Lots of People
Another interesting point at normblog. Well I can’t help it if he says something that catches my attention twice in three days. That’s just how things fall out sometimes. And really, this is something I’ve been mulling over for a couple of weeks or more, ever since re-reading Philip Gourevitch’s book on Rwanda. Longer than that really, maybe since last spring – maybe around the time Fareed Zakaria’s book on democracy was published. It wasn’t the book itself (which I haven’t read in any case) that sparked the pondering, it was the air of surprise in some of the reviews, that someone could make some shrewd and pertinent comments about democracy which recognized that democracy has some tensions or dangers. I was surprised that reviewers were so surprised – as if this were an idea that no one had ever thought of before, or at least as if it were an idea that everyone stopped thinking of once the universal franchise was in place, at least everyone to the left of General Franco. But surely it’s obvious if you think about it for about one quarter of a second that there is no magic law of the universe that prevents a majority from wanting to do things that are bad, oppressive, unfair, cruel to other people.
And that’s where Rwanda comes in. The population of Hutus was about 90%, of Tutsis about 10%. Not all Hutus wanted to slaughter all Tutsis, but a great many of them did. If there had been a referendum and they had voted on it and the kill-Tutsis side won, that would have been democracy.
Now to what Norm said:
If the liberation of the Iraqi people by military intervention was overall wrong, that needs to be argued independently of the circumstance that there were many in Egypt or Jordan or Syria who were likely to be enraged by it.
Just so. Those are two independent things. 1. X is wrong, or right. 2. X will enrage a lot of people.
Everything is going to enrage someone, and a lot of things enrage a lot of people, and some things enrage most people. But whether the things that enrage them are good or bad is a separate question. In fact one could argue that this is one of the drawbacks of democracy: that out of habit or sloppy thinking or good intentions, we mix up voting and public opinion and merit, as if they’re all more or less the same thing. Then we start to think that it’s arrogant and elitist to have an opinion that the majority of people don’t share. Then we start to think it’s arrogant and elitist ever to say anyone is wrong about anything – and then our brains turn to soup.
Interesting.
I just had this very conversation about the death penalty. Some western Illinois newspaper editorial suggested that Governor Blagojevich lift the moratorium on Illinois executions because a majority of his constituents favored the death penalty. (do not have a referencing link, sorry)
Excellent point.
I’d forgotten it until you mentioned capital punishment, but Julian talked about all this in a Bad Moves (called, appositely enough, Fallacies of Democracy) recently – including this observation:
“If Britain were run on majoritarian lines, for example, then fox hunting would have been banned long ago and capital punishment would never have been abolished. In other words, Britain would be a country which killed more people but fewer animals.”
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/badmovesprint.php?num=26
I thought this bad argumant was just a temporary aberation of Norman Geras’s, but evidently not.
‘X is wrong or right’ is not necessarily independent of ‘X will enrage a lot of people’. Not because there is anything morally wrong with enraging people in itself, but because whether an action is wrong or right depends (partially) on its consequences. Just because the rage of Islamists, or their consequent actions, are unjustified, does not mean that we can ignore them when considering the consequences of our own actions (or the actions of those we hope to influence).
I do agree with your more general point about democracy (Chantal Mouffe says some interesting things about this in the course of criticising Rawls). But you don’t need to say, as Norman and you appear to, that public opinion is per se morally irrelevant (unless you are a hard-line deontologist, I suppose). The important point is merely that it is not per se relevant. But public opinion can have some (secondary) moral relevance, and that has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Tim is right about this.
If you’re a utilitarian, for example, then whether your actions enrage people is part of the moral calculus.
This is fairly easy to demonstrate. It might be, for example, that there is a despotic, immensely powerful nation, which is perpetrating a slight wrong on parts of its population (e.g., making them go to philosophy conferences).
If the consequences of intervening to correct this wrong were that they were likely to be enraged – and as a result engage in a nuclear response killing large numbers of people, it would be morally wrong to intervene (if you’re a utilitarian, at any rate).
Hmm. Yes but what if you’re not a Utilitarian? And what if you consider consequentialist arguments as separate from moral ones?
Or to put it another way, what if there are indeed [consequentialist] reasons not to do a thing if you know it’s going to enrage a lot of people – ironically that is in fact one big reason I had more qualms about the war in Iraq than this Jerry S fella did – but you are still convinced that it is morally the best thing to do? Then aren’t you dealing with two separate questions? A moral one and a practical (or perhaps practical-moral) one? As in the case of the Iraq war. I could certainly see the moral case for getting rid of S.H., but I could also (like lots of people, of course) see all sorts of horrible potential consequences arising from the unilateral way the US went about it.
Abolitionism is another good example. It led to a hideous war that killed millions. Was it therefore immoral of William Lloyd Garrison to be an uncompromising abolitionist, was it immoral of the Republicans to oppose the spread of slavery in the Western US? Was it both moral and immoral? I don’t know.
Well, perhaps that’s what Tim means by case by case basis. And I take his point. But on the other hand I also still think it makes things clearer to separate the two.
It’s a very non-abstract question these days, isn’t it. That rage is clearly very likely to kill large numbers of people in the coming years. Short of global conversion to Islam (which I would find highly immoral, and might even literally prefer to die than to do), there’s apparently nothing we can do about it.
I just think that any proper moral calculus must take into account likely outcomes. And whether people are enraged – and what they’re likely/able to do as a result – is part of that.
Of course, one might conclude that the pay-off of an action outweighs the consequences of enraging a group, but one might conclude otherwise.
To risk the lives of millions in order to correct a slight wrong, even if the risk is only consequent of the rage of a group not directly involved, seems not to be clearly moral.
Well, I know, that’s what I’m saying. That’s why I talked about seeing the horrible consequences.
Perhaps I didn’t quote extensively enough to make it clear what Norm was saying. The opinion he was taking issue with implicitly endorsed the rage in question by means of pejorative phrases. Norm’s point was that the rage by itself doesn’t make the war wrong. Here’s what he said:
“If it wasn’t wrong, because of its aspect as a liberation of the Iraqi people from an odious tyranny, or even if it was (overall) wrong for other reasons than this liberation but its overall wrongness was substantially mitigated by the fact that the majority of Iraqis welcomed the liberation that came from it, then one has no reason to validate the enragement of others not themselves subject to that odious tyranny. Anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-Blair, people repeatedly resort to this argument from the reaction of the Muslim world – how it will be perceived by these people or those people – as if it just goes through without further thought. But try this: ‘Easing the restrictions on asylum seekers and treating them humanely will enrage members and supporters of the BNP and others within the broad constituency of the far right.’ OK with that? Probably not. Nor should anyone be, unless you’re in the business of endorsing racist responses.”
Without further thought. It still seems to me that for purposes of further thought, it is useful to recognize that the wrongness or not of the war is one question, and the rage of Egytptians etc. is another, even though the latter may in the end make the former the wrong thing to do.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding Norman Geras, but I took his post to be saying that it would only be right to take into account public opinion in making a moral judgement on the war if that opinion were justified. That certainly seems to be suggested by his BNP analogy – that it would be immoral to even consider the response of racists when evaluating asylum policy. It seems to me that the responses of evil people are, rather, one thing that might, sometimes, have to be considered when we are trying to do the morally right thing.
But you’re certainly right that there are two different things to consider, and calling one ‘moral’ and one ‘practical’, might be a useful way to make the distinction. However, they both seem to me to be action-guiding, and I think it’s wrong to over-emphasise the action-guiding importance of moral concerns (particularly in political cases, where the moral responsibility is kind of diffuse – if the attack on Iraq were immoral, who would we blame, exactly?).
Maybe Bernard Williams’ argument against utilitarianism can be turned against Kantianism here. The problem is not that discounting consequences gives the wrong answer, but rather that considering consequences as prima-facie irrelevant makes the decision seem simpler than it really is.
Indeed. Then again, not only is the moral responsibility diffuse, but of course the consequences are massively ramifying, unpredictable, chaotic, so consequentialist arguments are (obviously) extremely difficult to make, and to make persuasive. Many, many times over the past 58 years we’ve heard consequentialist arguments along the lines of ‘the people of ______ just want to be liberated, they’ll greet our troops with flowers, just as they did in Paris in ’44,’ and others along the lines of ‘you’re drastically underestimating the number and commitment of the people who are loyal to the current regime.’ And one can cite ‘rage’ (of someone) to support (or undermine) either argument.
So, in short, you’re right about making the decision seem simpler than it really is. In my zeal to separate and distinguish, I fell into oversimplification. Always the way.