10.5.11

In the last week, I have finished a conference paper, seen everyone on my panel drop out of the conference, spent a couple days waiting to find out whether I'd even be going at all, been reassigned to another panel, and been frantically revising the original paper. I'm looking forward to my vacation, whenever that will be.

Related to both my research and my general impressions of literature: Dostoevsky is right, Tolstoy is wrong, this time on the subject of intervention. For the record, this is always a stupid argument:

The sheer number of arguments Dostoevsky has for going to war raises the suspicion that none of them are the real reason.

This is only ever said by people who believe that human actions are guided by a single principle; who forget that politics and rhetoric involve convincing lots of different people who will be convinced by different arguments; or who think that underneath the reasons people give, there lurks a 'real' explanation for their behavior, which is always venal or sinister. None of these are sustainable propositions.

I have an ongoing argument (argument's a bit too strong; better to say disagreement on the ultimate worth of) with one of the fellows here about how and why 'right intention' falls out of just war theory in the modern period. I think it's the right move because it recognizes that human beings act under multiple motivations, and the presence of some bad motivations does not necessarily rule out the good. It's also, like the severing of jus in bello criteria for war-fighting from jus ad bellum questions about whether the war itself is just, intended as a means of encouraging those states that are fighting an unjust war to nevertheless buy into as much of just war theory as possible. He thinks it's because a strict adherence to right intention rules out many wars, including popular wars like WWII. We disagree on that war, and on many others, but it's an argument that doesn't hinge on impugning the motivation of particular individuals, just in arguing that people have a tendency to not think through all the implications of the positions they take.

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