LINK: Kieran Hally creates a little tiff in the blogosphere my opining thus, on Memorial Day:

"That so many are willing to serve is a testament to the character of ordinary people in the United States. That these people have, in recent years, shouldered the burden of service for the sake of a badly planned war begun in the name of an ill-defined cause, on the thinnest of pretexts, and with the most flimsy sort of evidence, is an indictment of the country’s political class."

He defends himself thusly:

"I am not the one who is “test[ing] my ability to invent a populist voice” as Orin claims. For an example of that, you could have gone to Arlington Cemetery today and heard someone claim that ‘we must honor [the war dead] by completing the mission for which they gave their lives, by defeating the terrorists, advancing the cause of liberty, and building a safer world.’"

One wonders, then, whether he'd argue for equal time against this sentiment:

"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain --"

I'm not saying that it's illegitimate for Mr. Healy to make such points as he wants to make, nor do I necessarily want to link the Civil War to the current international situation (though I quite often want to make just such a link, I wouldn't force anyone else to make it). I certainly don't want to make an accusation of bad faith, but the only difference I can see between Lincoln's speech and Bush's is that Mr. Healy thinks one is 'inventing populism' and the other, perhaps, is not. I confess I might be missing something, and so anyone who can actually substantively differentiate the rhetoric that's being used (on grounds slightly stronger than one of them meaning it and the other not) should feel free to do so in the comments.

UPDATE: The more I think about it, the more oddly apposite Mr. Healy's suggestion seems. Bush uses Lincoln to try and 'create a populist voice,' just like Lincoln uses Pericles to try and effect the same thing. Of course, you go back far enough, and the thing divides into rhetorical and ethical principles, but if one cana ctually succeed in doing a nuanced negotiation between them, well, bully to you.

FIRST COMMENT:

"Nick, good lead-in for a discussion, but I keep waiting for the grit of the deontological approach: for instance, how *do* you interact with the hierarchy (Kant, after all, believes that true imperatives *will never* disagree with each other--flawed, in his formulation, but if we believe the rules are God's rules, that should follow, no?) problems?

Further, as a lapsed deontologist who still believes God's commands have a priori status relative to our judgments, I'd wonder what you'd say to the following:

Christian morality is a rule-consequentialism based on rules which we follow because God can "see down the tree" perfectly and has asserted that following His instructions lead to the best conceivable consequences. We accept this by faith, and proceed to live by His commands in a manner which has *given rise to* deontological ethics *in the default of* the eschatological conscience which forms the essence of Christian morality.

In other words, deontological ethics is the post-Christian adequation of Christian morality, in much the manner that epistemology is the post-Christian adequation of Christian assurance that the universe is knowable because God wishes to reveal Himself through it."

I specifically avoided bringing in my own concept of deontological ethics because one of, I think, the big strengths of it (for political purposes) is that it's actually rather more open than utilitarianism to alternative constructions of this alternative morality--the most-socialist British bloggers in my blogroll and I can agree on large parts of foreign policy, and all think we're dealing in terms of imperatives, but just disagree on the source of those imperatives (and in this case, that's a relatively minor disagreement).

It's definitely true that, historically speaking, deontology is supposed to be a replacement for Christian ethics, because Christian ethics are supposed to be teleological. I think the latter claim is both true and false: it's certainly true that, for a Christian in Christian life, there is something like a telos to which people are supposed to be proceeding, though that telos will be at least partially differentiated for everyone, rather than one end-scenario (on earth, anyway) for everyone. I'm much more skeptical that there is actually a telos outside of Christianity. But all this talk of telos swings too far in the hard-core determinist direction, and there are two other facts which Christianity requires us to consider: first, we are free, so talk of teleology will be only a loose approximation for what goes on in our lives. Second, Christianity recognizes the acuteness of moral dilemma in a conception of the tragic quality of the world and human interaction--every life, even the more-or-less teleological Christian one, has to do with the reality of sin, and I don't think these can be considered strictly teleological elements. The Christian, I think, also recognizes the priority of the right to the good, relational duties, and moral imperatives in general, all along with the deontologist and against the consequentialist.

As for adjudicating between claims of moral rules, I'm not sure one can even do that systematically, because the relative weight given to options has to be determined at least somewhat by circumstances (Lewis and Niebuhr are right, for example, to say that in the context of total war between two sides with vastly different (one good and one evil) aims, one needs to take sides, but it's not obviously true that this follows for every armed conflict ever)--but determined by circumstances--the relative weight of moral principles--judged by something other than just their consequences. And all options can be bad ones (I would not be able to rest easy about killing Nazis, nor about letting them do what they want, though I have a clear moreal preference for the former over the latter), a position consequentialism cannot accept.

Also, one other note, about this bit:

"Christian morality is a rule-consequentialism based on rules which we follow because God can "see down the tree" perfectly and has asserted that following His instructions lead to the best conceivable consequences."

I will disagree with medieval Christian thought and Leibniz, among others, on this: God's rules lead to the rightest possible world, not necessarily the best (and if it is the best, it is only so in because it was first the rightest of all possible worlds).

LINK: Joe Carter has been kind enough to allow me to do a post on deontological ethics. I'll do my best to do replies to various objections, offer extensions, etc, here, as this weekend's schedule (dominated by declining nouns in Latin and spending time with my nephew) permits.

LINK: Norm posts on a subject near and dear to my heart, humanitarian intervention, and offers the following suggestion, on a proposal to have Britain incorporate conventions against genocide into their national law:

"But it doesn't go far enough. By making genocide the threshold for intervention, it would not in fact give protection to peoples against all mass killing, because not all mass killing is genocide; moreover much killing and related atrocity can be done without any of it taking on mass forms, without large-scale massacre - if there is a regular 'flow' of killing and atrocity on a smaller scale. As I have argued before, the threshold for the kind of intervention Brian is talking about needs to lowered."

Norm points out at least one potential problem with this:

"Of course, there must be such a threshold, practically, politically, morally. Intervention, especially military intervention, cannot be justified for every human rights violation, however small."

I see at least three other substantial problems with this proposal:
1. The genocide conventions, and consequently the laws they lead to, are still ungrounded in a critical sense (which is to say, we can imagine it as not beyond the realm of possibility that this set of genocide conventions or another one which was successfully negotiated on an international level might require morally unjust compromises--internalizing this set of norms does not make them the right (or the best) set to internalize). It might be the case that they are, but more work in grounding is needed.

2. What's essentially being argued is that the ability to intervene militarily and otherwise for humanitarian purposes should be the sort of decision that's open to all the normal forces of partisan politics within a nation--and the politicians in any given nation would probably be happy to ignore humanitarian problems when it's inconvenient for them politically--as they do now--but with the addedd difference that you've somewhat sullied the pull of the humanitarian impulse in the meantime.

3. I have some reservations about this being the correct level to situate this internalization of international standards--what you're essentially giving to a state is carte blanche to do what it wants when it thinks a humanitarian situation has been triggered (one can imagine Saddam Hussein invading Iran under a 'humanitarian' pretext)--and this is all the more a problem when you do with it as Norm does, and suggest (rightly, to my mind), that the threshhold has to be at least somewhat lower than it is now.

What does this suggest? Well, obviously, I'm not all the way to an answer yet (hello, potential dissertation!), but it does seem to suggest that perhaps some other locus is the appropriate site to try and internalize humanitarian ethics.

MY NINTH GRADE SELF AND MY CURRENT SELF ARE VERY CONFUSED AS TO WHAT TO THINK: Sleater-Kinney has a blog. It's a very disorienting experience, as most of their sentences seem to be only five words long or so. I'm not sure whether this qualifies as interesting or not, but I'm pretty confident it does not qualify as cool (e.g. titling your post on going to London "London Calling"... no buzz).

Also, there was a line in The Onion's review of their new album which reads:

"In a world where the mainstream has co-opted punk's sound, could classic rock be the new punk?"

The correct answer, of course, is "no."

UM: I think this guy needs to check out James Sundquist's Dynamics of the Party System, bit below excerpted from a post on how there really needs to be a political party for centrists:

"I'm registered as an independent -- I think of that as my political purgatory until something truly practicable emerges on the political landscape. Perhaps a new party is in order. Even as I write that, it sounds heretical to our binary democracy.

And yet, the first Republican president -- Lincoln -- ran and won when his party was only six years old. It's true that Republicans back in 1860 were inspired by the Whigs, but it was a new party nonetheless. Is that so unthinkable under today's circumstances?"

I was under the impression it picked up a large section of the previous Whig party and also a fair number of disaffected Democrats...but I might be remembering wrongly.

WELL: Interesting to see this post on Evangelical Outpost (Joe turned over his blog-space to someone else) on how consequentialist ethics aren't really that bad. As a deontologist, and particularly a Christian deontologist, I was a bit dismayed to read it because Kevin T. Keith glides past two of the biggest areas for deontologist objection:

1. Right and Good:

"But once a definition of moral right or moral good (we will also skip distinctions between “right” and “good,” though they are important) is in hand, the thing to do, of course, is to seek it and promote it as we live our lives." (bolding mine)

Darn tootin'. One of the key beliefs deontologists have is that the right and the good are at least sometimes (perhaps frequently) separable entities, and, what's more, the right takes precedence over the good*. Thus it's unacceptable to look only at outcomes in judging the relative merits of potential actions (it's not a logical impossibility than an action be wrong but good (for just you, for example), after all). This is actually what I think Kant was getting at when he said you can't treat people as means, only as ends: treating people as means to an end can allow you to justify any number of morally repellant things if the end result is supposed to be good enough**. And, of course, one could go one step further and point out, along with that famous religious conservative Michael Sandel (in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice), that the disagreements people have on issues of, say, distriubtional justice, are not just disagreements about how to apply certain moral principles to social or governmental action, but are also arguments over what are the appropriate criteria to use to try and decide what the relevant rules for deciding what distributions should look like (e.g., Rawls and Nozick).

In sum, then, deontological theory is better because it has a little more give in it (by recognizing and trying to deal with instances where the right and the good are separate), and also because it's more morally inclusive, especially in the context of a pluralist society, because unlike consequentialism, which tries (under its various auspices as act utilitarianism or what-have-you) to apply one single standard to the answering of all questions, deontology is open to the possibility of plurality in conceptions of the right, and has at least some rudimentary ways of trying to deal with that.

2. Grounding of Beliefs:

"Every such theory grounds its moral principles on such absolute truths, and every theory holds up its own rationalization of what constitutes such truths and how we know which ones they are. (We won’t get deeply into that here.)"

and:

"(I have seen arguments from Christians to the effect that only revealed religious precepts can be “absolutely true,” because only they come from God, or some transcendent realm, while all other claims are grounded on contingent reality on earth. This is far off base. Whether something is universally true has nothing to do with how one knows it is true, and at any rate the meaning of “absolute” has nothing to do with being “trascendent” or “from God.”)"

Well, to begin with, let me sound a bit like Richard Rorty: if you believe in something like free will, you're faced with at least the prima facie problem of deep contingency in the world. Keith wisely tries, on this basis, to punt the discussion over the relative (heh) merits of ethical principles from epistemology to ontology, but this won't really work for him. Here's why: a deontologist (such as myself) can claim that the moral principles from which my ethics are drawn come from a transcendent source (God)--but I can also claim that this last little bit is unneccessary, because my version of deontological ethics is right no matter whether I can justify it as such (because if right is right, it will be so whether or not I, or anyone else, chooses to believe that). And I can claim this, moreover, because I'm claiming an idea of right which I want to be in effect everywhere. Keith wants to do something similar for utilitarianism/consequentialism. But if consequentialism is the best moral theory because it's grounded in some non-relativistic sense of being true, then one has to assert the rightness of this ethical theory above all others. But utilitarianism is not, as such, a theory about the right. So I can suppose that there might be such a thing as utilitarianism*, which produces all the same results utilitarianism does, except one better result somewhere. Keith can do one of two things at this point:

1. Reject utilitarianism* as not being grounded as strongly as utilitarianism (remember, Keith wants to minimize the difference between consequentialism and deontology, and a deontologist would make a claim something like this in rejecting another conception of the right), in which case he sacrifices the purpose of utilitarianism (maximizing of good, whatever that is) to affirm it's ontological status, or

2. Replace utilitarianism with utilitarianism*, and admit the deep contingency (in terms of grounding) of consequentialist theory.



*for what I'll claim are somewhat intuitive reasons: goods are the sort of things one can have in greater or lesser quantities; rights are things which come in just two flavors: right and wrong. Assuming you care at all about right, it has to come first whenever the two conflict--you can always find good soemwhere else later.

**the mild example here being the implications of Rousseau's "forced to be free" line in the Social Contract, the more extreme ones being something like the liquidation of the Kulaks.

IT'S LIKE I THINK I'M ON VACATION OR SOMETHING:

I spent four days last week with a bunch of my friends at the Outer Banks (hence no posting).

I'll be spending the next three days in a place which is often (okay, never, except now, by me) called "The Outer Banks of Pennsylvania," so there will be no posting.

Actually, I'll be visiting my mother, and she has high speed internet access. So maybe there'll be more posting.

Then again, I have only 150 pages or so left of The Red and the Black (continuing my love affair with French 19th Century literature): that will probably win.

LINK: I can understand a few of Duke's basketball players maybe wanting to enter the draft, but Shav?

LINK: One of the elements of Straussianism which I think is probably most open to parody (though I know of no actual Straussians who do such a thing) is the idea that if one can discern the 'hidden meanings' behind what somebody writes, then you can begin to understand what they're really up to. I'm far too much of a literalist to go looking for alternate meanings when perfectly serviceable ones are already available to me.

Not surprisingly, then, I find this entire post rather amusing. Bush mentioned Yalta! Clearly he knew it was a big thing amongst some fringe conservatives in the 40s and 50s (how many of those are still active politically?)! But wait, all those people are dead! So it must be a codeword for something else!

Honestly.

Two notes:

1. If Harry Reid gave a speech which led to some people on the right claiming that he was sneaking in "code phrases" to some unnamed group of people, people on the left would make fun of them and claim they were clearly out of their minds, and would be right to do so.

2. There's a pretty clear surface meaning: Yalta was the culmination of a foreign policy which basically sold out Eastern Europe in exchange for peace. You can think there was no other pragmatic option available, but you really can't argue that a. the United States and Great Britain could have done something and b. intentionally chose not to. Those are the two big conditions for moral responsibility, so it's not out of bounds to suggest the US and UK ought to be held responsible. You can disagree about the end judgment, but not it's being a fit subject to be judged. I very much agree with Anne Applebaum that it's refreshing to see a governmental leader being willing to admit that anything the country had done in the past was morally wrong.

Also, I particularly like the correspondent to Professor Bainbridge who points out that Yalta happened because the US didn't really have a full exit strategy in place at the time. Snap!

QUOTE: Will Baude has an interesting reflection on the death penalty:

"Although unconvinced by the empirical claim that our current system of occasionally killing convicted murderers has any deterrent effect, I nonetheless think that people who commit heinous murders generally deserve to die.

The death penalty smacks of infallibility, to be sure, and that makes me uneasy. On the other hand, acting in the world almost always smacks of some degree of infallibility. We build solid structures, we entrench governmental systems, we reject certain options, paths, and forks forever.

And so, here. That states bother to retain their death penalty systems even though they are expensive, cumbersome, and so rarely employed as to be of little practical use has always struck me as rather odd, but not bad. Efficiency should not be the only goal of the criminal justice system."

LINK: Apparently, I am upbeat. You will have to take the test to see if you, too, can claim to be upbeat*. I'm feeling pretty good about the result*, but that's to be expected, right?

*which I generally take to mean "you're slightly right of center," but obviously the Pew people can't say that because 1. I already knew that and 2. Without coming up with cute ways to classify people, they'd have to fall back on saying banal things like "people who identify as Republicans/Democrats tend to support Republican/Democratic policies," which everybody already knows

VARIOUS BRITISH POLITICS UPDATES:

The Telegraph has a delightfully snarky article on George Galloway's coming troubles in the US Senate.

PooterGeeek speculates on the new young British voter, who could easily be considered to have an analog in American politics:

"Despite its general unwillingness to engage with party politics, Generation G still fancies itself idealistic. Sadly, other middle-class cynics, bitter Old Leftists, want to twist the punk-pragmatic idealism of the children of Live Aid into the misread-Marx idealism of the footstamping infant. A teenager carrying a “Blood For Oil” banner on behalf of a Socialist Worker front organisation thinks she has seen the puppetmasters for what they really are, when she is, in fact, a puppet of people who have been playing posture politics since before she was born...

We are talking about people who identify with rather than pity Bridget Jones, Homer Simpson, and Beavis and Butthead. Some dream of World peace; I dream of a world where it’s uncool to be an idiot."

Also, having finally come around to the left-British blogosphere view of the last election (winning is the important thing, are there are lots of reasons to believe things will get better, not worse), I can appreciate the irony behind this cartoon.

I'M SURE THIS WILL COME IN HANDY AT SOME POINT: A nice list of Russian (political) insults. For example, you might not guess that the Russian term for 'fascist' is "fashist."

LINK: I'll just post a link to this Crooked Timber post and note that I'll withhold judgment on the article until I actually read it.

LINK: Heh.

LINK: Yglesias tries to beat the drum for Norman Angell again:

"It's important to distinguish Angell's normative thesis -- aggressive war is futile in the context of market economies -- from his descriptive one: therefore wars will not break out."*

Neither of which is especially true, unless you're of the belief that the only reason anyone ever fights a war is to attempt to gain resources*. And anyway, to try to avert a potential argumentative counterthrust, just as leaders sometimes hide their decisions behind moral rhetoric, doesn't it seem likely that leaders would hide some international outcomes behind arguments they were explicitly about economic or territorial or resource factors (particularly if those outcomes were losing efforts, and there was some ideological or moral or other factor the leader wished to preserve)?

*leaving aside the weirdness of the normative claim proceeding the descriptive one, this might also be wrong if it turns out to be the case (and it probably does) that economic actors in states will find other trading partners if they assume a war with a particular nation with which they trade is forthcoming

**It also, I think, gets undermined pretty quickly when one lets go of the assumption of complete information and unbounded rationality--even if there are optimal outcomes short of war it doesn't mean a. people will see them and b. people could see them, even if they knew they existed.

BRITISH POLITICS COMMENTARY ROUND-UP:

Norm sees some reason to be optimistic:

"The exit poll says 66, and within no time at all I'm opining, with all my lack of psephological expertise, that the first results make that look too optimistic for Labour. The TV guys are more cautious - and subsequently to be vindicated, thank goodness. Let that be a lesson to me, and all you bloggers. If you sound off on things you're not too clued up about you may come a cropper. Yes, but we'll go on sounding off. It's the public square, it's getting your word in; it's not scientific research. At 1.45 AM, Sky are predicting a majority of 80; at 2.10 the Beeb say 76. I'm feeling better...

From 1979 to 1992 I went to bed on election nights (actually mornings) a lot less happy than I did at 5.30 today..."

Harry is rather less optimistic:

"Its going to be the last chance for a long time unless Gordon Brown can get a grip because watching those southern seats returning to the Tories was a brief glimpse at what might be around the corner. The Tories aren't back yet but they certainly aren't finished as some once claimed.


Blair, as an attractive electoral force is finished though and the Labour Party must do everything in its power to ensure that Gordon Brown (or whoever else might fancy the task) is given plenty of chance to establish his own government before the next election. We will see how grown up Labour is and how much or how little Blair cares for the party by how the transition is handled."

Then, there's what I can only term a really bizarre move, in which Michael Howard resigns as leader of the Conservatives. Says Howard:

"I've said if people didn't deliver they have to go," he said. "And for me, delivering meant winning the general election. I am doing what is best for the party and for the country."

...Which seems odd mostly because the Tories wildly outperformed the electoral expectations of them for most of the last government. Perhaps this is supposed to clear the ground for someone with more political savvy. But presumably such a person would've appeared on the scene sometime in the last eight years or so, so hope springs eternal.

Finally, just for amusement's sake, a suggestion from Matt Yglesias:

"I really should't offer up big ideas about the politics of a foreign country that I don't know all that much about, but just scanning over the math of the British election results it's very hard to escape the conclusion that Labor would do well for itself to form some kind of formal alliance with the Liberal Democrats. The two parties policies don't really seem to be particularly different, especially once you take into account the fact that there's a certain vagueness as to what Lib Dem policies really are and a great deal of internal dispute within Labor. If a single party can accommodate the views of all the different Labor MPs, the it doesn't seem it would take much change at all to accommodate the views of all the Lib Dem MPs as well."

Now, as far as I'm aware, the experience of 1992 convinced Labour and LibDems to vote tactically for each other to keep the Tories out, but I think that agreement collapsed this time around. They also weren't able to get it together in 1983 or 1987, and that was trying to face Thatcher. If they can't even coordinate most of the time on "not the Tories," why on earth would they be able to share a political party?

'Somebody told me to vote Conservative...':

Results not fully in, but, well, it looks like we'll get the answer to the question "when is a win not a win?' And a good likelihood that the creep and thug George Galloway will be sitting in Parliament. If I were feeling more ironic, I'd do a Kent Brockman reset*, but mostly it signals to me that the typical response to standing on principle in politics is to either get run out of office, or else practically so. Which is to say, indulging myself in a moment of cynicism (and perhaps someone who knows British politics better than me (SIAW?) can correct me if I'm wrong), but Labour is likely to railroad Tony Blair out sooner rather than later (<2 years, unless they're feeling very vindictive, which they might, and I'd give it less than a year), Gordon Brown will take over, and, having as he does slightly less in the way of mass political acumen, will run New Labour back to being Old Labour, which primes the Tories to do exceptionally well in another four to five years**.

900 vote margin for Respect in Benthal Green and Bow on 52.1% turnout. Ugh.

*'how many times do I have to say it? democracy just doesn't work, people!'

**Or, heaven forbid, the LibDems

WELL: As one might be able to guess from the slightly-higher-than-normal frequency of posts, the term is pretty much over for me (an oral exam on my international relations core class tomorrow, and a paper which is unlikely to be written for at least another couple of weeks*). This also more-or-less concludes my first year of graduate school. As Claire, Camille and Dara know from personal experience, I'm periodically a fan of summing up a year's worth of experiences to try and get some grand, take-away points. I've basically got one at the moment, but maybe more:

1. In his 20 Questions Jacob Levy encourages theorists to take both some statistics and formal theory (or game theory). Having managed to do both this year (the first quite painfully for the first semester), that's a set of recommendations I can highly endorse. Empirical literature is great for political theorists, because most empirical theories tend to be under-theorized with respect to the sorts of things we care about, which raises the potential for working across fields (as I will hopefully be doing); stats and game theory can provide a much better introduction into the empirical literature, allowing you to actually read the books or articles involved, rather than just skimming the intro and conclusion and avoiding anything with an equation. Also, there's a lot of impressive-looking but dubious empirical work out there (and I don't mean just the obvious obfuscatory stuff like Bueno de Mesquita; I mean more moderate-looking things like Russett and O'Neal, where it's harder to spot what's wrong about the analysis unless you have some familiarity with the statistical approaches involved), and some stats and game theory will help separate out the complicated-but-sound from the complicated-for-complication's-sake. And of course, if you aspire, like I do, to be a political scientist who's a political theorist, rather than just a political theorist, it will mitigate the urge to see positive and normative studies of politics as essentially different (which they're not, so it's good to realize this).

Others are invited to share their feelings on their currently or formerly completed first years of grad school in the comments.

*on applying public opinion surveys and social network theory to theories of liberal democracy, and asking "what's so bad about the way things are now?" Should be fun.

LINK: Joseph Britt at Belgravia Dispatch has an interesting reflection on how far the rule of law has come on the international scene:

"The length of time Saddam Hussein has been in custody was about how long it took between the time senior Nazi and German military officials surrendered to Allied forces and the end of their respective trials at Nuremberg. In the cases of ten senior Nazis sentenced to death, a little over two weeks elapsed between delivery of verdict and execution of sentence. With all respect to today's international legal community and its dream of perfect justice for all and full employment for lawyers, the trials given the Nazis were good enough."

...and though the reflection is mostly on Saddam Hussein, I think similar complaints can be made about the woeful international law responses to Pinochet and other similar former 'heads of state.' I think this is an area where just about everyone can agree international law should extend (even those of us who are cynical of what else can be done in the international system), but it does seem to frequently feel like justice isn't really getting done in any of these cases. Suggestions?*

*I'm looking at you, Ms. Soon-to-be International Law student

LINK: Classic KG

WELL: I've not blogged on the concept of solidarity for a long time (well, I've not blogged on most things for a long time), but this Harry's Place post does put me back in mind of it (quoting from Ali from Free Iraq):

"I looked at him with wide opened eyes and said (in a low voice), "Are you serious??" He said, "Let's go play chess you and I", and we took a table away from TV, and before we started playing he said, "Do you really think I meant what I said? It's just that this Ba'athist is listening and watching everyone's reaction. You know what I think of Tony Blair? I love this man! He's the only one whom when speaks about Iraq speaks with such a passion and honesty that makes you feel his blood is boiling and that he wants nothing more than helping us. He really makes me believe sometimes he has an Iraqi blood in him! I mean he speaks like he KNOWS and FEELS what's happening here".

I couldn't agree more, and I still remember it very well, when Blair was speaking to the Labor Party shortly before the war and he was the only coalition leader I heard saying he's going to the war for human reasons mainly. He said it clear to the people gathering there that yes the WMDs was the major issue and that there are serious reports that cannot be ignored, but then his personal main reason to go to this war was to liberate 25 million people. He added (surely not his exact words but I remember very well what they spoke) that even if these reports were wrong then my conscience would be clear and I would feel no regret at all because we would be liberating and saving 25 million people from a life that's worth than death.

After all that, yes I'm amazed that people still think he lied about the reasons to go to war. I wish I could get a tape of that speech and show it to these people, but I'm sure they can access such things much better than me and that they have listened to his words just as I did. Hell, he was speaking to them not me!"

So I want to take a stab at this, analytically, from the perspective of what I think is the Niebuhrian concept of double citizenship: basically, the notion that a person has a real, non-arbitrary affiliation to their nation-state*, which always makes the state the main actor on the international scene, but that they also (with the help of some ideological/ontological stance, where Christianity, Judaism, Marxism or whatever all qualify) have obligations towards other people which they at least sometimes need to act on. It's that latter sort of moral/political affiliation that leads people to do otherwise non-rational things (like campaign for someone who won't be representing you), and gives them the intensity of spirit to overcome a lot of obstacles to do whatever is right (this is the sort of look Ali describes Blair as having). It is, in short, the notion that the boundaries of the nation-state are totally irrelevant.

The real question then becomes, I think, whether it's right for Blair (as PM, and thus an official of the state) to act on the basis of his private convictions** through the auspices of the state. It's here that I find myself coming to a stop again and again. Hans Morgenthau argues (in practically everything he ever wrote; the man wouldn't stop using a good line once he found it) that fiat justitia, pereat mundus is a fine principle for individuals to apply in their own lives, but wrong for state leaders to apply, since their first duty is to preserve the state first and foremost, and not do anything that might weaken the state. On this view, Blair was clearly wrong to act (unless one argues that the relative military capabilities of Iraq and Britain were such that even a disasterous war for Britain wouldn't have really endangered them that much): even accepting the view in the parentheses, there certainly would need to be some mechanism by which the Labour government could justify or solicit opinions on the moral rightness and worthwhileness of the war, and accepting that view, I believe, means falling into the deliberative democracy trap.

Of course, Morgenthau also (nicely) contradicts himself on this matter, saying (in Scientific Man and Power Politics) that most theories of ethics in government fail because they try too much to differentiate 'political' and 'personal' decisions: as long as it's people deciding things (and it always is), there ought to be one unified theory to explain both. Fine then, Morgenthau might say: if the personal and the political have to go together in moral theory, and we know that moral imperatives are no better than second-best for states, they can be no better than second-best for individuals. But this is obviously a silly point: the examples in which self-sacrificing responses to moral imperatives are numerous and, on most folk conceptions of morality, noble and/or justified. So clearly, then, I think there's a need to better theorize when states can properly act on moral imperatives. To have the kind of moral inspiration Blair had and not do anything with it*** seems, well, wrong.

*on the theory that geographic, linguistic, historical and social forces are actually not very easily overcome as bases for identity. This is perhaps an IR analog to the American politics link between party affiliations between generations.

**though, insomuch as they represent a correct interpretation of moral imperatives, his convictions could be a. demonstrated correct and b. adopted, in principle, by anyone with a sufficiently comprehensive conception of the right.

***if you don't like Iraq as an example, pick your own pet international issue

OH, SNAP! OxBlog, on Matt Yglesias:

"So young and already so successful. He's practically the Jonathan Safran Foer of his generation. Anyhow, Matt says he will continue the proud TPM tradition of obsessively blogging about Social Security. I guess now that promoting democracy in Iraq doesn't seem like such a ridiculous notion, the President's critics need a softer target. En garde!"

LINK: For my Duke-based blogging friends: Killer Grease wants YOU!

LINK: In the weird article file, this one from TNR, on how unfair it is that the Catholic Church has recognition as a sovereign state. It's odd that they're using realism as a cudgel to try and advance liberalism: that is, the complaint mostly seems to boil down to: "it's really unfair that an unelected, non-democratic international organization (the Catholic Church) is generally recognized to be sovereign, because it allows them to unfairly influence the moral stances* of an unelected, non-democratic international organization (the UN)."

Nit-pickery to follow:

"But international law requires states to have four attributes: territory, a permanent population, a functioning government, and the ability to engage in international relations. The last requirement largely builds on the others: Whether a state can engage in international relations is usually decided by whether other states treat it like one."

Now, of course, it's true that the Vatican sees a pretty regular shift in who's there and who's not; then again, so does every other country. If you're going to complain that the Vatican isn't sovereign because they don't really have a permanent population, well, birth and death being what they are, that seems like the same process you have everywhere (except maybe the last place Gulliver visits in Gulliver's Travels).

Also, the article seems to be sort of willfully blind to the fact that international law (unlike, say, the international system) really is just socially constructed, based on norms, and therefore non-foundational. There's nothing law-like about it, if no one finds it necessary to follow.

*In fairness, a few of those moral stances seemed pretty bad. But it's absolutely unclear to me what differentiates the Catholic Church as an international institution from any other such institution (except that it probably has stronger ties to the people who follow it than the UN does).

LINKS: Well, it seems no one else (at least in the comments) has pointed this out, so I'll take a crack at it: Jeff Jarvis blogs here and here about new potential FCC appointments. Says Jarvis:

"1115.org reports that Ted Stevens -- the twit who wants to extend FCC censorship to cable and satellite -- now wants to install one of his aides in one of the empty chairs at the FCC. This is war, people."

Except, of course, that it's not war, and it seems just a little too hyperbolic and irresponsible to say so*. The current course of the FCC might be bad, the policies potentially being enacted in the future might be unwise and fly against evrything people with common sense might stand for--Ted Stevens may well even be a 'twit'--but this is not a war-it's a policy disagreement. And if you're not going to be nice to the people who disagree with you, why should you expect them to be nice to you?

*If someone 'declared war' on TV for showing too much sex and violence, Jarvis would no doubt be all over this little bit of rhetorical excess, and probably rightly so.