Please Stop the Bombing

 Please Stop the Bombing

    The other day I took a telephone call from an unknown number. I am very ready to be hostile to unknown callers, resembling in that respect my father. I managed an "Hello" in my driest, coolest, voice with a faint interrogative upturn at the end. However, a pleasantly cultured voice told me that he was phoning on behalf of humanity; "Humanity & Inclusion" in fact, whose appeal on Facebook I had recently signed. 

    "Been going since the eighties, in a quiet way", he told me. 

    Well (I thought to myself), it is a rather un-arresting title; a 'catch-all'. As though they had founded the charity before they had thought of the cause they were going to espouse. 

    "Why were you opposed to the bombing of civilians?" he asked me. 
    "I regard the bombing of non-combatant civilians as a war-crime, prohibited by Protocol I (1977) of the Geneva Conventions", I explained,  "Though, if Hamas deliberately mixes their combatants among innocent civilians, they are as guilty as the Israelis. However, that does not make the bombing legal." 

    "And I want nothing to do with such brutality and criminality" I added. 

    Of course, it cost me a year's worth of donations to Humanity & Inclusion. But it was a worthwhile phone call, as it has clarified my mind on the matter. 

    I do protest. I would not want to be a citizen of a brutal, criminal and inhumane country. 

Palestine could lease land to Israel

Palestine could lease land to Israel.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank are deemed illegal. 

(The Palestinian West Bank is land taken by Israel by force in the war of 1967, and the Israeli presence is thus against International law. )

Israel covets that land.

(There are many Israelis who want to live in Arab land with such a fierce craving that they break the laws of normal civilised life in attempts to oust the Arab residents. The political majority in Israel condones that barbaric behaviour, thus showing itself not competent to govern the area.) 

Land purchases between states have been agreed in the past.

(Admittedly with mixed success. Florida was acquired off Spain in 1819 for $5million of settled citizen claims. In 1848, by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the USA paid Mexico $15million plus $3million in claims for 1,360,000 square km of land, i.e. Arizona, California, western Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. The USA, in 1867, purchased Alaska off Russia at a fair price; $7.2million for 1.5million square km of land. Neither side particularly wanted the land.)

Could Israel occupy and enjoy Arab land legally? 

(Perhaps Israel could buy some land. But, if Palestine did not want to sell, perhaps they could agree to let out the land for an annual rent. Or negotiate a 99 year lease, as the British did with Hong Kong.)

Or are we living in a more barbaric, Post-Enlightenment, age?

Should we require unanimity of the Supreme Court?

 

 To the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, Harvard Law School,

Dear Randall Kennedy,

     I enjoyed your article in the London Review of Books of 21st Jan 2021, and was stimulated by it. You declared yourself to be a ‘Cynical Realist’, believing that the judges of the US Supreme Court are inevitably nothing more than politicians in robes, and are not, in fact, applying 'law' to their judgements.  But I think I am one of the other sort, whatever that is — perhaps a ‘cloud-cuckoo idealist’. 

     That is to say, I am inclined to think that, as to the justice of a disputed point, there is indeed a right and a wrong answer, definable in terms of a sufficient number of sufficiently well-trained deep-thinkers. 

     I would suggest that the Supreme Court be required to come to a unanimous decision. (Or at least a 2/3 majority.) If the justices could not discuss their way to a unanimous decision, I would have them sit there hour after hour, like cardinals at a papal election, till hunger drove one side to give way? 

    I do not think that a decision reached in that way would be worse than the predictable and apparently knee-jerk voting of the present Supreme Court? It would reinforce the claim that there exists such as thing as 'Justice'. 
Yours sincerely, 

Ian West

(See also: https://occidentis.blogspot.com/2021/03/one-justice-or-many.html   & http://occidentis.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-role-of-citizen.html.)

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Moral Choice: biology, philosophy or religion?

"Morality is best seen as a question of human biology, rather than one of philosophy; least of all one of religion."

Thomas Nagel raised an interesting question in the London Review of Books (3rd June 2021): how do we make moral choices. How do we reconcile ‘gut feelings’ with moral precepts, if they conflict? I do not think there is a real problem here, as I shall try to explain, though there are plenty of hypothetical problems. 

Nagel transfers to morality the concept of reflective equilibrium that John Rawls developed for the field of justice; a reflective equilibrium is the end-product of a reflective re-adjustment of one’s moral thoughts achieved by testing general principles against considered judgements about particular cases. The method itself could be called reflective equilibration (or simply reflection); it presumably involves successively tweaking the weightings given to the various relevant thoughts that come into one’s head until they cohere  into a consistent conclusion; one that is optimally concordant, or minimally discordant. It works if both the general principles and the particular judgements can be revised (tweaked). 

 

But Nagel’s main problem arises when there is a difference in kind between the various moral thoughts that have to be reconciled. He has been struggling for 40 years to reconcile two kinds of moral input. Some appear to come into the mind as rigid, clear-cut, laws telling us what is right, or wrong, (do not kill innocent people, do not tell lies); these he calls deontological. (They seem to be very like Kant’s categorical imperatives.)  Others actions, themselves neutral, have to be judged by their consequences as good or bad; these he calls consequential. A familiar form of consequentialism is Bentham’s Utilitarianism, seeking “the greatest good of the greatest number.” (See the very clear article on the Stanford Philosophy site: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/.)  

Nagel struggles a bit to define in general terms these two basic kinds of moral thought that present themselves to the conscious brain. He is not sure whence these intuitions come, and seems to be a little in awe of rules-based deontological morality; are these moral instructions hard-wired in our biology, or were we brain-washed by our parents? (To believe that one’s duties come direct from God does not solve the problem, except in so much as, by giving it a name, it allows the ‘religious believers’ to stop thinking about that particular problem.) Nagel is concerned to be even-handed between the two types of moral intuition but he is also concerned to allow morality to evolve, and admits that the rules-based thoughts offer more resistance to change than the ad hoc, utilitarian, type. Take homosexuality, for example; some people cannot overcome their instinctive taboo, but society as a whole is shifting its position. 

Some people are more inclined to be deontological; others to be consequential. I confess to being a deontologist, though an atheist; I don’t seem to mind too much if the rule is silly, or wrong, but I like to obey the rule nevertheless. For Nagel, the problem becomes: how can one do a reflective equilibration when some of the arguments are stubbornly inflexible? All the bending must be done by the consequential calculations.

And what about other people; must we equilibrate their intuitions also? Nagel concedes the problem but does not answer it:  “In some sense the moral point of view requires putting oneself in everyone else’s shoes…. The question" (he says) "is: how?” 

I deal with some of these issues in my recent book (West, I.C. (2019) “God for Atheists”, AuthorHouse, Bloomington.), though my conclusions are simpler than Nagel’s. Morality (I maintain) comes from the reflective equilibration, not of one mind only, but of all minds (or an adequate sample of minds). How is that done?.  Simply by asking questions, I suggest, and listening to the answers.

I described (in 2011) what I called at the time a “Philosophical Summing Junction”, roughly as follows: 

“We spent a happy hour or so, tossing around the question of who to save in the event of nuclear war; not because we anticipated needing a plan of action, but because Dr.X had challenged the claim that philosophy can clarify the mind and solve problems. I attempted to draw the exchange to a close by suggesting that in our 60 minutes of vigorous thought and discussion we had produced between us an almost complete answer to the question of how to proceed. Dr. X said he scored it "philosophy nil, chaos 100". So I tried to explain my contention again, at greater length.” (See https://occidentis.blogspot.com/2011/09/philosophical-summing-junction.html) 

I see the human mind as capable of liking to follow rules (on some occasions), of liking to save one's own daughter before that of someone else, liking to save the lives of strangers, even of dumb animals, baulking at the killing of innocents. I suspect that most people do not really mind if their actions are right or wrong in any philosophical sense, as long as they feel right. Furthermore, they like to be judged by people who come to the same conclusions as they do on these matters, people who know what is right, defined in this way.

I think this is the basis of the ‘Michael Sandel roadshow’. He steps onto the stage and asks a question, then takes comments from the audience for an hour. I think he has the correct approach to morality. 

In summary:  "Morality is best seen as a question of human biology, rather than one of philosophy; least of all one of religion."

Racists and Racism

Racists and Racism

     Jeremy Corbyn is said to have wanted to add the following rider to the Labour Party’s adoption of the IHRA definition of ‘antisemitism’: “it should not be considered antisemitic to describe, Israel, its policies or the circumstances around its foundation as racist because of their discriminatory impact, or to support another settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict”.

    I have been trying to think of a way in which Jeremy Corbyn could possibly be regarded as other than perfectly correct to say that the policies, and manner of founding, of Israel was racist. But, even if his statement was correct [ref.1], it may have been ‘wrong’ to say it. It may even have been anti-semitic to spell out the rider; though there is often a case to be made for telling your friends unpleasant and hurtful truths. 

    Both semitism and anti-semitism are racist. On the 19th of July this year Israel’s Knesset passed a law [ref.2] that itself declared Israel to be a racist state: “the national home of the Jewish people”.  But racism is not necessarily bad. (Who could take offence if I say “Ethiopians and Kenyans make outstanding marathon runners.”?) However, racism does represent a certain type of loose thinking that allows generalizations, which can be productive as well as dangerous.  

    Corbyn may have been wrong in thinking this was the right time to raise a pedantic, linguistic or philosophical point. But what about the political point? The State of Israel exist. There comes a time when the past seems beyond the reach of the law. In the various courts of world opinion (legal and lay), judgements are still pending on the actions of the Egyptians in 1948 and 1967, of Israel in 1982 against Lebanon, in 2014 against Gaza, and in 2018, in the Knesset. 

    It is hard to draw a clear line between the living issues and the dead. Perhaps an issue is ‘dead’ when less than half the population remembers it. On this basis Israel exists, but perhaps it should be helped back towards democracy and the rescinding of its law of 19th July 2018. Sometimes one has to be hurtful to be kind.

References

[1]  The online Oxford dictionaries give two meanings for the word ‘racism’:

i.  Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.

ii.  The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. )

[2]  Among the 11 provisions of the new law, it describes Israel as "the national home of the Jewish people" and says the right to exercise national self-determination there is "unique to the Jewish people". https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-44881554

The Role of the Citizen

The Role of the Citizen

International Law: Part 2 – The Role of the Citizen.

(It is the essential rôle of the citizen to require cases to be brought to the International Court; and to read, and publicise, the Court’s findings.)

Where does law get its legitimacy? Is it not, ultimately, from common consent?  A law is a statement proscribing or requiring an action but framed in such a way as to maximise the extent of agreement inside the polity that will be governed by that law.  There is little difference in this essential regard between laws inside a state and laws governing actions between states (or between citizens of one state and those of another), except that there is need of (i) a special court  to codify and apply [6]  International Law and (ii) a mechanism for finding and expressing the required consensus. Well, there is an International Court — the International Court of Justice established in the Hague in 1945 by the Charter of the United Nations. But is there a mechanism for finding and expressing the required consensus, without which the law is simply hot air?

It is illegal to kill people in all civilised states, except when the state is at war, whereupon it becomes accepted practice to kill enemy soldiers. (But not enemy civilians, nor random people, nor to use poisonous chemicals, nor cluster bombs, etc.) Why is it regarded as legal to kill enemy soldiers when a state is at war? Surely because society, and common sense, condones killing enemy soldiers (when they are the aggressors), on the grounds of self defence.   

Isabel Hull wrote an excellent article [1] in the London Review of Books (2018, vol. 40/8, pp. 25-6) reviewing the no-doubt equally inspiring book by Hathaway and Shapiro (2017) titled "The Internationalists and their plan to outlaw war" [2]. What a bold and brilliant plan; because states (it seemed, in 1918) could see no possibility of excluding war from their repertoire. But citizens did feel it was necessary to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable war. The four heroes of Hathaway and Shapiro’s book are: Levinson (1918), Shotwell (1924), Welles (1942) and Lauterpacht (1941). The first three, in the USA, successfully brought sharper definitions of legitimate and illegal wars into international pacts and declarations, and the last, in Britain, successfully argued the consequences of these declarations in making conquest by war illegal. 

The concept that territory changes hands only by consent, never by force, has become a centrepiece of modern international law.  Since 1945 there have been relatively few unprovoked acts of aggressive conquest: the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia in 1975 [3], the conquest of Kuwait by Iraq, and of Balkan neighbours by Serbia spring to mind, but were unsuccessful. Israeli expansion in 1967 was (perhaps) provoked, (though their subsequent movement of population into occupied territory [probably] breaks the Geneva Convention of 1949 [4]). And the Russian re-annexation of the Crimea in 2014 — was that by invitation of a suppressed population?  When is secession legal? When is the suppression of secession legal? (The confederate States of USA, East Timor, The Crimea, the Basques, Catalonia, Scotland?)

General ignorance, by the citizens of the world, seems to emerge as the main obstacle to the application of International Law, for each case has still to be decided by the bulk of the world’s citizens (being not themselves involved in the dispute). It is clearly impossible for more than a handful of skilled jurists in each country to command the facts and comprehend the principles at issue sufficiently to make a sensible assessment. So we need the International Court to consider each case and publish their findings. Currently, there seems little pressure from governments to bring cases to the International Court. Perhaps the sovereign powers tend to regard any intervention by the International Court as an infringement of their own sovereignty. And there seems to be little public pressure on the news media in civilized countries for information. So, it is the essential role of the citizen to require these cases to be brought to court. And to read, and publicise, the Court’s findings.

It has been argued that judgements by the Internation Court are futile if there is no mechanism for forcing the penalties that the Court may hand down [5]. I argue that this is no longer true. Ordinary people, you and I among them, are the people who must enforce consciousness of (and compliance with) the judgments of the International Court. Information transfer is now so swift and easy that a widely held judgement against a rogue country will have, in a short time, impact sufficient to influence law-breakers.

(This continues my investigation into the slow process by which we evolve International Law; a folk process; almost a religious process. For Part I see my previous post.)

References:

1.          London Review of Books (2018, vol. 40/8, pp. 25-6)

2.          Hathaway and Shapiro (2017) The Internationalists and their plan to outlaw war

3.         http://ejil.org/pdfs/12/4/1539.pdf

https://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/634kfc.htm; Question 3.

5.         Ranyard West (1945) Psychology and World Order, Penguin Books, Harmonsworth, UK.
6.          I am grateful to Ignacio Gomez-Palacio for a correction.

(For comments, and corrections, please write directly to me at:

Cawstein@gmail.com)

Nationalism: the greatest enemy to happiness today

International Law: Part 1 – Nationalism

     "Wherein", asks C.E.M. Joad in 1939, "is to be found the greatest enemy to the happiness of contemporary man?" In poverty? In pain? In the wickedness of the human heart? Possibly and perhaps. But these have oppressed men in all times; they were not distinctive of 1939. Twentieth century man (Joad suggested) suffered more from the unchecked power of the Nation State, than from pain, poverty, or personal brutality.

      "The Nation State regards itself as the sole arbiter of right and wrong, claiming to be both judge and jury in its own cause, acknowledges no law to govern is relations with other States and no morality in restraint of its designs upon its neighbours. Over the lives and liberties of its citizens it exercises an absolute control. It requires of them a willingness to kill other human beings whom they have never seen, whenever it deems the mass slaughter of the members of some other State to be desirable, and conceives that its welfare may be promoted by exacting from them the most horrible sacrifices, in order that they may harm the citizens of its alleged enemy.....

     "It tramples upon the liberties of individuals in order to establish its independence. While proclaiming its determination to be free, it deprives its citizens of their freedom......

     "The State is an anachronism. With its trade restrictions and tariffs, its customs and quotas, it sets up barriers between itself and its neighbours and seeks to the best of its ability to impede the manifest drive of our civilization towards unity. ...(driven by)...the abolition of distance.....It is only 150 years ago that it took a man as long to travel from York to London as it now takes him to fly from London to New York. The future holds in store advances no less remarkable than those of the past......... Today we can fly in the air; tomorrow we shall fly in the stratosphere." (Joad writing, we should remember, in 1939).

     I admire Joad's clarity, and vision. So much he got right! Yet the shrinking of distance that has seen a man walk on the moon, and that has sent this week a rocket to land on Mars (!!), has not yet welded Europe into a Federal State, nor abolished the concept of protective tariffs. At least this seems to be the case in the slower-moving parts of the Anglo Saxon world, like Derbyshire and Detroit. 

(This is the beginning of an investigation into the slow process by which we evolve International Law; a folk process; almost a religious process. )