Category: Ethics Page 3 of 8

War Crime Apologia

On July 2, 2020

One is not required to bomb hospitals, to torture, or to engage in mass killing of civilians when one is a chief of state. “My favorite war criminal did less war crimes than your war criminal,” is not a defense.

That people feel the need to defend those who do such things when in power is why we live in Hell.

The pathetic need of people to identify with a leader to the extent where they apologize for their war crimes is a sign of ethical illness, and when a plurality or majority do so, it is a sign of a sick society.

You who do, deserve your leaders. They reflect you and your ethics, and they have created the world you actually want, whatever you may say. You cannot commit war crimes as state policy and expect the evil you do not to eventually reflect in your own society. The best you can hope is to be a lord of hell, living on the suffering of others, but insulated from it, or to die before the worst comes home.

This is as true as, “bad people often have virtues.” Putin is not all bad; he has done good. Trump is not all bad; he has done some good. Obama was not all bad; he did some good. Blair was not all bad; he did some good. Etc…

The good does not wipe out the war crimes. Both must be acknowledged. But the war crimes remain real, and the people who ordered them are still war criminals; these men (and a few women) have done far more harm and evil than any serial killer who has ever lived.

If you believe that torture, mass killings, destroying civilian infrastructures, and so on is required of leaders in order to do their jobs, then you have acquiesced to live in Hell and all you are quibbling over is the details of Hell’s hierarchy, hoping you and your preferred people can avoid the Hell you inflict on others.

Update. Apparently a 101 on when civilian casualties are a war crime and when they aren’t is required.

When the POLICY is to mass kill civilians that is unacceptable. That was the POLICY in Chechnya.

Why is this hard for people to understand?

Civilians die in war, that is why the bar for war is high. Same with insurrection.

There are quantitative and qualitative differences between “civilians die in war” (collateral damage) and deliberately killing civilians.

This should not be hard to understand, and I am dismayed that I have to explain it, and related issues, over and over and over again.

You can kill criminals if your society allows it. You can kill soldiers when at war. Some civilian casualties will happen in war, and while that’s not good, it isn’t a war crime unless your war itself is a war crime (like Iraq, the Nazi invasions, Libya, the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden, and both nuclear bomb attacks on Japan).

Perhaps we need a war crimes 101 post, but I don’t have the heart to write it.

As for insurrections, these questions become blurred, but, even during the Terror, an attempt at at least pro-forma trials was maintained.

When you start killing civilians to create terror to break your opponents will as a government, you are worse than a terrorist, because you have the weight of a state behind you.

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Is Cruelty Required?

By Ian Welsh

On June 17, 2020

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Is it possible to have a society without cruelty?

That’s really the fundamental political question. (Economics, as you know, is a subset of politics, not different from it. So it’s also the fundamental economic question.)

It’s fair to say that there has never been a major society without cruelty baked into it, at least not since the rise of agricultural kingdoms about three thousand years after the invention of agriculture. Previous societies often had a lot of violence, but it’s not clear they all did, and some hunter gatherer band level societies seem to have had little cruelty.

But every major agricultural civilization has been cruel, and so has every major industrial society, though some are less cruel than others (insert reference to Scandinavia). Even those, however, are enmeshed in a system of industrial production that is, at best, exploitative, as in the case of conflict minerals, low paid workers, killed union organizers, and so on. Because it is not possible to run a decent society in the modern work in autarchy, even relatively kind societies are enmeshed in economic arrangements that cause great suffering hundreds to thousands of miles from them.

Cruelty is endemic even in good societies in the sense that our fundamental economic relationships are based on coercion; if you don’t work for someone else, probably doing something you wouldn’t do without the whip of poverty at your heels, and under supervision, well, you will have a bad life. School is based on coercion; do what you’re told when you’re told, or else, and so is work for most people.

That’s just the way our societies work, and while details vary, it’s more or less how they’ve worked since agriculture. Oh, the peasant may not have had close supervision, but they gave up their crops, labor, and lives under threat of violence, and they knew it well.

Even positive incentives are coercive. Get good grades and you’ll get a good job, etc… Please the mast… er, I mean, boss, yes, boss, and you may get a raise.

But a great deal of real cruelty lies behind the positive coercion in our major societies. American jails are startlingly cruel, filled with violence, rape, and fear. Chinese prisons aren’t so nice either. Police exist to throw you out of your house if you fail to pay the rent, which some double digit percentage of Americans are about to experience, because their society has mishandled an epidemic.

Sell cigarettes without the sanction of the state and your last words may be, “I can’t breathe.”

Our societies are based on positive and negative incentives. The amount of each varies with time and place. Finland right now has a lot more positive, and a lot less negative and a lot less consequences for disobeying. 50 years ago, the US put a lot less people in jail and gave those it allowed good jobs (white males) much better, nicer lives.

But there’s still always that threat in the background. And it’s always based on cruelty: “Bad things will happen to you, either actively or passively if you don’t go along.”

Now there are things we need to get done, collectively, in society. Build and maintain housing, grow and distribute food, keep the internet running (these days), but how much cruelty and coercion is required to do those necessary things? How much do you have to threaten people to get them to do those things? How cruel do you have to be to them if they don’t do them?

But another problem is that most of the coercion and cruelty in our societies has nothing to do with creating necessities like food and shelter and medicine and internet.

It has to do with making sure that some people have far more than they need, and others have far less. That some people have good lives with little coercion, while others live in constant fear. One problem with the boss, you lose your job, and you wind up homeless or in prison, and then even more terrible things happen.

Terrible things that are meant to happen, of course. We could lock up a lot fewer people and treat those few far better. We have more empty homes than homeless people and throw out at least a third of our food. No one need go hungry or homeless, and as for the internet, well, ISPs make close to 100 percent profit, so yeah, I’m pretty sure there’s no reason anyone should go without basic internet access.

So the cruelty in our societies is a choice. We can feed and house everyone, give everyone health care and have plenty left over, but we want billionaires and huge militaries or something, so we’re cruel. We’re cruel in the small details of everyday life (those maste…, er bosses) and we’re cruel in how we structure life, and it’s all a choice we’ve made.

Is it necessary? Must we be cruel? If we must be cruel, how cruel? What cruelty is actually needed, how much is just a preference or only required because we want very unequal societies?

Are we cruel of necessity?

Or desire?

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What Makes a Good Person?

By Ian Welsh

On February 17, 2020

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I was reminiscing today about the few actually good people I’ve known.

Two stand out, my friend Peter, who fought for Hitler; and my old teacher and coach Craig Newell.

I had a bad childhood. My parents were alcoholics, and my father was an angry drunk. Then I went to boarding school, and I was not the sort of kid who did well at boarding school, though the one I went to was well-run and preferable to being at home.

I did not come out of this believing in the goodness of humanity or that authority figures could be trusted. It’s one of the reasons I’m a good analyst in our current situation: I assume people with power are basically scum, and that when they aren’t they do the minimum and do it badly, and I’ve usually been right.

(I can also tell who the few good people are, which is why I supported Corbyn and have no time for the people who lied and smeared him.)

The only person in my life who ever proved completely worthy of trust was Craig Newell. The reason is simple: Mr. Newell (as I called him) had a code, and I NEVER saw him break it. Not ever. He never talked about his code, mind you, but I could tell he had one. He didn’t judge hardly at all, and he was never cruel. I literally never saw him be cruel even once. I never even heard of him being cruel and I did hear of his rectitude (in the best sense).

This isn’t something you can conceal in a place like a boarding school. It is not possible.

He didn’t go out of his way to be kind or good or anything, but he didn’t step away from it when the need was obvious. (As he didn’t with me, if that isn’t clear. And I was not a pleasant teenager.)

What I learned as a child is that most people don’t even meet the responsibilities of their positions (husband, wife, teacher, boss, politicians, whatever). A few do their duty, and I honor them for it, because it is rare. But to go beyond that and actually be a man of honor is unbelievably rare.

Still, Mr. Newell wasn’t as good a man as Peter, though he was more trustworthy. Peter went out of his way to be kind. Mr. Newell wasn’t cruel, and didn’t step away from need, but Peter stepped into need and helped.

Those people who see need and help, even if it is only a little, are, again, incredibly rare.

I tend to like people, and dislike humanity. But I don’t trust either.

Still, good people exist, as do honorable ones.

There is a Jewish myth:

Lamedvavnik (Yiddish: לאַמעדוואָווניק‎), is the Yiddish term for one of the 36 humble righteous ones or Tzadikim mentioned in the kabbalah or Jewish mysticism. According to this teaching, at any given time there are at least 36 holy persons in the world who are Tzadikim. These holy people are hidden; i.e., nobody knows who they are. According to some versions of the story, they themselves may not know who they are. For the sake of these 36 hidden saints, God preserves the world even if the rest of humanity has degenerated to the level of total barbarism. This is similar to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Hebrew Bible, where God told Abraham that he would spare the city of Sodom if there was a quorum of at least ten righteous men.

This story largely encompasses how I feel about humanity. Most humans are weak: They aren’t good, bad, or honorable, because they don’t have the strength. It mostly isn’t their (our) fault.

But a few are good, or honorable, and, rarely, both.

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Why and When Good Wins

By Ian Welsh

On August 12, 2019

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We live in a degraded Age. This isn’t to pretend that what came before was good in all ways, but all too often we deny the power of good. We think evil is smart, so good loses. Or we deny that good and evil even exist, claiming they are spiritual or metaphysical constructs with no impact in the world.

Raping someone is evil. It is always evil.

Torture is evil. It is always evil.

Feeding a hungry person is good.

Protecting the weak is good.

Healing the sick is good.

Kindness is good, and cruelty is evil.

This is not to say violence is never justified, or even killing.

Good must fight evil.

Those who refused to fight in World War I were right. Those who refused to fight the Nazis were wrong.

But here’s the important part: Good is Powerful.

When you refuse to do certain things like rape and torture, people want to be part of your group.

When you are known to be kind and take care of others, people want to be part of your group.

“Rational” evil people, who will rape or torture sometimes, and who will only help another person if it’s in their self-interest, are not trustworthy. When you need them–actually need them–they will not be there for you, AND if it’s in their interest to do terrible things to you, they will.

Good people, actual good people (and not those who pretend), can be trusted.

Anyone truly rational would rather be with good people.

But goodness can’t be based just on rationality. Rational people sell out. Rational people don’t help when they think helping isn’t in their interest. Rational people will be cruel to get what they want if they think they can get away with it.

Good, like any virtue worth having, must be something people do even when it is not in their self interest.

This is why people think good is stupid. Individuals are better off “free riding”; being evil and getting good people to help them. Groups, however, including the individuals in them, are better off if the group and the people are good.

Which is why good people have to also have an irrational hatred of evil. A complete intolerance for it. A “you get one chance and if you don’t reform you’re out” policy. (And out means either ostracism or death.)

Because rational people have to know that if they aren’t good, irrational people will fuck them up.

It is when good people refuse to enforce the norms of goodness, when they let people like those who run most of our societies today free-ride on the basic goodness and peacefulness of other people, that societies and groups turn terrible.

Good wins, but only if good believes in and enforces itself.

Evil, faced with actual good, tends to lose, because the good group is better to be a part of.

There are, of course, caveats and edge cases and “in group vs. out group,” but this is fundamentally true, and why, as long as they actually believed in their own ideology, hegemonic philosophies like Democracy and Human Rights and in older days Confucianism (despite its flaws) and even Christianity (before it became a state religion and turned evil) tended to win.

Evil has advantages, no question. But so does good, and when properly implemented, good’s advantages are greater.

Good loses when people want other people to be good so that they can be evil.

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Basic Ethics and When Violence Is Justified

By Ian Welsh

On July 8, 2019

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The simplest of maxim in all of ethics is: “I don’t harm others, I don’t harm myself.”

The problem with this ethic arises when someone else hurts you.

What do you do?

Perhaps the first step is to ask them to stop. If they don’t, attempt to move away from them.

If you can’t or if moving away harms you, the next step is violence.

“If you won’t stop hurting me, I’ll have to make you stop.”

In a complex society like ours this becomes complicated. There are people doing harm to you and me right now. Rich people, mostly, and powerful people like politicians and senior corporate officers. They kill people, impoverish people and make people sick for their own benefit. They don’t stop when asked nicely, or even rudely.

They also use a lot of violence to get their way and keep hurting people. I trust this is self-evident. The police and military don’t serve “the people,” except incidentally. Some schmuck who does some drugs goes away for years, while the crooks who brought down the economy and left millions homeless and impoverished because of their fraud and corruption pay a few fines that are less than what they stole.

But, the bottom line is they hurt people and won’t stop when asked, nor can one move away from the hurt they are inflicting. This hurt is likely to kill some billions of people.

So violence is justified. This isn’t a moral/ethical problem, it is a tactical strategic question. It is no longer a question of whether violence is justified against people who are doing great evil and won’t stop when asked, but a question of whether it will work and what is required to make it work.

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The Terrible Ethical Calculus of Catastrophe

By Ian Welsh

On May 31, 2019

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Let us say you know a catastrophe is coming, and you cannot stop it and thus save everyone.

What do you do?

You start making choices about who to save. Not just their lives, but their stuff and their power.

Catastrophes often lead to changes in societies, but sometimes they don’t.

The 1929 stock market crash, and the Great Depression lead to most of the rich losing their money and power. The end result was that the people running society changed, and that the post-war period was the best to be alive–in the developed world–in history.

This happened because Hoover and FDR did not believe in bailing out the rich, and FDR instituted the New Deal and 90 percent + marginal tax rates.

But while FDR didn’t think the rich should be protected, he did institute deposit protection for ordinary people. If you weren’t rich, you were covered.

The 2007/8 crash led to no such thing, because the priority was saving the rich. Obama, Bernanke, and Geithner went out of their way not just to keep the rich, rich, but to hurt ordinary people if necessary to do so. They deliberately hurt householders, when necessary, to help banks. (See David Dayen’s “Chain of Title” for all the grizzly details.)

Now, this is not to say that Treasury and the Fed should have just done nothing, like in 1929 (though if they had just followed the laws that were put in place after 1929, we would, in fact, be better off).

It is to say they chose to save rich people and not help most other people.

So the catastrophe led to a resumption of the status quo.

Except that it didn’t. It kicked the economy into shit-mode, and the result was Trump/Brexit and the general rise of the right. (Because all the major central banks and governments bailed out the rich and fucked everyone else.)

So, catastrophes happen, and a choice is made about who to protect and exalt, and that choice has consequences down the line.

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Climate change will be no different. Who is protected (or survives through their own efforts) matters, because it determines who will be powerful later.

It is thus important not just to save people you like, but to make sure that bad actors like bankers and the current political elite are not saved: They must lose their money and power (and if that means they lose their lives you should be okay with that, because they sure don’t care if ordinary people lose theirs).

This is ethical, because who runs society, and for whom, determines how good the society is. When society was truly run for the majority, with the intention to spread the wealth, society was good (and where it was bad, as with minorities, it is because the wealth was not spread).

A society is good if it tries to take care of everyone and tamps down inequality, allowing only moderate inequality. (Does anyone really need to earn more than 20x the median income?)

In the days to come, we will have to make choices about who to protect and who to save. Remember that it’s worth taking some time out to choose who doesn’t keep their stuff, their power and, yeah, even their lives.

If this bothers you, remember that they are deciding if you live and die, and their record shows that they either don’t care if you die, or that they actively want you to.

We are moving into some very bad times. Whether society is good or bad afterwards will be determined by who takes power during catastrophe, and who loses power during catastrophe.

It can be us, or it can be a small elite who cares only about themselves.

Choose.

The Most Fundamental Test of Intellectual And Ethical Integrity

By Ian Welsh

On April 18, 2019

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… is whether or not someone will argue against their interest.

If you are rich, do you ever argue for high taxes, perhaps? If you are a home owner, do you argue for policies which even the field with renting? If you have a job doing something harmful, do you argue that job shouldn’t exist or be changed to something less harmful.

People who always argue their interest are have no integrity and should not be listened to in public debates.

Of course interest has to be understood properly. One may be in a social group where arguing against apparent interest isn’t actually that. In certain left-wing circles arguing against women’s rights isn’t really against interest, because you’d be a pariah. And there is a reason why women married to right wing men, vote right wing: it’s not actually against their interest.

(These examples don’t mean I approve, they’re just examples.)

A lot of apparent insanity comes from people arguing what their social group believes, even if it’s against hard interest. It’s not in young right wing men’s interest to support climate change denial, but it’s part of what their ideology and group believes, so they do. Incels have some beliefs that make it less likely they’ll get laid or find love with a woman, but, again, changing those beliefs (or at least arguing from them) would leave them ostracized from their group.

A person with integrity has principles, and applies those principles. If one believes all people should be treated with dignity, for example, one might support another group’s rights even if that’s against one’s own interest and even if member’s of one’s own group would be angered by the stand.

Integrity.

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Rising and Falling

By Mandos

On December 21, 2018

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** MANDOS POST **

In several recent threads on this blog, we discussed (i.e., argued passionately about) the current goings on in Europe (Brexit, Greece, Italy, etc.) as signs of the impending decay and demise of the European project. I used to share this view to some extent, because I too am sometimes in the grip of a moral fallacy that haunts left-wing discourse: that things that are good, work, and things that aren’t good, don’t work. I actually think that in the bigger picture, this is true, but only in the largest temporal and spatial frames. In the medium term, lots of things that are good, are not stable enough in context to work (as in, be sustained for more than a short period of time), and lots of things that are not good, are nevertheless stable enough to last decades and even centuries.

Predicting whether, when, and how some particular set of events will cause large institutions to rise or fall cannot be done lightly or easily, and such predictions, when done in the moment, are more likely wrong than right. You should expect unexpected things to occur; there are too many variables. Some people are better at it than others, but you should take even the best track records with a grain of salt. Even two to three years ago, I would have predicted that the build-up of “bad karma” in the European system would have caused the EU to break apart by now. Even a few months ago, the rise of Euroskeptic populists in some countries suggested to me that the situation is increasingly desperate for European unity. However, over that time, and somewhat unexpectedly to me I must admit, it appears that some sort of inflection point has been reached.

The EU, as it stands now, was designed by a set of people that had different attitudes and goals over time. Therefore, it is a mixed bag, when it comes to good, not good, works, doesn’t work. A good chunk of its institutions were designed at around the peak of the neoliberal revolt against state management of the economy. In the EU, this took its expression in an approach to the economy that militated against state attempts to protect or bolster industrial employment in both public and private sectors. Because Europe does not suffer so much from the “moralized” version of libertarianism from which the US suffers (essentially, that your bank account is a virtual extension of your physical body), there is a stronger commercial regulatory apparatus developed even in the neoliberal era than what other developed “capitalist” countries tend to have. The neoliberal bits, especially the most recent ones like the Eurozone, have increasingly showed themselves to be not good and not working.

But this cannot be taken out of the context of the whole. It’s increasingly clear to me that Europe is still not that far off from the overall intended trajectory of the two generations of designers of European convergence. It is absolutely true that those who built the system had, for a number of different reasons, a deep suspicion of the public and popular sovereignty, even while they were also against outright dictatorship. I generally consider this to be overall not good and probably won’t work in the long run. (But I must note that the designers of the EU also recognized that they might need to legitimize popular sovereignty at a European level and built in provisions for systems to implement it.) However, they believed both in the necessity of European unity (in the modern world, a disunited Europe is structurally, deeply vulnerable), and the difficulty in getting a multilingual, multicultural subcontinent of fallen empires to accept the necessity of unification, so they constructed a system of what are effectively one-way traps to ensure that the cost of departure is always greater than the cost of endurance, even when the system in some matters doesn’t work. The goal is therefore for this endurance to eventually result in a crisis whose only positive-sum resolution is the Europeanization of authority.

With Italy’s effective capitulation to the Commission, and yes, with Greece’s previous compliance, and yes again, with a Brexit that is already providing the necessary object lessons, it appears that the crisis-and-trap strategy is still operating, or rather, it cannot be said to have failed at this point in time. That is, it remains that case that the strategy of making a series of systems that don’t work is working.

Considering that this game of deliberate historical manipulation has real human costs and indeed a known death toll in itself, one may well choose to designate it as not good. But, the evidence is that it still works.

So what would the decline of the European project actually look like? Well, there are, of course, phenomena that are hard to predict directly, like, sudden environmental cataclysms. If I were forced to make a prediction, however, the political coming-apart would probably have to look like one of the following options:

A situation comes to pass where it is immediately more materially beneficial to leave than to stay (this has not yet happened).
One or more countries decide to leave a major institution/treaty despite the costs, and they do economically better in the relatively short run after departure. (Brexit under the Tories is not likely to be an example of this.)
A consensus develops in several countries that long-term economic suffering is more desirable than staying in the EU, even if that suffering is greater than what they might have experienced inside the EU, and they sustain this consensus even after feeling that suffering.

All of this may lead you to consider projects like the European unification, designed explicitly around creating consequences that override popular will, to be not good. I have given you at least three possibilities for it to not work. So I would say, as before, that it is a mixed bag.

Political theodicy is dead. Long live political theodicy.