Politics

Essays

thesamovar — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 19:22:25 +0100

Below is a list of my essays on politics.

Critical review of Robert Nozick's "Anarchy, State and Utopia"

Articles

thesamovar — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 19:17:46 +0100

Below is a list of my politics articles.

Torture

thesamovar — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 06:40:37 +0100

[Note: this article was written around September 2003, but I feel it is relevant now. It is also unfinished, as should be obvious.]

In recent years, a longstanding disgust at the concept of torture has begun to be challenged. Torture is beginning to be seen as an acceptable weapon in the war against terrorism. The US has used “torture lite” on the prisoners held at Guantanamo bay. A British court recently ruled that a piece of evidence acquired through torture was admissible. In Germany, a policeman used the threat of torture to extract information from a suspect. [This whole paragraph needs researched in depth and expanded.]

[Description of sensory deprivation, comparison to Northern Ireland and Tim Shallice’s work. Conclusion: “Torture lite” is torture.]

[Some description of US attitudes to torture over the last 50 years or so might be interesting.]

The newly emerging attitude of acceptance of the legitimacy of torture is most likely a result of unbounded fear of terrorism. In our imagination, there is no limit to the destructive potential of terrorism. It is easy to picture millions dying after a dirty nuclear bomb going off in a major city, or biological or chemical agents being introduced into the water supply. Faced with a threat of seemingly infinite proportions, it seems as though any preventative measure, however outrageous, is justified. Especially so, since most of us can imagine ourselves as potential victims of terrorism but not as potential victims of state sanctioned torture.

Since the World Trade Center attack in New York, governments around the world have been using this fear to undermine domestic civil liberties. The promotion of torture is the next phase. At each step along this road – a road we have so far taken only a few steps along but which ends in a totalitarian state – we should stop and look back. If we pursue a purely militaristic strategy, the threat of terrorism will not go away – the situation in Israel should be proof enough of this. It is easy, when we live in fear, to hope that each small step along the road makes us safer. This is why we must now, and at every future step, look back and consider what the steps already taken have done for us, and equally importantly what they have done to us.

The utilitarian case for torture runs as follows. Torture, objectively speaking, is an evil, but it may give us information which could save lives, and it may be the only way to get that information. So, on balance, torture is justified in some cases where the information gained could end up saving lives.

The first thing to be clear about is that torture, if legitimised or legalised, will not be used only in cases where it will end up saving lives, but also in cases where it does not. The legal principle that people are innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt encapsulates the moral truth that it is so much worse to wrongly punish the innocent than to let the guilty go free that we should err on the side of caution in passing verdict. The decision to torture an individual is both a guilty verdict and a sentence. As such, it should be subject to the same standards of “beyond all reasonable doubt”. But the nature of investigating terrorism is such that these decisions will always be made behind closed doors, on the discretion of individuals and on the sole basis of their own judgement. It is inconceivable that giving the state the power to torture will not end in cases of innocent people being tortured.

Secondly, even supposing that the individual is indeed guilty of being part of a terrorist group, torturing them is a de facto punishment. As a society, we reject the idea of torture as a punishment, but to accept it as a means of obtaining information entails also accepting it as a means of punishment. Even if our intention were only to extract information, we can’t escape the fact that it is also a punishment. Once the information is extracted, the experience of having being tortured remains and can never be taken away. This is not only a punishment, but a particularly brutal sort of punishment that we would not tolerate in any other situation, no matter the crime. To accept the legitimacy of torture would not be merely a matter of pragmatism and expediency, it would be to accept a deep and fundamental change in the basic moral code of our society.

There is one more aspect to the utilitarian case, the reductio ad absurdum. It goes like this. Consider the hypothetical situation in which an individual knows that unless he gets a piece of information from a terrorist, a nuclear bomb will go off killing millions of people. Surely, in this situation, he should be allowed to use torture? Fans of the TV series “24” will be well acquainted with this scenario. There are two points here. Firstly, legalisation of torture cannot, as discussed above, be limited only to cases like these. You either have torture wholesale or not at all. Secondly, if an individual were in such a situation, he would still have the choice of using torture even if it were not legal. The choice would be a personal moral one, and it would be on their own conscience. It is important to understand that the law is not and cannot be a substitute for individual moral judgement in particular cases, it is a mechanism for imposing order in a systematic way. We should consider laws based on their systematic consequences in practice not on their theoretical consequences in extreme hypothetical situations.

Criticising war-mongering is to show true respect for the dead

thesamovar — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 06:38:29 +0100

I wrote this article on September 24th 2001 jointly with Sean Hartnoll for Take Issue! - I still stand by what we said then.

It is difficult to say much about the recent tragedy in New York and Washington that has not already been said. Many people have been shocked by the appearance of criticism of the US or concern about what they will do in response to this event. It is our aim to make clear why this criticism is not the product of a hatred or envy of North American people, nor of a disregard for human life and suffering, but is actually the product of an equal concern for all human life, regardless of nationality.

At the time of writing there has been no reaction to this event by the US or its allies. Our fear, and the fear of all of those who voice concern about what the US will do, is that the reaction will take the form of previous reactions (by the US and others) against terrorist attacks, perhaps even worse. For example, in 1998 the US bombed what later turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (producing half their pharmaceutical supply), thinking that it was a chemical weapons factory, in retaliation for attacks on their embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

The objective is to analyse the social conditions that contribute to the formation of terrorist groups, not to point the finger at the US, but so as to inform our future actions. This is the intent of the majority who have written articles attacking past US foreign policy. Regardless of the motivations of individual terrorists, a military response would certainly increase existing hostility towards the US. There is a vicious circle of violence; much like the Israeli-Palestinian situation, but played out on the world stage.

A logical objection remains: they will hit us again and soon, perhaps with nuclear or chemical weapons, unless we hit them first. But we have been hitting for years and years through bombs, sanctions and the funding of dictatorships and terrorist organisations (such as the CIA funding bin Laden in the 1980s). In the short term we need to make internal security arrangements, to an extent consistent with maintaining civil liberties, in order to deal with the immanent threat of terrorism. In the long term we need to change the way we relate to other countries and peoples, for instance the US support of Israel.

Our second major concern is the way this event has been used by politicians and the media. Whilst accusing dissenters and critics of being disrespectful to the dead and trying to further their own ideological agenda, they have fallen foul of their own criticisms. Politicians use emotional rhetoric that appeals to genuine human feelings of loss and anger to gloss over unpleasant details of political acts that they would never get away with otherwise.

The language used - "evil", "civilised world", "fanatic", and the like - renders the "enemy" beyond understanding. When combined with what even Bush must know is an untruth - "with us or for terrorism" - it serves to marginalise dissent both across the world and within the US. The Telegraph's "useful idiots" column, a list of writers disagreeing with the "war on terrorism" consensus, similarly uses a natural discomfort about criticism of the US in the wake of the tragedy to tarnish dissenters. This is presumably intended to have the long term effect of discrediting those who regularly challenge the Telegraph's worldview.

The US government has considered pushing through legislation which at other times might have been difficult. Tax cuts, supposedly to boost the economy, are an idea ridiculed even by conservative economists such as Paul Krugman in the New York Times. Other ideas being considered are an increase in military spending, lifting the ban on extra-judicial executions carried out by CIA agents abroad, and so forth. The British government, too, has sought to increase their police powers under the Terrorism Act, previously an unpopular bill. Big business has also used this opportunity. For instance British Airways, experiencing financial difficulties before the events, found an opportune moment to sack 1 in 8 of its workers.

A disturbing aspect of the media coverage, and the three minutes silence, is the elevation of 5,000 North American lives far above untold numbers of lives outside of the West. For instance the largely unreported loss of a million lives in Iraq as a direct result of economic sanctions and the continuing bombing campaign. Or the 5.5 million Afghans, according to the UN, dependent this winter on now non-existent food aid. This is at best disrespectful of human life and at worst profoundly racist. The term "collateral damage" has been used for very similar situations in the past. It was a terrible phrase then, it would be a terrible phrase if anyone were using it now. In the war against terrorism to come, let's make sure we show due respect to all lives.

Civil liberties and terrorism

thesamovar — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 06:34:45 +0100

This article was published in Take Issue! in February 2002. It's a little dated now, but I think I stand by most of what I wrote then.

As part of the "War on Terror" many governments around the world have proposed and even implemented new "emergency" legislation to deal with the threat of terrorism. Some of this new legislation is fundamentally at odds with the principles of liberty that are part of democratic society. In the UK, this new legislation is the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 which continues the work of the Terrorism Act 2000 (you can find the text of the two Bills by starting from http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/atoz/terrorists.htm).

Civil liberties are important because they protect the innocent, not the guilty. The requirement that police officers need a warrant before they can arrest someone or search people or premises, the right to a trial by jury, the right to be innocent until proven guilty - all of these are designed to protect innocent people from undue interference in their lives and harassment by the state. In the UK we no longer have any of these rights. For example, the Terrorism Act 2000, now part of UK law but drafted before the September 11 attacks, states that "A constable may arrest without a warrant a person whom he reasonably suspects to be a terrorist." (In other words, you now no longer need to be seen committing a crime to be arrested without a warrant.)

The basic principle underlying these rights is that it is better to let a genuine criminal escape accusation or imprisonment than to wrongly accuse or imprison an innocent person. To judge the merits of this principle, imagine yourself wrongly accused or imprisoned because the government thought it better to cast the net wide.

It is likely that minority groups will be disproportionately affected by the new legislation. The Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism (www.fairuk.org) in their submission to the Home Affairs Select Committee warned that the effect could be "Increased discriminatory treatment (and perception of discriminatory treatment) of Muslims by law enforcement agencies… The Macpherson and Denham Reports have recently confirmed the likelihood of 'institutional racism' within these institutions. These tendencies may take an anti-Muslim form following September 11."

This would be deeply wrong and disturbing in its own right, but the danger in allowing one group, in this case Muslims, to be singled out in this way could be even greater as the example of Jews in Nazi Germany clearly shows. For us to oppose government only when our liberty is directly threatened is not enough to safeguard democratic society. We have to take an interest in the liberty of everyone.

Many believe that although overturning civil liberties is undesirable, it is justified in response to the threat of terrorist attacks. The Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) allow for some restrictions on freedom if the threat is convincingly established and the restrictions are proportionate to the threat. To some it might seem obvious that, given that some 3,000 people died in the World Trade Center attacks, the danger is convincingly established and so enormous that the government's measures are proportionate.

However, in 1998 in the UK 3,501 people died in accidental road deaths. There is a convincingly established danger here, and yet what would be the reaction if the government proposed legislation suggesting that anybody that the police thought might cause an accident could be immediately arrested and have their car confiscated (without any restrictions)? Or if they proposed banning driving after 8pm? Surely it would be considered as an unacceptable infringement of civil liberties? Certainly it would not be considered a proportionate response. Instead, we would demand that the government find other more acceptable ways of combating this problem. Why treat the threat of terrorism differently?

One possible reason is the enormous destructive potential of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. However, this would not be a good reason for infringing our civil liberties. If there was an imminent and predictable danger that would result in mass deaths and that could actually be stopped by an infringement on civil liberties, that would be reason to do so. However, if the danger is not imminent and predictable, one that will perhaps never go away and that anyway would not be stopped by restricting civil liberties, then we should oppose it.

It is not imminent and predictable because there have been a tiny number of known uses of biological or chemical weapons by terrorist organisations compared to the thousands of yearly conventional terrorist attacks. These few have resulted in a tiny number of deaths compared to conventional terrorist attacks (for example the Aum Shinrikyo group killed a total of 19 people in two sarin gas attacks in Japan, one of the very few successful biological terrorist attacks).

More importantly, the fact that the threat of terrorism will not go away (at least in the foreseeable future) means that restrictions on civil liberties as a short term measure would not even stop the danger. To be effective, restrictions on civil liberties would have to be long term, this would be a radical and disturbing change in the way our society works.

The government was elected to serve the interests of everyone and they have enormous expertise and experience to draw on. This might suggest we should place our trust in them in such an important matter. Although this might seem plausible it is based on a rather hopeful understanding of the way our democratic institutions work.

The primary motivation, in a democratic society, for any government's actions is re-election. This is really not controversial. It is the point of democracy to force the government to govern in such a way as to get them re-elected. It accounts for both the good and the bad aspects of it.

This amoral (not immoral) motivation of government is not because it is composed of amoral individuals, probably quite the contrary. A government can be forced into taking certain actions even if the majority of the members of that government are opposed to them, precisely because we live in a democracy.

Two of the major groups that need to be appeased to be re-elected are the voters and the business community. Voters need to be appeased because they directly decide who gets to be in power. The business community needs to be appeased because they have an indirect influence in at least three important ways: Firstly because policies which were unfavourable to profits would cause businesses to move to more profitable countries, which would in turn make the government unpopular with voters. Secondly, because of their influence in the national media and hence on public opinion. Thirdly, because all major parties rely heavily on corporate funding. Note that none of these require corruption or conspiracies on the part of the government or the business community, they simply arise naturally.

In response to terrorism the government has to ensure that they are seen to be doing something about the threat of terrorism. This is very different from undertaking policies which might actually reduce the threat of terrorism, many of which would be unpopular, particularly in the business community (such as an ethical foreign policy, antithetical to profit), or too long term to be of any use in terms of re-election. Simply visibly "doing something" about terrorism is all the government need do, since voters have no way of evaluating the effectiveness or not of different policies - partly because terrorist acts in the West are rare and much of the data on terrorist activities is secret, making it impossible to use evidence to judge the efficacy of the policy taken, and partly because the enormous complexity of the factors that cause terrorism make it impossible to evaluate untested policies. In the absence of a deeper understanding of terrorism, the simplest and most effective strategy for re-election is to decisively and visibly "do something", regardless of whether that something will help or not.

Our responsibility, as citizens of an as yet imperfect and fragile democracy, should be both to seek to understand the threat of terrorism at a deeper level, and to demonstrate to the government that we are sufficiently concerned about civil liberties that it would cost them votes to pursue their current policies.

Critical review of Robert Nozick's "Anarchy, State and Utopia"

thesamovar — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 06:20:28 +0100

Robert Nozick's "Anarchy, State and Utopia" is undoubtedly a highly original and intelligent work. It has three major flaws though. Firstly, his idea of a minimal state requires not only that the state itself respects individual liberty to an unparalleled degree, but also that the population uniformly respects others' liberty to a high degree. Secondly, there is no discussion of power relations and the possibility of actually achieving a minimal state; the introduction of a minimal state today would not, and perhaps could not, have the effect Nozick desires, and there is little indication of what sequence of events could lead to a minimal state which would work. Thirdly, the "entitlement theory of justice" is inherently dualistic, a distribution of holdings is either just or unjust, but to defend it against the charge that a just distribution of holdings is impossible to achieve in practice, one would probably have to introduce a variable scale of justness, which would be antithetical to the spirit of the theory.

His entitlement theory of justice says, roughly, that if the initial distribution of holdings is just and every transaction that subsequently occurs is just, then the distribution of holdings will be just at all later times. A just transaction, again roughly, is one which is mutually and voluntarily (i.e. without physical coercion) agreed upon.

The minimal state is one that serves only to provide a monopoly police and military function. The police function is to protect its citizens against violence, coercion or fraud, and to enforce contracts. The military function is obviously to protect the state against outside aggression.

Is it possible for a society to exist whose basic structures contradict the propensities of the people who make up that society? More specifically, is it possible that a minimal state could coexist with a society composed of individuals who do not respect others' liberty? It seems unlikely that it could; there would be no pressure to maintain the minimality of the state if a majority wished to infringe on the liberty of some individuals, and so a minimal state would be unstable or prone to becoming a more than minimal state. The only other way a minimal state could be achieved in a stable way would be for an external power to impose it on an essentially unwilling population, a benevolent (libertarian) dictatorship. Surely this is not a state of affairs Nozick would consider desirable?

There are two major consequences of this requirement on a society with a minimal state. Firstly, it is not as permissive as Nozick would presumably like it to be, since it imposes respect for others' liberty on the populace. Secondly, it is as utopian, in the sense that it requires an enormous change in popular consciousness, as many of the socialist systems that Nozick criticises on these grounds. If we were able to achieve a society in which people did uniformly respect others' liberty to a high degree, without doubt an incredibly desirable state of affairs, then the institutions and legislation of a less than minimal state would either not infringe upon others' liberty (because the institutions and legislation wouldn't be used in that way), or those aspects that would infringe upon them would naturally fade away anyway (because there would be no support for such institutions or legislation).

This brings us on to the second point, the lack of a discussion on how a minimal state could be achieved consistently with the principles that motivate it (mainly liberty). The major stumbling block is probably the requirement that the population uniformly respect others' liberty, and the massive change in popular consciousness that this would require.

One of the major questions that has to be answered to determine the feasibility of achieving this is whether or not is possible, in general rather than in particular cases, for an individual who considers himself or herself superior to another to respect the other's liberty to the same degree as someone he or she considers an equal. For example, if the individual has more wealth, better social status, or whatever, can they respect the liberty of individuals with less wealth, social status, etc.?

If indeed general equality is the prerequisite for a uniform respect for others' liberty then it may be that Nozick's minimal state would, to function as intended, actually require a general equality (in wealth at the very least). This would, I suspect, be much at variance with Nozick's idea of a minimal state.

Finally, Nozick's entitlement theory of justice. There are three observations that undermine the usefulness of this theory of justice. Firstly, there will always be unjust transactions to deal with. Doing so is the purpose of the police, one of the two institutions in a minimal state. Secondly, not all unjust transactions will be detected, or even if they are it will not always be possible to provide compensation (for example if the criminal is not found). Thirdly, the entitlement theory of justice is "all or nothing". Either the entire distribution of holdings is just or it is not. It follows that a single unjust transaction that is not compensated undermines the justness of the entire distribution of holdings for all time. Moreover, this state of affairs is inevitable from the first two observations. So what are we to do with a theory of justice that inevitably says that the distribution of holdings is unjust?

The obvious answer is that, for example, a small theft does not really undermine the justness of the entire distribution of holdings. However, to fix the entitlement theory of justice so that this statement is meaningful one would probably have to introduce either a variable scale of justness, or perhaps introduce the idea of a local injustice in the distribution of holdings. The second attempt at a solution to the problem would not alone be sufficient though. Once a local injustice in the distribution of holdings is introduced, it could spread through the entire system reasonably quickly (because a just transaction with someone who has gained by an unjust transaction would spread the injustice to the other party in the transaction) until the entire distribution was unjust. So, at some point the concept of a sliding scale of justness would have to be introduced. What implications does this have for the theory?

Firstly, a sliding scale of justness is antithetical to the spirit of the original theory. The purpose of the original theory was to rule out moralistic statements like "it isn't fair that some are so rich whilst others are so poor". If the initial distribution of holdings and every subsequent transaction is just then nobody can complain. Once the possibility of a variable scale of justness is introduced, there is a possibility that injustice in the distribution of holdings can accumulate. The possibility that "it isn't fair that some are so rich whilst others are so poor" is now one that cannot be avoided a priori but has to be argued empirically (perhaps an impossible task). More importantly, it is not compatible with Nozick's distaste for "patterned" conceptions of the justness of distributions of holdings. Essentially, a patterned conception of justice in holdings is one that says "From each according to X, to each according to Y" where X and Y are some criteria (e.g. X could be "their ability" and Y could be "their need"). Nozick argues against them because, according to him, they necessarily involve a constant interference in the private lives of individuals. (This is simply stated rather than argued, but that's another matter.) However, unless he could produce an argument to demonstrate that injustice in distributions would not accumulate, then it seems that some sort of interference would be necessary to stop it.

So, in conclusion, there seem to be some deep contradictions inherent in "Anarchy, State, and Utopia". The entitlement theory of justice probably cannot be fixed without introducing some form of constant interference in individuals' private transactions and the minimal state cannot survive as intended without general equality.

Politics

thesamovar — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 06:17:14 +0100

I'm interested in radical critiques of contemporary western society and capitalism, and anarchist and left wing political theory. You can read my articles here, and my essays here.