Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja

The power of philosophy: Hamas, Gaza, Human Shields, and Hypocrisy

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The front page of this morning’s New York Times has a thought-provoking article on Gaza, “Civilians as Human Shields? Gaza War Intensifies Debate.” The issues discussed in it are difficult and complex, and the article as a whole is well worth reading. There’s a vast literature out there on human shields, as well as on Gazans-as-human-shields, and it would be silly to try to discuss any large swatch of it in a single blog post. Just two quick observations, then:

(1) People sometimes cavalierly claim that philosophy is irrelevant to “real life,” but this article is a vivid, if unintentional, refutation of that claim. For better or worse, the language of “human shields” (or innocent shields, or innocent threats, etc.) is now all-but-taken for granted in discussions of the ethics of warfare, as is the presumption of civilian or non-combatant immunity from military attack. That wasn’t always the case. Moral philosophers made it the case by making the relevant arguments in “obscure” books and journals, and lawyers followed their lead and institutionalized the philosophers’ claims. Military commanders eventually made compliance with those philosophical and legal principles a matter of “honor.” But the bottom line is that the terms of today’s debates about the war in Gaza were set by the writings of yesterday’s philosophers– specifically by the writings of the generation of philosophers (Walzer, Nozick, Nagel, Judith Thomson, etc.) who achieved academic prominence during the worst days of the Vietnam War, and turned to philosophy as a means of processing what they observed. If that doesn’t count as evidence of philosophy’s relevance to “the real world,” then questions of evidence are themselves irrelevant to the discussion.

(2) In a related article, an unnamed State Department official is quoted as saying the following:

 “What we’re trying to figure out is how we can get to the point where the violence can stop and these bigger key issues can be addressed over the longer term,” said a senior State Department official, who asked not to be identified in keeping with the agency’s protocol for briefing reporters.

The biggest key issue is the Israeli occupation and settlement of the West Bank. But American credibility on that issue can be gauged by the fact that the last time it was called on publicly to re-affirm its own assessment of Israel’s settlement policies–at the UN, in 2011–it refused to do so. Putting the point less charitably, it couldn’t summon up the integrity or courage to do so. The US has consistently claimed to be opposed to Israel’s settlement policies but has just as consistently refused to condition support for Israel on Israel’s ending that policy. And so the policy has continued, with pro forma American disapproval, and de facto American support. Any intelligent person would have to wonder how long such a charade could go on.

After almost five decades of this pattern, the State Department wants us–and the Palestinians, and the rest of the world–to take the United States’s supposed interest in “bigger issues” on faith. But fideism doesn’t work in politics anymore than it works anywhere else. Fideism, secular and religious, is after all one of the “root causes” of the Arab-Israeli conflict as such. What makes the US a dishonest broker in the dispute–not that it has to be a broker at all–is its equivocal attitude toward faith-based politics. Unfortunately, that attitude has its basis in philosophy as well–yet another confirmation of philosophy’s relevance to “real life” and of its power over people oblivious to the power it has.

“Pairwise”

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It belatedly occurs to me that my last post misuses the term “pairwise.” A pairwise comparison is a comparison of one pair of things as against another pair, not a comparison of two items that are paired against one another. I was using “pairwise” to mean the latter, but that’s a mistake.

Incidentally, I haven’t set out a formal list of “policies” for this blog, but one of them will surely have to be that I promise not to make substantive changes to a post after the post has been published. I will, however, correct copy-edit level mistakes, as long as they don’t substantively change the point I was originally making. I guess you might object that any change, even at the level of grammar or punctuation, affects some substantive point somehow, but I’d respond that the changes I regard as “copy-edit level” are too minute to count as substantive in the relevant sense. They improve the clarity of the original argument without changing its content. Anyway, when in doubt (when I’m in doubt), I’ll tell you that I’ve made a change after I hit “Publish.”

I take it that the preceding policy differs from what one finds at some other blogs, where bloggers routinely modify their claims in response to criticisms, don’t inform their readers that they’re doing so, and then proceed as though the criticisms in question were misplaced. That’s obviously dishonest, and I’m surprised that readers are less critical of the practice than one might expect them to be.

Pairwise civilizational verdicts and the Arab Israeli conflict: a sketch

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I recently had a “debate” about Israel and Palestine at the Bleeding Heart Libertarian website. I wrote my post at the suggestion of Roderick Long (Auburn) in response to one by Fernando Teson (Florida State University College of Law); Long posted it as a guest blog at BHL as well as at his own website and at that of the Center for a Stateless Society. (I’m not an anarchist myself, but I occasionally consort with anarchists, e.g., when they post my decidedly non-anarchist writings on their blogs. By the way–thanks, Roderick!)

One topic that repeatedly came up in the debate, and that repeatedly comes up in debates like this, is what I call inferential license via pairwise civilizational verdict. The basic idea is this: you’re trying (in moral terms) to adjudicate a dispute between two parties, X and Y–where “X” and “Y” are typically distinct “cultures” or “societies,” and in this post-Huntingtonian-but-still-Huntingtonian age, therefore belong to different “civilizations.” In order to adjudicate the dispute, however, you assume that you’ve got to begin with premises that express a kind of global moral verdict on each society. That’s the pairwise civilizational verdict. Once you have that verdict in hand, you can then use it to regulate whatever inferences you want to make about the dispute. If, for instance, you find that X is morally superior to Y, you then systematically give greater weight to X’s claims in the dispute, and greater plausibility to evidence that seems to favor those claims. That’s the inferential license. Put the two things together, and you have a classic recipe for coherence-without-input-from-the-world. In other words, you have a recipe for generating a coherent (or apparently coherent) grievance-narrative that feeds all claims about the conflict through a filter that favors one side in the conflict. As I’ve argued elsewhere (but in somewhat different terms), that’s fundamentally what I think the Arab/Israeli conflict is.

There are at least two sets of questions lurking here. One concerns the legitimacy of making pairwise civilizational verdicts as such. Roughly: are they legitimate, and if so, how or why? Another concerns the legitimacy of using such verdicts to regulate disputes. Supposing that they are legitimate, should one use them to regulate particular disputes; if so, how and why?

Here’s a very quick thought on the first set of questions (the “are they legitimate” questions). It seems to me that the idea of a pairwise civilizational (or cultural or societal or national or ethno-national) verdict is a highly equivocal one. Suppose that I say that culture X is superior to culture Y. The claim should provoke some obvious preliminary queries. For one thing, we have to be clear about the values for “X” and “Y”: what exactly are they, what are the truth conditions for claims about “them,” and how do we justify those claims? They also have to be comparable entities; we can’t be engaged in the moral equivalent of comparing apples and frog’s legs. Finally, we have to know how defeasible they are. How many exceptions (or what kind of exception) would defeat a generalized verdict about the superiority of one culture to another?

Given that (which is a lot to give), the “X is superior to Y” claim is ambiguous as between any of the following six claims:

1. The norms we associate with X are superior to those we associate with Y (not that we have any empirical evidence of causal connection; we’re going by associations).
2. The norms expressed by X are superior to those expressed by Y (assuming we have a way of identifying when a norm is expressive of a culture).
3. The political regime of X is superior to the political regime of Y, and superiority of political regime reflects superiority of culture.
4. The average citizen/denizen of X is morally superior to the average citizen/denizen of Y.
5. More of the citizens/denizens of X are morally superior to more of the citizens/denizens of Y.
6. The worst aspects of X are not as bad as the worst aspects of Y.
This isn’t the place for a full “chisholming” of these claims, but I think they require chisholming before anyone can be very confident about the legitimacy of any particular pairwise verdict. I also think that the more chisholming they undergo, the more problematic the overall strategy will come to seem. I don’t mean to suggest that pairwise cultural or civilizational comparisons are always or necessarily wrong or unjustified. I just think they’re more complicated than some overly gung-ho moral realists (or ethno-national tribalists) have realized.
(Thanks to David Bernstein, Mark Friedman, Sergio Mendez, Alice Raizel, and Michael Young for inspiring this comment, in some cases by exemplifying the confusions I’m implicitly criticizing.)

Sari Nusseibeh’s Retirement at Al Quds University

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My friend and colleague Sari Nusseibeh recently announced his retirement as President of Al Quds University in Jerusalem. (He was also one of the University’s co-founders, and teaches in the Department of Philosophy.) I was Sari’s guest at Al Quds last summer, where I was invited to give three lectures on topics in political philosophy of relevance to the Arab-Israeli dispute. With Sari’s help, I also got comprehensive political tours of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, did some sightseeing, went swimming in the hottest swimming pool I’ve ever experienced, and drank some of the best tea I’ve ever tasted. It was the experience of a lifetime for me, and I owe Sari (and his colleagues) a debt of gratitude for it that I can’t imagine ever being able to repay. (I also owe my Felician College colleague Fahmi Abboushi for putting me in touch with Sari on the occasion of Reason Papers’s 2012 symposium on Sari’s book, What Is a Palestinian State Worth?)

It’s remarkable that while here in North America, academics are bemoaning the death of the humanities and of the malaise of academia generally, Sari managed in a few decades to build a major university essentially from scratch–in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Booker T. Washington’s founding the Tuskegee Institute–I actually gifted Sari a copy of Up from Slavery–but on a grander scale. When I’m tempted to complain about academic life at home, I find myself thinking about what Sari has managed to do at Al Quds, and stop. Times may be tough for small liberal arts colleges in the US, but at least we don’t operate under the conditions of a military-bureaucratic occupation (or for that matter, the relentless anti-intellectual pressures exerted by religious fundamentalists).

Sari has narrated his own story better than anyone can, but I didn’t want to let the moment go by without offering a (non-alcoholic) toast in tribute to what he’s accomplished so far. The next time you confront someone who derides philosophy as a pie-in-the-sky endeavor, direct them to the life and work of Sari Nusseibeh. Like Socrates, he’s managed in theory and practice to bring philosophy down to earth–and at the center of life, where it belongs.

The Objectivist movement: a repudiation

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It’s probably obvious to anyone who’s Googled me that I have a more-than-passing interest in the ideas of Ayn Rand. If you’ve noticed that much, you’ve probably noticed that I take Rand seriously, am highly influenced by her, and agree with a lot of things she said. I don’t any longer know whether my agreements with Rand qualify me as an “Objectivist,” but they’re substantial enough to be unusual among academic philosophers.

In my view, Rand’s best ideas are to be found in what she wrote about epistemology and in the more abstract parts of her work on moral psychology, ethics, and aesthetics. Those parts of Rand strike me as deeper and more insightful than most of what I’ve encountered in analytic philosophy. But there are plenty of things in Rand and in her followers that strike me as weak and ill-argued. Apart from some suggestive remarks on causality and free will, I don’t think that Objectivism has a well-developed metaphysics, and ironically–despite its widespread notoriety–Objectivism’s political philosophy is to my mind, its weakest and least developed feature. In any case, the closer to the “ground” one gets–that is, to concrete, “applied” issues in ethics, politics, and aesthetics–the more problematic I think Rand’s views become. Frankly, some of her political views seem to me to border on insanity, and many of her aesthetic views are idiosyncratic and ill-argued, to say the least.

Of course, the same might be said of Nietzsche, Sartre, or Wittgenstein–which has never deterred philosophers from expressing enthusiasm for their work. Academic philosophers suffer from a rather strange double standard in this respect when it comes to Rand. People who haven’t read Rand feel free to dismiss her on the basis of vague rumors about what they think she said–and yet no one could legitimately dismiss Nietzsche, Sartre, or Wittgenstein even by offering up direct quotations of some of the utterly ridiculous things they actually said. It’s perfectly possible, after all, for a philosopher to have astute or even brilliant things to say in one domain, and to offer up rubbish in another. In fact, it happens all the time. Anyway, that–the brilliant/rubbish interpretation–happens to be my view of Rand. (I like Rand’s novels, but also have mixed feelings about them, and ultimately end up agreeing, in different ways, with both their most fervent enthusiasts and their most vehement critics.)

On the whole, I would dispute the idea that Rand left us a worked-out “system,” or that her followers have produced one. As I see it, what she left is a series of astute, under-appreciated, and ill-understood philosophical observations awaiting further development by competent philosophers. On this view, it’s premature to describe “Objectivism” as either true or false, since more of “it” exists in potentia than in actuality. (Ironically, Objectivism currently lacks the resources to spell out the latter insight, since it has no worked-out account of the metaphysics of potentiality and actuality.)

Having said that, my main purpose in writing this post is less to clarify my philosophical views on Objectivism than to issue a public repudiation of the Objectivist movement. A “public repudiation” might well sound self-serving or narcissistic to some ears, as though I regarded what I said in a blog post as making some major difference to the prospects of the movement. Since I know that it won’t, that isn’t my aim. Frankly, I’m not all that concerned about or interested in the “prospects of the Objectivist movement.” What I’m concerned about, given my evident interest in Rand, is the possibility of my being associated with it.

Depending on how you count them, the Objectivist movement has three or four institutional vehicles–the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), the Anthem Foundation, the Ayn Rand Society (ARS), and The Atlas Society (TAS) (previously the Institute for Objectivist Studies, then The Objectivist Center). Carrie-Ann Biondi and I briefly ran something we called the Institute for Objectivist Studies (IOS), which we conceived of as a successor to the original IOS (founded in 1990). Our IOS lasted seven or eight months, from March until October 2013. I’ve always kept my distance from ARI and Anthem, but was a dues-paying member of ARS from the early 1990s until 2012, and had an on-again, off-again relationship with TAS, most actively between 1991-1994, and then for one-year stints in 1997 and parts of 2012-2013. (The latter relationship is now permanently “off.”)

I won’t bother to rehearse all of the details involving the similarities, differences, and histories of the four institutions. Suffice it to say that I regard all of them as morally corrupt, and regard the very idea of an “Objectivist movement” as a pointless (and pernicious) waste of time. I’ve expressed my opposition to the idea of an Objectivist movement here. My objections to each of the four Objectivist institutions are scattered on websites across the Internet. I may bring them together some day and house them in one place, but the basic objection can be put in a few sentences: in my experience, none of the four Objectivist institutions I’ve mentioned is committed to an honest conception of intellectual inquiry. Some of them wear more impressive academic garb than others, but all of them operate within a “movement” mentality that relies on heavy doses of group-think, dogmatism, and on occasion, all-out intellectual dishonesty. A judicious person would think long and hard before accepting an invitation from any of them. Ultimately, I don’t think a judicious person would accept such an invitation at all.

This isn’t the place to make a full case against the Objectivist movement. Not having done so, I can’t claim to have convinced you of my belief in its problematic features. Having distanced myself from it, all I can do here is to underscore the need for caution–even outright suspicion–in dealing with it. As most people already know, the Objectivist movement has a bad reputation. I would just add that most of that reputation is well- earned and well-justified. My advice: do some assiduous research before you deal with it, and you’ll come to the same conclusion on your own. (And, to paraphrase Philip Larkin, if you’re already in the movement, get out while you can.) Meanwhile, caveat emptor. Let the would-be buyer beware.

A founding act of theft

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I’m going to borrow or steal my first couple of posts from my Academia website. I started blogging there about a month ago, but found the platform hard to use for blogging purposes, and don’t in any case want to clutter up that particular page with blog posts. So the three posts that follow this one are the first few I wrote there in June and July 2014.