Just Liberal Violence
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Just Liberal Violence

Sweatshops, Torture, War

Michael Neu

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Just Liberal Violence

Sweatshops, Torture, War

Michael Neu

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About This Book

'This book critically examines " just liberal violence " forms of direct and structural violence that others may be " justly " subjected to. Michael Neu focusses on liberal defences of torture, war and sweatshop labour, respectively, and argues tha t e ach of these defences fails an d that a ll of them fail for similar reasons. Liberal defences of violence share several blind spots, and it is the task of this book to reveal them. Neu offers a unifying perspective that reveals the three kinds of defence of violence under investigation as being essentially one of a kind. He demonstrates that each of these defences suffers from serious and irreparable intellectual defects an d ar ticulates these defects in a synthesised critique. The book goes on to accuse liberal defenders of bein g c omplicit in contemporary structures and practices of violence, and highlights the implications of this argument for moral and political philosophers who spend their professional lives thinking about morality and politics.'

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Year
2017
ISBN
9781786600660

Chapter 1

A Plea for Defiance

This book is a critique of contemporary defences of ‘just liberal violence’. I use this term in two senses. First, just liberal violence is violence purportedly committed in defence of human rights and/or in order to minimize human suffering. It is those intentions that are said to render violence in their pursuit just; to make such violence the morally right thing to do. Second, just liberal violence is just that: liberal violence. While allegedly serving just goals, it is undertaken in practice, and defended in theory, by ignoring considerations which disturb the liberal framework governing the use of just violence.1 When those considerations are made explicit, it is clear that just liberal violence is mere violence, violence without adequate justification. In this book, I aim to offer a critique of liberal moral defences of such violence, focusing on sweatshops, interrogational torture and war. I argue that these defences share fundamental assumptions and methods of argument that are mistaken.
Just Liberal Violence does not, however, impose a rigid unifying lens through which to evaluate and reject these defences. I do not put forward the claim that moral defences of sweatshops, interrogational torture and war are all exemplars of exactly the same sort of thinking. Rather, I claim that they share a set of common features, which often play out in different ways. The critiques I offer are thus intended to stand on their own, as well as form part of an extended argument; they are critiques both of the works of individual authors and of the wider literature of which these authors’ works are emblematic. This book is an invitation to resist ways of thinking that justify violence morally within a narrow framework of unexamined liberalism. But of course we need to do something about mere violence, rather than just think about it. So this is not only a philosophical intervention; it is also a political one. In developing it, I am not putting forward a particular conception of justice; I merely argue that contemporary defences of just liberal violence are inadequate.
Since this book is also an attempt to persuade people of something they do not believe already, it carries the risk of failure. My hope is that the authors whose work I engage with will find reasons to pause for a moment before continuing to steamroll their theoretical defences of violence across a landscape inhabited by people often largely indifferent to, or obsessed with, the practice of violence. Be that as it may, I am hoping that some of those readers who sympathize with arguments in defence of just liberal violence will come to reconsider their views. I am not just talking about academics here, but about everyone who follows political matters, makes judgements about them, debates and criticizes. The most important audience I address, however, is the community of students, broadly construed; all those who are open to argument, have not made up their mind, and have not invested their careers in certain forms of intellectual inquiry and/or political practice, including the practice of complicity.2 There is no doubt that my analysis is limited, but I hope that it can nonetheless help people rethink, or at least recognize that there might be something to be rethought. I also hope that ‘better minds than mine’3 – but minds perhaps inclined to agree with some of the basic contours of the arguments offered – will correct, improve and expand on my case against just liberal violence. Their most important task, however, will be to make this case politically effective.
In the next chapter, I introduce the key features of moral defences of sweatshops, interrogational torture and war. I begin by identifying three common reductions: (1) a reduction of violence, (2) a reduction of moral agency and (3) a reduction of perspective. For example, defenders of sweatshops reduce all violence to merely physical violence, arguing that sweatshop workers are not subjected to violence unless they are physically coerced into doing their job; just war theorists reduce moral agency to reactive agency, focusing exclusively on the moral rightness or wrongness of waging war in response to an act of unjust aggression, rather than thinking about how agency could prevent purported ‘just war situations’ from arising in the first instance; and torture defenders take a reduced perspective on the world, dividing it, neatly, into a world of evil villains and complete innocents.
I then show that these reductions point towards two foundational problems. The first is a neglect of interconnectedness, which I refer to as ‘analytic atomism’. Defenders of just liberal violence assume a world that is neatly separable through analysis. They are concerned with the morality of individual and/or communal conduct, but they neglect the way in which individuals and political communities are interconnected in social structures, including structures of global reach. And/or they fail to see that any attempt analytically to separate their philosophical arguments from the politics of their time – the attempt, essentially, to engage in apolitical moral philosophy about matters of politics – renders these arguments at once invalid and dangerous. The second foundational problem is a tacit ‘moralistic realism’. Defenders of just liberal violence appear to be challenging the political realist position according to which the world of politics is a world of selfishness, fear of death and pain, as well as lust for power and domination. And yet their apolitical prescriptions are oriented – even if unwittingly – towards maintaining precisely that violent status quo.
Taken together, the reductions and foundational problems identified constitute the unexamined liberalpolitik of just liberal violence. Defenders of just liberal violence are effectively trying to square the circle in their respective attempts to build their defences of violence on the basis of the choices, rights and/or liabilities of specific, isolatable agents. For their moral case turns out not only to justify way too much to be able to justify anything at all; it also inevitably collapses into an argument about consequences whenever the attempt to square the circle has failed. And while I am not making the case in this book that consequentialism is mistaken as a moral outlook, I will argue that contemporary defenders of sweatshops, torture and war – within their narrow framework of unexamined liberalism – are attentive only to some consequences of their respective moral prescriptions, but not to others. This, I argue, is a mistake.
Lots of people have written in moral defence of sweatshops, torture or war. I focus – in chapters 3, 4 and 5 – on the defences offered by a limited number of authors whose work I take as emblematic of a wider literature. There would not have been much to gain from throwing in a great number of thinkers who, for all the differences of emphasis, are all engaged in projects that have key features in common.4 After all, this is a reflective book intended to ‘irritate and stimulate discussion’,5 not a textbook designed to give a detailed and comprehensive overview of three contemporary strands of literature. Suffice to say that my critique applies to the work of all those thinkers – and there are plenty of them – who frame their moral inquiries in similar ways.6
So whose work to focus on? In the case of sweatshops, the topic of chapter 3, I reject arguments made by economist Benjamin Powell and philosopher Matt Zwolinski. Powell has written an entire monograph devoted to the cause of defending sweatshops – published by Cambridge University Press. Since his argument lacks philosophical sophistication, however, it is important also to deal with the more erudite – but no less flawed – defence offered by Zwolinski. Conveniently, these two authors have even joined forces and produced a co-authored defence in addition to their single-authored ones. I argue that their defence is based on a narrow understanding of violence, one that fails to recognize the structural violence which forces people to subject themselves to working under atrocious conditions; it reduces human agency to, for example, a woman’s ability to choose between greater and lesser risks of being sexually assaulted at work – with financial compensations varying in accordance with associated levels of risk;7 and it reduces perspective by shrinking the material world into an economic marketplace, inhabited by disconnected rational choosers – a place devoid of historical and political location. The choice-based argument in defence of sweatshops embraces analytic atomism by way of making a moral case that treats transactions between sweatshop employers and employees as isolated events in space and time. Not only does it have the inadvertent side effect of functioning perfectly well as a defence of existing slavery in the contemporary world; it also offers prescriptions that, if followed universally, can serve only to perpetuate an extremely hierarchical global system of exploitation. The liberal case for sweatshops fails.8
And so does the case for interrogational torture, as I proceed to argue in chapter 4. Alan Dershowitz’s case for legalizing interrogational torture would have been my obvious target here, had Bob Brecher not already offered a thorough critique of it in Torture and the Ticking Bomb.9 I have chosen to focus instead on defences of interrogational torture put forward by Fritz Allhoff and Uwe Steinhoff, whose writings on the matter represent two poles of the torture-defending position.10 The former is overtly political in that Allhoff defends interrogational torture not just in theory but also with explicit reference to the political context in which the defence is articulated: the ‘war against terror’. The latter, by contrast, is purportedly apolitical in that Steinhoff defends interrogational torture analytically, separating this analytic defence, indeed explicitly distancing it, from the context of contemporary politics. Different though they may be, however, both Allhoff ’s and Steinhoff ’s defences suffer from similar reductions. In particular, they both reduce the violence of interrogational torture to singular acts, failing to recognize the violence of a society in which such acts are morally, legally and institutionally possible; they reduce agency to reactive agency, that is, to making sure that the innocent and virtuous are in the right when resorting to torture in response to some villain’s aggression; and they eliminate alarming features of liberal-democratic politics from the moral perspective they offer.
As regards moral defences of war, which I attend to in chapter 5, there is little doubt that Michael Walzer and Jeff McMahan are the most widely read and cited contemporary just war theorists. Their writings differ a lot, however. While Walzer aims to make a ‘moral argument with historical illustrations’,11 McMahan does the sort of abstract and relentlessly analytic philosophy we also encounter in Steinhoff. He often presents the reader with a multitude of intricate thought experiments designed to figure out, in strictly binary fashion, what is right and wrong, and who may be killed and who may not. That both McMahan and Walzer have used just war theory as a critical tool to condemn war, such as the war against Iraq in 2003,12 is one of the reasons why I have chosen to engage with their work: as the sort of work that – because of its having been used as a critical tool – exemplifies the strongest possible intellectual opposition to the argument I make. I will argue that just war theory – even in its most thoughtful and ‘critical’ articulations – fails to give us the sort of critical instrument needed to confront the political moralists of our time. For there is something that unites Walzer’s and McMahan’s moral defences of war: a reduction of the violence of war to – predominantly – killing; of agency to the merely reactive agency of doing right when it is too late; and of perspective to one that assumes the binary divisibility of the complex and messy political world of war into right and wrong.13 These reductions render both Walzer’s and McMahan’s accounts, for all their differences, guilty of the same unexamined liberalpolitik.
The sixth and final chapter is on the question of intellectual complicity. I revisit arguments in defence of just liberal violence through the lens of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go, suggesting that defenders of just liberal violence are complicit in maintaining a moral climate in which violence is not just taken for granted but considered just. They thus have a responsibility fundamentally to revise their current intellectual practices, and to stop being complicit. But the answer, in times of Trump, cannot just be for these thinkers – indeed for anyone – to withdraw from public life. As colleagues and I have written elsewhere, ‘To be non-complicit is an exercise in self-defensive psychology; the aim is to avoid blame. To be anti-complicit is to be defiant, in collaboration with others, in the face of structural wrongdoing’.14 Just Liberal Violence is a plea for defiance – in theory and in practice.

Chapter 2

Just Liberal Violence

In this chapter I introduce the core features of just liberal violence, thus laying the ground for my critiques of moral defences of sweatshops, torture and war. I will go through these core features later in the book: first, the three reductions of violence, agency and perspective – reductions which must be made for the moral defences to work; second, the foundational problems of analytic atomism and moralistic realism to which these reductions point; and, third, the unexamined liberalism that these reductions and foundational problems, together, constitute. In the chapters that follow I offer elaborations of these claims in relation to defences of sweatshops, torture and war.
One of the claims I make in this book is that defences of just liberal violence turn out on closer inspection to be question-begging: their field of analysis is reduced in such a way that they assume what is to be demonstrated, namely that certain forms of violent conduct can be just. Just violent conduct includes granting people the option of subjecting themselves to atrocious working conditions so that they need not prostitute themselves to be able to stay alive; engaging in interrogational torture to uncover information that might prevent a metropolis from being blown up; and bombing an evil regime to stop it from engaging in aggressive warfare and/or committing genocide. The only alternative to the enactment of just violence in such situations is always depicted as even worse, indeed as much worse. Liberal arguments for the justice of violence are articulated with a view to prevent those even-much-worse alternatives, giving action-guiding advice to those in a position to enact such violence. What is assumed is that it must be morally possible for just agents to do the right thing in situations whose production they have, as is also assumed, played no part in.
These defences of liberal violence reduce the variables which have been marked out as relevant for moral judgement. They focus on specific moral agents – individual or collective – and eliminate from the scene of analysis the complexity of the social structures within which real-world agents are located.1 The obliviousness to complexity thus functions as an enabling condition for defences of just liberal violence to get off the ground, making it possible for theorists to develop their analytic arguments within a simplistic framework of right and wrong. In this configuration, violence can be divided – neatly – into vicious and virtuous violence. The former is used by those who break the law, the latter by those who defend and restore it. Indeed, there is a sense in which those who write in defence of just liberal violence see their intellectual contribution as an exercise in virtue. Not only do they provide us with a framework through which to criticize those who enact violence unjustly; they also come to the rescue of, and to empower, the morally troubled warriors of liberal justice.

REDUCTION I: VIOLENCE

A constitutive feature of defences of just liberal violence is their being narrowly concerned with solely physical violence. Defenders of sweatshops, for instance, do not think that sweatshop labourers are treated violently unless they have been physically coerced into doing the job; hence they would not even conceive of their moral case as a defence of violence. Uwe Steinhoff, a torture defender, thinks there is no such thing as psychological torture.2 The United Nations (UN) economic sanctions imposed on Iraq between 1991 and 2003, which led to the deaths of some 500,000 Iraqi children, would not be categorized by authors contributing to the just war discourse as an instance of the UN – or the United States and United Kingdom, who had led the process – waging war on Iraq.3 It is only direct, physical assaults that count as violence; physical assaults on life, liberty and property. Just war theory in particular often focuses exclusi...

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