Anti-Climacus

WELL: I've been trying to wrap my head around this series of posts at normblog, not because I disagree with any of them, but rather because the view they're criticizing seems so odd. I keep coming back to this quote from Lenin in Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky:

"Everyone has a sacred right to approach a question in whatever way he pleases. One must only distinguish a serious and honest approach from a dishonest one."

There's an argument of anti-war-types that goes something like this: we should find moral fault with those who supported the war not merely because the consequences of the war were bad, but because those consequences were entirely forseeable, their decision to support the war must be held suspect. It's pretty clear to me that the consequences argument can put no moral responsibility on your average citizen: there's nothing an individual who did not fight in or vote on the war could do to make things happen otherwise than they did. It's also pretty clear to me that the attempt to link consequences back to poor decision-making has to fail, because anyone who seriously contemplated the war generated numerous counterfactuals, and simply put their faith in a certain set of them as being most likely to happen. The only information that would change the decision is the very information you can't possibly have when making it.

All the talk about being morally responsible for "forseeable" consequences is silly; just because we ended up in the world where a certain set of actions took place doesn't mean we couldn't just as easily have ended up in a nearby possible world without these particular problems. We actually never hold people responsible on the basis of "forseeable consequences."*

But, I'm increasingly concluding, the shift from talking about the morality of consequences to the morality of decision-making is key. Anti-war-types can't thwack pro-war-types on consequences--everyone agrees that torture is bad, or more troops are needed, or that having a democracy is good. I think a lot of the reappraising of decisions that is going on is just an attempt to score points and not really an attempt to be serious about the moral implications of political action, which is a shame, since there's a lot of important thinking to be done in this context.

*generate any counterexample you like: it'll merely be an instance of the could've-done-otherwise criterion.