectivity, liberal personhood, enormous socio-economic freedom, and a political system that represents our will as people, while avoiding a tyranny of the majority. But how can we achieve this sustainably?

This inexorably returns me to the idea of deliberative democracy. Only with ongoing public discussion over meaning can we maintain our cultural commonplaces while still achieving our liberal values. We must accept the importance of Principles, of sacred values, in keeping our community safe and free. That doesn’t mean we should abandon critical discussion over them, but it does mean that we need to keep some ideas special: not immutable but nevertheless central and univeralisable.

Military assassination: a humanist way to wage war?

How should humanists feel about the ‘drone strikes’ on Taliban or al-Qa’ida leaders? Here are my thoughts.

Military assassination is, more than any other phenomenon, my greatest area of academic interest and expertise. If you check out my CV, you’ll see I have two forthcoming articles on it, and for someone of my very junior academic status, this fact speaks more about my focus on the topic than any other statement I might make. This blog post is my attempt to address the subject from a specifically humanist perspective. It’s a bit hastily put together, broad and therefore also shallow, but as its target audience are minimally informed members of the Humanist community, I don’t think this is a flaw. If anyone wants greater detail, particularly on the Israel-Palestine conflict stuff, please let me know.

Generally speaking, a military assassination is when a military organisation, which could be part of a state or part of some kind of rebel or insurgent group, carries out a premeditated killing of a specific person who is perceived to be an enemy combatant. [1] Many of the UAV ‘drone strikes’ carried out by the US government – usually by the CIA – in places such as Pakistan and the Yemen are examples of military assassination.

Assassination is a very contentious activity. The frequency with which non-combatant bystanders are killed alongside combatant targets is troubling even when it is low. The ethical and legal criteria for distinguishing combatant from non-combatant are difficult to develop in the abstract and more difficult still to apply in practice, and as I will explain later, this causes problems for military actions where people are targeted in their homes or during their routine lives, and not in places that look much like battlefields. There’s also a general unease, I think, for the idea of ‘named killings’, whereby someone is hunted down and killed regardless of whether or not they are on the battlefield and fighting at the time.

But I still think that assassination has the potential to be among the most ‘humanist’ – that is, the least traumatic and harmful-to-wellbeing – uses of military force. By ‘military force’, I mean acts of organised violence carried out in an environment of armed conflict according to the strategies and guidance of some kind of command structure. Now, regardless of your opinion of killing on an essential level – and I’ve given mine – the fact is, war is and will be a feature of the human condition. It might decrease in prevalence, but it won’t disappear. And it will happen that our community may be a party to a war. So if military assassination seems to offer a way to wage war while remaining as true as possible to our humanist convictions, we should be amenable to using it.

Before going any further, I do need to say a few things. First of all, assassination is unlikely to ever ‘win’ a war. With only rare exceptions, killing a single person, or even a small set of people, is unlikely to end a conflict according to favourable terms, and so regardless of its potential, it should not be viewed as a panacea or in strategic isolation. Second, any method of violence, any application of the military instrument, is open to misuse and abuse, and aligning actualisation with potential is often a very challenging task.

I’ve written already on the morality of war from a humanist perspective, so I won’t go into much detail here. But to review, a humanist morality of war should treat all life as valuable, combatant or noncombatant, and should seek pragmatic, heuristic principles in the use of force that minimise the overall human cost of war. As is already laid out in current international laws, the use of force in war should adhere to the principles of necessity, discrimination, and proportionality. That is, any use of force must be strategically necessary, discriminate between combatant and noncombatant to a reasonable degree (a good example of a heuristic), and be proportional to the military importance of the goals achieved. Violence that harms people not involved in the fighting, that harms more people than is necessary, or that is unnecessary entirely, is bad.

Where a humanist perspective will be a bit controversial is in denying both the analytical separation of justice in war (jus in bello) and the justice of a war (jus ad bellum), and in rejecting the Doctrine of Double Effect [2]. To a humanist, no use of force is sufficiently discriminate or proportional if it is used in the prosecution of an unjust war. Even though it is practically useful, in limiting the trauma of war, to require that violence in war only adhere to those two conditions, this should not influence our overall moral judgements. And whether or not a method of violence specifically targets nomcombatants, if it will predictably kill a large number of them, it should probably be avoided, all things being equal. But again, prudence and pragmatism should be our guiding lights.

It isn’t hard to imagine how assassination might be ‘justified’ according to the above criteria. Particularly in conflicts where combatants only emerge from the noncombatant population to mount specific attacks, then return to their homes and their noncombatant lives, within their larger communities. In such cases it can seem almost impossible to isolate combatants from noncombatants. Theoretically, an assassination could be among the most discriminate possible uses of force, as it requires only one death and therefore can be accomplished with potentially very little force. And given the bloody nature of war and important role that military specialists or commanders play in making war, targeting such individuals is certainly very likely to be proportionate to the threat they pose both to human wellbeing in general and to a war effort in particular. But this is all still in the realm of the abstract.

A bit less abstract are the criteria for determining who is and is not a combatant. The Geneva Conventions, to which most states are signatories and to which even non-signatories such as insurgent groups can be held accountable, require that anyone not openly displaying insignia demonstrating affiliation with a party to combat be treated as a noncombatant, which grants protection from military force but at the same time renders one subject to criminal law. The Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions further develop the criteria distinguishing combatant and noncombatant in a clearer way for wars involving non-state parties (such as, say, al-Qa’ida or Hamas), though they do not have the same customary and legal status; the US and Israel are not signatories, for example. But these are still often hard to apply in practice. The Israeli government assassinated numerous leaders of Palestinian nationalist groups despite those leaders arguably not qualifying as combatants under international law. The Israeli government justified targeting these leaders on the basis of their role in developing and ordering military action, comparing them to high-ranking military officers. On the surface, this seems like it should be a persuasive argument, if true, but international law is at best vague about the status of such leaders when they’re not carrying weapons and either in the lead-up to or execution of a military operation in which they are taking part. Furthermore, they were often targeted in their homes or during routine non-military activities such as visiting a shop (or a mistress, as happened in one case). Another even more difficult case is that of al-Qa’ida leader Anwar al-Awlaki,who was killed in a bombing by a state in which he held citizenship – the United States – and by all accounts was unlikely to ever personally become a combatant according to the criteria specified by the Conventions.

There is also the problem of bystander casualties. Between October 2000 and July 2007 Israel carried out 134 assassination operations, resulting in 367 deaths, 218 of them of specified targets. The rest were a mix of combatant and noncombatant bystanders. Once one accepts that in this particular conflict, fighting must take place in populated areas, a two-thirds success rate for targeting should be seen as quite discriminate. There are many ways in which the IDF has tried to minimise bystander deaths, such as by preferring to kill targets while they are in vehicles, and by using missiles with unusually small warheads. Or by using snipers. I think that the ongoing threat to Israeli lives posed by Palestinian militants justifies targeting them, but it must be noted that the acuteness of this threat has diminished substantially since the days of the Second Intifada, and that in turn makes it harder to justify less discriminate operations. As for the case of the US ‘drone strikes’, it may be easiest to quote my academic self (or just read this blog post at Duck of Minerva which cites a few more up-to-date sources):

In compiling accurate data on the US drone strikes, one must remain humble in the face of several significant epistemic limitations. As the programme is covert, the details of its particular actions and policies are difficult to discover or verify [and] it is extremely difficult to accurately gauge the true number of fatalities the strikes produce, as casualty figures are largely based upon unverifiable information…. The Jamestown Foundation published in its journal Terrorism Monitor that the most rigorous interrogation of drone strike reports found that, with a total of 144 strikes by19 June 2010, the CIA drone campaign in Pakistan was ‘impressively accurate’: only 68 of the 1,372 confirmed deaths (4.95%) were clearly identifiable as civilian, and 1,098 (80%) were by comparison clearly identifiable as combatant. While as previously mentioned, these numbers should be taken with a great quantity of salt and be viewed with scepticism – though the Jamestown Foundation  study appears to have been conducted with as much empirical rigour as one could demand – it is nevertheless possible to see that the US assassination programme is perceived by ‘Western’ publics and by much of the population in its theatres of action to cause significant if not indiscriminate damage to civilian bystanders.

Military assassination also might not work as well as its proponents suggest. One statistical analysis of Palestinian nationalist violence during the Second Intifada showed that assassinations neither increased nor decreased the rate of attacks [3]. Another showed that assassinations neither reduced nor increased fatalities either [4], despite it being fair to assume that killings of expert bombmakers and veteran commanders should reduce the lethality of attacks, even if not their frequency. It must be noted, though, that isolating the effect of assassinations from the large range of Israeli counterterrorism activities via statistical analyses is difficult if not impossible, and there has been strong support for assassinations amongst Israeli security experts according to my research. Not so for the US drone strikes, though, which are criticised by some experts for alienating local populations due to their perceived indiscriminate nature. The truth of the matter may be that they are quite discriminate, but even a small number of bystander deaths might be enough to completely undermine their strategic value in most cases, and besides, often perceptions matter more than reality. Furthermore, the Terrorism Monitor stats don’t differentiate between assassinations and attacks of opportunity which did not target specific individuals, and there may be a significant difference between the two.

Notably, while Israel has clarified its policies and procedure for determining who may be targeted and when an assassination is legitimate via multiple legal entities including its Supreme Court, the US has not done so at all.

In summary:

• Military assassinations aren’t essentially bad from a humanist perspective, and are potentially among the least harmful military actions
• Military assassinations should be subject to the same rules of war as other military actions, meaning that they should be used to target combatants and should adhere to rules governing proportionality and necessity. They should therefore be conducted with as much transparency and oversight as possible – something which, even taking into account the need for secrecy, the US has not been particularly good at doing.
• Military assassinations must be studied further and considered carefully on a case-per-case basis to determine whether and how they would be strategically beneficial, for violence that does not avert more harm than it causes should be considered a bad thing, and much of the harm that violence causes can be difficult to measure and lies in the feelings of insecurity or moral outrage it can produce in an audience

Notes:

[1] This is loosely based off of the definition I gave for ‘assassination’ in my article ‘Crossing Off Names’, forthcoming in Small Wars and Insurgencies

[2] Very generally and minimally speaking, it states that if a bad effect is foreseeable but not intended, the act that causes it is not wrong. For example, the ‘terror bomber’ who bombs a factory in order to kill its workers and create fear is committing wrong, but the tactical bomber who bombs the factory to render it inoperable is not doing wrong, even if the deaths of workers are likely. One is in the clear if one can answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘if the bad effect didn’t happen, would my goal still be served?’

[3]  Hafez, Mohammad and Joseph Hatfield, “Do Targeted Assassinations Work? A Multivariate Analysis of Israelʼs Controversial Tactic during Al-Aqsa Uprising,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 29, no. 43 (2006)

[4] Plaw, Avery. Targeting Terrorists – A Licence to Kill? Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008.

We are what we believe – but let’s pretend otherwise.

A common – and laudable – theme of secularist discourse is the separation of belief and the believer. In short, that ‘we are not our ideas‘. A  sharp little discussion of it I recently read has moved me to contribute my own thoughts here, but the controversy over the Jesus and Mo’ cartoons in London, and the subsequent passing by the LSE’s student union of what amounts to a law against blasphemy, are highly related. The argument goes something like this:

A person’s beliefs can be criticised and even ridiculed without violating their right to hold that belief, or their basic rights to dignity and safety. A person’s ‘self’ is separate from any set of propositions they hold to be true. Thus attacking such propositions as wrong or absurd should not be construed as insulting or degrading.

To quote:

Hating ‘the belief’ that someone holds is to hate something that can be discarded by the person in question….Thus hating ‘the belief’ is entirely seperate from hating ‘the believer.

This argument is based on highly problematic ontological grounds. Basically, it presumes that a self exists independent of the ideas about the world that collectively comprise one’s understand of meaning and value. While it’s true that my self image and the foundations upon which I measure mine and others’ worth are unlikely to to be affected by my investment in, say, the existence of the Higgs-Boson (though this may not be true for some physicists), it is not true that there is anything more to my sense of self than beliefs.

The origins of identity are contentious, and there is robust debate over the priority of differentiation (cf. Stuart Hall, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler), the validity of a group/individual dichotomy (cf. Tajfel and Turner, Barth, Bourdieu), and of the primacy of some identities over others (eg developmental psychology). However, one conclusion occupies a point of near-consensus amongst scholars, researchers, and philosophers of identity: it is socially determined.

If identity is socially determined, then we gain our sense of self by testing our ideas about ourselves against what other people seem to think about us, and by seeking to confirm or affirm particular beliefs within a social or intersubjective context (cf. Grossman).

There are some beliefs which almost everyone is likely to want to hold about themselves. Most people want to believe that they are smart enough, perceptive enough, or aware enough not to form horribly wrong conclusions about their world. Most people, even if they’re willing to admit being wrong about important parts of their ideological or cultural systems – and that requires a significant existing level of security and underlying affirmation – want to believe that they aren’t stupid or deserving of derision and contempt for having held wrong beliefs.

In other words, there is a direct relationship between the way we treat a person’s beliefs and the way they build and sustain their self-image as an individual both worthy of and in possession of respect and dignity. It is an unsustainable naivety to believe that you can hate some beliefs without hating those who hold them. It is undeniable that public expressions of bigotry will make the targets of their vitriol feel bad. It is also undeniable that public mockery or sustained attacks upon certain sets of beliefs – ‘religious beliefs’ let’s call them, solely for their particularly important role in explaining the world and selfhood to those who hold them – will also make people feel bad.

But it’s a good naivety, at least institutionally. If we want to have a society in which people feel free to express themselves, and in which people are universally subject to the same standards of recognition, then public reason must be secular reason, and public expression must be as close to unlimited as is possible (exceptions could be made for direct incitements to violence).  By ensuring that every idea is open to critical analysis, we ensure that society as an entity has its own self-awareness, and the people who comprise it are able to subscribe to a standard which, at least potentially, is blind to class, race, age, gender, or any other particular identity: reason.

In other words, separating belief from the believer is specious. But useful. Because Enlightenment.

Discourse, Insult, and the Doctrine of Double Effect

A recent row over the decision of the UCL Atheist, Secularist, and Humanist Society to use for their Facebook ‘pub social’ event page an image of Muhammad and Jesus sitting next to one-another at a pub, taken from the delightful Jesus and Mo’, and the subsequent request by the student’s union that the picture be taken down following a complaint, has got me thinking about one particular problem of pluralistic society:

In a pluralistic society, many forms of expression will offend somebody. How do we balance freedom of expression against our desire to foster a sense of mutual respect and recognition in our community?

Now, I am strongly anti-censorship. I think that prohibiting certain kinds of expression is a very dangerous move with the potential to lead to seriously diminished democratic freedoms and a degradation of the very discourse we should seek to protect. I’m willing to see incitements to violence outlawed, but beyond that I find limits on freedom of expression to be too slippery a slope.

But just because something shouldn’t be outlawed doesn’t mean that it isn’t morally wrong. The fact is, people feel safer and more comfortable in a conversation if they don’t feel as though other participants are deliberately trying to cause them insult or offence. This shouldn’t result in any hostility towards arguments, but it should lead us to be cautious about how we express our disagreement or even our anger at the beliefs and actions of others. We should not shy away from saying ‘this is bad’ but we shouldn’t stick out our tongues while saying it. Or, to provide an example, we should feel comfortable criticising the reaction many people seem to have over the depiction of Muhammad without shouting ‘Nyah nyah, look at my picture of Muhammad drinking an alcoholic beverage made from pig’s blood!’ solely with the intent of provoking feelings of grievance.

One clue as to how we can make moral assessments about our expression might be to employ an important part of Just War Theory: the Doctrine of Double Effect. Very generally and minimally speaking, it states that if a bad effect is foreseeable but not intended, the act that causes it is not wrong. For example, the ‘terror bomber’ who bombs a factory in order to kill its workers and create fear is committing wrong, but the tactical bomber who bombs the factory to render it inoperable is not doing wrong, even if the deaths of workers are likely. One is in the clear if one can answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘if the bad effect didn’t happen, would my goal still be served?’

In the case of this picture, I suspect the goal wasn’t morally wrong. It was posted for internal consumption, was thematically related to a social event to be held at a pub, and is the sort of thing this community finds clever and amusing. Whether it offended and insulted or not is unrelated to these reasons.

Of course, you might say that theories of justice in war are not so applicable outside of that context. This is a good argument – and an even better one might be to problematise the Doctrine of Double Effect itself, for suffering of any type is bad, whether intended or not – but I think it strikes a pragmatic balance here. It allows us to protect forms of expression while still allowing us to condemn things which seem aimed only at causing particular people hurt. It condemns deliberate provocations without condemning the provocative, so to speak. It may be difficult to assess the motivations behind another’s expression, but this rule can at least help us consider our own actions:

An act of expression is not morally wrong for causing offence when its intended effect is not specifically or solely to offend.

More on Capital Punishment

I was thinking more about capital punishment after it came up in a conversation last night, and decided to give another look at a post I wrote a few months ago on the subject. There I came across a quote from a friend in favour of capital punishment for certain offences, and I have decided to write a little bit more about why I think that my friend’s attitude is wrong-headed. The first time around I addressed the concept of moral dessert (rather shallowly) but did not focus on some of the other potentially problematic aspects of what my friend was saying. I hope to do that this time around.

To review, what my friend said was:

Anyone who brutally murders people without any expression of remorse or will to repentance is telling us that they do not value life, including their own. Notice I speak of someone who sees no wrong in their murdering another. Such a person implicitly forfeits their right to life by so unsympathetically taking the life (lives) of another (other).

I have heard variations on this position from a few other people, including people who like this friend generally show a consistent and strong commitment to humanist values. And on the surface, it seems to be in keeping with a focus on advancing an ethic that calls for human life to be treated as an object of great value.

Until you stop to think about it.

In a sense, this position requires us to use the killer’s values rather than our own. We infer from the killer’s actions that she doesn’t value life (which may or may not be true). We derive from this that we should act in accordance with the killer’s lack of concern for her own life, according it the same [lack of ] value. Does this mean that it is morally acceptable to kill someone if (we believe that) she does not value her own life?

This reminds me of the classic question of whether a person can sell herself into slavery. If we believe that every person should be entitled to a set of properly basic and universal rights, then those rights obtain whether or not the rights-holder wants them. But let’s be charitable and remove from my friend’s position the part about the killer not valuing her own life. Does keeping the rest make it better?

One immediate thought on a relevant analogy: does an unrepentant thief lose all right to own property of her own? That seems like an odd position to advance. Maybe murder is a special kind of wrong act? Let’s say that it is. We’re still left with problems.

Consider the subject of this position: a person who ‘brutally murders people without any expression of remorse or will to repentance’. Presumably this subject occupies a special category apart from other killers, in order to lose the right to life, which is only something that happens to some killers. The term ‘murder’ here smuggles in certain assumptions, such as that the homicide in question was not an act of justified self-defence, or otherwise morally permissible, but it isn’t a terrible word choice. In the end, of course, we have to have a standard for what constitutes murder. But nevertheless, when confronted with an unrepentant killer, I think we have only two possibilities that explain their lack of remorse:

1. She believes that the killing was morally justified because it was either self-defence or another kind of righteous act, such as an honour-killing to avenge an insult or discipline a wayward family member, or taking the life of a cheating spouse in a crime of passion that the killer feels was morally permissible, or perhaps even an execution of someone who has implicitly forfeited their right to life by unsympathetically taking the life of another;
2. She believes that the killing was morally justified because when she desires to kill someone, it is not ever wrong – in short, some kind of psychopathy.

Should a killer of the first type occupy a special category? I say no. The fact that the killer believers her actions to be morally justified out of self-defence or righteousness suggests that she has a real sense of morality, possesses the capacity for ethical calculations or feelings of empathy or sympathy, and is simply operating off of a different set of value judgements than the ones we are using when we call her act ‘murder’. As humanists, I think we have an obligation to recognise the vast plurality of moral systems currently held by the vast plurality of people who together comprise humanity. While we are certainly entitled to advance our own moral arguments, there doesn’t seem to me to be any way to non-arbitrarily select a subset of people who disagree with them in favour of a different set of moral views and call them so vile as to deserve death.

Consider the example of the terrorist bomber, who sees the victims of her attack as legitimate targets in a war, either because those victims are in her perspective actual combatants or because she views her ends and the probability of attaining them as justifying the means. Would you expect remorse from this person? Probably not, unless you also succeed in convincing her to change her mind about many other aspects of her value system and political views. Does our failure to persuade her to change her mind render her right to life forfeit, when if we could make a better argument such that she did change her mind, she could keep her right to life? That seems an absurd thing for a humanist to believe.

What about killers of the second type, who are not so much specifically unrepentant as generally unrepentant, and who think that morality just doesn’t apply to them? It does seem to me as though these people could more easily be said to occupy a discrete category independent of our success or failure to convince them to change their minds about their actions. No matter how well we argue, such people will never feel remorse.

Except this is a mental illness. It’s a terrible mental illness that poses a great danger to both those who suffer from it and to anyone around them. But what kind of humanist advocates for the killing of the mentally ill?

Even if I accept the notion of moral dessert for the sake of argument, I just can’t find any merit to this position on capital punishment.

Enlightenment Values, Discourse, and Oppression

I want to discuss why I think it is that communication and dialogue are, ideally, the tools we should use to free ourselves or others from situations of oppression. When we say that we are oppressed, what we usually mean is that we are being treated unjustly by someone who has power over us. This unjust treatment can be specific to an interpersonal relationship with a particular oppressor, or it can be something that pervades the general conditions of our environment, and is a systemic or structural phenomenon. This might range from discrimination in job applications or by the judicial system based on group stereotypes to rules of conduct or social mores that unfairly exclude people lacking in education or wealth. One good example of the latter – which can often be subtle or unrecognisable to those who don’t suffer from it, or even to many of those perpetuating it (for example, this good parable) – would be Rhodesian electoral laws, which restricted the franchise to property owners and therefore were formally non-racist while excluding virtually all of the country’s non-white population. Suffice it to say, oppression is a bad thing. By definition, in fact.

I think it’s safe to say that we would like to minimise not only the oppression we suffer, but the oppression that others suffer as well. This is in keeping with the values of compassion and commitment to human wellbeing that are essential to humanism.

But how can we do this?

In thinking about this question, I have come up with a kind of typology. This is actually somewhat connected with a project I began just over half a year ago in looking at different types of political protest, but I won’t bore you with the details of that.

Imagine that A is suffering oppression at the hands of B. Maybe others like A are suffering oppression at the hands of others like B, or maybe it’s specific to this one relationship? It doesn’t matter for the purposes of this thought experiment.

A has three options for ending the oppression:

1. Threaten B with violence or something else unpleasant until B stops being oppressive (coercion);
2. End the entire relationship, which could even require leaving the community (abortion);
3. Convince B that her behaviour is bad so that she stops being oppressive (persuasion).

Coercion has certainly been the choice of many oppressed persons and peoples, appearing both morally justified and strategically easy, and while we can identify situations in which it has worked, we should view it with great scepticism. Threats exist only so long as they are sustained, and thus in many situations a respite from oppression that is won through coercion will only survive while that coercion is maintained. Violence has a tendency to generate the circumstances for more violence, and what value is an escape from oppression that leads only to more oppression (or counter-oppression), at least to a humanist? Abortion has also been the choice of many, and could be seen as the impetus behind many secessionist movements. One version of abortion might be for A to simply kill B, or otherwise deprive her of the very instrumental capacity for oppressive relation. This should be distinguished from violence used to threaten, as the goal is destruction rather than coercion, and it has also been the choice of some oppressed groups. Even excluding that extreme action, I think that humanists are likely to be uncomfortable with the choice to divide communities and separate people from interacting, as this option reduces rather than increases the richness of our social lives.

Thus we are left with option 3: persuasion. Like coercion, this is a communicative act, and one which requires that we identify the source of oppressive behaviour in order to usefully tailor our persuasive messaging.

As I see it, oppressive behaviour comes from one of two possible sources:

1. The oppressor has similar values to ours, and her oppression comes from incomplete or incorrect information. I’m sure most of us can recall cases where we have felt mistreated by someone, only to find that they simply misunderstood our intentions or our situation, and that they were not so much malicious or selfish but merely clueless;
2. The oppressor has reasonably complete and correct information, and simply has different values from us. She knows how we feel and why, but disagrees that her conduct is unjust.

The second category is where most of us are tempted to place bigotry, but I think that in most cases we underestimate the influence of ignorance over actually irreconcilable understandings of what it means to be good. Most people believe themselves to be fair, just, and ultimately good individuals, and most people will if prompted enough likely define those traits similarly. I would thus generally place most kinds of bigotry into the first category, as prejudices are ultimately heuristics: convenient principles for making fast assessments, which are presumed to be accurate enough to be worthwhile, but which may not be. This  leaves us with a certain very important conclusion:

Oppression happens most often when an oppressor has faulty knowledge of her victim’s circumstances, such that she behaves unjustly when she otherwise wouldn’t.

So going back to A’s task of persuading B to change her behaviour, we can now say that A’s goal is to change B’s knowledge – that is, the information available to her and the way she categorises it. There seem to be three ways for A to do this:

1. Share her perspective so that B feels greater empathy (appeal to compassion);
2. Directly critique B’s paradigms or presumptions so that the justificatory basis for B’s oppressive behaviour is undermined (appeal to reason);
3. Act in such a way that B’s paradigms or presumptions are shocked, and that in her conformation with and interpretation of such an act, she develops an awareness of the injustice of her treatment of A (propaganda of the deed).

The last of these includes all sorts of protest actions, which could range from sit-ins and marches to terrorism. One of the appeals of this third option is that it does not suffer from the flaw of the first two; namely, that it does not require an open, neutral discursive exchange. If A cannot even bring B to the table for a chat, and command B’s attention long enough to have a dialogue, then delivering a shock to B by more dramatic means at least has a chance of working.

Yet the third way also suffers from two significant flaws. The first is that while dialogue has a reflexive element – meaning can be discussed and deliberated to ensure that  participants are ‘on the same page’ – communication by dramatic action is prone to misinterpretation. A’s ‘propaganda by deed’ might be intended to force greater awareness, of self and of others, into B’s life,  but if B interprets A’s behaviour as, say, coercive or selfish, then the problem of faulty knowledge persists. Worse, the oppression might increase, as B responds to a perceived threat or resorts to counter-action under the midguided notion that A can be shown the injustice of her original grievance – that A does not suffer oppression but is given just treatment. This leads to the second flaw, which is commonly referred to as the ‘escalation trap’. Here A and perhaps also B resort to ever more powerful attempts at shock action, shifting communicative exchanges entirely into the realm of symbolic drama, and perhaps even into violence. While there are certainly cases where the third way succeeds in alleviating oppression, there is generous evidence available to any student of history or social psychology showing that the opposite is also highly likely.

Thus, if the kind of discursive space necessary for the first and second ways can be established in a way that makes these strategies successful, it would carry far less risk of further oppression or violence. But what does this space require? I think the most concise starting point for answering that question might be Habermas’s rules of discourse:

1. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to
take part in the discourse.
2. a) Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatsoever.
b) Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatsoever into
the discourse.
c) Everyone is allowed to express his attitudes, desires, and needs.
3. No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion,
from exercising his rights as laid down in (1) and (2) above.
(Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action/Habermas)

With these rules in place, all participants in a discourse should be able to debate and deliberate according to a single, universal, and therefore fair standard of evaluation.

These rules accord well with the Enlightenment principles of reason as something which transcends cultural boundaries, of certain objective metaphysical laws and conditions (of the sort discoverable through the sciences or by studying logic), and of the potential for rational, autonomous, and free thinking subjects.

But since it is impossible to simply ‘bracket out’ the existing power imbalances of society, which would serve to exclude or handicap the ability of some people to participate effectively in a discursive sphere, there is a social project which we must pursue to ensure that the rules of discourse actually obtain in reality. This project is to ensure that any potential participant have enough education, social security, and legal protection to be able to argue knowledgeably and effectively.

One might design this project behind a Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance’, but I won’t digress into this too much.

It is clear in looking around us that our society is far from the Habermasian ideal, and that the project of establishing the ideal conditions for discourse is daunting. Certainly there is a strong onus upon us to lobby for better protection for the socially disadvantaged, and to provide that protection personally by speaking or acting against oppression when necessary.

Nevertheless, I think that a valuable part of it is to begin, immediately, to present discourse as the best way to combat oppression – as the more compassionate, more humane, more communal, and more secure path to advancing our interests and our grievances – and to encourage people to use reason and communication as a means of engaging with the world.

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.

Nobody deserves to die

In debates about capital punishment, most humanists seem to agree: it’s a bad idea. The stats seem to suggest that it doesn’t deter crime any more than non-capital sentences, and the flaws likely to occur in any justice system make it overwhelming likely that a government regularly giving capital sentences is going to execute an innocent person. That doesn’t sit well with many people.

But one area where these does not seem to be consensus is on the question of whether or not anyone, theoretically at least, deserves to die. In considering the harm wrought by some of the most atrocious criminals imaginable – war criminals ordering mass rapes or savage serial killers – many humanists are willing to say: this person is so bad that they deserve to be killed. They lose their right to live (if you believe in rights) and the brutality of their actions surpasses a level past which they, by their responsibility as a moral agent, should lose their most precious possession: life itself.

To quote one friend:

Anyone who brutally murders people without any expression of remorse or will to repentance is telling us that they do not value life, including their own. Notice I speak of someone who sees no wrong in their murdering another. Such a person implicitly forfeits their right to life by so unsympathetically taking the life (lives) of another (other).

This is unsustainable on at a rigorous level of analysis.

What does it mean to say someone deserves? A good basic definition from the dictionary is that it means ‘to be worthy, fit, or suitable for some reward or requital’. Essential to this notion is that a person is an autonomous agent. Their decisions are made through rational analysis of some range of choices, and they as an individual should be held morally responsible for their decisions. A good choice thus deserves praise while a bad choice thus deserves rebuke.

The claim ‘people should be considered morally autonomous agents’ can be defended on two grounds: prudence and truth. To say that it is prudent to treat others as though they are morally autonomous doesn’t require that they actually are such, according to the rules of logic. If that is your only argument, then questions of whether or not someone should be said to deserve will be grounded in practicality. But to say that it is true that a person is morally autonomous requires that one believe that we have real control over our moral choices.

It goes without saying that as a matter of practical need, we must treat people as having some measure of agency. Otherwise we’re left with nothing but total determinism, in which we see a person’s actions as being entirely dictated by their genetics and their upbringing or environment. Were we to believe this, we would be unable to sustain any anger towards people who treat us badly, or have any honest appreciation of others for their virtues. But as I said earlier, this doesn’t mean that it is true that people have autonomous control over their choices.

Rationality is an information-sensitive exercise. It is about assessing cost and benefit, given a certain set of values and a certain set of means available for realising the interests obtained from those values. Those values are determined by something: either by one’s genetic or evolved predispositions, or by one’s upbringing and environment. And while one’s environment is arguably shaped by the choices that they make, those choices are themselves determined by genetics or environment. Thus while we can hold that rationality is possible, we cannot hold that a rational agent is a morally responsible one.

As far as rationality and criminality is concerned, this leaves us with something along the lines of, ‘there are no bad people, only bad ideas’. And bad actions, of course, since ideas + rationality = motivation for action.

What about actions resulting from something nonrational, like powerful feelings of love or empathy or jealously? I don’t think we can hold a person responsible, at an essential level, for those either. If a person does something without having really thought about it, that person hasn’t made a choice. They’ve reacted to an impulse. And while we can celebrate good impulses and revile bad ones, we shouldn’t treat reactions to them as morally autonomous behaviour.

I think this argument should lead us to believe that it isn’t reasonable to say that a person deserves to die, because to do subverts the goal to presuming moral autonomy in the first place, namely to make social life navigable and to some degree analysable. We gain neither navigability nor knowledge by ending the lives of others.

Of course, one could still argue that the presumption of moral autonomy is prudent enough to be taken to its ‘natural conclusion’, which encompasses the very question of whether or not someone deserves to live. One may find it so important to justify rewards and punishments at a deontic level as to support killing some people because doing so seems consistent. But this is also problematic: life is not a thing of value of which one may be deprived. Life cannot be taken away from a person, because life precedes personhood. Life is the boundary condition within which the notions of merit or rights have any meaning at all. In other words, life has no value according to the presumption of moral autonomy alone. Even the most prolific murderer has thus not taken from his victims something which can be seen as equivalent to his own life. In other words, even believing that a person can deserve reward and punishment does not support the belief that depriving someone of their life could be a punishment equivalent to the wrongness of some moral transgression.

No matter how you look at it, nobody deserves to die.

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.