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Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can't, Condemn the Terrorists?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2017

G. A. Cohen
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‘No matter what the grievance, and I'm sure that the Palestinians have some legitimate grievances, nothing can justify the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians. If they were attacking our soldiers it would be a different matter.’ (Dr. Zvi Shtauber, Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom, BBC Radio 4, May 1, 2003).

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 58 , May 2006 , pp. 113 - 136
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2006

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References

2 Perhaps I should define the word ‘overdog’. On September 4, 2003, just before 1.30 p.m., U.K. time, the World at One, a British news programme, interviewed a spokesperson for the British arms industry (whose name I did not catch) about the then current International Arms Fair in London. The spokesperson was asked whether he did not agree that, although arms exports made money for Britain, and British people might welcome that, they would nevertheless be happier still if the same amount of money were being made through some form of non-arms export. He replied more or less as follows: ‘Not at all. British people are proud when they see Harriers and Tornadoes being used in far-flung places. Of course, if we were selling small arms, like Kalashnikovs, that would be a different matter’. That man was a spokesperson for overdogs.

3 To his Today programme interviewer, John Humphrys, at 8.15 a.m., U.K. time.

4 Voltaire famously said, ‘I disagree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it.’ I am saying something closer to ‘I agree with what you say, but I shall attack your right to say it.’ OK, maybe not to the death.

5 You might nevertheless have wanted me to say what I think terrorism actually is. But there is, in a sense, nothing that I think terrorism is, where ‘is’ is the ‘is’ of identity: I would affirm no English sentence of the form ‘Terrorism is …’ of which I would say that anybody who denies that that is what terrorism (‘is’ of identity) is says something false. The behaviour of the word ‘terrorism’ is too disorderly for us to be able to identify a range of its uses that could serve as canonical tests of proposed definitions of the term.

6 It is, moreover, false that terrorism is never productive, as Michael Ignatieff economically shows: ‘As for the futility of terrorism itself, who could say with confidence that Jewish terrorism—the assassination of Lord Moyne and then of Count Bernadotte, the bombing of the King David Hotel, followed by selective massacres in a few Palestinian villages in order to secure the flight of all Palestinians—did not succeed in dislodging the British and consolidating Jewish control of the new state? Though terror alone did not create the state of Israel—the moral legitimacy of the claim of the Holocaust survivors counted even more—terror was instrumental, and terror worked.’ ‘The Lessons of Terror: All War Against Civilians Is Equal’, The New York Times Book Review, 17 02 2002.Google Scholar

7 Note that the proper object of assessment is not terrorism but a course of action that includes terrorism, which covers courses that also include negotiation. Pure negotiation is not the only alternative to terror: the efficacy of the good cop/bad cop strategy is well understood.

8 The implications of the proposition would make most people recoil from it. Andrew Williams spells them out: ‘The view contemplated here seems to me to imply that there is an injustice so burdensome that if the only way in which I can escape it is by imposing it on others, then it is permissible for me to do so no matter how many individuals I might have to sacrifice and how little threat they pose to me.’ (Private communication.)

9 The question, ‘Who can say what to whom?’, goes largely unexplored in contemporary moral philosophy. To be sure, if all that moral philosophy were interested in were which acts are right and which wrong, then this phenomenon might deserve little attention. (‘Might’: I do not myself believe that the phenomenon carries no lessons as to what is morally right, because I believe that what I call the ‘interpersonal test’ (‘Incentives, Inequality, and Community’, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume XIII, Peterson, Grethe (ed.) (Salt Lake City: Utah University Press, 1992), 280ff.Google Scholar)—which is not employed in the present paper—has non-interpersonal moral implications.) But, insofar as moral philosophy seeks to reconstruct actual moral discourse, the widespread neglect by moral philosophy of the phenomenon described in the sentence to which this footnote is attached is unjustified, since it looms very large in moral discourse.

I myself began to examine the interpersonal dimension of moral utterances in ‘Incentives’, and the theme was subjected to further study by Jerry Dworkin in an article called ‘Morally Speaking’ (in Reasoning Practically, Ullmann-Margalit, E. (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2000))Google Scholar. As I said: ‘A [moral] argument will often wear a particular aspect because of who is offering it and/or to whom it is being addressed. When reasons are given for performing an action or endorsing a policy or adopting an attitude, the appropriate response by the person(s) asked so to act or approve or feel, and the reaction of variously placed observers of the interchange, may depend on who is speaking and who is listening. The form, and the explanation, of that dependence vary considerably across different kinds of case. But the general point is that there are many ways, some more interesting than others, in which an argument's persuasive value can be speaker-and/or-audience-relative, and there are many reasons of, once again, different degrees of interest, why that should be so.’ (Ibid., page 273: a number of illustrations of the ‘general point’ follow the quoted paragraph.)

I hope to say more about these matters in a paper called ‘Ways of Silencing Critics’, a draft of which I shall send on request.

10 My topic is not when it's morally permissible or obligatory to condemn, and it is not part of my view that it is always bad or wrong for someone who is not in a position to condemn to condemn. I could agree with a person who said: ‘I really wasn't in a position to condemn him, but issuing that savage condemnation was the only way to rally others and/or to get him to stop, and that was more important than making sure that my speech-acts were in accord with my —standing”.’

I believe that lying is in itself wrong, and that it therefore counts against an act that it is a lie, which is to say that there is something wrong with lying because of its nature, whatever its typical, or unusual-case, consequences may be. But sometimes those consequences can make it all right, or even imperative, to lie. So, similarly, here: I believe that there is something wrong with condemning unless certain presuppositions are fulfilled, but if dodgy condemning is going to save the children, then I say: ‘Condemn away!’ It may be better that villainous superpowers condemn one another's villainies than that they remain silent about them, because that way we learn about the villainies on both sides (and, hence, inter alia, how poorly placed the superpowers are to condemn each other). I think one can say: ‘He has no right to condemn, but let us hope he does condemn’, and maybe even ‘but he ought to do so…’.

11 The phrase ‘illocutionary force’ is J. L. Austin's: see his How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), Lectures VII–XII.Google Scholar

12 It may be worthwhile to distinguish some distinct ways of resisting the claims of this paper. You disagree with me most fundamentally if, as I have said, you deny the very existence of the sort of transgression of which I accuse Shtauber, if, that is, you deny that the capacity to engage in good-faith condemnation is relative to the record and/or posture of the would-be condemner. But you might accept that relativity thesis yet insist, against what I have said, that absolutely excluded acts can be condemned by anyone: Shtauber might then be immune to my critique. And he might also be thought immune to it for some other reason, even if one's standing does bear on one's capacity to condemn absolutely excluded acts.

13 For some further attempts at explication, see my ‘Ways of Silencing Critics’: see footnote 9 above.

14 Yet both Goldstein and Shapiro could, of course, be condemned by the conscientious club-attender Hockenstein.

15 This is not to deny that what the pot says is true, and in some contexts, its truth will be all that matters. If the kettle had said that it was clean, what the pot says to the kettle might pass muster. But in political contexts, in contexts of political enmity, what the pot says is often discredited even if it is preceded by a rosy and false self-appraisal on the part of the kettle

Compare Christopher Ricks' quip about T. S. Eliot: ‘… Ricks said Eliot's clearing Wyndham Lewis of having fascist sympathies was like the pot calling the kettle white. ‘I was right and wrong to make the joke, which was quite a good joke,’ says Ricks. ‘If you follow it remorselessly it suggests Eliot was a fascist which I don't think he was. But he also wasn't in a position to clear other people of the accusation. There is too much that Eliot is associated with that is not without its links to fascism.’ (Profile of Christopher Ricks by Nicholas Wroe, Guardian Newspaper Review Section, January 29, 2005, 23)

Worthy of narration here is the following joke: The rabbi has left the synagogue to do some shopping, and the shammas, or, if you must, the verger, is in charge. The rabbi returns unexpectedly early, and, entering the synagogue, finds the shammas on the floor, in prayer: ‘Oh, Lord, thou art everything and I am nothing!’ Says the rabbi: ‘Hah! Look who says he's nothing!’

Nietzsche said it quicker: ‘He who despises himself still esteems the despiser within himself.’

16 I presume here that, despite the context of that remark, Jesus intended it as advice not only about literal but also about metaphorical stone-throwing.

17 Would Jesus have allowed you to cast a stone if you first signed up for being the next victim of stone-casting? Consider monks who flagellate each other. Why shouldn't the fact that we are all sinners mean that we should all criticize each other, rather than, as Jesus says, that no one should criticize anybody? (I thank Marshall Berman for that pregnant counter-suggestion). Compare the discussion of the ‘inconsistency explanation’ of tu quoque in my ‘Ways of Silencing Critics’: see footnote 9 above.

There is some further investigation of tu quoque in my ‘Ways of Silencing Critics’ (see footnote 9 above). And we should also consider what might be called counterfactual tu quoque: ‘You'd do this, or worse, if you were in my shoes.’ Can American neo-cons put their hands on their hearts and declare that if their own weapons of mass destruction were somehow immobilized, say, by computer hackers, then they would nevertheless refrain from using terrorist means against their opponents, even if they thought them effective? (I set aside the claim that they have non-counterfactually used, and nourished the use of, such means in Latin America). Can they deny that what are now terrorists might prefer to use approved weapons of mass destruction, in acceptable ways, as the United States may be presumed to have done (in discussions with terrorcondemning Americans who do not condemn the United States) at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

18 I italicize those words, because they point to a theme that occurred to me late in the course of my work on this paper, and that needs further development. In some fashion condemners invite third paries to join them in condemning the condemnable, but when tu quoque applies to condemners, there are reasons for third parties to refuse to join them.

19 The diagnosis of those judgments, and whether or not they really support double effect, is controversial.

20 If some amount of side-effect killing n is just as bad as some lesser amount of aimed-at killing m, then some lesser amount of side-effect killing p (m<n<p) where recklessness is displayed would surely be just as bad as that amount (m) of aimed-at killing.

21 Note the present tense: I do not say that a reformed Nazi superior cannot condemn an unreformed lesser functionary for having obeyed him.

22 On ‘similar or worse’, see ‘Ways of Silencing Critics’, section (1).

23 Also worthy of exploration is how and under what circumstances your involvement imposes on you a duty to condemn. And there may be cases in which you have both a duty to condemn and no right to do so.

24 Suppose some oppressed opponents of a state begin a campaign of liberation by attacking soldiers. But then the state gives its soldiers bulletproof armour, and, needless to say, doesn't also issue such armour to its oppressed opponents. Suppose that, as a result, the oppressed can now have an effect only by attacking civilians. Can they not say, tellingly, that their oppressors, in adopting the armour policy, have left them with no other recourse? We, the bystanders, may be able to condemn both co-responsible sides: the state for its armour policy, the oppressed for now attacking civilians. But how can the state condemn the oppressed, unless the state can impugn their grievance?

25 By that I mean that the grievance-causer need not be the options-restricter, or vice versa: I do not mean that ‘You caused our grievance’ is powerful even if we have many good non-terrorist options, or that ‘You made terror a good recourse’ is powerful even if we have no justified grievance. The force of each consideration is indeed normatively dependent on the force of the other.

26 An army which they would of course not need to use to seek to achieve an independence that they lack!

27 Many Israelis would claim that both the Oslo agreement and Camp David offered the Palestinians a state, but that Arafat's venality and incompetence lost it for them. Palestinians counterclaim that what was offered was both constitutionally and geographically inadequate: a set of powers that amount to less than full and rightful sovereignty, within a set of ‘Bantustans’ that did not satisfy the full and rightful Palestinian territorial claim. I take no stand on these matters here. But the Israeli case, even if sound, cannot be pressed against my criticism of Shtauber, since to raise that case is to embark on the enterprise of assessing the Palestinian grievance—and that is what Shtauber thought and sought to avoid.

28 To be sure, there exist non-violent unconventional means, and they are sometimes more effective than terrorism, but recall our decision (see page 115) to face the challenge of a terrorism that is distinctively productive. In any case, Shtauber wasn't forbidding violence, just violence against non-soldiers, and violence, to similar effect, against soldiers, is harder for Palestinians to achieve.

29 I think that one reason why colossal terrorism in response to colossal injustice perplexes us is that we commonly take a person's lacking any reasonable alternative to an action A as justifying her doing A. It usually does. But not always. And realizing that helps us to think more clearly about terrorism.

30 But straightforward suicide is forbidden by Islam, whereas suicide that also kills infidels or other legitimate opponents is honourable martyrdom: in which case it would be religious belief, not Israeli action, that blocks this more effective and, judged non-Islamically, more acceptable course. (I owe the suicide-without-homicide suggestion, and the comment on it in this footnote, to Diego Gambetta).

31 After writing this paper, I benefited from reading Tim Scanlon's ‘Blame’, a work in progress that distinguishes three items: blameworthiness, (the attitude of) blame, and the act of blaming. One might say that I explore above certain contrasts between the first and the third of those. I should therefore note that, as it seems to me, much of what disqualifies the act would also disqualify the attitude, and that, as it also seems to me, a major reason why the act gets disqualified, in the relevant cases, is that it expresses a disqualified attitude.

32 The end of what the Jesuits consider to be a person's most impressionable age.