Comments Elsewhere

Who are you thinking of in particular?

It may just be that the church leaders you’ve been noticing lately have been from different denominations. The United Methodists have always had bishops; the Southern Baptists have never had them. Some Pentacostals (PCG) did change the title of their District and General Superintendents to District and General Bishops as of 2002, but the positions were already oversight positions; they just changed the name, apparently to make it sound more spiritual and less like secular upper management.

E. Simon,

I don’t know what you mean by my “contingent position.” Contingent on what?

My position is that warfare as it is conducted in the modern world is almost never justifiable because the circumstances under which you can excusably kill innocent people in the course of protecting yourself from an unrelated menace are very limited, and the number that you can excusably kill is “almost none.” For a more detailed discussion, see Roderick Long’s essay Thinking Our Anger. I’d be glad to discuss the issue at more length if you want, but I’d like to suggest that it’s far less urgent for me to spell out the details of my view than it is for you to spell out the details of yours, because I’m not trying to defend a fucking war as proportional retaliation.

I should note that I am no more ignorant of the doctrine of double effect than you are. I’ve nowhere suggested that civilians were deliberately targeted by the IDF (how would I know?). What I am suggesting is one of the traditional conditions on the doctrine of double effect: that to be excusable, the evils inflicted must not be disproportionate to the goods achieved. So just pointing to double effect does not absolve you of the intellectual responsibility of spelling out how many people can be (regrettably but expectedly) killed and maimed in the course of retaliating against unrelated menaces, and how much killing and maiming of the innocent would make the policy intolerable for reasons of proportionality.

I’ve accused you of dodging the issue because if you do not have an answer to that question, then you can have absolutely no moral basis for endorsing the war. If you don’t even have a ballpark estimate of what a tolerable civilian body count is, then you have no idea whether or not the killing and maiming of innocents has gone beyond the limits of proportional self-defense. And if you don’t know that then you don’t know whether or not the war is legitimate self-defense or a massacre. If you treat the question as some higher mystery beyond your ken, then you have thereby admitted that you have no idea whatever whether justice demands that the IDF continue or that it relent.

If, however, you profess not to be able to answer the question, but then turn around and continue supporting the war, particularly with polysyllabic hand-waving at pacifying abstractions such as “collateral damage” and “appropriately disincentivizing,” then what I have to conclude is that you are quite satisfied with the level of killing, burning, bombing, and maiming being inflicted on innocents, but that you’d rather not say so because it would sound too brutal coming from your lips. If that’s not so, then you could refute my claims by actually coming out and giving us some idea of what you consider acceptable rather than setting the question aside unanswered and trying to describe what happens to men, women, and children when bombs are rained down on their neighborhoods, when their homes or farms are destroyed, when their flesh is burnt by fire or torn up by sharpnel or crushed by rubble, and when their lives are snuffed out or forever marked by permanent wounds, with words like “cost” and “disincentivize” and “collateral damage.” If you want to defend war, then there it is: defend it. And if you don’t like Orwell being quoted at you, then stop writing about real violence being inflicted daily against real people as if it were nothing more than some debit on an accountants’ ledger somewhere in the Ministry of War.

As for States and their boundaries: I am an anarchist, so I don’t give a damn about which side of the bloody line in the sand people are on. But even if I were not an anarchist, it would hardly change my position on this question. However many special obligations a State may have towards its subjects over and above the obligations it has towards the subjects of other States, it is no more entitled to go out and slaughter alien subjects than it is its own subjects. If you accept the legitimacy of the State then you might very well think that governments have more of a duty to rescue their own subjects than to rescue the subjects of other governments from a pre-existing danger; but that does precisely nothing to license going out and actively killing or maiming innocent subjects of other governments in the process of trying to rescue your own subjects from an unrelated menace.

Max,

Not everybody in those “building complexes” has any particular choice about who stays there. For example, how exactly are the scores of children who have been killed in the bombing and shelling of residential targets to blame for who is or is not quartered in their homes, or riding with them in their cars? What did families vacationing on a beach do to deserve getting shelled by the IDF? What attempts are the IDF making to limit the killing and maiming of unrelated third parties from bombing of houses in residential neighborhoods and rocketing of cars on civilian streets? The answer appears to be “more or less nothing,” given the massive scale of destruction to civilian infrastructure and the escalating body count in both Lebanon and Gaza. Not surprising, because aerial bombardment is not exactly a precise form of warfare and it is nearly impossible to carry it out in civilian areas without killing or maiming a lot of innocent people.

You mention, “Since, [terrorists] are not a formal group of war, which is distinguishable by uniform or location. They are difficult to attack.” But I find it hard to work up much sympathy for the IDF in spite of the difficulties the poor dears must be laboring under. If it is difficult to identify the guilty or difficult to attack them without snuffing out or ruining the lives of lots of innocent people, then you had bloody well be much more cautious about doing the attacking.

The current war on Lebanon, let us remember, started over the death or capture of some 10 Israeli soldiers in combat. Even if one stipulates to the claim that the Hizbollah attack on the soldiers was an act of aggression (something I’m willing to stipulate to, but others might not be), that does not give the IDF a blank check to use any level of retaliatory violence they please in order to try to stop future attacks. Not even the subsequent murder of about 10 Israeli civilians following the beginning of the onslaught does that. So far about 280 Lebanese people, most of them civilians, have now been killed in the bombardment and Israel shows no signs of letting up. It seems to me that on absolutely any plausible understanding of the principle of proportionality this is morally criminal, whether or not the cause for which the IDF is going to war is a just cause. Just causes neither justify nor excuse wholesale slaughter of unrelated third parties, whether they are killed as the result of direct targeting (terrorism) or whether they are killed as an expected and accepted side-effect of attacking some unrelated target (so-called “collateral damage”).

Incidentally, pointing to Dresden (or the terror bombing of World War II more broadly) won’t get you very far. I consider the firebombing of Dresden to have been an indefensible massacre and a war crime of the first order.

As for sympathy, well, it’s not about sympathy. While there are some people in Lebanon who celebrated Hizbollah’s attacks and some people in Gaza who celebrated Hamas’s attacks, there are also many who were disgusted by them, but people are being killed quite independently of what they thought. And no matter how unsympathetic I may be towards people who “celebrate” such attacks, merely celebrating an evil is not a hanging crime.

E. Simon: And yet, the use of Israel’s military will prevent Hizbullah from intentionally causing the loss of similarly incalculably valuable Israeli lives.

I’m aware that this is one of the professed aims of the attacks. However, you’ve merely dodged the question rather than answering it. Just how many of those “incalculably valuable” lives of innocent third parties in Lebanon is the IDF entitled to snuff out or ruin in the process of trying to to protect the “incalculably valuable” lives of innocent Israelis? What are acceptable ratios here in your view, and what would amount to disproportionate violence? Fewer civilians killed than were saved by the attack? One-for-one? Two or three Lebanese civilians killed for every Israeli civilian saved? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Or is any body count at all acceptable?

I should note that I’m asking you this, not because I’m naive about what modern warfare involves, but rather because I’m all too familiar with what it involves, and I happen to think that the nature of modern warfare makes concerns about proportionality of violence very important. Given the fact that some 235 people, most of them civilians, and including scores of children, have been killed in Lebanon so far in retaliation for the death or capture of ten soldiers, along with the murder of about ten civilians in various attacks over the course of the conflict, it seems particularly urgent in this conflict.

E. Simon: But Israel is not responsible for Lebanon’s failures in necessitating that most unfortunate decision.

No, but neither are unrelated third parties who happen to live in Lebanon responsible for Hizbollah’s crimes. Whatever causes the Israeli government may have for going to war, it is certainly not entitled to use any means necessary to achieve its war aims, and if there is no way to carry those objectives out without inflicting wildly disproportionate suffering on innocent third parties in the process, then its objectives had jolly well better be left unachieved.

E. Simon: There are costs, no doubt. But the costs of not thusly, and appropriately disincentivizing against murder are much riskier, given the total analysis.

Please. Do you think I give a fuck about “appropriately disincentivizing against murder”? The issue here is how many innocent people you can maim or kill in the process of protecting yourself or others against being maimed or killed by some unrelated menace. This is life and death that we are talking about, and passing it off as “costs” of diddling with incentive structures is frankly obscene.

George Orwell: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

(from Politics and the English Language)

Richard: Put in more intuitive terms, we can ask: could our world have turned out in any possible way?

Sure. In fact, I’d wager that it’s necessarily true that our world could have turned out in any possible way, provided that you’re not equivocating on the sort of modality you’re talking about in between the “could” and the “possible.” After all, any way that our universe could not have turned out to be is (ipso facto) an impossible, not a possible, “way.”

To put it another way, isn’t your question here just equivalent to asking whether the world could have turned out in any way it could have turned out, or whether it’s possible for the world to have turned out in any possible way?

Richard: Or are some possibilities so extreme that they could only be realized by a different underlying universe?

I don’t think I know what this even means. What would it mean to have a numerically (not just qualitatively) different universe from the one we’ve got? I can conceive of things going quite differently in this universe, but I really have no idea what I’m supposed to imagine about this numerically distinct, alien world that would make it something other than the world we’re in, under different circumstances. (If they are numerically distinct, could they both be actual at once? If not, why not? But if so, doesn’t that conflict with the condition of totality?)

Alex Skiles: Whether or not property P is essential to object x itself has to do with whether or not x has P in all possible worlds. But possible worlds aren’t the sorts of things that can have properties in other possible worlds.

I don’t see why they wouldn’t be. If there are statements that are true of possible worlds, (e.g. that in at least one of them I went to bed instead of writing these remarks), then that seems like a good prima facie reason for saying that those statements are actual, i.e., are among the states of affairs that constitute the actual world. But if you accept that, then you accept applying predicates to worlds within other possible worlds (e.g. that the world in which I go to bed has, in this the actual world, the property of having been accessible for me).

Of course, you could deny the prima facie case, and argue either (a) that modal facts aren’t in any possible world, but float outside (over? under?) any possible world; or (b) that there aren’t really any facts about possible worlds at all. But the sort of transworld realm of facts required for (a) seems to undermine the idea of possible worlds as total; and to assert (b) just seems to be to give up on possible worlds as anything other than a useful fiction.

E. Simon:

And just how many unrelated third parties do you think the IDF can legitimately kill or maim in the process of retaliating against “Nasrallah and his supporters”?

Will: Can you seriously expect Israelis to give Lebanese civilians equal importance as their families?

That depends on what context you’re speaking in. Importance for what?

If you mean, “Should Israelis give innocent Lebanese strangers as many birthday presents as they give their own family members?” then of course the answer is no.

If you mean, “Should Israelis feel the same urgent need to rescue innocent Lebanese strangers from danger as they feel towards their own family members?” then the answer is probably still no, but less obviously so.

If you mean, “Should Israelis be willing to actively go out and ”slaughter” innocent Lebanese strangers in order to protect their own family members from danger?” then the answer is no, they should not. Murder is wrong.

Will: Given the choice of saving a dozen people I don’t know or my wife I would choose my wife. I wouldn’t care how unethical it was.

We’re not talking about a situation where Lebanese civilians just happen to be in danger, and Israelis have to choose between “saving” them or saving their family members. We’re talking about a situation in which the IDF is rolling out, professedly in the name of ordinary Israelis, and actively killing innocent Lebanese civilians, supposedly in the process of trying to damage or destroy a guerrilla army (Hizbollah), which many of those civilians are not members of.

So the “choice” you pose here is a weak analogy at best. The proper question to pose to yourself is: would you be willing to go out and murder a dozen people you don’t know in the process of saving your wife from some unrelated menace.

I wouldn’t. And if you would, then you’re a fucking sociopath.

mrfisher,

If you personally want to offer narcotics for free, then in a free society you’d have every right to do so. I hope you don’t propose to present me with the bill, however, or to force those who are selling drugs at a profit to stop doing so.

For what it’s worth, if you propose to ENFORCE a price ceiling of zero, that would virtually guarantee tremendous shortages of drugs unless those footing the bill have a nearly unlimited budget that they’re willing to devote to providing the drugs. If they don’t, and shortages and the attendant rationing result, then you’ll merely re-create the black market that exists under Prohibition: people will pay under the table for access to drugs now, or drugs over and above the amount on their ration card. Either you can let that market flourish (in which case you give up on the enforcement), or else you can escalate the use of force in the attempt to suppress it (in which case you end up with much the same situation that you have now).

Genius:

as a [consequentialist] I would say they have an obligation to do what is required to defend themselves without causing more harm than would have been caused by the thing they are trying to prevent.

Consequentialism does entail this standard, but I think that that’s a good reason not to be a consequentialist: the standard is too lax about murdering the innocent. It excuses (in principle, if not in fact) all kinds of retaliatory violence, even terroristic violence, against people who have done nothing to deserve it. If the Israeli army could save the lives of 100 Israeli civilians by murdering 99 Lebanese civilians in retaliation for an attack, I think they would still be wrong to do so, even though there’s a decrease in the net body count. Reason being that the 99 Lebanese civilians (ex hypothesi) didn’t have anything to do with the threatened murder of the 100 Israeli civilians, and other people’s lives are not yours to volunteer for that kind of sacrificial duty. This connects up with a more general problem I have with consequentialism in the theory of justice: it suggests that the primary demand of justice on you is that you take steps to minimize the amount of net evil going around in society. Not so: the primary demand of justice is that you must be just.

Clark:

Doesn’t Israel have the right to either eliminate Hezbolla as a threat or come to some sort of peace accord?

Sure, but not by any means necessary. They have no right whatsoever to inflict massive and disproportionate human costs on the lives and livelihoods of civilians in Lebanon in order to “eliminate” Hizbollah or to force their hand diplomatically (or to do the same thing, mutatis mutandis, in Gaza, to eliminate or force a settlement on Hamas). After all, the Israeli government could do all kinds of things to eliminate the threat from Hizbollah; they could, for example, firebomb all the cities in southern Lebanon until everyone in the area was dead, or they could threaten to use nuclear weapons on Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, etc. These would be far more effective at the task of restraining or destroying Hizbollah than the current military strategy is; I leave it up to you and your God to judge why it is that they are not appropriate responses to the death or capture of a handful of soldiers, or the threat posed to civilians from ongoing poorly-aimed rocket attacks.

Clark:

Once a war starts the fact is that there are collateral casualties. While I think there is a lot one can blame Israel for the fact is once the war starts there isn’t the possibility of a clean fight like you suggest.

This is not an argument in favor of so-called “collateral casualties” (that is, killing or maiming innocent people). If it’s an argument against anything, it’s an argument against going to war.

Clark:

One can’t simply say, “I can’t think of anything better” and then simultaneously say, “their current actions don’t meet the standard of restraint.” That’s just a cop out.

Oh yes one can. If you can’t figure out any way to achieve your aims without doing evil to innocent third parties in the process, then your aims had jolly well better go unachieved; it is better to do nothing than to do evil.

I would like to be able to suggest something that the IDF could do that would not be evil and that would be better than doing nothing at all; attacks on Israeli civilians are criminal and should be stopped where possible. But I’m under no obligation to come up with that constructive advice for them before I condemn immoral policies that they’re presently engaged in: they are obliged to stop doing evil immediately and completely, whether or not anybody has thought of any better way to accomplish their professed goals.

Clark:

I hate to say it but as democracies both the people of Lebanon and Palestine have to foot a lot of the blame. (Just as Americans have to accept the blame for George Bush)

Oh, bullshit. What blame should I accept for the policies of a ruler that I never voted for, never supported, and have no effective control over whatsoever?

Amp,

Thanks for this post.

This puzzled me, though:

In virtually any context other than a crime committed by US soldiers, a 14 year old girl who was raped and murdered would be called a girl, not a “woman.”

That’s probably true, but why is it important? Is raping a woman, then murdering her and burning her body to cover up, any less monstrous than doing the same thing to a “girl”?

The language might not provoke the same level of outrage amongst the average newspaper reader: sexual assault against children or adolescents tends to be treated as if it were more of an outrage than sexual assault against adult women. But if it doesn’t provoke the same level of outrage, then that’s a problem with the audience, not a problem with the newspaper.