To the Tooting Station

Mill, Marx, and multiculturalism

Is Ken Livingstone’s support of multiculturalism in keeping with Millian liberalism? Or is it, as David Cameron claims, a Marxist and ‘discreditable attempt by an ageing far left politician to hang on to a narrative about race that sees people from ethnic minorities as potential agents of revolutionary change’?

Now, there’s a lot to untangle here. Livingstone uses the term multiculturalism referring to both the fact of multiculturalism – that modern society comprises many different cultures, races, traditions and religions – and the project of multiculturalism – that government and its agencies should not only permit the existence of these cultures, traditions and religions, but that it also has a responsibility to promote these cultures, traditions and religions through policies of diversity, group rights, difference-friendly liberalism, cultural programmes and the establishment of quotas. The interchangeability simply obfuscates two issues, in turn confusing two distinct objections: those from the lobotomized fringe of the hard right objecting to the very fact of multiculturalism, and those objections from progressive leftists that see multiculturalism as as a departure from a philosophy of individual rights, individual autonomy, universalism, difference-blind liberalism, and an embrace of relativism .

Livingstone declares that multiculturalism is simply a contemporary manifestation of Mill’s principle of liberty:

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. (J S Mill, Stefan Collini (ed.) On Liberty, 1989, p.13)

For Livingstone, this simply means:

Multiculturalism asserts the right of a person to live their life as they wish, including culturally. If they wish to live in classically "English" style, then this is fine. But it is also fine if they want to lead a more Indian lifestyle, or a more Jamaican one, or if they wish to organise their life more around the ideas of Buddhism or Judaism. This is the basic principle of multiculturalism.

And the basic principle of liberalism. So why invent the new term? Is there any difference between Millian liberalism and multiculturalism? Certain elements are in keeping with the Millian legacy: the state has no warrant to interfere in matters of culture and tradition, and freedom of association is sacrosanct. So in this sense of a weak multiculturalism, Livingstone’s claims seem to stack up.

Yet this liberal principle was qualified by Mill. Mill sought to extend some of the state’s power to hitherto excluded areas. Mill was, in particular, scathing about men who regarded the family as his personal fiefdom, writing of the ‘almost despotic power of husbands over wives’. (J S Mill, Stefan Collini (ed.) On Liberty, 1989, p.105) In The Subjection of Women he noted: ‘[…] man had anciently […] the power of life and death over his wife. She could invoke no law against him: he was her sole tribunal and law.’ (Ibid. p.146) This clearly has implications for those promoting or embracing conservative cultures – would Mill really have welcomed this as a contribution to diversity, despite its subordination of liberty?

The notion of positive interference is even more problematic. In a sense, the notion of group rights, difference-friendly liberalism, and positive discrimination betray a certain Marxist critique of liberalism. Marx contended that oppression was primarily economic, that only through the overthrow of the capitalist forces of production, would oppression end. Because oppression was primarily economic, he declared notions of political individual rights to be both ‘ideological nonsense’ and ‘obsolete verbal rubbish’ – this seemingly fictitious legalistic freedom was contrasted with real freedom to be gained under Communism. Theorists of group rights and difference-friendly liberalism cling to a similar logic – oppression is practised against otherwise excluded minorities. While these groups possess a formal freedom, inequality and oppression remains. Only by bringing these minorities into a full and proportionate participation in the spheres of politics, economics and culture can the real root of oppression be erased.

Yet both Mill and Marx are quite opposed to any promotion of existing cultures. While Mill regarded cultural encumbrances as unavoidable, he also emphasized the importance of individual autonomy and the creative fashioning of the self. He spoke of the ‘despotism of custom’ as being opposed to the ‘spirit of liberty’ (Ibid. p.70). Mill called for ‘experiments of living’:

Where, not the person’s own character, but the traditions or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress.

[…] He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best.

[…] He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.(Ibid.p.57-59)

Marx is largely at one with Mill here – he lamented the role of tradition: ‘Tradition from all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ (T. Carver ed., Marx: Later Political Writings,1996, p.32) So clinging onto the remnants of any culture is quite an un-Millian position. This isn’t an argument against specific cultures as such – rather it’s an argument for an individualist, rather than a communitarian, mode of living. This isn’t, then, simply an argument against non-Western religions and cultures, but against all communitarian, anti-individualists ways of fashioning the self.

For Mill, diversity is never a good in itself. It’s a good if it highlights alternative modes of living that free individuals could potentially adopt. It also contributes to the search for truth and the revitalisation of thought. Yet these diverse modes of living are only a good when they express the individual’s chosen path, not the dictates of custom: ‘… his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.’ (J S Mill, Stefan Collini (ed.) On Liberty, 1989, p.67)

So that’s the theory. In practice, Livingstone strays even further from Marx and Mill. He not only promotes all sorts of benign cultures and religions, but also embraces the malignant ones, embracing those leaders of a fundamentalist Islamism. Livingstone’s just a little too keen on, for instance, Yusuf al-Quaradawi, the latter a diverse proponent of wife-beating - ‘[…] far from being in any way countenanced by the principle of liberty, it is a direct infraction of that principle, being a mere riveting of the chains of one-half of the community, and an emancipation of the other from reciprocity of obligation towards them.’ (Ibid. p. 91-92) -  clitoridectomy, death for apostasy, suicide bombing, and something of a hard-line opponent of the liberty principle for homosexuals. Mill, or Marx for that matter, wouldn’t have embraced any of this nonsense.

There might be the odd Millian or Marxist kernel within multiculturalism. But with Livingstone it appears it’s not only standing on its head, but performing intellectual pirouettes.

Bodies and embodiments

I’ve been thinking about bodies. Well, not just like that, but you know, things like rationality, reason, truth, universalism, culture and their relation to the flesh.

For the cultural relativist, the fact of individuals’ embodiment by culture and history makes appeals to reason, universalism and truth untenable: individuals are solely moulded by these external forces, passive recipients of the diktats of their environment. They adopt the latter element of Marx’s phrase from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – ‘ [...] they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited. Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ – yet ignore its former assertion: ‘Men make their own history […] .’

Because individuals are unable to step out of their own (historical and cultural) skins, because language is said, like an over-zealous, if slightly clumsy, lover, to go ‘all the way down’, we can never attain that God’s-eye position of pure reason. Truth is diminished to the status of incommensurable ‘truths’, conversations that may possess coherence within a specific culture, but have no necessary relation to the external world or humanity. So in this sense they seem to take the bodies’ embodiment in culture and history seriously.

Yet this doesn’t necessarily refute the idea of reason and truth. Bodies don’t necessarily restrict comprehension of the world, but enhance our understanding. The relativist can’t quite get over the limitations of pure reason, so diminish the possibility of any reason, of any thought process that engages with, and seeks to understand the world. Simon Blackburn notes this in Truth, A Guide for the Perplexed:

What we talk about is intimately involved in our doings…. We are not ‘stepping outside our own skins’ as we say these things, we are staying firmly inside them, but secure in our explanations of our own doings. If Baudrillard’s contemporaries saw the bombs as real, this is not because they were getting above themselves, but because they were prepared to think about where their beliefs came from, and if anyone averts their gaze from such a question this means that they do not acknowledge their embodiment in the world at all.
(Simon Blackburn, Truth, A Guide for the Perplexed, 2005, p.171)

But there’s more to this. Thought isn’t only a product of culture – while thought is undoubtedly mediated through cultural forms, it may sometimes express some bodily truth, a truth that may transcend culture and history. Relativists deny this – for them, this form of universalism robs the individual of its culture heritage. While they take cultural embodiment seriously, the material fact of fleshly embodiment seems something of a different matter. The material body is robbed of its agency, it is unable to free itself from the determinations of culture - the body appears powerless against these dark forces at work.

Then the relativist denies the universality of rights – if individuals are solely shaped by culture, rights only exist when groups assert their existence: there is nothing external to culture we could look to in providing a foundation for universalism. The body, its material existence, the possibility that some universalism could be based on its very physicality, is discounted. Individuals are not simply seen as cultural producers, but become precisely synonymous with culture. In preserving and respecting actually existing cultures, the relativist asserts his respect for the individual by proxy: by respecting specific cultures. To them, the cultural embodying is the important thing: actual bodies seem all too much of a churlish distraction.

Binary oppositions

Binary thinking is obviously a Bad Thing (as binary opposed, to, say a Good Thing). But perhaps not all binary thinking is so bad:

It is better to be alive than dead. It is better to be free than to be a slave. It is better to be healthy than sick. It is better to be adequately nourished than malnourished. It is better to drink pure water than contaminated water. It is better to have effective sanitation than to live over an open sewer. It is better to be well educated than to be illiterate and ignorant. It is better to be able to practise the form of worship prescribed by your religion than to be prevented from doing so. It is better to be able to speak freely and be able to join social and political organizations of your choice than to fear that, of your activities attract the disfavour of the regime, you face arbitrary arrest, torture or 'disappearance' at the hands of bodies organized by or connived at by the state. And so on.

... There are a variety of way in which we might support the claim that such interests are universal. One would be to argue that there is a universal human nature which gives rise to certain physiological and psychological needs. [...] it may usefully be supplemented by an appeal to the choices actually made by people in a position to make choices. [...] people strongly prefer life to death, freedom to slavery, and health to sickness. [...] It was the anthropologist, not the people involved, who elevated the value of cultural diversity above that of health.
(Brian Barry, Culture & Equality, 2001, p.285)

If you're into polemical defences of liberalism, universalism and egalitarianism, go and buy it. Then read it. Then quote it in a post.

Absolute cobblers

Mark Braund writes today's obligatory Comment is Free faith v rationality piece:

This is not to imply that the conclusions I draw through reasoned reflection are necessarily more correct than the conclusions of those who seek guidance from religious teachings.

... I cannot claim that my non-religious world view is more accurate than the various world views of people of faith. There is no possible rational basis for such a claim. All I can say is that having had some exposure to the alternative, and having thought long and hard about it, my non-religious world view is the one the best suits me.

Well there is, and you could, especially on the basis of your own argument. Accuracy here refers to a world view, what we might slightly differently call, say, a 'view of the world'. So there is something out there, something independent of our perceptions, some object called the 'world'. This worldly thing includes humans, mountains, gasses, minerals, animals, liquids, all these sort of things. A view that correctly, or probabilistically, represents this world, could be said to be accurate, or in the second case, probable.

Once we admit there is something called the world, we can either say the world exists independent of what we say about it, or that somehow we magically construct that 'world' through acts of speech – that there is indeed no palpable world out there, nothing our concepts could ever be adequate to, for that world is merely one of of our own nocturnal imaginings. If it's acknowledged there's something out there known as the world, a specific representation or theory - utilising certain concepts, discarding others - can be judged on how it relates to this thing we call the world, whether it works or not: a map that directs us to our desired destination could be said to be accurate. One that fails is inferior and demonstrably inaccurate. Concepts that represent that world better (i.e. are more accurate) can be described as rational – those that fail to, or simply regard the world as something of a troublesome obstacle ultimately to be ignored can be regarded as irrational, as inferior descriptions or representations, of that world. Braund admits as much – he seems concerned about some phenomenon, an all-too-worldly phenomenon, called 'global warming': i.e. a theory based on certain facts and masses of scientific data, utilising certain concepts, all about that thing out there. A thing which under any other circumstance, we're apparently powerless to understand.

If we opt for the first option, that there is a material world out there, independent of our perceptions of it, the case for relativism starts to fall down – some descriptions aren't adequate to the external world, they can be falsified through experiment. Yet with the constructivist position, we're no longer talking about a world as usually defined, rather a world differently imagined by each and every individual – it's not even possible to agree any description is more accurate than any other, for we're all at liberty to construct that world just as we see fit. It's also simply impossible to define what that peculiar thing under discussion, the world, even is.

Yet the argument becomes even more baffling. For the theory, that one 'cannot claim that my non-religious world view is more accurate than the various world views of people of faith', is presented as something of an absolute fact – a true, fact-dependent description of the status of belief, science, knowledge, etc... So while, say, a rational or scientific description of the world is reduced to the realm of pure theory or faith, a theory about this apparent scientific theory – that all theories are equally accurate and fact-independent – is elevated to the status of fact. The only facts that are truly factual are facts about theories. This isn't necessarily bad, though. You can now theorise for all eternity upon theories on the status of fact-dependent theory, erecting an infinite supply of additional theories - the first being that it's definitively, logically, and scientifically, a load of cobblers.

Caldwell be confused?

Christopher Caldwell reviews Ian Buruma’s forthcoming Murder in Amsterdam in the New York Times. It’s all pretty harmless stuff, but then you reach this passage:

Buruma interviews two charismatic reformers: van Gogh’s collaborator Hirsi Ali and the Iranian-born legal scholar Afshin Ellian. Both believe that nothing short of dragging Islam through the wringer of skepticism and ridicule, as Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers did Catholicism, will suffice to disarm potential militants like Bouyeri. But Buruma is skeptical. He suspects that many of those who invoke the Enlightenment are merely defending a conservative order. “Voltaire had flung his insults at the Catholic Church,” he writes, “while Ayaan risked offending only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe.”

That is unfair. Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him. We need a much more flexible definition of the word “minority” in a world thus networked. Buruma is quite right, though, to suggest that Hirsi Ali’s praise of the Enlightenment, as a movement that “strips away culture, and leaves only the human individual,” has something in common with the promise of Islamism, which would strip away culture and leave only the individual and God.

Both Buruma and Caldwell see an equivalence between the Enlightenment and Islamism. I mean, it’s almost Buntingesque in its crassness. The idea that the Enlightenment sought to remove culture, leaving the individual alone with his Reason, isn’t that convincing. That it sought to overthrow certain conservative traditions, arbitrary authority, monarchism and clericalism is undeniable. But to suggest everything would begin anew…. The Enlightenment also granted significance to the concepts of liberalism, toleration, universalism, rights, these sorts of things. These aren’t mere appeals to some form of disembodied or unencumbered Reason, but are rather the products of engagement with other humans and the material world. The individual is not simply abandoned to his own devices, bereft of any moral compass, devoid of any values whatsoever. If this was really the case, how would we account for the Enlightenment’s legacy of toleration, universalism and human rights, which are pretty obviously based on some notion of a common human nature and a social collective?

This is precisely what the ‘promise of Islamism’, as described by Caldwell anyway, doesn’t do. The individual here is accountable to nothing but a phantasm of their own making - which, to all intents and purposes, amounts to being accountable only to oneself. The Enlightenment legacy offered individuals the prospect that all ‘that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’ The ‘promise of Islamism’ seeks the exact opposite - the preservation of the ‘fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions’.

(via Will)

No borders

Eve Garrard posted on the notion of cultural relativism (some of the more outlandish examples being this and this) over at Norm’s a couple of weeks ago (real life's unfortunately intruded on the possibility of an earlier response). It’s pretty good stuff - but in one way it seems to go not nearly far enough, in another, too far.

When we talk of Enlightenment values – universalism, the prioritisation of reason, individual autonomy, the free-flow of ideas, freedom of thought, individual rights, the liberal rule of law – are these values solely and uniquely Enlightenment values? For instance, some of these values – the prioritisation of reason – are not necessarily unique to the Enlightenment. Some display a stubborn permanence over long swathes of human history – they are not confined to the one historical period and its subsequent intellectual and political heritage. So these values might not necessarily be described as solely Enlightenment values. Amartya Sen made this point a few years ago:

… once we recognize that many ideas that are taken to be quintessentially Western have also flourished in other civilizations, we also see that these ideas are not as culture-specific as is sometimes claimed. We need not begin with pessimism, at least on this ground, about the prospects of reasoned humanism in the world.
(Amartya Sen, in NYRB July 2000, pp.33-38)

Describing them as Enlightenment values as such can give the impression – however misleading - of some sort of ‘imposition’ on other, somehow alien, cultures.

Many of the values referred to as Enlightenment values are important in themselves, regardless of their provenance, or not, in the Enlightenment. Just as things like British values aren’t important because of their Britishness: their significance stems from the fact they are, broadly speaking, good universal values. Eve says as much in her second point.

But if this is true, that some of these Enlightenment values are universal, then the third point on the porousness of cultural borders is not a necessary condition of the second point regarding the indigenous sources of these values – you might even argue that by stressing the growing inter-relatedness of cultures, their permeability, you almost undercut the second point of universality: the apparent universality is more of a process of universalisation. If Enlightenment values are universal and good, and can emanate from indigenous sources rather than from foreign impositions, interactions, etc… it could be expected that these values are present, to some degree or another, in most nations, almost irrespective of the degree of cross-cultural dialogue. Kwame Anthony Appiah convincingly argues this in the Ethics of the Identity (p.269) – for instance:

Skepticism about the genuinely cosmopolitan character of the view I have been defending may flow in part from the thought that it seems so much a creature of Europe and its liberal tradition. So it may be well to insist… that my own attachment to these ideas comes, as much as anything, from my father, who grew up in Asante, at a time when the independence of its moral climate from that of European Enlightenment was extremely obvious. Now, it would be preposterous to claim that he came to his cosmopolitanism or his faith in human rights and the rule of law unaffected by European traditions. But it would be equally untenable to deny that the view he arrived at had roots in Asante….

So you might argue this the other way around: that the inter-relatedness of culture is a permanent feature of human life; that the immutable things are the constant flows from one to culture to another and vice versa; yet the world’s open borders are not a necessary precondition of the spread of Enlightenment values, but are symptomatic of its pre-existing universal applicability. Rather than borders being open, in some respects they simply don’t exist.

Guardian columnist seeks enlightenment

‘I need some help’ – yep, for once she’s bang on. Madeleine’s been getting down with Muslim intellectuals: they’re getting edgy about the Enlightenment tradition being ‘used (implicitly or explicitly) against Islam’:

These Muslims then argue that the Enlightenment was a process of European definition in the face of the Ottoman Empire; it was shaped in opposition to Islam and hence has an inbuilt anti-Islamic bias.

It’s the classic Orientalist argument, so all well and good. But… Accusing the Enlightenment of being anti-Islamic is a bit like accusing a curmudgeonly misanthropist of having it in for blondes – it’s not the hair that’s the unique object of enmity. Similarly with the Enlightenment - when it was atheist, it was against religion per se: Islam wasn’t a unique target. In fact, the Enlightenment’s main target was European Christianity, clericalism, and monarchy – the arbitrary authority of theistic tradition and social conservatism in eighteenth-century Europe.

When the Enlightenment did address non-European cultures, it was far from disdainful, without falling into some proto-Buntingesque relativism. It accepted cultural and religious diversity, yet simultaneously held to a limited universalism. It could sometimes indulge religious thought, yet believed religion should be subjected to the appeal of reason. And it also sought to establish institutions and laws to guarantee freedom of religion, freedom of thought, the free flow of ideas, etc…. When Enlightenment thinkers analysed non-European societies, they refused to place cultures in a hierarchy of development, in some crude Hegelian-cum-Darwinian fashion. Far from being uniquely hostile to religion, the Enlightenment established conditions for private religiosity:

Usually deists rather than atheists, concerned with fostering tolerance rather than embracing any type of dogma, most philosophes considered religious faith nothing more than superstition, but they were content to leave matters of belief to the individual. Hardly any of them were concerned with abolishing religious forms of identification and most implicitly understood the difference between “religiosity” and “religion.”

Enlightenment thinkers wished to temper the power of religious institutions by privileging the secular state and, for this reason, traditionalists and dogmatic defenders of the faith – all faiths – have criticized them unmercifully ever since…. Such a stance involves recognizing faith as a private conviction…. For those committed to the Enlightenment legacy, indeed, religion turns into a problem only when it strays beyond the private sphere and identifies its concerns with those of the public weal. (Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment, 2004, pp.166-167)

But what the Enlightenment balked at was the idea that religion should ever intrude into the public sphere, that it should subsume government and law.

Bunting describes a debate between Bronner – also author of an impassioned, if sometimes rather ranting, diatribe against the Iraqi War – and Jonathan Ree: Bronner sees the Enlightenment positioned

… at the heart of all democracy. It forms the basis of freedom and human rights, for example its views on torture. It argued that we temper our worst tendencies through reason. It was not against religion, but against fanaticism, and argued that religion should be kept in the private sphere…. He concluded by saying we need to pick up the Enlightenment legacy and adapt it.

Yet for Bunting this is all superfluous. Despite holding to some Enlightenment values – free flow of ideas, the appeal to evidence, some notion of what is a true argument, and, the courage to use her own (admittedly tenuous) understanding – she’d rather embrace the irrationality of Freud, Nietzsche and Foucault.

Then we come to this un-enlightened flourish:

… why do people think an understanding of rationality which is over 200 years old is useful now?

Oh, I don't know? Maybe because of all the above? Why does 200 years old become the arbitrary cut-off point? Of course, it doesn’t: if it did, why would Madeleine pay any attention to Islamic thought (1400 years old). Why would Freud (80 years old), Foucault (30 years old) and Nietzsche (120 years old) sneak in through the back door with their theories of irrationality? And why would people still persist in writing (and unfortunately reading) interminable nonsense, despite all the available evidence suggesting they should probably desist?

Harold Pinter awards (cont.)

The potty-mouthed poet's won the Nobel Prize:

In an almost entirely unexpected move, the Swedish Academy have this lunchtime announced their decision to award this year's Nobel prize for Literature to the British playwright, author and recent poet, Harold Pinter and not, as was widely anticipated, to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk or the Syrian poet Adonis.

In my day you wouldn't have got a CSE with this:

Hallelullah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.

We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.

It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!

Hallelullah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.

We did it.

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth

Mind you, it was for his dramatic works, so I could be being unfair?

The changing face of anti-Semitism

Amoz Oz has an interesting paragraph in A Tale of Love and Darkness:

Europe has now changed completely, and is full of Europeans from wall to wall. Incidentally, the graffiti in Europe have also changed from wall to wall. When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said 'Jews go home to Palestine'. Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a vist, the walls all screamed: 'Jews get out of Palestine'.

By the way, this book would make even a Muscular Liberal a little weepy.

What's my motivation?

David Aaronovitch has a piece in today's Times, probing possible moral equivalences between the Nazi's, suicide bombers and the US forces in Iraq:

Many people die in wars or as the result of violence. For that great majority of us who aren’t pacifists and who wouldn’t attempt to interpose our bodies between our sisters and the raping Hun, there’s always the question of whether some kinds of violence are less bad than others.

What makes the fire-bombing of Tokyo less morally offensive than the great Mukai-Noda decapitation contest?

…If we kill innocents, in whatever numbers, in whatever way and for whatever reason — save direct self-defence — then what says that we’re not just as bad as they are?

Aaronovitch looks at potential moral differences between these acts: ' [...] the motivation matters. I believe that it is depraved to take pleasure from the murder, ill-treatment or torture of fellow human beings.’ In the cases Aaronovitch sites, there is a dramatic excess, a sadism, a gross infliction of pain that wasn’t required, whether the aim itself was just or unjust. These regimes exist by, and for, the exercise of unrestrained violence.

And:

I think intention matters. If your violence is caused by a desire for Lebensraum at the expense of racial inferiors, the intention is obviously less honourable than, say, that of removing Saddam Hussein. But if the desire behind the Iraq invasion had been, as some critics charged, merely to annex Iraq’s oil, then all deaths caused by the coalition would have been morally repugnant.

But is intent enough to justify a course of action? For instance, I can do something good for good intentions, something bad with good intentions, something inadvertently good with bad intentions, or something bad with bad intentions. Anyone can argue that their intent was pure and, of course, we can examine their subsequent actions and either believe them or discount their gloss on events. But the individuals’ self-image of their actions doesn’t seem sufficient.

And even if we don’t take sadistic pleasure from an action, if we embark on a course of action that can potentially result in significant loss of life, can we necessarily justify this course of action? The case for Iraq as a just war remains strong. But for a just war to be just, the conduct also has to be just. If, for instance, there is a suspicion, or at least a high statistical probability, that a great number of civilians – the very people we’re hoping to free from a barbarous dictator - will die as a result of our actions, is it still just to embark on such actions?

While intention and motivation do matter, these are often fuzzy areas that can all too-readily be discounted. While motivation and intention can make us seem ethically aware, they don't actually offer much to the victims of the violence. They merely seem to gratify our own moral self-image. Yet the very attention to civilian deaths and casualties - something that has unfortunately been absent during the Iraq war - could have been one area that distinguished us from other forms of killing.

Perhaps these sometimes appalling acts – those resulting in the unintentional killing of civilians – can be partly justified through two further appeals. One, something of a utilitarian argument, that war can sometimes save lives. This could be used to partly justify Hiroshima, the fire-bombing of Dresden and the war in Iraq. But a further justification, if a little paradoxical, could be the relation of the war to fundamental, immutable and universal human rights:

Force that observes limits and is premised on a concern with human dignity is frequently called upon to fight force that operates without limits and makes a mockery of human dignity. (Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror, 2004, p.168)

However, this appeal to human rights would necessitate a properly proportionate use of force, the use of force that didn't value servicemen's lives above those of civilians:

If the decision to intervene is morally compelling, it cannot be conditioned on political considerations that assume an asymmetrical valuing of human life. (Paul W. Kahn, War and Sacrifice in Kosovo, Philosophy and Public Policy 19, nos 2-3, Spring - Summer 1999:1-6, in Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror, 2004, p.157)

Even after all this, I think an ethical difference does exist between the US forces in Iraq, Nazi war criminals and suicide bombers, and this is something that can't be laid down in a ready-made formula. But a difference does exist, that recently stated by Amos Oz:

...we might occasionally take wrong turns. But even as we take a wrong turn, we still know what we are doing. We know the difference between good and evil, between inflicting pain and healing, between Goethe and Goebbels. Between Heine and Heydrich. Between Weimar and Buchenwald. Between individual responsibility and collective kitsch.