Last week, we had Mia Bloom in to give a job talk as a potential hire for the School. I'm not sure how many of my students were able to attend her CISSM forum on the role of women in terrorist groups, but if they didn't, they should check out some of her publications, as she's done some interesting work.
But what I wanted to talk about for a second was the brief conversation we had about Walzer when I met with her beforehand - especially since we're reading his Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands. The conversation helped me put my finger on what I find really disturbing about Walzer.
I forget how we got on the topic exactly, but Bloom mentioned that she'd read Just and Unjust Wars, and been surprised that Walzer had then gone on from defending a pretty restrictive picture of when war could be justified to be supportive of the use of forceful measures short of war (including the no-fly-zones and sanction regime) in the case of Iraq, and in particular to criticize France and Germany for not supporting "coercive containment," despite his acknowledgment that the no-fly-zones were military operations (at least not clearly supported by international law) and the sanctions were notoriously harsh (though, to be fair, he did make at least some mention in his Iraq comments of the need for "smart sanctions").
Despite Walzer being the standard-bearer for contemporary just war theory (for better or worse), I feel that there is a strong undercurrent of romantic infatuation with atrocity in a lot of his work. You see it, for instance, in his description of Churchill's response to the Dresden bombers in Just and Unjust Wars: Walzer says that it was appropriate for them to be denied public honors, even though their atrocities were justified by military necessity (according to Walzer, if I'm remembering him correctly). But at the same time, I at least couldn't shake a feeling that, in his view, those who flew the bombing raids could take a secret pride in their actions that, if anything, is enhanced by the fact that they will be misunderstood by the masses with their petty bourgeois morality. Similarly, in "Dirty Hands," Walzer sets the conflict between the utilitarianism that the policy maker qua policy maker must adopt and the basically Kantian/deontological everyday human morality that binds her as a tragedy - but in the very portrayal as a tragedy romanticizes, ennobles it. The policy maker who acts against human morality must recognize the indelible wrongness of her actions, but at least I have trouble shaking the feeling that Walzer admires her for adhering to a higher morality. It reminds me of Borges' reassessment of Judas, of if that's too heady, Henry Rollins talking about how "real men stand on the frozen dawn, the icy line, and they look into the future!" (quote is at about 8:42) Or, I hear, the attraction of fictional characters like Jack Bauer (but while I'm willing to stoop to the level of quoting a punk icon like Rollins, I couldn't maintain my snooty academic elitism if I watched 24). And I think it's easy for that to lead to a view that we need to not be sentimental in confronting "evils" like Saddam Hussien (or, in other works, terrorism).
I worry about it because I think this is a line of thinking that it's really easy for policy types and political philosophers to fall into. We spend a lot of our time thinking about what would be the best thing to do - best policy, best government, whatever - and then we get frustrated when we have to descend into the muck of reality and try to get it implemented (every semester I teach Moral Dimensions, I have at least one student who expresses the view that maybe not everyone should get to have an equal say, the way democracy supposes they should). So it's easy to daydream about and romanticize the idea of just making things right even if you have to break a few eggs, or a few bones.
Unfortunately, history is littered with broken Utopian projects. The impulse is always, "yeah, if we ram this policy through/bomb that village/ignore that law/assassinate that dude/torture that person, that's bad, but it's for the greater good." But that assumes not only utilitarianism of some kind of another, but that we're really, really smart. The problem is that, in the real world, you very often only end up with the short-term lesser evil and the greater good never materializes, or doesn't materialize in a way that clearly justifies the evil you did (was Dresden justified in the end? I hate Nazis as much as the next guy with a Jewish nose and no surviving European family...). That's what's led folks like Shklar to her "liberalism of fear" - her liberalism was closer to what many folks call "libertarianism" (even though if you use it that way, you may get punched by an anarchist), but motivated not by a view that it would be inherently wrong for the government to do more than protect some very basic rights - rather, she just feared that doing any more would inevitably lead to the cruelty of sacrificing real human beings to an imagined perfect future.
And, frankly, a lot of conversations on these topics cheat. When people propose "ticking time bomb" scenarios about torture, in the example we know that this person has the information, and we know that we will get it if we torture them, and we know that there is no other way. But in the real world, we probably don't know any of those things (and if we had enough intel to know any of them, we probably wouldn't need to torture anyone to find out where the bomb was).
This line of thought always leaves me at an impasse. At the end of the day, I think some form of consequentialism is correct (not just for the policy perspective). But perhaps we need to have a fearful consequentialism, not one that even implicitly congratulates itself from seeing beyond petty taboos. And as human beings, I fear that it's far too easy for regret and tragedy to become a kind of self-indulgence.
Walzer skips ahead to the question of, "how should a moral agent react to knowing that she did the right thing, but had to act wrongly to do it." I think maybe that's too fast. As serious moral agents, if we make decisions that harm some for the putative good of many, we shouldn't ask, "how much regret should I feel over the lesser evil?" We should maybe ask, "What if I got it wrong? What if I harmed a bunch of people for nothing?"
