Ideas
Living the good life
Published 30 August 2007
Some principles outweigh all other moral concerns.
His wife has an affair and leaves him and the children. He can't handle it. In his self-deception, he goes around to the house she's in, with petrol for the letter box and glue for the locks. She's there, but he sees the cleaning woman go in, too. The judge treats with contempt his plea that he is guilty of only one murder, that he did not intend to burn to death the innocent cleaning woman. Her family hates him for his note of condolence.
That is as good an analogy as needed for the intentional killings of great numbers of innocents in our terrorist war in Iraq. They are first of all the moral crimes of Bush and Blair. They will be Brown's, too, if he does not act soon on his moral character. You intend to do, as all decent law and sense knows, what you foresee as the probable consequence of your actions.
Is the problem of Palestine hard, the rights and wrongs controversial? No. There is no complexity at all. None. Four-fifths of the homeland of an indigenous people, the Palestinians, was taken from them, then defensibly, in a circumstance that included the Holocaust. Neo-Zionism is the taking from them of at least their freedom in the last fifth. It is moral barbarism. They have a moral right to their terrorism against it.
Do these judgements rely on some principle of retributive justice in Immanuel Kant's ethics, along with the emptiness that all men are to be treated as ends as well as means? There is no such principle. Do they depend on the congeries of stuff that is liberalism? Do they depend on human rights - there for everybody's picking and choosing? Are they at bottom about equality? Do they depend on hierarchic democracy? On the past retorts of a shyster-lawyer in an elected assembly, a ferret at the despatch box?
No, the judgements rely on a less manipulable attitude we all share despite our terrible self- interest - the Principle of Humanity. It is about bad lives, lives deprived of the great human goods, frustrated in the great human desires: decent length of life, bodily quality of life, freedom and power, respect and self-respect, goods of relationship, goods of culture.
The principle is that the right thing as distinct from others - action, practice, institution, government, society, possible world - is the one that, according to the best judgement and in formation, 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.
The judgements rely on the principle, but the connection is not simple. Any principle that tolerates the torture of a child for the purposes of a man's sexual excitement is destroyed by that consequence. The Principle of Humanity can be relied on in judging Iraq and Palestine. It is also supported by morally intelligent convictions about them.
Ted Honderich's most recent book is "Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War" (Continuum, £8.99)
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