RIGHT &
WRONG, TERRORISM, TERRORIST WAR, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Prof. Ted
Honderich
This
is a sketch for a talk on 14 November 2011 of the University Tent of the occupiers of
the churchyard of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. A small contribution
to a splendid moral and political endeavour, one that has rightly
gained the attention of the world, an advance in necessary civil
disobedience. For a second talk, in the University Tent and also to a general assembly of the occupiers, go to Humanity, Conservatism, Desert, Two Freedoms, Near-Determinism, Inhumanity, Resistance .
You haven't
got a telly in your tent, I guess, so cast your mind back to your last viewing
of one or more of our New Teletubbies -- still rightly named by me Tinky Winky,
Dipsy, Laa-Laa, and Po. There they are, still making funny noises and uttering
things in their baby-language, just like the originals, and getting messages
from somewhere. They are also known by their aliases, of course, which conceal
their kiddy-reality -- these aliases of course being Cameron, Clegg, Osborne,
and Cable.
Think of
what the New Teletubbies go on about. They go on about the unacceptable, the
fair, the democratic, freedom, the absolutely necessary, competition, social
mobility, the market, terrorism, humanitarian war, the limits of civil
disobedience, the big society, the prudent family we've got to keep in mind in
connection with the economy, and so on.
What this
stuff comes down to is what to do, what kind of society to have
-- in short to what is right or wrong. No one does or can avoid the
question, whatever reluctance there is about using the terms, whatever is said
about moralizing and preaching, whatever the desire to avoid difficulty and
challenge.
Anybody
actually thinking about the unacceptable, the fair and so on has to have a way
of comparing supposedly good things. For a start, there are different kinds of
freedom, from market freedom to freedom to get a job or not to be cold and
hungry in retirement. You need to compare an awful lot of things that people
are for or against. You also need to save yourself and others from
self-deception. For such reasons you need a general principle of right and
wrong, as definitely as you need one measure or unit, say a foot or a
metre, to compare heights of people.
There are a
lot of provably hopeless principles, some owed to good intentions. Democratic
decision-making. Desert. Human rights. Negotiation rather than force or
violence. Law and International law. Utility or the sum total of happiness.
Conservatism. Liberalism. Realities of economics. Just war theory. Terrorism
being unique in intentionally killing innocent people, so unlike war.
Help
from democracy? Fundamental argument for democracy is two heads better than
one, more better than two. Equality and freedom presupposed. Compare our
hierarchic or pushers' democracy. Top decile of population with at least 1000
times the political influence & power of bottom decile. Freedom decreases
with equality.
Desert?
-- no non-circular principle. Claims of human rights? -- they conflict,
probably like human rights themselves. Always negotiate? -- with rapist in
action, with Hitler when tanks on the way to Holocaust? Law? -- all agree there
is vicious and self-interested law. Greatest total happiness? -- justifies
victimization of a minority, indeed a slave class. Conservatism? -- no
principle at all to justify the self-interest it shares with the rest of us.
Liberalism? -- a dim mess, despite a good intention or two.
The
Principle of Humanity is a clear and effective principle or decision-procedure,
as subjective as any but uniquely provable. Rests on a definition of bad lives.
Bad
lives:
Deprivation and frustration in terms of six great human goods, fundamental
desires of human nature. (1) decent length of conscious life. (2) bodily
quality of life. (3) freedom and power, including political freedom and power.
(4) respect & self-respect. (5) the goods of relationship. (6) the goods of
culture, including religion.
The
Principle of Humanity:
The right thing -- action, practice, institution, government, society, possible
world -- is the one that according to the best judgement and information at the
time is the rational one in the sense of of being effective and not
self-defeating with respect to one end -- getting & keeping people out of
bad lives.
Character
of the principle. Analytic philosopher's descendant of the Golden Rule.
Consequentialist -- what is right is what has certain consequences. Principle
that the ends justify the means? No, the ends and the means justify the means.
Unvague concepts. No metaphor. No pretence of necessity. No cant of a political
class. No ad man's stuff.
Uniquely provable, on basis of our shared fundamental
desires and the generalness of reasons. No one prefers shorter conscious life to longer, pain to comfort,
captivity to a freedom, etc. You don't want, e.g. pain, whatever you think of
others being in same pain -- or others being in comfort but not excess
comfort, i.e. not comfort that could be reduced to end your pain. What of
excess comfort, which could be reduced but not turned into pain, with
the effect of somebody else's pain becoming comfort? Say yours. All of us, if
we were in the pain position, would believe that excess comfort should
be reduced. That this would be right. Our reason for this would indubitably be general,
i.e. applying to us now in our comfort. The argument pretty irrefutable.
Certainly by stock market traders et al, espite the inanity of various sonorous
falsehoods & lies.
More
difficult matter than proof of the principle, very difficult, is the general
question it raises -- of judging rationally re probable consequences of lines
of action, e.g. of pushers' democracy, civil disobedience, terrorism, etc. Also
the lesser question of rational modes of address -- not only parliamentary
language or academic restraint but also the expression not only of condescension
to conservatism but also contempt?
A
few remarks later in the discussion period after this talk -- on on the
Principle of Humanity and terrorism, terrorist war such as ours against Iraq,
Palestinian terrorism in historic Palestine against neo-Zionism, our
ideological air war in Libya, the Arab Spring, the need for an English Winter
-- and the general and great recommendation of civil disobedience.
Thinking
of the New Teletubbies, I celebrate the moral nobility and glory of this St. Paul's
civil disobedience in tents. It is not childlike. Still a need for further
forms and gestures of civil disobedience. And gestures. By another English
colonel today, true to Rainborough of the Civil War -- "For really I think
the poorest he hath a life to live, as the greatest he...."? A tank in
Parliament Square? No shells in the thing. After the telly arrives, back to
barracks in Pimlico to accept penalty of his civil and military
disobedience. For more along these lines, go here.
Ted Honderich's
relevant books: After the Terror (Edinburgh University Press, 2003); On
Political Means & Social Ends (Edinburgh University Press, 2003); Terrorism
for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy (Pluto Press, 2003); Conservatism:
Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair? (Pluto Press, 2005); Punishment: The
Supposed Justifications Revisited (Pluto Press, 2006); Humanity,
Terrorism, Terrorist War: Palestine, 9/11, Iraq, 7/7... (Continuum, 2006),
in America titled Right and Wrong, and Palestine, 9/11, Iraq, 7/7... (Seven
Stories Press). Papers etc at http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/
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