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CounterPunch
November
21, 2002
Reflections
on Kant and Moral Equivalence
by MICHAEL NEUMANN
Michael Lerner is typical of those who require
everyone to condemn the attack on the Metzer Kibbutz, where a
Palestinian went out of his way to kill two children being shielded
by their mother. In between references to his own integrity,
Lerner assures us that there can be no moral equivalence between
one murder and another:
"There are people who say, "Yes,
but there is greater violence being done to the Palestinian people
by the Occupation--and Palestinian children killed in their beds
by Israeli bombs from the sky are no less victims than Israeli
children killed by terror." But this is a crazy and sick
way to think. I hate it when a similar argument is made by Jews
("the killing of those Palestinian civilians by Israeli
planes and bombs is not morally equivalent to the acts of Palestinian
terror."). THERE IS NEVER ANY MORAL EQUIVALENCE BETWEEN
ONE ACT OF MURDER AND ANOTHER--BECAUSE EACH ONE IS A UNIQUE TRAGEDY
IN ITSELF, AND NOT TO BE EXPLAINED AWAY. HUMAN BEINGS ARE CREATED
IN THE IMAGE OF GOD, THEIR LIVES ARE SACRED, AND IT IS IMMORAL
TO TAKE SOMEONE ELSE'S LIFE TO ACHIEVE YOUR POLITICAL ENDS. Period."
(Tikkun.com)
One one level, this is just silly. Suppose
two acts come from equally bad intentions, violate equally weighty
moral laws (or maybe even the same moral law) and have equally
bad consequences. Why shouldn't they be equivalent? What would
be 'explained away', and why couldn't each still have uniquely
tragic qualities? But Lerner is talking about two children being
shot dead. Perhaps he's just looking for a fancy way to say that
he really, really doesn't like that.
Lerner is good-hearted. We think that
people's goodness of heart does them credit, but not everyone
has thought this. Kant held that to act because of one's feelings
for others was no more than an exercise in self-gratification:
acting from good-heartedness, for him, was simply satisfying
certain emotional urges. Kant felt that truly good acts were
those taken simply because they were right, not because of how
you felt about doing them. He might not have been impressed by
Lerner's reactions.
We needn't be as puritanical as Kant.
Perhaps Lerner's problem is not that he feels too much, but that
he feels too little. We all do, because we can't feel everything
we should feel for everyone in cases like this. If we can ever
do so, it is only after we understand what is involved, and looking
for moral equivalences is one way of trying to understand.
Take the claim that shooting children
at point-blank range is morally equivalent to bombing them from
a great height. You might object that the latter, as practiced
in, say, Afghanistan, is accidental. But it isn't quite. Certainly
the people who planned the campaign in Afghanistan knew that
children would be killed with as much certainty as the attacker
at the Metzer Kibbutz knew this. Or, as the Michael Lerners of
the world might put it, they knew with certainty that innocent
children would be blown apart, torn limb from limb. They did
not want to kill any particular child, but they intended to do
something they knew full well would kill children. Even from
an ivory tower, that doesn't seem so different from intending
to kill the kids.
I respect hesitation about such ugly
events. I don't presume to come to conclusions about their moral
equivalence. But I do want to ask: what is going on when the
equivalence of such acts is debated? Perhaps a bit of history
is unfolding.
'Our' morality, we are told, has a Judeo-Christian
heritage. That's true, but not entirely wonderful. We've been
trained to place great moral weight on the condition of people's
souls, not least because of a self-interested preoccupation with
salvation. Even hard-core atheists are not immune from this influence.
They don't want to be cold-hearted bastards who couldn't appreciate
how awful it was to kill a child. They would want to feel even
worse when the killing was so in-your-face, so intimate and deliberate,
as at Kibbutz Metzer.
There used to be a good reason to make
people feel that way. In the early Christian era, killing was
up close and personal. That meant it could happen only when the
killer had hardened his heart. In warfare, this didn't change
much until the emergence of air power. Even an artillery-man
in World War I lived in his own hell. He saw, heard and smelled
the effects of shelling on a daily basis. He too had to harden
his heart.
What about the people who sent others
to war? Even for them, things only started to change around the
18th century. Louis XIII of France, no great warrior, still had
to command his troops from the outskirts of the battlefields.
He saw the suffering he inflicted. As for the French people,
they really had no role in sending others to their deaths. France
was hardly a nation, much less a democracy, and the French had
not even an indirect say in war and peace.
We know things are different now, and
that today, leaders and many soldiers can kill from afar. We
are less ready to acknowledge that we too can do this. Voters
do have a say, sometimes a decisive say. We can demand the death
of innocents, and elected officials do listen: such are the joys
of democracy. We get out there and support our candidates. We
stand tall. Often we happily back military actions which we know,
with absolute certainty, will kill children--not all such actions,
just our favorites. And, just like Michael Lerner, we all do
this full of good-heartedness, full of love and compassion. Today,
you don't have to feel like a bastard to be one.
We should take this into account when
comparing acts. The morality which emphasized the bad-heartedness
of the killer, the brutality in his soul, was appropriate for
a time when killing without brutality was all but impossible.
Now we can and do kill even when seeped in squishy love for others.
So maybe making equivalences between high-altitude bombing and
ground-level shooting isn't just a left-wing canard. Maybe today,
common decency requires us to wipe away a suspiciously fine distinction,
and to recognize that what you do with full foreknowledge of
its effects is as bad as what you do directly intending those
effects.
In that case, killing children from the
air, unenthusiastically but with full foreknowledge, is no better
than shooting them from three feet away. That the pilot and the
commander are full of love for children, and couldn't bear harming
them, is not good. It's bad. It means that these killers have
found in their feelings a way to believe themselves much better
than they are. And this goes not only for the commanders and
the pilots, but also for the kind-hearted voters who put them
there. (And please, let's not exaggerate our kindness. We love
it when our side wins, and we don't cry about the bodies it has
blown apart.) Today it may be more dangerous to tolerate nice
killers of some invisible child or other down there, than to
tolerate the killers whose child victims cower before them.
So maybe there is, in some cases, a moral
equivalence between the American and the Palestinian styles of
child-killing. But this is no cause for smug leftist satisfaction.
Moral equivalence cuts both ways. It needn't be the case that
both acts are wrong. Maybe both acts are right.
Make no mistake: if we approved of modern
warfare against a Hitler or a Pol Pot, or wanted 'more vigorous'
intervention in Rwanda, we approve of American-style child killing
in some cases. Why then shouldn't we approve of Palestinian-style
child-killing in some cases? If America's self-defense requires
children's deaths, why shouldn't the Palestinians'? Was the Taliban
really more of a threat than the Israeli government, which rages
and brandishes the power of life and death over every single
Palestinian inhabitant of the occupied territories?
Of course it is not just the threat that
counts; it's your alternatives in responding to it. What should
the Palestinians do? March? Strike? Vote? Pray? Negotiate? Dialogue?
Reach out? Been tried, got nowhere. Take on the Israeli army
with slingshots? Been tried, got nowhere. Wait for world opinion
to turn the tide? World opinion counts for less than nothing
without US opinion, that engine of compassion which sputters
while peoples go down to destruction.
Of course we can say, there must be something
else they can do. What? The Palestinians cannot rely on theoretically
possible, unspecified alternatives. They must have real ones.
We can be too high-minded to calculate a response; the Palestinians
can't afford this. And each of them calculates, not for himself,
but for all.
The calculations are not difficult. All
the Palestinians can do--not for themselves, but for one another--is
to hit back at Israel any way they can and to shrink at nothing
that will hurt their enemy. To do otherwise would be as if one
woman, fighting off ten men, felt herself obliged first to wallow
in the voluminous outpourings of moral anguish about violence
by those who never have to deal with it.
So the Palestinians fight back. A kid--God
knows how--gets through the dense, tightly focussed security
of a major military and technological power. His objective is
not to kill children. It is to kill as many people as he can,
as quickly as he can, to hurt Israel as much as he can, before
he is cut down: that he should escape is so unlikely as not to
figure in his thinking. This is not the act of a pathological
killer, driven by delusions and hallucinations. It is not the
act of a cynical kidnapper, out for gain. It is not an act of
ethnic cleansing. (Rather it is Israel's settlers who are out
to cleanse the occupied territories of Palestinians.) It is not
even the act of someone trying to survive--quite the contrary.
It is an act of resistance against a state which prefers relentless,
bloody territorial expansion to peace. It is the act of someone
who wants his people to have some tiny chance of survival, of
something better than utter despair. And his fight carries with
it a simple, salutary message: don't push people too far.
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada and the author of What's
Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche. He can
be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca
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