The recent spate of government crackdowns on Free Speech and Free Assembly in the Middle East has inspired a great many arguments for action and a great many arguments urging non-intervention. Looking at this particular incident, and the previous one, and the one before that, and any number of moral arguments (on both sides) for any given policy, it’s difficult to ignore that, in moral disputes, the moral arguments for action and intervention have far more persuasive power than the moral arguments that urge non-intervention.
When you see a government shooting unarmed people, it’s very difficult to identify with the government. When one projects oneself into the scene, one imagines oneself as an unarmed civilian being shot. It’s infuriating to see the powerful shoot, maim, kill the powerless. We remember Kent State. We remember lynchings in the South. We watch movies where we see Ghandi’s Dharasana Satyagraha and we rage.
We know, in our hearts, that the moral argument pushes us to intervene and make things better. If not us, who? If not now, when? We, as a society, have a responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves against the tyrants who would murder them.
Isn’t that argument much more powerful than the argument that we, as a society, have a moral responsibility to respect the autonomy of other countries? It’s like some topsy-turvy world where one argues against someone who keeps hammering the right of slave-owners to have the freedom to own slaves. Like someone who says that we shouldn’t intervene in a mugging because of the mugger’s right to make a living.
The problem, of course, is that the moment we say “of course we ought to intervene!” as we nod to the idea of stepping in and saving the poor victim, we will not prevent a mugging as much as send dozens of missiles flying… which hasn’t really that many analogies for the mugging. “So we use a modified Kalashnikov and go full rock and roll in the general direction of whatever weapon the mugger is using and hope that we also kill the mugger without doing appreciable harm to the muggee… sure, a couple of bullets might hit, but such collateral damage is to be expected. The important thing is to keep in mind that the mugger has been mugging the muggee for the last 30ish years and we ought prevent him from mugging for one second more.”
At the very least, one wants to ask “why is this exceptionally important *RIGHT NOW*?”… and to hear the question answered with another question probing the motivations of someone who wouldn’t want to prevent a mugging results not in a satisfactory answer but, yes, even more questions.
And that’s without getting into issues such as “what happened the last time we tried to break up a mugging by going full rock and roll?” or “what happened the time before the last time we tried to break up a mugging by going full rock and roll?” As it turns out, the predictions made by the folks who said, paraphrased, “this won’t end well” were more accurate than the ones made by the folks who said, paraphrased, “maybe the mugging victim will ask me out on a date because this is so very romantic”. (Hell, one could write a stand-alone essay discussing the different thought processes that show up when the muggee starts screaming at the guy intervening and setting IEDs and putting up posters of Moqtada al Sadr instead of saying “thanks, that guy was mugging me”.)
Indeed, when someone starts looking at the answers to “what happened the last couple of times we did this?” one starts seeing patterns. “Well, what about the time before that? Does the pattern still hold?”
If the answer comes “yes” (and it does), is there some conclusion we might be able to reach about the moral argument that tugs oh-so-strongly at our hearts and begs us to intervene?
Those aren’t the questions that interest me the most, however. I am most interested in why relying on the moral argument for any given situation makes us so much more likely to have to rely on the moral argument for a different one. Having done that twice, why are we even more likely to have to rely on it for this third problem over here? In most cases, adopting an argument that has not only in living memory but in recent memory resulted in catastrophe would be seen as, at best, foolish. Why does this particular trap catch us again and again and again?
Because “…freedom is like a kite that can fly higher and higher in the breeze…”
This is the only April Fool’s post I have liked so far today.
Because people want to believe that they can make a the world a better place, but they don’t want to think about the constraints and complexities that really face them.
It doesn’t matter whether the policy is supporting a foreign rebel movement, or mandating that people buy health insurance. The implicit belief that its intentions that count is ubiquitous and pernicious.