Abstract

History is about present curiosity, present feeling. Recent history is almost always about present decision, present action.

Ted Honderich, Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War, 2006

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 21 September 2009

Right and Wrong

The question of right and wrong is said to be timeless. It is the question of humanity, decency or justice. The philosopher, Ted Honderich has been concerned with the Principle of Humanity, not Kant’s principle with the same name, which can be a much or as little as anyone pleases, just as the Christian sentiment, “love your neighbour”, can mean doing something to help them, but commonly is just a slogan with no practical content. Christians satisfy themselves that faith is sufficient for their own salvation, whatever Christ said. When the Christians’ love motto has some content, it is too often limited to members of the same church or one’s closest actual neighbours, one’s next door neighbours or even one’s relatives. Honderich has been moved by the greed and cynicism of the neocons under Bush in the US, and Blair and Brown in the UK, to frankly expose the immorality of these people who claim to be Christians—and their supporters—but have no discernible morality between them.

In Humanity, Terrorism and Terrorist War, Honderich puts the events since 9/11 under the microscope using a rather Socratic method of asking many questions to lead the reader to think of their own answers while aiming to show how the philosopher approaches such questions with clarity and reason. The upshot is a revelation of the hypocrisy of US and GB leadership and, indeed, politics, their cynicism and self seeking mendacity.

So, was the war against Iraq started by Bush and Blair, in March 2003, like the terrorism of September 2001—9/11? Was it morally relevant, relevant in terms of right and wrong, that Blair engaged the British nation via their army’s participation in the Iraq war, in the killing of a great many more of the Moslem people, because the terrorists identified with them, than they had killed in 9/11 or in later atrocities in Madrid and London? Was it not relevant, as a newspaper asked in the week after 7/7 that Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister—indeed President as he thought—had put the British population at risk in the service of the President of a foreign power, the US President Bush? Is it any less terrorism to kill tens of thousands of innocent Arabs than to kill a few thousand innocent Caucasians?

No one can say that fighting a war is never right. The pacifist might attempt it, but is hardly serious. Would even the pacifist stand aside while their wife or daughter was attacked with rape in mind? Gandhi is often cited as an example of a pacific man, able to use peaceful protest to achieve political success. It is true but he did not restrict himself only to civil disobedience. He said clearly that when it had no hope of success he was ready to lead violent resistance to oppression. He preferred non-violence, but accepted that violence was sometimes necessary.

Not fighting might mean facing destruction, and then it is plainly folly not to resist. Though negotiation might be an option, and a better one on the face of it, the weak can not rely on the strong to be reasonable when they can enforce by might their unreasonable demands. Nor can the strong be relied upon to negotiate sincerely rather than use it as a distraction while they establish an irresistible force on the ground. And a nation entirely morally wrong can create circumstances whereby a weaker people have to respond by violence or by some action that can be portrayed as being provocative, then hypocritically condemn the aggression even though it was provoked, or sometimes entirely false, and use it as a pretext for retaliation, thus making immoral acts seem justified or even noble. Americans will recognize what is being said here.

What is right is not always what is legal. Law requires only a majority to be enacted, and so can be used immorally, perhaps to oppress a minority. Was the mass murder of Jews by Nazis legal? Few will deny it was immoral. It is morality that decides whether laws are right or wrong, not the other way round. Judgements of right and wrong come before the law. Since the Nuremberg trials after World War II, people have been expected to know what is right and wrong irrespective of the law, or of orders given in the name of immoral laws or immoral authority. Soldiers told to kill innocents can justifiably refuse on moral grounds.

Nor can it be upheld that a monstrous law must be obeyed because it is the law. It is not true that any law is better than none. Even when the main fabric of the law is admirable and even moral, it is not true that a particular monstrous law—merely some warp or weft of the whole cloth—must be kept to support the law as a whole. Any such flaw is a flaw in the whole fabric of the law, and ought not to be accepted out of an expedient defence of the rest as morally right when the particular clause is morally wrong.

International law, in particular, is often wrong or understated, and is too often overruled, when it is not, by the self interest of militarily strong nations, none being stronger than the USA. In the case of the war in Iraq, no general agreement confirmed it as being legal, whether in the opinion of other powers, or of the legal officers of the US and GB. The invasion of Iraq was a fait accompli, having nothing to do with international law, but a lot to do with justice being the will of the mighty. While international law can be helpful, it is never decisive because the most powerful nation can, when it is in their interest, overrule it by force.

The Palestinians, Zionism and Israel

Since 1967, Israel has been the concern of 65 resolutions of the UN Security Council. They have condemned, deplored, censured and regretted the actions of governments of the state of Israel against the people of Palestine. Israel was carved out of Palestine in 1948 in accordance with the aims of the Jewish political movement called Zionism—Zion being the biblical holy mountain of Jerusalem. The resolutions called upon Israel to cease its actions and give up the additional Palestinian land it was periodically fond of seizing, to stop the destruction of Palestinian homes, to stop taking their water, to stop setting up illegal settlements on Palestinian land, to stop imprisonments, harassment, killings, massacres, and making people refugees in their own homeland. Resolutions were also directed against Israeli racism towards Arabs and violations of their rights as human beings.

The majorities on the Security Council passing these resolutions were between 10 and 14 for to 1 against, out of 15 member nations with a vote. The one country voting against was not Russia or China, it was always the USA. The US has the attitude that Israel can do no wrong whatever it does. However vile its atrocities are, it is never wrong to do them, and if the rest of the world demurs, the rest of the world is wrong. The single vote of the USA is a veto on UN action, then US leaders and diplomats, like John Bolton, say the UN is impotent. It is impotent because the USA wants it to be impotent in these matters and makes sure it is.

Ignorant readers of the right wing press in the US and Britain claim Israeli actions, however indiscriminate and morally disgusting, are justified by the actions of the Palestinians. It is the Palestinians whose land was stolen so that the state of Israel could be set up, so the initial offence was against the Palestinians. And the UN had no reason strong enough to warrant a single resolution against the Palestinians in the time it was notching up resolution after resolution against Israeli atrocities and discrimination. It was not that the Palestinians were not trying, were not fighting to get their lost possessions back, but the scale of their attempts just could not match the scale of the Israeli response. They did not have the sponsorship of the world’s richest and most powerful country. They did not have the military force, sophisticated aircraft and weaponry, even rockets and nuclear weapons. The Israelis had all that.

Palestinians had taken no land from the Israelis. It was the reverse. They had not terrorized and threatened whole villages, and bombed defenceless households to scare them away from their own homes and fields. That is what the Israelis had done, just as they bombed the King David Hotel. Whether you like the UN or hate it, it is the forum of the main nations and peoples of the world. It is the closest there is to expressing the will of the human race. It sees few reasons to pass resolutions condemning the Palestinians, but sees recurring reasons for condemning the Israelis. The international will is that the Israelis are in the wrong, and only the military and financial might of the US stops the world from restricting the immoral treatment of the Palestinians by the Zionist Israelis.

If you have the impression that the Palestinians are equally to blame, it is because of the media convention of balance. When it suits them, the media claim they must maintain a balance between opposing political opinions and viewpoints, and in Britain, the TV stations are obliged to keep some sort of balance. The trouble is that a balance is utterly false and misleading when there is no balance. The Israelis are the prime aggressors in Palestine, but the false balance that has to be maintained makes it seem as if the Palestinians are to blame too. Then public opinion sides with the Israelis because of the huge guilt felt by everyone over the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews. The Israelis, called by Honderich neo-Zionists, the racist Zionists (some others are not racist) flagrantly use the holocaust as propaganda to distract attention from their own crimes, a hugely successful decoy supported by the western media almost without exception.

Representatives of all the nations on earth, representatives of the whole human race, find, in judgements almost unanimous except for one rogue nation, that the Israelis are guilty of heartless crimes against the Palestinians that just cannot be ignored. These judgements are moral judgements, and constitute aspects of international law, even if international law is only partial, and too easily bypassed by those whom it does not suit. Such a nation is the United States. The US ignores morality when it comes to defending the actions of its puppet and ally, Israel. Refusing to accept and apply normal moral standards can only be immorality.

For the US, resolutions supported by almost everyone in the world are wrong. Those who accuse Israel or its sponsor of immoral behaviour are labelled as anti-Semitic. Because millions of innocent European Jews were murdered by Nazis in World War II, any criticism of Israel, the state set up after the war for displaced Jews, is labeled as Nazi, and the critic a Jew hater. Even Jews are accused of it because many Jews, including some Israelis, can recognize immorality when they see it. They are human beings and can empathize with human beings unfortunate enough to have to suffer Israeli oppression. The accusation of anti-Semitism is merely a slur—an ad hominem fallacy—a defamation meant to prejudice uncommitted observers against critics of Israel. Many westerners, ashamed of Nazi treatment of innocent Jews accept the fallacy rather than judging honestly what is going on now.

Zionism is a political outlook that is necessarily racist at its core. It required the expulsion of Palestinians from their home, and then necessitated their subjection lest they seek to return to what had been theirs for over a millennium. Even so, Honderich sees two Zionisms because many Israeli Zionists, like Yuri Avnery, are shocked by the continuing mistreatment of Palestinians, and the continuous annexation of Palestine by Israel. Not all Israeli Jews want to abuse their Arab neighbours. The die hard racialist Zionists are in fact the anti-Semites, for Semites are all those who speak a Semitic language, so most Semites are Arabs. Zionists are the real anti-Semites because they treat Arabs as sub-humans, just as Nazis treated Jews as sub-human. The attitude is the same. In both cases, it is immoral.

What of those who say UN resolutions are irrelevant because the UN is just a talking shop, certainly of no interest to the USA which will not be reined in by anyone. That too is an irresponsible and perhaps immoral attitude on the part of a nation one would expect to respect reason. As for the UN, the US is happy enough when it supports whatever suits the US. The US does not then veto resolutions but flaunts them as justification for its foreign policy. A UN resolution brought about an embargo of food and medicines to Iraq for years before the latest Iraq war was launched, when Bill Clinton was the US president, a man considered intelligent and liberal. As a result, a large number of Iraqis, mostly infants and children, died through malnutrition and inadequate treatment. This was a resolution of the UN that the Americans agreed with. The UN is therefore not always merely a talking shop. Whatever makes it a talking shop sometimes and other times not is not any rational moral assessment of the objective situation. It is simply whatever suits US geopolitics. That cannot be moral for a nation boastful of its Christian commitment, nor is it on the basis of the Principle of Humanity.

Human Rights

What then is the value of being human, when you are not an American? In 1948, the General Assembly of the UN passed and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It guarantees life, liberty and security, freedom from fear, freedom of movement, and a decent standard of living, adequate for the maintenance of health. Nor are people to be robbed of their property or nationality, nor subject to racism or discrimination, nor stripped of their reputation and honour. These rights and freedoms were subject only to one possible limitation, the rights and freedoms of others, and the just requirements of morality, order and general welfare in a democratic society. But what of people suffering oppression? The Declarations days…

…it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion and against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law…

So, human rights include “as a last resort” the right to resist tyranny and oppression by rebellion. Humans who are tyrannized can rebel against it. No American can honestly argue otherwise. The US was itself formed by rebellion against the Britain of the Royal House of Hanover. Is the world to do as the US says, and not as they do, or did? Rebellion against tyranny is all right for Americans, but is not all right for, say, Palestinians deprived of the right to their property and nationality, their freedom from racism and discrimination. It is the Israelis who have violated and continue to violate Palestinian rights. Americans rightly revere their Declaration of Independence from the rule they hated, that of the British kings who wanted America subject as a colony, but Palestinians are not allowed to revolt against being driven from their traditional fields and homes by strangers from abroad, Zionist Israelis who are never satisfied by what they have already snatched of Palestinian land. They constantly want more of it, perhaps all of it.

Palestinians believe with most of the world, that their rights, those of human beings in general, according to the Declaration of Human Rights, have been violated by the Israelis. When people are subject to oppression and tyranny, when they have been deprived of many of their human rights, the right they retain always is the right to rebel against their oppressors. Indeed, the Declaration recognizes that they might be compelled to turn to resistance, and armed resistance when their oppressors are armed. It means they might be compelled to murder their oppressors to establish rights they have been denied. This compulsion is the compulsion they feel as human beings to assert their rights. They are compelled by not having any viable alternative. They are compelled by their own nature, and their own reason, their desire to be able to live decently like anyone else including Texans. For Palestinians it is an overwhelmingly valid reason for their revolution. Israelis just deny it.

Terrorism and Just War

The west treats rebellions like this as terrorism. US leaders say we are fighting a war against terrorism. It is a just war, they say, a justified war. Such a war cannot be wrong. It is right. It is moral. It would be wrong not to fight it. Yet it seems to deny the Human Declaration of Human Rights. A just war has certain characteristics:

1. It must have a just cause. A clear example would be self defense. You were attacked first. You fight back to establish the status quo before the attack. Your war is to re-establish peace. Another example of a just war is to fight to defend human rights or a way of life. If this is considered just, then you can even start the war! It will still be just even though you are the aggressor.
2. A just war ought to have a chance of succeeding. It ought not to be a hopeless war. People should not have to fight a war that can only cause needless suffering because it has no chance of success.
3. A just war need not be between nation states, but, as the Declaration of Human Rights says, it can be fought by a resistance movement directed against oppression and tyranny, an insurrection. As such movements are always called terrorist movements by the tyrant and its supporters—not infrequently newspaper and TV channel owners—terrorism can be just. It cannot be written off as “evil” or some sort of madness without proper consideration.

   Even vile and murderous actions tend to come from somewhere, and, if they are extreme in character, we are not wrong to look for extreme situations. It does not mean that those who do them had no choice, are not answerable. Far from it. But there is sentimentality too in ascribing what we do not understand to “evil”. It lets us off the hook. It allows us to avoid the question of what, if anything, we can recognize in the destructive act of another.

   Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

4. A just war ought also to be proportional. Tacitus wrote “they create a desert and call it peace”. It sound very disproportional and cannot be just. A war that is too costly in lives and damage is not just.
5. It must not include the killing of innocents or non-combatants. There can be no justice in killing innocent people, and there is no morality in pretending the victims were collateral damage, a disgraceful disparaging of human life.
6. A just war must also require the exhaustion of other means of settling disputes and grievances, or the sincere conclusion that negotiations are not being treated seriously or are the cover for the continuation of further oppressions or military operations on the ground.
7. A just war must have as its cause only the just one. The just cause ought not to be a cover for some other undisclosed or unadmitted aim that is not just.

There are other ramifications, but from these it is plain that few wars can be justified. In particular, western powers, which like always to claim the high ground in international disputes, often fail to meet one or another or several of these criteria of justification of war. Neither the US and GB in Iraq, nor the Israelis in Palestine meet the criteria.

Morality and Self Interest

Yet we are always patronized by our politicians, corporate bosses, media moguls, and their hacks that we cannot criticize geopolitical decisions because we are too naïve, too unworldly, too ignorant of the intentions of our enemies to comprehend what they are. Our leaders see other leaders as being always like themselves, selfish, cynical practitioners of realpolitik and machtpolitik, playing power poker with other people’s lives the chips. Ultimately, it is called looking out for yourself, “I’m all right, Jack!”. It sounds practical, but it does not absolve anyone from using moral judgement, from being moral people. Morality does not admit easy exceptions. It cannot be subsumed beneath personal or national selfishness, and no amount of approval of immoral actions by a leader, or media hacks, or political allies, or ingratiating academics can change it.

Self interest does enter into a nation’s relationships with the rest of the world, there is no denying it, but it is not the only factor that does, and self interest is often more subtle than just grabbing what you can, or reflex counterpunching. A considered and generous response to the 9/11 attacks would have served US and the west’s interests far better than seeking revenge by way of a punitive expedition against a random country.

We are all of one species, with the same motives and motivations in general—rational ones and emotional ones. We share the same desires, and have the same capacity for empathy, even if some think it is macho to hide it. We can appreciate each other’s situation. That our leaders discourage us from doing it ought not to stop us. If we are told it is naïvete, we should suspect them. It means that for Americans and British to say something is in their interest can be no justification, for every other nation in the world can find similar justifications and make similar declarations. That these declarations can be made and justified does not necessarily make them right or moral.

We cannot assume that we have the exclusive use of morality because our leaders assure us it is true. Anyone can make the same claim. Terrorists can say it too. It is in their interests… it is their view, at any rate, and their view is in their own self interest just as Bush said it was in the self interest of the USA to bomb and invade Iraq. Perhaps those others are right, and our leaders are wrong. We ought not to be duped, especially by loyalty, by patriotism, if we hope to be moral people. We need to examine these matters.

People and nations do not escape moral judgements because they lack all morality themselves. Bush and Blair cannot escape it because they do not have a clue what morality is. It is natural for us to have sympathy for other human beings who are suffering. Our nature as a species, our human nature, necessitates our empathizing with others. No one normal can escape it. To be devoid of empathy, and especially sympathy, is to be deficient, to be less than human, to be inhuman in some sense, so to suppress this natural feeling and end up harming many other people is to voluntarily, wilfully become inhuman. It can then hardly be surprising if this wilful neglect of all moral feeling leads to others returning our inhumanity, rising violently against it, offering resistance to it, turning to war as we are too ready to do, and when that is impossible to guerrilla war or terrorism.

Even politicians like Bush and Blair, claiming the highest morality the west has to offer, the morality of Christ, cannot escape these consequences and the judgement of others that their morality is not moral, and therefore that their Christianity is not either. Christ did teach the difference between right and wrong, but it ought not to be necessary to be Christian to make the distinction. It is a function of our humanity, especially our nature as social beings. Notwithstanding any professed religious conviction, the demonstrable inability to distinguish right from wrong, not merely what is expedient and what is not, shows these people as inhuman—frankly, as monsters. Unthinking reflex actions are not what is needed in dealing with terrorism directed against us. Christ, you American Christians, said “turn the other cheek”, he did not say club to death the one who slapped you. We are to reflect on the cause, the reason for it, and the reasoning behind it, not to retaliate without thought.

We need to remember that other people have their own interests, which will differ from ours in all likelihood, but are not therefore wrong. Hard though it may seem, negotiation then becomes possible, and even people with very different outlooks can agree to live together when the greater good of all is preferred to the destruction or decimation of one side or the other. War wastes resources as well as lives, resources which could have made everyone’s living easier, and therein is its immorality.

Democracy, Politics and Revolution

If, then, the UN Declaration on Human Rights recognizes that revolution is a valid response to tyranny, it becomes a puzzle why so many people, especially in the US, are against it. The political standpoint called conservatism is held in the US by most Republicans. Conservatism is politics informed by nothing important other than self interest. Whatever Christian, moral, or moralistic talk goes with it, it is not informed by any discernible moral principle. It seems sturdily opposed to all rebellion, and conservatives consider terrorists to be the worst kind of rebels.

Yet conservatives have been been happy enough to support revolutions when it suited their outlook, when it was expedient. They did not like Bolshevism in Russia and supported all sorts of invasions and counter revolutionary activities. They cheered the overthrow of legal governments they did not like like Allende’s in Chile, and one in Nicaragua. They have supported very many dictatorial governments and leaders in many countries because they were ready to supress with brutality popular movements that US leaders had decided they did not like. These are all examples of US support for political violence—so much for democracy. They are examples of conservative support for terrorism, a lot of terrorism. The overthrow of Allende was terrorism. It is just not called terrorism when the US supports it.

Contrary to conservatism in western politics is liberalism, which, its name means, is a commitment to freedom. J S Mill and, more recently J Rawls have urged the importance of this commitment, but the question must be asked, before one can commit to any particular freedom, what the good of it is. The freedoms touted by westerners have been rather abstract rather than material, like freedom of speech, a commendable freedom, most people will agree, but not one that will fill the belly of a starving child. Even so Rawls puts freedom of speech in a category higher than freedom from starvation. Abraham Maslow, who devised a hierarchy of human needs, would disagree. Fulfilling physical needs comes way before any ideas of fulfilling higher motives arise.

Democracy is meant to be the guarantee of freedom. Western nations are classified as democratic, and it is considered to be better than any other form of governance, though its practical nature needs a closer look. Because democracy is touted as best, in any disagreement between a democratic state and their enemies—like those typically called terrorists—the democratic state is always considered right. Though the military of democratic countries might be killing far more innocents than suicide bombers, it is all right, it is unquestioned, because democracies cannot be wrong.

The leader of Al Qaida, Osama bin Laden, is a terrorist who has plotted the murder of several thousand innocent people in the west, mainly in the 9/11 atrocity in New York. It was an evil act and bin Laden is an evil man. Bush and Blair responded by plotting the killing of between 25,000 and 100,000 innocent Iraqis, but theirs was not an evil act, and they are not evil men. Democratic leaders cannot be evil, even when they plot far more murders than those who are evil. Their much greater degree of murder is not even thought of in the same way. These murders were acceptable, not entirely so, not by everyone in the west, but certainly by our leaders and most of the media. Their nominal attachment to democracy absolves them from sin, even those who ignored democratic procedures in deciding to go to war, and those who ignored proper democratic procedures to get elected.

Democracy is supposed to be a good thing because it gives every citizen a say in the nation’s decisions… well, every citizen who is registered as a voter, and has not been defranchised on some pretext. Many are in these categories of people unable to vote. They get no vote and count for nothing in our democracy. Many other people have a vote but do not use it. They too have not had any say in the nation’s decisions. You might wonder why all these people are so not so keen on the benefits of democracy that they do not make sure they can have a part in the nation’s decisions. The answer is that they do not agree with the politicians and the media barons that democracy is so great.

Democracy has done nothing for them. It does not work for them. Whoever they vote for seems to them to make no difference to their lives. Their vote does nothing or counts for nothing, and this conclusion is based on experience not on theory. Democracy is only a good thing when everyone’s vote makes a difference. It means every vote must be equal, and voters know it to be so. But these absentee voters know the opposite. Their votes at least do not count, or they believe they do not count because they cannot make any discernible difference to their lives whether they vote for Smith or Jones.

One reason is that our leaders are not interested in making democracy work. Quite the opposite. They prefer the system to be unfair because it is unfair in a way that suits them. Everyone’s vote is not equal in any first past the post system like those of Britain and the US. The only votes that count are the so-called floating voters, people mainly in the middle of the political spectrum who are willing to change their vote. All seats with a traditional majority leave the opposition voters effectively disenfranchised, so they might decide not to bother. Even when proportional representation is introduced, the best systems are rarely picked, discredited as being too complicated, when the real objection is that they work too well.

Democracy and Power

But the effectiveness of the individual’s vote is not the main problem with democracy. Far worse is that the power of people in society to influence voter’s intentions is far from equal. Someone in charge of a newspaper or a TV channel has much more influence on the vote than a truck driver, or a school teacher.

The present economic system concentrates initiative in the hands of a small number of rich men. Those who are not capitalists have, almost always, little choice as to their activities when once they have selected a trade or profession. They are cogs, not part of the power that moves the mechanism. Despite political democracy, the power of self direction belonging to a capitalist and to someone who has to earn their living are extraordinarily different. Economic affairs touch our lives much more intimately than political questions. Those who have no capital usually have to sell themselves to some large organization. They have no voice in its management, and no liberty in politics except what their trades union can secure. If they desire a form of liberty which is not thought important by their trades union, they are powerless. They must submit or live on benefits.

Bertrand Russell, Political Ideals

Rich people use their wealth to affect the electoral result, and wealth is grossly unevenly distributed in our societies. In the US, the richest 10% of people own 70% of the national wealth, a ratio of 7:1. The other 90%, including many people who consider themselves well off, have only 30%, a ratio of 1:3. In other words the wealthiest people are over twenty times richer than everyone else, including the middle classes who consider themseves to be wealthy. They are hundreds of times wealthier than the poor, many of whom have less than nothing, in that they owe more money than they have. They are the ones who feel their vote does not count, and that is why it doesn’t.

It is impossible to defend our democracies as being fair. They are not meant to be fair. The poor haven’t the money to influence the vote. Wealth is power, economic power, and economic power is political power. The poor have no political power. All the political power is in the hands of the rich, mainly rich people stand for office, and America has two millionaires’ parties. Huge amounts of money are needed to campaign across the US. Parties set up to represent the interests of the poor just cannot compete. A poor man can only stand with the help of one of the rich parties and rich sponsors. They are not likely to part with their cash to support anyone likely to change the system. Ideas and options that cannot attract rich men’s dollars never get heard.

Though the US claims devotion to the Christian god, it is much more devoted to the god it calls “The Market”. To blaspheme “The Market” is a much more serious sin than to blaspheme Jarvay. So “The Market” is upheld by the political basis of society, and a vast priesthood and establishment of institutions and commissions extend from local banks and Stock Exchanges into the international arena—the IMF, the World Bank, the European Commission, and so forth. Empires always spread their culture and religion to their dependencies and colonies, and the US has done the same. But however revered “The Market” is, the aim of buying and selling is a mere transaction, and not at all an approach to truth or morality. The aim of the vast infrastructure of “The Market” is to keep wealth where it is—with the caste of plutocrats that runs the USA.

The theology of “The Market” religion was founded by saint Adam Smith. While most conscious aims and desires are most obviously satisfied by acting to fulfil them, Adam Smith thought the God of the Market fulfilled them by His Hidden Hand. It is untrue:

No more do you get a decent society by not trying to get a decent society than you win a war by not trying to win the war.

Ted Honderich, Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War

It is all intended to justify an inequality in economic power that refutes the fairness of western democracy, and therefore refutes democracy itself as touted by our leaders. To say, apologetically, as some western politicians do, that our democracies are as good as we can expect but not perfect, that they do not provide us with total political equality, is to deny that they are democratic. Democracy is meant to be totally politically equal, it requires total political equality. Honderich mocks his earlier less critical self for being persuaded otherwise, illustrating to us that even a philosopher can be taken in and we all need to be alert, and concluding now that our democracies are democracies of inequality, even gross inequality.

The richest citizens in our democracies have hundreds of thousands times more political power than the poorest, and when one person has all that power compared with most of the rest, then only that one is effectively enfranchised. The rest have a vote, but the only voice they repeatedly hear is that of the rich man. Everyone hears the voice of the newspaper or TV proprietor, and his rich friends who can afford advertisements, documentaries and opinion pieces or features. And this is not a new or revolutionary argument. The plutocratic nature of our societies was highlighted almost two centuries ago by J S Mill. Today, the fact that Britain joined the US in an assault on Iraq without the institution of British democracy, the House of Commons, being allowed to vote on it, despite a million or more people marching in the streets in opposition to the prospective war, while one man could decide the fate of nations, the deaths of tens of thousands of Arabs, and hundreds of our own young men and women, proves that democracy in the UK is a fraud.

Subsequently, when the coffins of dead soldiers were paraded through the country town of Wootten Bassett, the media could glorify the needless sacrifice of their lives by calling them heroes. Heroes! For going 6000 miles to kill innocent Afghans in their villages! And if they did manage to kill some bad guys, the deaths of the innocents, the numbers of which we never get, cannot make it heroic. One hundred and thirty years ago, Gladstone the Liberal leader, berated Disraeli, the Conservative Prime Minister, for the same crime. A good Christian, Gladstone asked rhetorically whether an Afghan life was not equal in the eyes of God to a British one. Or an American one. He knew that the good Christian’s answer was that all life is equal in God’s eyes. Is it that our leaders will never learn, or that they profit from the deaths of these innocents and our heroes, and do not care a tinker’s cuss about what God thinks, for all their meretricious piety?

It is not heroic but inhuman to kill innocent people, and the immorality of it cannot be turned into morality by calling those who die on the wicked errand heroes. Nor is it turned into heroism on the supposition that democracy is right because everyone has had a voice in the decision, that we are all involved and committed. Undemocratic democracy means that we have not all had any such part of these crimes. Unequal democracy is not democracy, and grossly unequal democracy is properly called plutocracy. We have seen all that, and that the worth of our democratic judgements is nil when democracy is not democratic. We ordinary folk are supposedly free to decide. That is what our politicians constantly boast, yet we are clearly not free, but bound by the will of those whose wealth and power we cannot hope to equal. We are not equal to them economically or politically.

Many of us, puzzled by the charade, taken in by the lies, just as a great philosopher admitted he once was, cannot understand why we got into these terrible situations when there seems no sense in it. The reason is that our say is negligible. We cannot compete with the rich who manipulate us openly, and much more is hidden or subtle manipulation. That is what the so-called Third Way, New Labour in the UK, was. It was the annexation of the British people’s party by neoconservative sleight of hand. Some Old Labour activists knew it, and left wing critics of Labour knew it, but the Labour voter did not know it. They were the manipulated ones, and many still are despite the succession of catastrophes since.

Freedom or Equality?

When it is clear that we are not equal and not free either, we discover we cannot expect to be both. Politicians tell us we can have one or the other, or lose a bit of both. With Bolshevism, the Russians chose to be equal, and so they were not free. We are free, we are told, so cannot be equal, though we are neither. The dichotomy is false. Freedom should mean equality, and equality should mean freedom. They are either aspects of one thing, or they are proportional to each other, not inversely proportional.

Freedom for all means everyone must have equal access to the means to be free. When someone has a gun and is willing to use it, the people being threatened are not equal to the gunman. Everyone without the weapon is not free but a slave. When someone is rich, does not have to work, but can spend all the free time they have campaigning and buying TV and newspaper coverage, then all their opponents not so privileged are not free. Freedom needs equality. The less equal we are, the less free we are. The more unequal we are, the more we are bond servants or slaves of the rich.

The political mantra of the choice we have between freedom and equality applies only in the sense that some freedoms are contradictory. Someone cannot be free to be rich in an equal society. Economic equality denies personal riches. Equal access to health care denies the insurance seller a dubious income out of people’s health concerns. Equal access to education denies the rich from privately educating their children and gives everyone an incentive for universal excellence in education.

Suppose now that people, after decades of frustration, decided that it was time to give economic equality a chance. Do you imagine that the rich will stand aside in the interests of fairness and democracy and let them vote for communism? Many countries have sought to do it, whether by rebellion, because they had no option of voting, or occasionally by the ballot—Chile for example. In every case, military might overpowered the will of the people, often US military might, or terrorism sponsored by the US via the CIA. Is it possible to believe the US government would countenance in the US itself what it will not countenance anywhere else even in tiny states like Grenada? Why ask? The assumption of western democracy is that some options are not on the cards, while others are compulsory, and a century of constant propaganda against equality has drilled it into the US psyche.

When John Rawls worked out his system of justice as fairness, certain liberties, certain freedoms were taken as given, and as having priority over others such as economic equality. Rawls was rigging the set up to suit the political reality of the USA. He knew political equality was not an option. Freedom to be rich meant that somehow the system had to override economic equality. Rawls did it by substituting equality of opportunity for equality, raising it into an intermediate level of priority between economic equality and the abstract freedoms considered most important, though they never could actually be realized without equality of power. Rawls realized that his “veil of ignorance” could only mean that communism must be chosen for any society at the outset. It was the way to maximize anyone’s worst status in society, yet Rawls allowed it to be disposable as soon as any inequality of wealth could make everyone better off.

The fancied equality of opportunity left a loophole for the poor man to get rich—the so-called American dream—even though there can be no equality of opportunity, either, in a plutocracy. Is George W Bush an example of the American dream? He was a drunk and multiple loser, constantly set back on his feet by his family wealth, until he became president of the USA. It is a good bet that without his family connexions, Bush would have ended up in the gutter. Sometimes someone poor wins the lottery, but it is no substitute for fairness.

Rawls’ saw that equality could not be be the natural state of society, because it would not be allowed to be. So, beginning with the realities of US capitalism, he concluded that it was right. The input of justice as fairness was conservative political economics and its rationale, and Lo! that is what emerged. Rawls’ conception of a “veil of ignorance” shielding the assembly of citizens deciding on the nature of human society (the original position) from the status they would have in that society once it was set up ensured equality—because no one ignorant of where they would be in society would risk being in an inferior or even the worst possible position in an unequal society. No one rational would gamble that they would turn out rich when the odds were overwhelming that they would not but would be poor or a slave.

The natural human society is egalitarian, so Rawls had to let inequality grow out of it, and justified it by allowing it only as long as no one was absolutely worse off economically, even though they were relatively worse off. The man who invents a better stone axe gets rich, and is allowed to retain his wealth because everyone in society was better off with his invention. What though of the next generation and the next? Why does the reward for genius translate into a continuing reward for his children and grandchildren when they are offering nothing to society to merit any reward, but rather are alcoholics and losers? That is the flaw in the argument. People generations down the line, dissatisfied that they have less than the class of people descended from some genius of merit, can demand the recall of the original position and a return to the natural equality of the beginning. The ancient genius has had his reward, and his descendents do not deserve its extension to them. If Prescott Bush deserved some special reward from society, why should his half witted descendent, George W Bush?

The Principle of Humanity

Ted Honderich find the arguments of Rawls in A Theory of Justice not at all fair, and proposes instead a “Principle of Humanity”. Morality does not need the justification of fanciful schemes, of social contracts, however useful they might be in promoting proper thought about it. Our human nature as social animals commits us to a morality of good consequences for our fellow humans in the society we share. The components of the good consequences we all desire and hope for are:

1. a decent length of life
2. a good life, free of pain with adequate food, water, shelter, security, sleep and the natural opportunity of sex
3. freedom and power—not to be forced or bullied to do things by others against our will
4. good relationships with others, including the love of others and membership of a society, nor do we want to be cut off from others on some pretext
5. respect and self respect—not to feel worthless or treated with disdain or humilation, nor having to share humilation with others in our social circle
6. culture, the assurance of customs and tradition including religion, if we choose it, and shared beliefs generally, education, knowledge, and not to be forced into habits we do not want by corruption and degredation.

All of these are components of the good life, the life that people desire and hope for especially when they do not have it, the life that is natural to want as a human being and especially as a social animal, not an isolated, solitary or secluded one. So the Principle of Humanity is that it is natural for each of us to yearn for and seek a good life, and that is common to us all as human beings. Obviously we want a good life for ourselves but we are social beings who live together in society and for whom society is the central fact of our living, without which we would not be human, and so necessarily we want a good life for our fellow humans.

Involved in the Principle of Humanity is possibly an even more basic principle of empathy. Many social vertebrates besides humans, perhaps all of them, empathize with others of their species, and sometimes even with different species. Empathy has a physical basis in the mirror neurones in our brains which fire when we recognize others experiencing what we have experienced ourselves. It shows that concern for others is part of our physical make up—the way we have evolved as social animals. We are natively concerned for other people, and not to be suggests we are lacking something essential to humanity, or are suppressing it contrary to our nature. Empathy is our ability to sense what it is like to be someone else, to feel their pain or joy, their despair or elation. It is sensing what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes. It is reflected in the central tenet of all major religions, including Christianity—“do unto others as you would be done by”.

The Principle of Humanity, to state it a bit more fully, is that the right or justified thing as distinct from others—the right action, practice, institution, government, society or possibly world—is the one that, according to the best judgement and information is the rational one in the sense of being effective and not self-defeating with respect to the end of getting and keeping people out of bad lives.

Ted Honderich, Humanity, Terrorism and Terrorist War, 2006

The Principle of Humanity is saving people from bad lives however it may be done. In itself, it has nothing to say about equality. It would apply in an egalitarian society if everyone’s life were equally bad, and even in any perfectly good society, it would be the measure of its success. It is a principle of fellow feeling, of empathy and generosity. It is what morality means in practice, what it is about, its material basis and reason.

Implications and Practice

Regrettably for the disgustingly rich, however, excessive richness is a sign of a malfunctioning society, and correcting it requires the redistribution of wealth. Someone wealthy will doubtless plead it will make their life worse, contrary to the Principle of Humanity, but it is not making it bad! It is not ending it, or putting them into slavery or destitution. It is saving people from slavery and destitution, far more people than it will make feel poor relative to their previous gross wealth, though they will not be poor. It is not making the rich into paupers or slaves. The aim is to get people out of bad lives, not to put them into them, even the rich. If everyone has a good life, then no one has a bad one. Material incentives would be cut to those necessary for the aim of reducing bad lives, and those who are already well rewarded, like bankers, do not need grotesquely inflated bonuses as an incentive. That is just daylight robbery of the bank’s customers and shareholders. Equally, the poor do not need the threat of destitution to force them to work whatever the compensation.

Violence of any kind has no easy place in the Principle of Humanity. It only makes lives bad except for those who make an immoral living out of causing bad lives by selling armaments. They are human vampires living off other people’s deaths. Violence can be justified under the Principle of Humanity, but not indiscriminate violence, the violence directed against anyone who has not provoked it. Violence can be contemplated only as a last resort, when people have no alternative other than to submit and perhaps die. Jews were right to defend themselves against the Nazis intent on murdering them in the Warsaw Ghetto, but the principle is general. If it was right for Jews fighting Nazi oppression, it is right for Palestinians fighting Zionist oppression. Violence might be necessary to get people out of bad lives.

Equality is not specifically an aim of the Principle of Humanity, but it too is necessary to get people out of bad lives. In a democracy, equality of political power is essential if it is to be fair. Unfair democracy is not democracy. As all humans have similar needs by virtue of being members of the same species, no system that deprives some of them of necessities like food, water and shelter can meet the requirement of the Principle of Humanity. The essentials of life are not being fairly distributed.

Morality then has its basis in the physical evolutionary make up of human beings, a reflexion of our evolution as a social animal. It is not handed down to us by a supernatural God, though it does relate to the origin of the concept of god as a symbol of early human society and its culture—as the tribe idealized and personified as its mythical founder, totem or father. The totem represented the tribe and its culture and all of its social conventions, and was mythicised as the founder of them in their original and idealized form. It was the culture and then the religion of the tribe, meant to be followed by its members and so idealized as morality, correct behaviour. God evolved from the mythical founder, as a supernatural symbol and guide, and so was always associated with morality. Tribal leaders stood for the god, and were meant to be exemplary people. If our own leaders are not exemplary, when they spoil lives rather than benefit them, we should not hesitate to give them exemplary punishments.

The Principle of Humanity is not a slogan to be shelved and only brought out for propaganda purposes. It is a call to action. It requires us to do something, just as the Christian principle—“do unto others as you would be done by”—requires Christians to do something, not merely to have faith. The empathy and co-operation that is characteristic of our species requires us to do something to help others, and certainly cannot mean we are meant to make lives worse. Killing someone is not improving their life, unless they are suffering some agonizing terminal condition and request it. The principle is not abstract, not directly concerned with abstract freedoms and qualities. It is not theoretical, hypothetical, or impractical. It is not hard to know when you are making a life better or worse. The various aspects of the Principle of Humanity are mainly easy to understand, not least because, by empathy, we can judge how we would feel ourselves if the circumstances were different. We are not to leave suffering people in their misery, and must never add to it.

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.

John Rawls

The Principle of Humanity is a principle of truth in that it will not do to pretend it is not true, to turn away from inconvenient facts, and it is not a principle of only helping someone in your own church. All life matters. All lives matter. To consider that only certain ones matter is to deny truth, to think immorally. Some things are self evidently true for anyone. Torturing a child for sexual gratification is wrong. It is never right. It is a plain truth. The Principle of Humanity is similarly self evidently true.

We saw Gladstone reminding Disraeli, God is not partisan in respect of human beings, and you only have to put yourself in someone else’s shoes to realize that every life is valuable to its owner. A grandmother’s, and a mother’s life is as valuable as her child’s, even though any good mother would value her child’s higher. Torturing the mother or grandmother, or the father or grandfather is as wrong as torturing the child. Torturing is wrong. There is no condition that makes it right. Allowing someone to be tortured is wrong. Torturing gives someone a bad life, and is counter to the Principle of Humanity. It is counter to the Christian principle of doing unto others what you would be done by.

Would the one who ordered the torturing want to be tortured? Would Bush or Cheney or Rumsfield? Exposing people to pain or physical damage for any reason is wrong. It is not even right as punishment, and torture is not meant to be punishment. Tortured people are not guilty of anything. They have not had the process of law to test their guilt of anything. These people are no more than suspects, and that means many are innocent. Yet they are tortured. They are given a bad life. They even die under torture! Without justice. We would not like it ourselves so we should not do it to others.

Nor must we turn away people who are starving, or lack the means to protest their misery and oppression and change it, or otherwise lack the means to enjoy a good life. If you can imagine how a proposed action would affect you if it were done to you, then you can judge whether you should do it to someone else. If some action would make your life less bad if you were in someone’s situation then it is something you should do. The only question is what actions or deeds will be most effective and most easily done to save people from bad lives. Whatever it is, it is what should be done. And, if we have the choice of deeds only with bad consequences, we must choose the least bad one. It is immoral, though, to pretend there are only bad choices, when there are others. Every available choice must be considered.

If the Principle of Humanity is wrong, then you have to explain how it is wrong. It is not wrong just because you do not like its implications, and propose to ignore it. You have to explain why it is not moral or is inadequate as a moral code, how it differs from morality that has been expressed for millennia, how it can be improved. If it is wrong then is Christianity wrong, or how does it differ from Christian morality, you Christians? If it is morality without God, then the question remains, how does it differ practically. The Principle of Humanity is a clear practical statement of human morality. Those who reject it, must reject it because it is too clear. It does not admit of any dissimulation about it. It exposes the immorality of our society and our leaders. We can measure them with it.

Further Reading

• More about morality, morality, and justice as fairness.
• A lot more on religious origins—five linked webpages
• More on the death of God and secular Christianity
• More on primitive revelation

The Terror of War and a Hope of Peace

• Read substantial chunks of Ted Honderich’s book at Google Books:
  

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