Anti-Climacus

LINK: Megan McArdle has an excellent reply to John Quiggin's argument on consequentialism and war. To wit:

"When it comes right down to it, consequentialist arguments are generally arguments about what the consequences are, and how the value of, say, getting rid of a loathesome dictator and his troglodyte descendants compares to the lives of innocents who inevitably die in such invasions. Surely, a good liberal would not argue that merely sustaining life is the only important value; are not freedom, prosperity, security almost as important?

Mind you, I don't say that on such an expanded scale, Iraq would be a good idea; we're doing pretty miserably on the "security" part, and freedom and prosperity look far from secured. But Mr Quiggin's post seems incredibly superficial, for something that purports to be reasoning from first principles, rather than to the pre-determined conclusion. Of course, there may be some deeper philosophical and/or semantic subtleties that I'm missing."

I think Quiggin is probably just plugging into the standard quasi-communitarian/noninterventionist/pacifist* line on any kind of fighting in general. Certainly, his argument looks similar to some of the stuff Michael Walzer peddles in Just and Unjust Wars. Nevertheless, it seems to me like there's a problem with proceeding here out of a strictly consequentialist analysis: you simply can't know ahead of time. Even if you could, in game-theoretic terms, fully tree out all the possibilities, and the reasonable range of possibilities, you'd still get something that would give you only a potential idea of your payoffs given what you know at the outset. Of course, no one can actually handle that level of calculation, so you surrender another measure of certainty and start prioritizing the things you think will 'matter more.' But, ultimately, no one really knows**.

In the face of that, it seems like you have two alternatives: either you can oppose every possible foreign move, or all of them except the ones where it's blindingly obvious that your side will win, or else you accept that there are some rules which you can reasonably follow. And it seems like quite a lot rides on which side you take on that question.

*these all being measurably different categories, but happening to agree in large part on this particular area of foreign policy and international relations

**I also find this sort of calculation vexing because it suggests that its entirely possible that the rightness or wrongness of an action will be dependent on something that may or may not happen 25 steps removed from the initial decision. This seems like an inversion of Aristotle's argument in the Nichomachean Ethics that the happiness of dead people is relative to the honorableness of their descendents: perverse to consider, but logical enough if you follow a certain train of thought.