Ethical Reasoning in International Affairs

Arguments from the Middle Ground

C. Navari, C. Navari, C. Navari

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137290960
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Law

Arguing for a middle ground between idealism and realism, this book considers the most pressing ethical and moral issues in contemporary international politics, including intervention, human rights and aid, and sets about reasoning how to resolve them in politically realistic ways.

1

The Terrain of the Middle Ground

Cornelia Navari

In ethical debate, the ‘middle ground’ signifies the position between two alternatives in applied ethics, alternatives that are frequently represented as, or demonstrated to be, extremes. This may be the distance between two opposed moralities, such as allowing homosexuals to become ministers in the Church of England, at one end, as opposed to forbidding them even the sacraments. It may also be the distance between a thoroughgoing moral skepticism and the further reaches of naïve ‘idealism’. Molly Cochran has recently used the term ‘middle ground’ to characterize the aspirations of members of the British Committee on International Theory, to locate an ethic that could combine state interests with some form of international morality (Cochran 2009). The term echoes Aristotle’s ‘mean’ (sometimes the ‘golden mean’); and the method of argument frequently follows the structure of the Nicomachean ethics, where Aristotle proposed that virtuous conduct was to be found in the avoidance of extremes.

The aim of middle-ground theorizing in this sense will be to achieve reconciliation between the two positions, generally by respecting elements in each. Accordingly, in ordinary usage, the ‘middle ground’ will be the reconciliation, or in looser language, the ‘compromise’.

In international ethics, this sense of middle ground frequently refers to the distance between ‘interests’ and ‘values’—alternatively, in normative doctrines, between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’. In a recent volume on constructivist contributions to normative theorizing, Martha Finnemore (2008) observes that humanitarian intervention “occurs in an intricate structure of conflicting norms and values”, citing the conflict between human rights norms and “geo-strategic considerations”. The procedures used in resolving a posited tension between interests and values tend to follow a common path: it will generally be argued that the dichotomy is a false one; that interests also encapsulate values; and that the issue is actually one between different sets of values. The aim will be to bring the two sets of values into some kind of positive relationship, often through some institutional formula. (Finnemore structures the conflict of values as a tension between self-determination and humanitarian intervention, and her institutional formula is the steady promotion of ‘good governance’ as an international norm.)

But of greater concern to middle-ground ethics in the relations of states is the confrontation between two equally compelling and apparently opposed ethical strictures such that in striving to meet one, the other must be transgressed. In this form, it is generally referred to as the ‘moral dilemma problem’. Moral dilemmas are rather different from value conflicts, in that moral dilemmas present us with no easy override or institutional ‘fix’. The classic example in international relations is the demand to be at once a good person and a good citizen. Andrew Linklater (1990) has demonstrated the tensions, in public policy no less than in abstract considerations of political theory, between the contrary demands of moral personage and moral citizenry. Indeed, he bases his argument for universal human rights, and for the state as the protector of human rights, conceived globally, on the irreconcilability of the good man and the good citizen. He argues that a concept of a universal rights-holding person is the only way of reconciling the two ethical demands. A parallel case would be the conflict between states rights and human rights.

But the paradigmatic example of moral dilemma is the dirty hands problem—the situation where in order to do right one must do wrong, or even actual evil. Here, not only is there no easy override, there may be no override at all. In his ‘Politics as a Vocation’, Weber contrasted the morality of the Sermon on the Mount with the morality of political responsibility and ultimately concluded that the choice between the two moralities was a subjective one. One simply had to choose. Michael Walzer, a paradigmatic middle-ground theorist, in his Just and Unjust Wars outlines the three classic routes to dealing with ‘dirty hands’: the miscreant as hero; the private stain on the soul; and public accountability. In the last, the political actor renders up his actions for judgment by his peers. Hands remain, however, dirty, and the moral subject is only relieved of the legal or political burden of his actions, not the moral burden.

Finally, there is the question of moral limits. Of critical concern to middle-ground theorists concerned with international relations is the situation where there may be either ethical or structural constraints to normal ethical conduct. In war, for example, it is commonly understood that soldiers are exempted from aspects of ordinary morality, not only because they are licensed to kill, but because battlefield conditions may obviate such normal moral strictures as mercy or compassion. By contrast, but in the same vein, are the moral limits to self-sacrifice. Whereas the soldier is expected to ‘put his life on the line’, the civilian is freed from this injunction. In consequentialist ethics, for example, even if committing suicide would save a number of lives, and may be recommended on the grounds of the utility calculus, it is accepted that there is no obligation to self-immolation. Richard Price’s Moral Limits and Possibility in World Politics (2008) identifies a number of moral limits with relevance to international ethics. All ethical theories prescribe moral limits and define areas beyond which the strictures do not apply.

Behind all of these types of moral consideration lies a common feature: they all involve issues of value pluralism—a situation in which what is valued not only differs, but where the different values may even collide. Hence, middle-ground theorists are, necessarily, value pluralists.

Middle-ground theory and value pluralism

Value pluralism is the doctrine that there are, more or less, inevitable conflicts between values, and that, in formal terms, values are ‘incommensurable’. This does not mean that values cannot be ‘measured’ against one another. It means that there is no single yardstick against which they can be measured and, as such, they cannot be ordered against one another in a single hierarchy. It means they have no common measure in mathematical terms, either integrally or fractionally.

The political philosopher most commonly associated with value pluralism is Isaiah Berlin, through his two theories of liberty. Berlin detected two ideas of liberty that had come to dominate early 20th-century liberal political discourse, which he termed ‘negative’ liberty and ‘positive’ liberty. Berlin’s analysis of the two understandings demonstrated that they were, in some respects, opposed doctrines and, moreover, that they could not be reconciled. In other words, many steps to achieve positive liberty would necessarily result in infringements on negative liberty. In international relations, a similar position can be associated with Hedley Bull, in his outlining of the conflict between order and justice. Bull held that order and justice were equally valuable—they were each conditions and achievements that were to be highly valued. He also held, however, that the achievement of the one was often at the expense of the other, and that this was necessarily so, at least so long as the international order remained an interstate order (Bull 1995: 88).

Neither Berlin nor Bull invented value pluralism. The modern problem of conflicting values began to be apprehended in legal jurisprudence from the 1870s by liberal lawyers in the emerging positivist tradition who sought to base civil law on some common (social and democratic) standard of value.¹ The problem of conflicts of value was immediately understood by those who sought social foundations for the law, and liberal jurisprudence turned almost at once to methodological inquiry directed to resolving such conflicts. The Scandinavian School of legal studies, introduced by Mikael Baaz in Chapter 7, is one such example, but it was scarcely alone. Legal pragmatism in the United States was also largely inspired by the apprehension of conflicts of value; and the pragmatic method developed by Dewey in the United States was largely intended to resolve value conflicts. Berlin’s own work was anticipated by the naturalist philosopher, Sterling Lamprecht, in two articles defending ethical pluralism for the American Journal of Philosophy (1920, 1921).

One question that concerned Berlin, and an issue that all value pluralists must determine, is whether such values are ‘objective’ or whether they merely reflect subjective preferences. Berlin distinguished between whether people preferred sugar in their coffee—a subjective preference—and such values as different ideas of liberty. He argued that the latter were not mere subjective preferences. On the contrary, they emerged from the deep structure of human nature—that humans were free to determine their lives and that their ends had not been genetically programed. As such, different values were inevitable and did not relate simply to individual preferences but to historical trajectories and social choices, and that these had an ‘objective’ existence, in the sense that they involved institutions, common practices, and shared conduct, and, moreover, ‘reasonable disagreement’. Moreover, and not least, they carried consequences. (They were, in modern parlance, ‘social facts’.) Berlin also rejected the doctrine of ‘emotivism’ in logical positivism—the notion that any value which could not be rooted in a naturalistic science was a mere offspring of the emotions and that it should not be a subject for philosophy. He held that even objects that were not scientific, in any sense, could, and often should, be subjected to philosophical scrutiny. Ethicists who believe it is worthwhile to subject value preferences to ethical scrutiny obviously hold to the doctrine that they are ‘objective’ in the sense intended by Berlin.

A second question frequently raised by value pluralism is whether values are ‘incommensurable’ in degree or always absolutely. The technical term is ‘zero-sum’, and the question is whether a conflict of values is necessarily zero-sum. Berlin has been termed a ‘radical’ in terms of incommensurability, since he held value conflict to be not only inevitable but usually insurmountable, and not only in lexical terms but also in terms of policy. He held that one must always choose between positive and negative liberties. But perhaps the most famous example of radical incommensurability is Max Weber, in the famous (or infamous) essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’. For Weber, the morality of the Sermon on the Mount was absolutely opposed to the morality of political responsibility. One must be either a saint or a ‘political man’—there was no possible reconciliation between the two. He concluded his essay with the advice, considered by some to be nihilistic, that one simply had to choose which morality should guide one.

Not all value pluralists hold to such radical views on incommensurability. Situational ethicists, for example, argue that attention to the details of specific situations will often lead one out of the morass of conflicting moral considerations. Catherine Lu (2012) has recently argued that many ‘hard choices’ in ethics are the result of simple economic deprivation, in the absence of which no choices, hard or otherwise, would be required. Pragmatists also insist on attention to the details of a case, and they will observe that the same ethical outcome may be shared by those with different ethical positions. There is also the possibility of the ‘higher value’. The philosopher, attuned to a potential conflict of values, may be able to identify a more general value, such as universal human rights, or the avoidance of suffering, which can act as an umbrella, orienting the relations of the values. Terry Nardin, in Chapter 3, has argued that the idea of mutual respect may serve to orient many value conflicts in the public arena. (Whether they are thereby abandoning value pluralism for ‘value monism’ is an interesting question and depends on what is entailed in theorizing the higher value: Linklater (1997) would deny that his notion of human rights obviates value pluralism; Ronald Dworkin, by contrast, has argued that there is ‘always a right answer’ in value conflicts—found by reference to some higher value—and that ‘value monism’ is therefore sustainable (Dworkin 2000).)

There are also the historicists, not always considered value pluralists in the philosophical sense, since the original Hegelians tended to argue that the historical process would, of itself, produce a harmonization of value conflict (hence producing ‘value monism’, eventually). Neo-Hegelians are not, however, so sanguine. Mervyn Frost, a neo-Hegelian, has expressed his stance on value pluralism in the following way:

Our values are constituted within social practices which change over time. So for example, human rights were not a component of international practices in the 19th century or the first half of the 20th. Today, by contrast, we are all participants in the two practices that I have written about, global civil society, and the society of sovereign states. Built into these practices are very specific sets of values concerning the freedom of individuals and the freedom of states.²

But he does not underplay the tension between the two different sets of practices; they are equal and objective in Berlin’s sense; and, he argues, a philosophical understanding is required to resolve the tension. In other words, the ‘owl of Minerva’ will not resolve the tension by itself.

Incommensurability is not to be confused with incomparability. Berlin compared positive and negative liberties and charted the consequences of the two understandings. In a recent essay questioning the direction of much political philosophy since Rawls, Amartya Sen has pointed out that one does not need an ‘ideal’ or super ordinate theory in order to make judgments on political arrangements—that it is possible to compare the outcome of various political and social arrangements and to make judgments accordingly. J. B. Elsthain, reviewing a work on Raymond Aron, observes that Aron, a staunch liberal, had no view of the ideal liberal society, that he was interested in “better rather than worse arrangements”, not ideal states, and that in his politics “it is always a matter of partial projects: comparative justice, relative fairness, and so on”.³ Navari echoes her judgment, arguing that “Aron made distinctions between actually existing regimes rather than their imaginary counterparts”. (She also noted his choice criterion: “the day-to-day hopes and conflicts of men” (Navari 2013: 306).) Brian Anderson has referred to Aron’s liberalism as ‘interpretive pluralism’, which he understands as Aron’s way of “granting to the historical and social world its manifest complexity”.

Value pluralism implies a suspicion of social and political programs that promise perfection in human arrangements, since such program necessarily involve the sacrifice of some values to others. Even so general a value as Rawls’ fairness can certainly be defended but, a value pluralist would argue, cannot override other, equal, values (such as compassion or merit). Pluralists are also highly attuned to the coercive requirements generally involved in putting ‘value monism’ into effect—killing people in the quest for value perfectionism is scarcely a tendency unknown to the 20th century and the most secure ideological bulwark against campaigns for moral perfectionism is the claim of value pluralism. Even coercion in the context of genuine value contestation is something a value pluralist would find difficult to countenance. Most value pluralists would have had some difficulty, for example, approving the NATO bombing of Serbia. The values involved, of self-determination on the one hand and state coherence on the other, for a value pluralist generally obviates recourse to an armed intervention designed to support one side over the other (although there may also be other reasons for objecting to intervention).

They are also likely to be impatient, even irritated, with the type of philosophical argument that begins by outlining some ideal social arrangement. It is not merely a question of anti-perfectionism; a true value pluralist will read such arguments with a positive sense of alarm, deriving from a fear that such arguments pose illocutionary harm to the genuine plurality of values protected by a liberal society. Moreover, the focus upon an ideal state posed by ‘idealist’ arguments will, the pluralist argues, tend to mislead in making proposals about actual social arrangements. Sen points to the distance, and lack of engagement, between the realities of poverty in the Third World and the ‘ideal type’ social arrangements often proposed to a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. The Terrain of the Middle Ground
• 2. Are We Linguistically Left-Handed? In Search of Responsible, Ethical Subjects
• 3. Realism and Right: Sketch for a Theory of Global Justice
• 4. Middle-Ground Ethics and Human Rights in International Relations
• 5. Theorizing Secession: What Should Be the Relationship between the Ideal and the Empirical?
• 6. Global Constitutionalism as a Middle-Ground Ethic
• 7. Beyond Order versus Justice: Middle-Ground Ethics and the Responsibility to Protect
• 8. Hedley Bull and John Dewey: Two Middle Grounders and a Pragmatic Approach to the Nuclear Dilemma
• 9. The Ethics of War, Innocence, and Hard Cases: A Call for the Middle Ground
• 10. Authoritarianism, Anti-imperialism, and Intervention: The Precariousness of the Middle Ground
• 11. Power Transitions, Emerging Powers, and the Shifting Terrain of the Middle Ground
• Index