At Duke, a couple professors in English have a working on political theory, attended variously by professors and grad students across the usual-suspects departments. Each month, we pick a text and have a discussion on it. Two weeks ago, the reading was Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and I was the person tasked with leading our discussion.
Having avoided Paine up to this point in my career (I may have read some of the "Rights of Man" as an undergrad), I decided to start with a simple question: where is the common sense in 'Common Sense?' The term only appears three times in the text (go ahead, control-F), and Paine never does anything to address the opacity of his deployment of the phrase. This use is probably the clearest:
IN the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense: and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession, and suffer his reason and his feelings to determine for themselves that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off, the true character of a man, and generously enlarge his views beyond the present day.
Whether 'common sense' is a synonym of the first two, or intended to expand on it, is hard to say. Nevertheless, we settled on two possible meanings, where common sense is both the grounding of the argument and its rhetorical hope. In establishing his arguments, Paine often avers something without supporting reasons given, aside from an 'it should be obvious that...' (think 'it should be obvious that no reconciliation with England is possible'). He also writes in such a manner--in the blockquote above, for example--as to imply that his conclusions, once the individual divests himself of his particular biases, will in fact be, or become, common sensical to him.
It's this first use of the term that interests me in the context of Waldron's review of Walzer. I'd like to approach this topic by borrowing from a Jacob Levy appreciation of Walzer, namely, the prolific stream of high-quality work the latter produced over a long period of time:
While he wrote excellent material both before and after this time, it seems to me that there's a 13-year stretch-- 1977-1990-- that's just stunning for breadth and scale of achievement. His published work from that era that I think are all major and enduring contributions, including four really quite distinct enduring books:
Just and Unjust Wars
"The Moral Standing of States"
"Philosophy and Democracy"
Spheres of Justice
"Liberalism and the Art of Separation"
"What Does It Mean to be an 'American'?"
"The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism"
Interpretation and Social Criticism
The Company of Critics
I've not read the two between 'Liberalism and the Art of Separation' and Interpretation and Social Criticism, but I have read Exodus and Revolution (a very excellent book, especially if you ever do any Biblical interpretation), so let's call it a wash.
It's always struck me that Just and Unjust Wars is the odd book out here, joined perhaps by his 1995 article in Social Research, "The Politics of Rescue." Otherwise in his work, Walzer offers a strong defense of self-determination, very much along the lines Waldron indicates. That we disapprove of some practice or manner of organizing social life means nothing; we are not part of that society, and we do not get to judge. Though he carries this view to absurd extremes on occasion (as skewered by the Philosophy and Public Affairs respondents to "The Moral Standing of States"), he is consistent.
But this view, so far as I can tell, does not apply in Just and Unjust Wars: we can have a legitimate expectation that anyone fighting a war knows the rules and moral arguments governing that action, and retain the right to censure anyone who fails to live up to them. Mao is wrong to label respect for enemy combatants 'asinine ethics;' we can reasonably expect all leaders to know genocide is never acceptable.
The two positions should appear to conflict: on the one hand, peoples have a right to organize their political lives in most any way they see fit, not merely because it respects their self-determination, but because we cannot be expected to know or make good judgments about the character of the people making decisions. However, we can (and should) sanction them when their conduct exceeds certain limits, or when those actions spill out over a national boundary. Leaving aside the tricky question of what constitutes a national boundary (since there are a large number of disputes over that), one is left to wonder where the set of ethics everyone is supposed to know arises? Two strong possibilities: either there are ethics everyone is expected to have because natural law/the experience of war ensures everyone will have reactions against certain behaviors, or else the leaders of the world constitute a group that can have shared understandings in the way a people can have those same understandings.
The answer, inasmuch as there is one, appears to be that both are the case. Just and Unjust Wars page 16:
No doubt the moral reality of war is not the same for us as it was for Genghis Kahn; nor is the strategic reality. But even fundamental social and political transformations within a particular culture may well leave the moral world intact or at least sufficiently whole so that we can still be said to share it with our ancestors. It is rare indeed that we do not share it with our contemporaries, and by and large we learn how to act among our contemporaries by studying the actions of those who have proceeded us.
This appears to be the second, social-construction option. David Miller suggests the alternative in the introduction to Thinking Politically:
The underpinning for this position can be found in his book Thick and Thin, in which he argues in defence of 'moral minimalism,' the idea that there are certain moral rules common to all societies--rules such as those prohibiting murder, deception, and gross cruelty--that exist alongside thicker morality that each society has evolved to govern its distributive practices and other areas of social life... So when humanitarian intervention takes place, it does so in the name of a principle (if Walzer is correct) the intervened-against society must already recognize. Of course, its leaders will claim that their actions are justified by the need to preserve public order or territorial integrity, goals which they claim are sufficiently important to override human rights. But they cannot dismiss the moral basis on which the intervention is being launched.
One might recognize this as a classic natural law (or ius gentium) theory, complete with explanation for self-deception. Neither of these is an explanation, exactly, of how the moral sense with respect to war comes to be. Much like 'common sense' for Paine, this moral sense, applied but never explained, does much of the work in getting his arguments off the ground. I mean to be critical of this because I don't believe that account will do--as Walzer himself notes, the human impulse to inhumanity is strong, and to combat it requires something stronger than an appeal to what we (who are never put in the position to decide these things) understand to be the case morally. I also believe that it weakens the theory of intervention he can give, for reasons I may elaborate later.
But let us review: there exists a moral standard to which we can reasonably hold all people, the violation of which justifies forcible intervention against the state, no matter what value the intervened-against claim in their defense.
On this basis, Jeremy Waldron has to be wrong to claim, as he does in the NYRB essay:
What Walzer calls 'communal integrity' has a nonrelative claim upon us; it is not a case of departing from universalism; it is a case of one universal value--self-determination--checking our enthusiasm for the imposition of others.
The claim has to be wrong because self-determination is always relative to the basic values which permit humanitarian intervention. To be otherwise, there would need to be a case in which a value of 'universalism' in Walzer's sense is ignored in favor of self-determination, which one could identify as morally right. I submit there are no such cases. Walzer, defense of sovereignty and all, is an interventionist; all he does is argue whether a given case justifies intervention.
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