Author Archives: Charlie Whitaker

About Charlie Whitaker

Charlie is an architect living and working in London. Increasingly, he is also a philosophy graduate of Birkbeck, University of London. When he is not doing his real work, he puzzles needlessly over news stories and current events.

VTV

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Reality TV is a television format in which ‘ordinary’ people willingly participate. They don’t act; they do, for real. A reality TV show is hence defined by the activity it features. For example, if the participants are going around in cars, arresting people; you have a ‘cops’ reality TV show.

The reality TV genre has an identifiable sub-genre. For example, Masterchef. In this sub-genre, the participants not only do things, they get lectured at by experts. Often, a participant does badly and gets shouted at. He or she may lose and get eliminated. Sometimes a participant does well, and wins. He or she then goes through. Usually, a participant has a chance to improve. This is always the case if the participant is featuring in just the one show: at the beginning of the show, he or she does badly, gets lectured at, is made to cry if at all susceptible, and then improves.

We need a name for this sub-genre. ‘Improvement TV’ is an convenient choice, but it suggests self-improvement, and that’s too woolly a concept. ‘Results TV’ might be better. After all, results are what matter. The fillet of tuna must be perfectly cooked, and the sauce must be delicately flavoured. The dress must be just right, and the make-up must be exquisitely coordinated. At the same time, a participant can’t spend all day about it, so perhaps ‘performance TV’ is what we want. The idea is that, with guidance, the participant will learn to consistently perform at an excellent level. Come to that, why not ‘excellence TV’?

Then again, failure means bad things; bad as in worse than a brow-beating. Putative dates will mock; wealthy and demanding customers will not pay; the participant’s business will fail. If the show is a contest, the participant may be eliminated, once the fruits of his or her poor efforts have been thoroughly reviewed. So perhaps another name candidate might be ‘consequences TV’. Fail, and there will be consequences.

We’re still missing something, though. We’ve been focussing on the participant and his or her efforts, and we’ve ignored the expert. But the expert is crucial to the success of, well, everything. There must be standards; the expert sets them. There must be motivation and encouragement; the expert provides it. There must be specialist knowledge; the expert has it. Crucially, there must be an ethos of success; the expert knows what this is, and will impart it, if the participant pays attention (the participant is very lucky to have the opportunity). In short, the expert is virtuous; the participant, less so. So there’s our coinage; ‘virtue TV’. It’s the stuff of our times. Draw near and be made virtuous.

Crowd delirium

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Urbain Grandier, as Aldous Huxley recounts (The Devils of Loudon, 1952), was a French clergyman of the seventeenth century. In 1634 he was executed. He’d been tried and found guilty of witchcraft. This charge had a sexual dimension; the nuns who first accused Grandier (in 1632) said that he had sent devils to seduce them. Of course, no modern person would admit to believing in witchcraft, so it’d surely be hard to find anyone today who thought that Grandier’s burning at the stake in front of a large crowd was warranted. To modern eyes, Grandier’s story comes across as picturesque and barbaric; and, ultimately, remote.

There are some other things relevant to Grandier’s case. (Bear in mind that Grandier was real person.) Despite torture, he never confessed to anything. But he had been critical of authority (specifically, Cardinal Richelieu). He was good looking, and he had a reputation as sexually adventurous.

But anyway, that was a long time ago.

Take Colin Stagg, then. In 1992 he was prosecuted for the murder of Rachel Nickell. Stagg never confessed to anything (despite attempts at entrapment by an undercover police woman, posing as a love interest). No evidence connected him with the crime he was accused of. The Metropolitan Police still went ahead and put him on trial for the murder, literally on the grounds that they believed he was the kind of man who would have done it. The case against him failed – as you’d hope. But the Daily Mail continued to insinuate, for almost a decade, that Stagg was a sexual deviant who had ‘gotten away with murder’. In 2008 a man already committed for murder was convicted of the crime Stagg had been accused of.

Hysteria is a word that’s been used. Huxley suggests ‘crowd-delirium’:

… the crowd-delirium can be indulged in, not merely without a bad conscience, but actually, in many cases, with a positive glow of conscious virtue.

I don’t think it’s reaching too far to suggest that where crowd-delirium exists today, it’s at least partly embodied in newspaper reporting. The 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, seems to have set off something very nasty. Here’s Sue Carroll in the Mirror:

Articulate and flirtatious with moist Bambi eyes, her status, carefully manipulated by her garrulous publicity-driven parents, morphed from suspected murderer to victim long before the trial. A flight home had been arranged and grandiose plans were afoot for the prodigal daughter’s return with lucrative book deals in the pipeline, movie rights under discussion and TV interviews planned.

The brutal murder of a beautiful young girl in a vile sex game was turned into a side issue. The fact Knox had wantonly and without a single vestige of shame named an innocent man, Patrick Lumumba, as Meredith’s killer was also conveniently forgotten by fans and family.

And here’s Libby Purves in the Times:

The American campaign for Amanda Knox (nobody seems to bother about Guede or Sollecito) is almost libellously critical of the Italian court; but for what it’s worth, both evidence and reconstruction look pretty convincing to me. Not least because of the perpetrators’ heavy use of drugs and drink — the defence put their changing stories down to memory loss — and because of the febrile sexual obsession that seems to have driven the young attackers.

It seems unlikely that it was deliberate murder: more like an extreme episode of disinhibited, brain-fogged sexual bullying that ran out of control. Three against one, fuelled by a toxic mixture of male excitement and female resentment of a “prig”.

You need more than imagination for a just conviction, and there isn’t evidence for a “vile sex game” or “brain-fogged sexual bullying”. It’s overwhelmingly likely that the ‘sex game’ theory is nothing more than a construct of the prosecution. And I’d suggest, incidentally, that a plausible explanation of why the investigation turned to Lumumba (a black man) is that the police attempted to fit him up by extracting a suitable confession from Amanda Knox; and that they did this on the basis that Knox had sent a text message to Lumumba (her employer) which said ‘ci vediamo’ (‘see you later’).

The more you look at the story of Sollecito and Knox, the more innocent they seem. And if they are innocent, all you have in their conviction is further injustice to add to the original crime. By contrast, there is much stronger evidence against Guede, who was convicted earlier this year. I suspect that this is the very obvious direction of travel for those not ‘transcending downwards’. But there’s a species of opinion writer that’s not interested in the rights or wrongs of one individual case. Purves again:

What is really sad though — see, even I jib at saying “wrong” — is the idea of “adventurousness”: sex made “zipless”, gourmet, divorced from affection, understanding, wonder or hope. You clock a hot piece, pull, mate and discard with hardly a name-check. It rounds off the evening but blunts your humanity. Many grow out of it and find faithful partnerships. Some find later life haunted by it. Some misunderstand the other party’s intentions and are devastated, or become stalkers.

At worst, a few confuse the general tolerance with permission to bully and coerce.

But as adventures go, frankly, the fling-culture is rubbish. And the saddest thing of all is how very miffed many people will be with me, for saying so.

A shorter Purves: someone must be doing something wrong; someone should burn.

The new Tory party: desert for everybody

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It’s taken me a few days to get around to it, but here’s my take on David Cameron’s equality speech (The Big Society: Hugo Young Lecture, 10 Nov 2009).

Cameron name checks Wilkinson and Pickett and says that they “have shown that among the richest countries, it’s the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator”.

He then sets himself this rhetorical objective: how can you square an admission that less equal societies do worse than more equal societies with a long-standing Tory view on personal wealth: that is, the wealth of an individual is a reflection of the choices they have made. Since choice is good, material gains that aren’t explicitly judged unlawful must also be good. Here is an example of this kind of thinking in a 1977 speech by Margaret Thatcher:

The economic success of the Western world is a product of its moral philosophy and practice. The economic results are better because the moral philosophy is superior. … Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice, there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.

And of course this view was taken up almost wholesale by New Labour, so it’s a view that still has currency in a very large part of Britain’s polity. The problem for advocates of choice simpliciter is that choice is compatible with inequality. And it’s hard to be an advocate of inequality: at least, it’s hard to do it in a way that’s going to make you popular. Cameron’s way out suggests sleight of hand: he switches from talking about inequality measured across the whole of society to talking about inequality between those in the middle and the least well off:

We all know, in our hearts, that as long as there is deep poverty living systematically side by side with great riches, we all remain the poorer for it. That doesn’t mean we should be fixated only on a mechanistic objective like reducing the Gini co-efficient, the traditional financial measure of inequality or on closing the gap between the top and the bottom. Instead, we should focus on the causes of poverty as well as the symptoms because that is the best way to reduce it in the long term. And we should focus on closing the gap between the bottom and the middle, not because that is the easy thing to do, but because focusing on those who do not have the chance of a good life is the most important thing to do.

And if our attention can be shifted towards the category of the least well off and away from the category of the wealthy, then perhaps we might just stop worrying about the wealthy. If this is Cameron’s purpose, he’s only following in the footsteps of New Labour’s Peter Mandelson, the man who told us he was ‘intensely relaxed’ about personal wealth.

But let’s say we take Cameron seriously: let’s say we agree that alleviating extreme poverty is the goal that matters and restrict our political aim to that. How can we reach that goal while (implicitly) either maintaining taxes at current levels or even reducing them? After all, in the same speech, Cameron tells us the increase in government spending since 1997 can’t be sustained. More than that, he argues: ‘large government’ has come to cause inequality:

But, quite apart from the fact that it turns out much of this has been paid for on account, creating debts that will have to be paid back by future generations; a more complete assessment of the evidence shows something different – that as the state continued to expand under Labour, our society became more, not less unfair.

Cameron’s answer, it seems, is to reduce state spending and curtail the role of government and instead go work on the way people think: children should get “better education” and adults should get better attitudes: “responsible behaviour” should be incentivised. Now this may make you think of New Labour, but forget them: to my mind, at least, the stall Cameron is setting out looks as ugly as anything yet brought forth by American conservatives. This is workfare advocacy. And the failure of this approach, of course, is just what people like Wilkinson and Pickett have been working hard to demonstrate.

But even if your stall is unattractive, you can set it out in an honest way. You might simply say: we believe that benefit claimants should do more to justify our support. Cameron goes beyond this. For one, his suggestion that the increase in state spending since 1997 (when New Labour took office) has caused inequality is really reaching. A history of UK wealth distribution shows that most of the post-war rise in inequality took place from the late 1970s to the early 1990s: all Tory years. This is well known. Even worse, Cameron conflates ‘size of government’ with ‘amount of state spending’. These are clearly not the same thing: you can have a small government that spends a lot, or you can have millions of bureaucrats who are needlessly penny-pinching. The complaint that many have made about New Labour is that they have promoted the second. It’s a reasonable complaint, yet it says nothing about the proper role of government: what its aims should be; what makes it legitimate.

Is there anything more going on in Cameron’s speech? Is there a broader ethical point? Is there anything new? I can’t see it. And an old idea which is not getting any Conservative Party air time, but which needs to, is this: an individual’s lawful choices may have bad consequences for others. If our lives go badly, we might have a share in the blame, but we don’t carry all of the blame. Where lives are blighted, adjudicated redress – where those who adjudicate are under democratic oversight – is justified. Taxes can be fair.

I’m very happy we’ve workshopped this today

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Royal Mail management is hiring 30,000 temporary workers, not to replace Royal Mail’s own workers who are going on strike – which would be illegal – but ‘to clear any backlog that might develop’.

Peter Mandelson is beyond sour: he’s curdled. He says “gale-force change” is needed for Royal Mail and drops all sorts of nasty hints about various Royal Mail customers shopping elsewhere in future. Well, we’ve come to expect that from him. Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat leader, backs Royal Mail’s managers: he says “taking the whole country hostage like this is the wrong thing to do”. Hoped for more from you there, Nick, I really did. I can’t find anything that says what the official Tory line is, but I’d be amazed if they’re backing the strikers. Finally, various private companies are lining up to take swipes.

Anyhow, I took a tour of a new-ish Royal Mail sorting facility a few years back. Think of me as one of those venture capitalists – I like to get a feel for the way a place runs, see how many cars are in the parking lot after hours, that sort of thing. Yes, it’s anecdotal evidence. Yes, my prejudices will be showing.

The facility was explicitly divided into two halves; the sorting side (basically one huge shed) and the management offices and staff welfare side. The security team had its own special room with a separate route in and out of the building (apparently to protect them from intimidation). Thieving from the mail does seem to be a concern. On touring the cloakroom I saw an employee hiding behind a row of coats; she stood very still while we were there, perhaps hoping that the group I was in would just go away. Which is exactly what we did. Maybe she was just bunking off, or maybe she was going through pockets; hard to say.

At the time of our visit, the sorting side was more or less deserted; it seems that sorting and delivery workers start early, then a whole bunch of them go out to deliver the mail they’ve just sorted. There was some machinery visible, but it was not, shall we say, a fully mechanised facility. The management side (furnished with colourful blobby chairs and break-out spaces) was busy in the sense that office workers were present. Some of them were in meeting rooms. I saw a sign on one of the meeting room doors. It said: ‘role play training in progress, do not disturb’.

From my recollection of seeing things first hand, and from what I’ve read recently, I’d say the situation at Royal Mail is like this. Relations between workers and management are terrible; the workers mistrust the management to the extent that any change to process (typically through mechanisation) is strongly resisted. On the other hand, Royal Mail ‘management’ have assembled plenty of padding between themselves and the hard, on-your-feet-all-day stuff; I suspect many of them are just going through the motions, or are doing make-work, all the while shirking the task of building a sense of common purpose. If my little vignette here is at all true to life, you have an industrial disaster in the making. And I would not lay blame on the strikers before looking hard at how other people in that organisation have been conducting themselves.

And it would be a shame to see Royal Mail stumble or fall, because I suspect there’s some good culture there worth saving. For instance, I’d much rather have Royal Mail deliver my internet purchases (yes, the internet will put Royal Mail out of business for sure) than the clown outfit called Home Delivery Network. The postie has some local knowledge; he or she likely knows you a bit, may even know that you’re out, and probably has figured a safe place to leave your package so that you don’t have to go through the redelivery mill.

I have to say the subsidised canteen was excellent, but would worsen your health if you ate there every day.

Feed the techne

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We had a presentation today from some impressively smart and determined people at Orangebox, a Welsh company that makes office furniture. Their ambition is to do ‘cradle-to-cradle’ (C2C) manufacturing; that is, manufacturing where a lot of the material you use to make your new products comes from your own older products, recycled. What makes this better than recycling, conventionally understood, is that if you know how a product is made, you know how to recycle it effectively. With conventional recycling, either the consumer or an open-to-all recycler has to attempt to separate out the various metals, polypropylenes, nylons, etc. and there’s pretty good evidence that they’re not up to it. For one, even a product as apparently simple as an office chair has upwards of a couple of hundred components. Worse, where dissimilar materials are bonded to each other in the way that they tend to be – if the manufacturer means those materials not to come apart – effective recycling is more or less impossible. The higher grade plastics get irretrievably contaminated through mixing with other plastics; then the only viable destination is the base of a traffic cone, or similar. Can you recycle a traffic cone base? No: the next stop is landfill. From LCD TV casing to landfill via traffic cones might be a ten year process. This is not really recycling.

Getting to be a cradle-to-cradle manufacturer is a challenge. You have to design products that are competitive in terms of manufacturing cost and quality, and which can be separated into their constituent parts when it comes time to recycle them, but which won’t fall apart in the hands of the user. You also need to know what those parts are made of. This is more of a problem than you might think. When you buy the feedstock for plastic components, you get shipped some boxes of granules; these, when heated appropriately, will flow nicely inside your stamping tool and set into the shapes you want. What’s in those granules? The manufacturer isn’t necessarily saying. To help get around this problem, there’s the interestingly named Environmental Protection and Encouragement Agency (EPEA). For a fee, EPEA will contact a materials manufacturer and get them to say, in confidence, what’s in their product. Without giving anything away, EPEA’s chemists will then say if that product is suitable for C2C manufacturing. As a work-around, this does seem to … work.

A while back, Dsquared suggested to me that the concept of embodied energy isn’t a goer. If your aim is to select products in the interest of sustainability, you have to contend with the possibility that you simply won’t know what the true embodied energy value of a product is. C2C manufacturing has a different emphasis. It aims at closed loops; all of the stuff just goes round and round.

Yes, it comes down to bias. Whose bias do you want?

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Broadcasting regulators: they’re creationists. They want to control everything. Well, OK then. Let’s try and follow this through. I give you an allotment gardener. As it happens, this gardener only likes to grow potatoes in his patch. In the neighbouring allotment, we find another gardener, and she likes to grow as many different plants as she can; from aloe to zinnia, it’s all in there. Which of our two gardeners is a creationist? Can’t say? I’d suggest, then, that calling broadcasting regulators creationists is a mis-analogy. Disbelief in natural selection – note, that’s natural selection – has almost nothing to do with preference among kinds. So maybe better to leave creationism out of it.

Mis-analogy number two: the monopoly:

There is a land grab going on – and it should be sternly resisted. The land grab is spearheaded by the BBC. The scope of its activities and ambitions is chilling. Funded by a hypothecated tax, the BBC feels empowered to offer something for everyone, even in areas well served by the market.

Murdoch junior’s insinuation is that the BBC is a rent-seeking organisation that is attempting to build itself into a position of market control. Now the BBC is in some sense a monopoly, in that it receives most of the public broadcast funding available in the UK, but James Murdoch conveniently ignores the fact that the BBC is also a state agency limited by charter, and has been so since its founding nearly ninety years ago. License fees don’t go up when the BBC decides the time is right, and they don’t go up by an amount it thinks it can get away with. Instead, government decides what the BBC can do (although it only sets broad parameters) and also decides what revenues it will receive. Regulation is already in place, to say the least.

What’s more, what ‘land’ is there for the BBC to grab? There’s a range of broadcast technologies and – as far as I can tell – none of them are mutually exclusive. My (non-specialist) understanding is that they work pretty much as follows:

(1) Terrestrial broadcast

Rights to terrestrial broadcast spectrum are regulated by the state; a portion is reserved for the BBC (and ITV and Channel 4) and the rest is auctioned. Since digital broadcasting allows more information to be broadcast in a smaller part of the spectrum, there’s actually more ‘land’ available now than there was before;

(2) Satellite broadcast

Here the bar to entry is not a shortage of spectrum but the cost of launching satellites, installing dishes, etc. and this is a hurdle that Sky, the company of which James Murdoch is non-executive chairman, has already jumped; the BBC has no ambitions to be a player in satellite broadcast, although Sky does carry BBC channels;

(3) Cable broadcast

In the UK, cable TV is constituted of a number of local geographic monopoly suppliers, none of which is the BBC; Sky does not provide cable TV service in the UK, although, as with the BBC, some of its channels are carried on cable;

(4) Internet broadcast

Here, the potential monopolists are BT and the cable TV companies, through their control of the infrastructure; however (in stark contrast to satellite and cable) the internet is arranged so that the means of access is transparent to the user, and anyone anywhere can have a web site, and that includes Sky and the BBC.

From this brief survey, I’d note two things. One is that there is plenty of space and opportunity alongside the state broadcaster. The second is that the organisations which control the various bits of infrastructure don’t necessarily control what is communicated using that infrastructure. Even though most would say this is a good thing, it’s possible that James Murdoch thinks it’s a bad thing; hence his suggestion that the BBC is “dumping” news (note also the “state-sponsored”, as in ‘state-sponsored terrorism’):

Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet. Yet it is essential for the future of independent journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it.

But as the internet reveals, popularity isn’t always a function of resources. With news, many people want what they read, hear or see to be free from the crasser kinds of bias, which is perhaps why the BBC’s internet news site is as popular as it is. Now the BBC may have its own biases, but here’s the choice; do you want (a) the biases of several thousand middle class media professionals, left more or less alone to do what they think best in the context of their charter, or (b) the biases of a squadron of merchandisers? If you prefer (a), I’d argue that only a tax-funded organisation can deliver. If you like the BBC’s web offering and make use of it, this is what you are voting for. If you prefer (b), then presumably you’ll be content to consume a fair bit of advertising and product-driven editorial, which is exactly what James Murdoch has in mind:

The UK and EU regulatory system also tightly controls advertising: the amount per hour, the availability of product placement, the distinction between advertising and editorial and so forth.The latest EU-inspired rules on scheduling of advertising restrict the number of ad breaks permitted in news programming. Television news is already a tough enough business. These proposals could undermine commercial viability even further.

In summary, look who’s talking. Given half the chance, the Murdochs would make it so that all news is Murdoch news, and bastard crap at that. We can at least take some comfort in the implicit compliment to BBC news reporting. If everyone is following the BBC in preference to the Murdoch product, the BBC must have something going for it.

Update: Murdoch senior’s News Corporation (via its subsidiary News International) has been accusing of the BBC of empire-building for several years now. Here’s a 2006 article which talks about “unfair advantage” and the lack of a “balanced media ecology”. So clearly this is something they’re going to keep chipping away at. But if they’re talking about the internet, I don’t see any grounds for complaint. As I said, anyone can set up a web site. If it’s good, people will visit.

Also, I should have attached Exhibit A: News Corporation’s Fox News.

The invisible hand of letting people know who’s boss

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Edward links downblog to a piece by Ronald Bailey in Reason magazine. My precis of Bailey’s thesis runs something like this. Having children, per se, isn’t so expensive. Educating them, on the other hand, is very expensive. This is because the levers of a modern, free market, rule of law, enforcement of contract society are complicated and you need a lot of training in order to know which lever to pull, and when. In actuality, lack of training generally leads to denial of access to said levers and hence a lifetime of poverty, and no one wants that for their child. Hence the expense of education deters prospective parents from actually going ahead and having children; this is the ‘invisible hand of population control’. And it’s a good thing! This is because no one wants a tragedy of the commons situation, like you’ve got in all those poor countries.

I can see the following problems with Bailey’s argument, in no particular order, and not worked through, since this is not an essay:

(1) There’s your local commons, and then there’s the global commons. Further, population and global resource depletion need not be coupled; the small population of a developed society may take more in the way of resources from the world than the much larger population of a less developed society;

(2) The length, complexity and cost of education need not be coupled to the total skill demand in a society; to take a picturesque example: piano tuning is a difficult skill to acquire, but it’s easy to imagine a society that generally prefers simpler instruments and has no pianos at all;

(3) In actuality, the length, complexity and cost of education is often to do with status display; in many (most?) societies, education is a positional good purchased by the parents;

(4) The cost of education need not be the only, or even the main deterrent to having children; it’s possible to find low birth rates in actual societies where most (or even all) formal education is state provided (and hence, obviously, the cost of that education is shared between all taxpayers);

(5) It’s fairly well established (I think) that freedom is not something that necessarily flows from rule of law and enforcement of contract; it’s possible to have a society where many citizens have relatively little freedom yet all contracts are honoured;

(6) In the context of (5) above, we should probably ask what Bailey means by ‘economic freedom’; his gist seems to be ‘those freedoms enjoyed by the better off’;

(7) A society where a majority composed of not so well off people is deterred from raising children – and where, by contrast, a few well off people have lots of children – is not necessarily a very nice society. I’d suggest there might be gentler ways of avoiding tragedy of the commons situations.

His brain is not involved

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There’s a slightly notorious Japanese proverb: “the nail that sticks up will be hammered down”. For several weeks, M. and I have been trying to think of a British equivalent. We were both sure there must be one. Well, now we have a candidate. It’s the phrase: “he’s a bit of a loose cannon”.

Both sayings point to a normalising intent. The intent to normalise: it’s out there. And if we don’t like the idea of being normalised, we’ll find sayings such as these objectionable, perhaps even slightly embarrassing. And nails, hammers, cannons. All very instrumental. All very metal, for that matter. But there are differences. The Japanese saying is perhaps more fatalistic than disapproving. You sense regret that the hammer must fall; perhaps it would even be better if one or two nails were to remain sticking out. No such regret with the cannon. A half ton composite of iron and oak hurtling across the gun deck: that’s something nobody wants. And hammering won’t help: there’s no hammer big enough. Instead, a dozen strong and resolute men, with careful timing, must catch up with the careening twenty-four-pounder and restrain it. First with one rope, then with more ropes.

But that’s not all. A real cannon is big and heavy; on the loose, it really might maim or kill. The ‘loose cannon’ saying, on the other hand; well that gets said of people who threaten nothing more than saying something truthful and heartfelt at the sector strategy conference. And then there’s the qualifier: he’s a bit of a loose cannon. How mealy-mouthed is that?

Anyhow, AFOE readers: do other cultures have their hammer / cannon sayings?

What’s wrong with the phrase ‘war on terror’?

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Normblog – ‘the weblog of Norman Geras’ – is often quite good and I read it when I get the chance, but this recent post of his was pretty bad. Norman says that those who, like Shirley Williams, dislike the phrase ‘war on terror’ have “trouble coming up with compelling reasons for their dislike” of that phrase.

Specifically, Norman argues, crime is not exclusively a civil affair: actions against criminals may include actions of war. I think Norman’s making some sort of synecdochal error here. Wars are always fought between political entities and hence in a war there are always multiple actors – both leaders and followers – on both sides. This has major implications for considerations of criminality and legitimacy.

All actors in a war (it’s assumed) are willing to use violence; that is to do, in wartime, things which in peacetime would be considered criminal. This said, some may do things which even in the special circumstances of war will be considered criminal. These are war criminals, and they may well include the leaders of a side. Other war leaders may be considered criminal for things they did before war explicitly began. Perhaps their involvement in starting war is their crime. Nonetheless, when you’re fighting a war leader (criminal or otherwise) you’re very likely not fighting him in person; you’re fighting his army. Your opposition to Tojo, say, may be founded in his criminality but your use of violence is legitimised by the fact that millions on Tojo’s side – some of whom won’t ever be thought criminal – present a threat to you which can only be countered by use of violence. After all, if it were just Tojo, you’d send in the police. The police can’t get to Tojo because of his army? Frustrating, yes, but not in itself justification for violence.

And so – the standard criticism goes – use of the phrase ‘war on terror’ suggests that we are under threat in a way which justifies violence, as in a war. If we disagree that this is so, then naturally we won’t want to hear the phrase ‘war on terror’ used in political discourse by way of presenting options for action. Our situation has been described incorrectly. The ‘war on terror’ is only a metaphor? (I think Norman has been misled by this one, somehow.) Maybe. But then, I can take it, so is the call to send in the air force. Count me with Shirley Williams.

Real action heroes don’t justify

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The doctrine of double effect has bugged me for some time. It probably doesn’t help that double effect is usually tagged as Catholic, and in that connection we have Blair’s Catholicism … and Iraq … and the self-exculpatory speechifying, and now the middle east peace envoy business. Double effect: it’s all mixed up in there somehow. Obviously I’m not going to like it.

But what’s going on with double effect anyway? Roughly, it’s a doctrine that says we can make a distinction between actual effects on the basis that not all effects were intended, even if all effects were correctly predicted. Hence, someone who in a single act brought about both a good effect and a bad effect may be excused if:

(1) He or she intended the good effect and not the bad effect, and;

(2) The resultant good effect did in some way compensate for the bad effect.

A double effect advocate who wants to finesse things might add that the bad effect mustn’t precede the good effect in a causal chain. There’s potential for fuzziness here, but what makes double effect unattractive isn’t some difficulty with causation. If the doctrine of double effect is going to be your guide in deciding whether or not to do something, you’re first going to have to work out who will judge what, and when. On condition (1) above, seemingly the actor carries a special burden of judgement: he or she must single out and focus on a good effect, so as to intend it. Whatever ‘intending’ involves, surely no one else can do it but the intender. But on condition (2) above, it’s not at all clear how the judgement of the good compensating for the bad is to be made. Is it the actor who gets to make this judgement, or his or her peers? A government agency? A court of law? And when do they get to judge? The doctrine doesn’t give us criteria for deciding this. It’s not interested.

Of course, other people (neighbours, end users, professionals) do tend to take an interest, depending on what’s proposed. To take Chris Bertram’s example from the recent thread about this on Unspeak: let’s say that you, as an adherent of the doctrine of double effect, propose a bridge-building project. You expect some people will die, but to have a connection from here to there will be good, and it’s the connection you intend, so you proceed. Except that you don’t, because most places with governments exercise oversight of anything larger than the construction of a hen house. You say: ten people will (likely) die building my bridge. The government, in response, says: this bridge (a revised design) is better because although there’ll be one successful and two attempted suicides over the next fifty years, no one will die during construction. Build this bridge instead. The burden for deciding (2) has been taken on by the state, on behalf of interested parties. Additionally, even though the burden for acting in accordance with (1) officially remains with the actor, his or her options are more likely than not shaped by the presence of an outside interest. After all, society, insofar as it can be said to want something, wants us to think of good effects, not bad ones. The upshot? An agent who invites the views of others in an effort to satisfy (2) limits the agency implied by (1).

In short, the doctrine of double effect tends to offer itself as a doctrine for moral lone rangers. My personal finding is that in most cases where heavy moving is planned, there’s a happier result when advice of parties with an interest is actually followed. Just ask; it might even be the law. Even if it’s not the law, it’s likely that someone cares. For bridge-building, seek advice from engineers (and the neighbours). For bombing, seek advice from air force generals (and the bombed).