The leading political blogger Graemer Archer once said of coherence in politics:
Coherence, you see, is the natural consequence of an ideology, and in politics it is rarely A Good Thing. Since an ideologue has a rule book, a device which he or she believes is a perfect description of the rules which govern man's interactions with man, he or she need almost never make any contradictory statements. This follows with probability nearly one, because all political thought will flow from the axioms of the ideology machine.
He concluded:
That's enough. Leave theology to the religious, and ideology to the left. And leave coherence to mathematics. Politics is for humans.
Graeme happens to be a Tory, but dissing what he says just for that attribute is not good enough. He is a fluent and articulate blogger of subtlety and great power; and (as most readers will know) I was a judge of the George Orwell Blogging Prize which made him this year's winner.
So is he right?
For me, coherence is a virtue when thinking about political, media, and legal issues.
When Johann Hari first faced criticism for his journalism, I set out why it was important to hold him to the same standards which would be applied to conservative and reactionary writers.
Similarly, I have also critcised supposed champions of rationalityRichard Dawkins and A C Grayling. On the other hand, I have defended Cherie Booth from unfair criticism in respect of the religious language in her sentencing remarks.
But that sort of stuff is easy; such consistency is the simple avoidance of partisanship (which is a bane of British intellectual and political life).
More difficult is conceptual coherence: do one's arguments in context [A] lose any force because they do not work in context [B]?
Over the last year I have written on a variety of topics, and I do wonder if my position is coherent overall. In each case my argument is made sincerely (I am not a contrarian, though I often get called that); but do all the arguments cohere with each other?
Earlier this week I set out some thoughts on abortion. Here I prioritised the privacy of the woman and said that an abortion is a surgical procedure which is the business only of her and her doctor.
In this, I was being consistent with my views on transgender issues and sex work: a transgendered person's surgery is a private medical matter, and a sex worker has complete autonomy over what he or she can do with their own body.
So far, so coherent; and because the principle of privacy being employed is consistent, I think my overall position is stronger for it.
However, I have also written recently about capital punishment.
There I denied the autonomy of those involved:
But capital punishment demands more than a willing executioner and cheering spectators; it needs for the whole of the State apparatus to be augmented so that the end of a given formal process is the deliberate killing of a human being. The absolute wrongness of the original act is then repeated by the State on our behalf.
This is why capital punishment can be fairly said to be barbaric. It takes something which is wrong, and then projects it on the political and legal institutions of the State: it makes repeating that wrong a purpose of public policy.
Is this coherent with my view of abortion as an essentially private matter?
Is not an abortion also a requirement that "the State apparatus to be augmented so that the end of a given formal process is the deliberate killing of a human being"?
For me, the answers to these questions are informed by my (implicit) denial that the aborted foetus is a human being.
But what of my general support for "liberal intervention" in foreign policy, where people are killed as a consequence of the military actions of the UK State?
Can one oppose the death penalty as a matter of first principle and not also be a pacifist (or at least an isolationist where the military is used only for self-defence)?
At this point, one can imagine Graeme nodding and saying this was his very point. Coherence, by itself, is not a political virtue.
He is certainly right to the extent that something illiberal or misconceived should not be done just because of a general ideological stance.
But when it comes to taking lives (or the taking of potential life), it appears to me that the principled arguments to be deployed should cohere.
If one life (or potential life) is to be taken by the State in one situation, but not in another, it seems to me imperative that the State - and the supporters of the State's policy - should be clear as to what the basis of that lethal or non-lethal action is.
Lives may be at stake from weak or muddled thinking.
Either the State can take lives (or potential lives), or it cannot.
And if so, we need to know why one life is taken but not another when similar arguments could apply.
Graeme is right to emphasise that purported coherence by itself is not a virtue; but in matters of life and death, it seems to me that there should be coherence.
If capital punishment - or torture - is wrong in all circumstances, why is the killing - or maiming - of people by our armed services not also wrong?
Can I really be against capital punishment as a matter of basic principle, but in favour of liberal interventionism abroad?
How come the latter gets the benefit of the "greater good" and not the former?
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Saturday, 3 September 2011
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22 comments:
I think looking for coherence of this kind is a mistake with large issues for the simple reason that more than one idea or motive or reason is involved. Abortion isn't just about privacy or autonomy or any other single-word item.
"Can I really be against capital punishment as a matter of basic principle, but in favour of liberal interventionism abroad? How come the latter gets the benefit of the "greater good" and not the former? "
Begs the question: do you really think capital punishment would result in "greater good"? If I believed it did then I am not convinced I would oppose it.
"Greater good" is the key to coherence here. I guess that you don't believe that the greater good is served by the death penalty, in that life imprisonment prevents murder just as effectively as the death penalty, without the disadvantage of taking one more life.
Liberal military intervention in foreign policy is professed to be done "in the greater good". Presumably the greater good here is saving more lives than the the number of deaths it causes. Surely a net gain in lives is consistent with opposing the death penalty?
Thanks for your comments,
Even if there were a "greater good" I still would oppose the death penalty, as the deliberate judicial killing of a person is wrong in all circumstances.
I have the same view of torture.
Fascinating article, for sure. It seems to me that it could link to a separate piece about action vs inaction. 'Liberal intervention' of the sort seen in Libya does indeed mean the state is involved in killing people, but those people (in theory at least) are trying to kill others (civilians, in the case of Libya) and so the state's action is intended to preserve life, even if it is taking it in order to do so. This is, of course, that slippery slope of weighing up numbers killed vs numbers saved, the latter of which is often unknowable.
When it comes to capital punishment, the state can achieve what it needs to - the preservation of life of any future victims, the punishment of transgressors etc - without killing. Prison is a more humane and sensible alternative (sensible in that it allows for erroneous convictions to be overturned and prisoners released).
Wherever the state can achieve the preservation of life abroad by more peaceful means (eg sanctions, diplomacy etc.), it should also do so.
It seems to me that Archer's position is fundamentally undemocratic, or at least un-elective-oligarchy-ic. The kind of pragmatic, principleless politics he is espousing is the kind we had under Tony Blair, and which came with "sofa cabinets", unaccountability, misdirection and contempt of parliament. It seems to me that the manifestos on which we elect our rulers are not just itemized to-do lists, giving all and only the intended legislative programme, but are taken as representative of the kind of legislation which the party wish to pass, and from which we—the electorate—tend to infer principles which we compare with our own instincts (or, preferably, our own reasoning!).
It is interesting that Archer considers principle-led politics to be leftist dogmatism. It is in the nature of the Conservative to assume that the status quo needs no defence, and therefore he or she can continue to promote ideas such as the free movement of capital, inheritance of personal wealth and so forth without conceptual analysis. They just "are the case", they are "givens." In fact, of course, they are part of a programme as principled, coherent and dogmatic as any leftist agenda.
David: whilst I am inclined to agree with you re capital punishment and torture, I would be interested to know how you, as an atheist and rationalist, justify these positions. "Always wrong," smacks of moral absolutism, and as an atheist I find myself disliking this, even though I hold them too. As per my previous comment, those of conservative (now small-c as well as big-C) leanings have less problems, because of their ability to accept "givens", but as a progressive who wishes to subject his own assumptions to analysis, I can't get away with this.
To be honest I rather think that your reason for opposing the death penalty is pretty weak as killing is by no means the wrong in the world. Kidnap could be seen as akin to imprisionment and fines to theft: by your logic almost all punishment is barbaric and wrong.
There are better liberal grounds for opposing the death penalty which could leave your belief in liberal interventionism intact: e.g an absolute right to life granted behind Rawls' veil of ignorance.
Ted Honderich is good in this area. If you've got time you should read his books, "Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair?" in which he fully debunks the idea that Conservatism has any philosophy beyond self-serving defence of privilege and outlines his Principle of Humanity and, "Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War: Palestine, 9/11, Iraq, 7/7" in which he examines thr rights and wrongs of political violence.
I think we need to be clear about the difference between the state killing people and the destruction of an early-term foetus. The religious pro-lifers aren't consistent in so many ways. They do not mourn miscarriages or allow unbaptised babies the same burial rights as identical baptised babies. They certainly care little about a person's fate as soon as they are born if their politics is anything to go by. They too have been debunked fully, especially here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0kJHQpvgB8
There can be general principles that can guide one through life. They are applicable especially in politics, and can allow for apparent inconsistencies when compared with established politics. We want more people to be able to live better lives, for example.
Again Ted Honderich is excellent with his Principle of Humanity: "Our end must be to make well-off those who are badly off, by way of certain policies: (1) increasing means to well-being and, more surely, transferring means from the better-off that will not affect their well-being, (2) transferring means from the better-off that will affect their well-being, those at the higher levels to be affected first, and observing a certain limit, (3) reducing the necessity of inequalities, and (4) allowing only what can be called, without definition for now, necessary violence. Further, these policies are to be pursued in part by way of practices of equality."
More here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/PofH.html
That first sentence should read:
To be honest I rather think that your reason for opposing the death penalty is pretty weak as killing is by no means the only wrong in the world.
As a rationalist (that is I believe legislature should be driven by a rational evaluation of cause and effect, rather than by populism), the statement "the deliberate judicial killing of a person is wrong in all circumstances" does indeed smack of idealism.
Do you really mean "all circumstances", or do you mean "all circumstances that you can conceive of"? I would say the former is dogma, the latter is probably a rational view.
To test which, try a thought experiment in which in a liberal state valuing human rights, a hypothetical minority group of fascist atheists believe that by murdering politicians, journalists, lawyers, liberals and everyone of religious conviction, they could overthrow the state, which would then pardon the "political prisoners" that had been imprisoned for murder and proceed to cleanse the country of people not sharing their beliefs.
Thus, they are not deterred from murder by the current sanctions against it, but with no afterlife to look forward to, they are deterred by the death penalty. This movement is slow to start, but it becomes obvious that only the death penalty can "nip it in the bud".
Would the death penalty be acceptable then, in the greater good, or do you hold with "is wrong in all circumstances"?
[Hint: you could easily replace the subversive minority within with a foreign power, in which case the problem transforms to that of an state defending itself in wartime]
@A Brit Abroad: I do not think that "for the greater good" arguments can be used to address the problem. Firstly, they are not circumventing moral absolutism, there still remains an absolutist position: the meta-ethical principle that "the greater good" is the yardstick by which we measure morality.
More importantly, "greater good" arguments purport to be objective, but are in fact subjective. Your position of deterrence be countered by another "greater good" argument which stated that although there might be immediate deterrence effect, the presence of the death penalty in a society would normalize the concept of retributive killing, and in the longer term lead to an increase in revenge- and vigilante-style murders. Your "greater good" is immediate order in society, mine is the longer term production of a society of decent people who are less inclined to do the naughty things in the first place! I'm not saying for certain that my greater good is a greater greater good than your greater good, merely pointing out that it's not a simple calculation.
@Stuart Brown: Just to be clear, I'm not in favour of the death penalty or torture. But the reason I'm not in favour is that I believe they are not for the greater good.
In fact, I had to choose quite a contrived "thought experiment" to illustrate that their could conceivably be a situation where the death penalty is in the greater good, for a liberal society.
You are correct, though, in saying that the greater good is likely to be subjective. Presumably, Gadhaffi and Bashar al-Assad believe that killing and torturing protesters is in the greater good.
We are fortunate in living in a liberal, democratic society, in that the death penalty and torture are not necessary to maintain our society.
There are those (Rumpfelt, Cheney) that would argue that torture was necessary to defend liberal societies from "the war on terror". Presumably, they use a rational argument to justify this. But they are wrong - for every American life that might be saved by information obtained under torture, I believe about 10 more people would be persuaded to join the fight against America, because it is easier to persuade them that America is evil.
So you are also right to argue that calculating the greater good is quite complicated... But I believe if we bring the calculation out into the open, explain all the factors we are basing our decision on, then politics will be much less partisan and it will be easier to reach a rationally determined consensus, with the public understanding how the decision was made.
Surely if you oppose the deliberate judicial killing of a human being on the basis it requires the machinery of the state, to be consistent, you are going to have to declare yourself a pacifist. It's difficult to see how that very same argument wouldn't apply to military action involving the killing of a human being. I suppose you might invoke the principle that fewer people died as a result of the defeat of Adolph Hitler, but this line of taking the action that leads to the least number of deaths could lead us down some unpleasant paths. Should an oppressed minority not fight for its freedom if to do so would increase the number of deaths?
On the abortion side, you really are going to have to come up with some justifiable criteria defining at what point a foetus goes from being a non-human to a human being if you are to have a coherent argument.
I'm much less inclined to think coherence in any formal sense is possible in real life. We might manage a level of self-justified coherence which we find tolerable, but I think it impossible in any formal sense. What seems to happen is that lots of special cases, definitions and arguments are created to try to post-justify the original principles as being coherent and applicable in all circumstances. I think it's a nonsense. The real world is simply not reducible to algorithms. Indeed it's dawned on researches into the human mind, that we simply don't, and can't work that way. The mind would appear to be a seething mass of different, and often contradictory entities. Our decisions are largely made unconsciously, with the conscience mind doing its best to rationalise the result. To think there is a single coherent entity which controls our actions or thoughts is simply an egotistical conceit.
As Walt Whitman noted presciently
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
nb. on the use of capital punishment, I take the pragmatic line that we've reached a point in social development where it's unnecessary and possibly socially damaging. In other, very different, circumstances it might not be true.
This is a fascinating subject and there has been some empirical work into it. For example, most people would divert a train to save five people on the track even where it would kill another person in the path of the diverted train. They would, however, refuse to push a fat man from a bridge in order to stop the train and make it safe.
What seems to matter is the degree of agency in the act - there is a difference between killing someone and performing an act which will cause someone to be killed. In my view, there is less agency going to war than in capital punishment.
I think the original quote fails to distinguish simplicity from coherence. Ideologues are rarely coherent, in my experience, but do have a view of the world which is 'one size fits all'. Politics requires pragmatism but you can be pragmatic in a coherent fashion.
It is late at night so I cannot resist being a bit provacative and testing your coherence to its limit. Does your view of private autonomy over the body extend to female genital mutilation?
No assumption should be made from the above about my own views. I just like to explore these issues.
As someone who opposes both capital punishment and liberal intervention, I do not think your position incoherent. There are arguments for and against capital punishment and for and against liberal intervention. Without enumerating these arguments, I think it is possible to choose a subset of these arguments such that your position is supported. I do, however, think that your position is incomplete - that is you have not considered a sufficient number of arguments to resolve your dilemma.
On the position of liberal intervention itself: if you support liberal intervention abroad, then, presumably, you would support liberal intervention by a foreign power in Britain. If not, then your position is certainly incoherent.
You are right about the importance of coherence but your thinking about actions in general is naive. You do not make the proper distinctions between types of causing death. You run together as morally equivalent, all kinds of causing death which leads you to think that capital punishment is morally equivalent to abortion and humanitarian interventions, private muders, and presumably, self defence, death caused by negligence etc. The issue of coherence has risen for you because you fail to recognise the distinctions between different kinds of killing.
What's wrong with a 'case-by-case' approach providing it stays within agreed parameters? Is that somehow not coherent?
The way I read Archer's quote he inaccurately substituted 'ideological' where he meant 'doctrinaire', which resulted in his false conclusion.
Frankly, I take it as an admission of inadequate language and debating skills by Archer to oppose coherence. It says more about his inability to identify points of comparison and make a satisfactory definition encapsulating the situation than it does about the likelihood of a successful principled defence of any political stance.
Sadly it's voices within political debate such as Archer who distort issues by polarising them with their inaccuracies into pragmatic/idealist camps and this is what leads to the damaging partisanship you describe.
His approach overlooks the requirement for conciliation which enables each side to avoid getting bogged down in the decision-making process and allows us the people to take meaningful action and get on with our lives, but at the same time it enables government to more easily ignore opposition by denying the possibility of a narrative thread for campaigning (which potentially explains why he as a tory is so susceptible to the line).
On your examples the simplicity of a consistent answer might be easier, but it is not preferable to coherence - the apparent contradiction indicated should suggest we reexamine our arguments.
I resolve it by arguing that while we might agree to the principle of rule we may also apply exceptions - ie that inconsistent application can be deemed appropriate and proportionate depending on the circumstance.
The three issues are the three classic constitutional archetypes, reflecting debate about the relationship between the state and the individual, the relationship between states and the relationship between individuals.
Law is only required to regulate these relationships because we are human and circumstance often isn't ideal.
So, while I think everyone can agree that the need for abortion, capital punishment or military intervention would never exist in an ideal world, reality is less clearcut.
On the death penalty, I could support the ultimate sanction if I could be sure use would be reserved only for ultimate cases (which raises questions of how and where to draw the line - Hindley, no. Hitler, maybe.).
On abortion, I will support it where it is used under advice of the competing claims to human rights (which means not discounting the foetus, father or other potential guardian).
On military intervention, I do support it as an option for effective deescalation of a volatile situation - as required by multi-layered universal sovereignty and defined by humanitarian need.
Where Archer says "leave coherence... politics is for humans" he's employing simple rhetoric to excuse his own illogic in rejecting the very human arguments he identifies. So, HE chooses to leave coherence because politics is BY humans and he can't escape the fact he is one!
I agree - coherence is a virtue when thinking about political, media, and legal issues. This statement, More difficult is conceptual coherence: do one's arguments in context [A] lose any force because they do not work in context [B]? is not at all difficult to do or understand, but many twist it as they might have their own agenda. Just my two cents.
Hello Ophelia Benson, I am not agree with you that coherence of this kind is a mistake.
Your post,which grapples with the conundrum that has troubled me as one who shares your position on liberal intervention and capital punishment, led me to check up on Emerson's famous maxim.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" (often misquoted by omission of the word "foolish").
As the wiki article points out, I like others had always misquoted this maxim: by omitting foolish thus losing the point that it is false consistency that is at issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Reliance
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