Philosophy Bites? (Killing in War)

I reg­u­larly listen to the pod­cast Philo­sophy Bites presen­ted by Nigel War­bur­ton. In each epis­ode, a new and inter­est­ing topic is raised with a guest philo­sopher (someone always of note) who has about ten minutes to present their view. I have not writ­ten about it before, but this is not because it has not stirred me. On the coun­try, I often have to stop myself exclaim­ing aloud in dis­agree­ment with some of the guests, for I have long felt that Nigel goes “too easy” on them. Indeed some­times his ques­tions are more the gentle nudge of a teacher than the interlocutor’s retort. Some­thing only asked to tease out the argu­ment a little more.

This reminds me of my old philo­sophy pro­fessor, who would often fence with me on a sub­ject by gently passing me back ques­tions to nat­ur­ally draw out my thoughts into a more coher­ent (ha!) mode of expression.

Clearly with no great success.

The fen­cing ana­logy is apt here, as this is exactly how fen­cing is taught: gently. The Maes­tro leads the pupil through a slow and safe sequence and at the moment of com­mit­ment points out, by gently prod­ding them, that they have over­reached and should have covered quarte instead. How­ever, I prefer being taught in the vein of the mar­tial arts. In kar­ate, any point of view is thrown mer­ci­lessly into the cru­cible of com­bat and tested to destruc­tion. If it is right, then it works. There is no gen­tle­ness and no kind­ness. Only some­thing that stands and some­thing that falls. It is true that when you over-reach you are battered, but at least you learned some­thing and your mas­ter has shown you some honesty.

Hon­esty is always refresh­ing. As John Len­non said, “Just give me the truth.”

So, while Nigel might want to con­sider renam­ing the pod­cast to “Philo­sophy Nibbles”, apart from that, it is by far one of the most intel­li­gent and thought pro­vok­ing down­loads avail­able any­where on the web and one of the reas­ons I fell in love with pod­casts in the first place (the other was MOG Army, which has unfor­tu­nately pod-faded).

So, what of it?

I am going to start writ­ing some opin­ion on these pod­casts, post­ing it here, and invit­ing a more stim­u­lat­ing debate that is pos­sible in the show’s cur­rent format.

We will start with this epis­ode, “Jeff McMa­han on Killing in War,” from Sat, 21 Novem­ber 2009.

When is it right to kill?

Often, when this ques­tion is raised, it is answered only in a neg­at­ive sense. That is, “When isn’t it right to kill?” While this is a valid tac­tic in any argu­ment, it does not cover the crux of the mat­ter, mainly because the argu­ments put for­ward focus on the mat­ter in hind­sight. As in, “When wasn’t it right to have killed?” Such answers are always going to be easier to for­mu­late because one can imme­di­ately refer to examples com­mon between the mem­bers of the debate. People will use the Second World War, the Falk­lands Con­flict and the Iraq Wars to draw lines in the sand that fit their point of view, with the bene­fit that the out­come of those con­flicts is already settled.

There­fore, when dis­cuss­ing “neces­sary defence” and “right­eous con­flict,” they will refer to WWII. When talk­ing about “empires rat­tling their sabres,” out will come the Falk­lands. When talk­ing about “immoral” and pos­sibly “illegal inva­sions,” they will men­tion the Bush years and the Iraq War.

Con­veni­ent. Very con­veni­ent to restrict your­self to judging decisions after the fact. Philo­sophy is not a jus­ti­fic­a­tion of some­thing that has passed; it is also neces­sar­ily a frame­work for going for­wards. This, of course, runs the risk of being proph­esy and there­fore an argu­ment that can­not be imme­di­ately proved (an ana­thema to most mod­ern mor­al­ists), but it grasps the truth of the mat­ter. It is actu­ally say­ing some­thing on the subject.

I want to depart from the lar­ger pic­tures rep­res­ent­ing the mired dis­cus­sion of inter­na­tional rela­tions for a moment (we will come back to it – as it forms the con­clu­sion of the argu­ment I am going to advance), to dis­cuss killing on a much more indi­vidual and per­sonal level. For while we may, and often do, ascribe indi­vidual con­cepts (con­cepts designed for indi­vidu­als and their actions) to lar­ger con­cepts (con­cepts such as ‘a nation’), we are stretch­ing out­side our terms. I believe it is a mis­take to start talk­ing about a “nation’s will.” National will is frac­tious, and neces­sar­ily so in a demo­cracy. Try­ing to claim there is such a thing exist­ing for more than a short moment in his­tory is anthro­po­morph­ising unne­ces­sar­ily and incor­rectly. Con­clus­ive national will is not really like fish swim­ming all together, but rather like marbles fall­ing down a stairs; grav­ity draws them in the same dir­ec­tion; it is dir­ec­ted chaos. Armies, nations and states do not have a moral con­scious­ness, gen­er­als; sol­diers; com­batants do.

I believe that when it comes down to it, right down to it, killing is between people not peoples. It is indi­vidual dir­ect action. Killing is in a human push­ing but­tons, a human pulling a trig­ger and — tra­gic­ally often — a human com­ing Mano-a-mano with the enemy.

So, before dis­cuss­ing right actions in wars, and the pos­sible jus­ti­fic­a­tion of some of the actions we see around us, lets us con­sider an individual’s rights.

Of all the rights we enshrine in laws, mor­als and philo­sophies, the one that mat­ters the most is the right to life. Every human was born with the right to live. What does that mean? It means the right to be. It seems almost too simple, since we are reg­u­larly sur­roun­ded with people being (and we are being ourselves) that we for­get what it really means. It means, simply, that your life belongs to you. It is yours. It is the one thing that truly is yours. It is the last thing you would give away and usu­ally the first thing you would save. It is short, per­il­ous, excit­ing and yet some­times incred­ibly boring.

It is all you really own.

You there­fore have another right, the right to defend it. Noth­ing that any­one can do will take this away from you. But, what does this mean? If you have the right to defend your­self, can this right get cancelled?

No, it can never be cancelled.

You can fight until your last breath if you wish. You can be dragged to the gal­lows, to the opera, to the hos­pital. No one can take this right away. Rights can­not be cancelled.

Of course, a right needs some­thing else. It needs the power to exer­cise it. Through exer­cising your fun­da­mental rights you real­ise your abil­ity to be free to a greater or lesser extent. Of course, this extent is always going to depend on the situ­ation you find your­self in.

So, while a pris­oner on the gal­lows may have lost the abil­ity to exer­cise his right to life, he has not actu­ally lost the right. He will, most prob­ably in a moment, lose his life, but he never at any time lost his right to it. He can­not. A soci­ety may judge him and say, “We will take your life,” but there is never a point that he loses the right to try to defend it. That is why exe­cu­tion is a ter­rible thing, some­times neces­sary, some­times the least cruel option, but always some­thing that pricks with guilt.

This may sound pedantic, but I am lead­ing some­where. So, let us put this another way. Let us start a little fur­ther back. A tiger stalks a boar in the fields of India. The tiger draws near. Near enough that the boar is about to die. She leaps. The boar is taken in the neck and in a moment of chaos his throat is crushed. Death fol­lows this killing.

That is just nature we say. The tiger did not take the boar’s right to life away, she just killed him. The boar, if he could have, would have defen­ded him­self or run away to pre­serve and defend his right to life. On the other hand, the tiger also has a right to life. She has a need to eat to pre­serve it. She has cubs to feed. At no point does the rights of either get taken away, they only get expressed.

That’s nature sure enough. It is called by one group, “The sur­vival of the fit­test,” and by another, “The will of God.” Regard­less, it is nature. A cycle repeated all the way back in the dis­tant his­tory of time. Since the first single cell organ­ism ate the one next to it, it has been nature. That single cell organ­ism took the other organism’s energy for itself. It took it away as a com­pet­itor for other food, for space and per­haps for a mate. By sur­viv­ing, it pre­served its life. This was not an immoral action, only an expres­sion. The tiger is in the same situ­ation. The boar is food — energy is in the form of other liv­ing things — and the tiger needs this energy to sur­vive. The boar on the other hand is not gif­ted a moral high ground for being attacked and killed. It has been unable to express its right to life. If it could some­how turn the tables on the tiger and fight her off, even per­haps kill her, then he would not be express­ing a moral vic­tory. He would be express­ing his right to defend his life, and express­ing it well.

The tiger is not bet­ter than the boar.

The boar is not bet­ter than the tiger.

It is a simple mat­ter of cap­ab­il­ity, the move­ment of energy, the weight of power. The expres­sion of rights.

The anim­als are free.

The human is only an animal.

One of the greatest mis­takes man­kind makes is the think­ing of them­selves as sep­ar­ate from the anim­als in the world. It is a mis­take as we are not that spe­cial. The reas­ons that we do this are not that spe­cial either. Tigers prob­ably con­sider them­selves bet­ter than boars and boars surely are bet­ter, they must grunt to each other, than those bloody tigers!

It is a mat­ter of skewed perspective.

Per­spect­ive that is also not spe­cial to humans. There is a type of bird in Iran that lives in a recog­nis­able “fam­ily”. They share the food, share the preen­ing, fall asleep on each other, take turns stand­ing guard, scare off snakes and such. To see such activ­ity in birds, an animal we do not nor­mally anthro­po­morph­ise, is to see ourselves in an unusual other. I am always amazed at humanity’s judge­ment in this regard. I often meet people who state that there are, “Humans and then anim­als like ele­phants, oh, and of course, the fish in the sea and the birds – don’t for­get the birds.”

I used to think this atti­tude was one of ignor­ance. A simple mis­un­der­stand­ing that the term “animal” means fish, birds and mam­mals such as humans and ele­phants. An ignor­ance of our place in the tree of life. But, it isn’t. It is some­thing else. It is the pla­cing of our minds, our con­scious­ness, and our view of the world above that of the other life on the planet. We have achieved this dis­tinc­tion, this pedestal’ing, through one thing only: the expres­sion of power. We think this because we have the power to do so.

Power, in this sense, is expressed in every way we can meas­ure it, we con­vince ourselves it is true. Intel­li­gence and the abil­ity to kill with impun­ity for two. We tell ourselves that it is only nat­ural, and it is, to kill to eat. Even veget­ari­ans kill some­thing that lives; it is the essen­tial nature of life on Earth. What is wrong, what blinds us, is our made up justifications.

Our made up morality.

We do it with more than the “dumb beasts” out­side in the world. We do it with each other too. The vast major­ity of humans are suf­fer­ing from a ter­rible skew­ing of per­spect­ive. Their own. Their own life is some­how more import­ant that any­one else’s. This leads to the most amaz­ing level of self-serving jus­ti­fic­a­tion for many things. The human mind nat­ur­ally, it seems, man­ages to smooth over their own mis­takes and hor­rible actions, sweep­ing them under the car­pet, while all the time tak­ing great pains in point­ing out each other’s. There­fore, we tell ourselves that we are not ‘rude’, only ‘out­spoken’. When someone tells you what he or she would do in their place, “Oh, I would have just smacked him” they say gruffly, with the scowl of fantasy­ing visu­al­isa­tion, as though they actu­ally did do that, they are actu­ally simply con­firm­ing their own view of their place in the world. It is a kind of “king of the hill” moment prob­ably com­mon to all animals.

All life has some level of soci­etal struc­ture. It is, in the very least, the method that they have to reproduce.

When there are 6 bil­lion of you, this is nat­ur­ally a mesh of com­plex rela­tion­ships float­ing one atop another. How you talk to your wife, your boss, your friends. How you treat strangers, old people and dif­fer­ent people. All these lay­ers mesh into how oth­ers see you and, in being in one place or another within the mesh, how your mind sees itself.

Tigers do this too. Just at sim­pler level.

There­fore, if all life acts in this way, if it is a com­mon­al­ity to see your­self as spe­cial, it becomes — like in a top-heavy frac­tion — some­thing you can can­cel out of the final reduc­tion. This leads to the truth. Refresh­ing, but cold.

Your life has no more mean­ing as any­one else’s. Your right to defend your­self is exactly the same as someone else’s.

If that is the case, then the mor­al­ity (that natural-perspective-judgement on the situ­ation) can­not and should not enter into the decision you find your­self faced with.

And so here we are. We have swum, albeit briefly, down into the water of the pool and touched the bot­tom, only to now turn and reach back for the sur­face and another breath. Some­time soon, a full and slow dive will be needed, so that we may explore this strange under­wa­ter world in more depth. Con­sider this a quick pre-se.

Take a so called, “moral dilemma” of two sol­diers shoot­ing at each other. They are both in a fight to defend their life; they both have an equal right to sur­vive. Just because one shoots first, because one has the drop on the other or because one flanks and has an easy kill, mat­ters not one jot. The same as for the tiger. Both have the right to defend them­selves and both are express­ing that right. Just because one has the power to express that right more effect­ively than another is irrelevant.

Now, let us not jump ahead here to my con­clu­sion, because per­haps it is not as you ima­gine from the above. For while, this may sound like I am express­ing the ancient creed of, “might makes moral right,” if you think about it, I am not. I may not like the truth of this argu­ment, but that doesn’t mean I should not face it, or I fall into the trap that it high­lights. So, I am actu­ally say­ing that there is no “moral right.” There is only an animal’s right to its life and its abil­ity to express that right. A tiger is not mor­ally right. It is just cap­able. Real­ity is without mor­als. Real­ity is natural.

If you accept that the tiger is not “wrong” for hunt­ing the boar, if you real­ise that all liv­ing things takes energy from other creatures, if you real­ise that we delude ourselves when we raise human­ity above the other life of this planet, then this argu­ment nat­ur­ally follows.

“Mor­al­ity,” is our lim­ited inven­tion, this we already know, and we waste a lot of time scrab­bling around try­ing to uni­ver­sal­ise this. What is now hope­fully clearer is that mor­al­ity is neces­sar­ily an illu­sion. A frame­work based on a selfish per­spect­ive on the world, a mis­un­der­stand­ing of our place on the planet, in the Universe(s).

Someone might now say to me, “But what of that ‘right,’ you men­tioned? The right to life. Is that not the basis for a mor­al­ity? The key­stone upon which it all rests?”

Well, no. It is not. As I said, rights mean little without the power to express them. The right to life and the right to defend your life are clearly not things that pre­vent nature affect­ing you. You may, almost cer­tainly will, one day become ill enough to threaten your life. Does that make the virus killing you “wrong?” Our moral judge­ments pre­dic­ate that we put ourselves on a ped­es­tal that blinds us to the real­ity we find ourselves in.

What does this mean for morality?

It leads to a simple truth, that is: “mor­ally right” does not exist. Actions can­not be cor­rectly and object­ively judged under the frame­works we have built ourselves, because the com­plic­a­tions, the un-weaving of the web of mor­al­ity, is impossible and even­tu­ally lim­ited to our own selfish perspectives.

Here is an every­day prac­tical example. Today, 16th Decem­ber 2009, the work­ers of Brit­ish Air­ways announced that they were going on strike for the 12 days over Christ­mas. From the point of view of the news media, my mother and almost any­one out­side this strike, this is a rep­re­hens­ible action of moral out­rage. Think of all the people, “whose Christ­mas is going to be ruined” is what we are urged to do. How­ever, for the staff of BA who are going on strike, some sort of beha­viour, some sort of man­age­ment ‘evil’ has led to such a situ­ation that they must strike to stop it. To them, they are doing the right thing. It is a mor­ally right action to strike.

How can one unravel this situ­ation and judge moral rights? Are the strikers right? Is the news media right? What about those affected by the strike? Are they mor­ally right to com­plain? They will miss Christ­mas, what if one of them is going to the sick bed of a dying rel­at­ive? Does that make the strike wrong? What if one of them is going to the sick bed of a recov­er­ing rel­at­ive that they plan to murder? Does that make the strike right?

This maze, this puzzle with no answer, is the essen­tial dilemma that can­not be unrav­elled ahead of time. A group of expert Philo­soph­ers might be try to unravel it and after years pro­nounce that yes, or no, the strike was mor­ally right or wrong, but what would be the point? Not only will have the strike passed, but clearly no one could have decided the cor­rect action ahead of time. If mor­als can only look back, then they lose much of their worth.

Why?

Because, they rely on the illu­sion of per­spect­ive. Who is to judge? Who is impar­tial? No one.

There is no real “moral right” or “moral wrong” and cer­tainly the attempt to judge as such using the com­mon frame­work is fruit­less. Coun­tries that try to make moral decisions before attack­ing do so only in terms of their own per­spect­ives. For example, take Amer­ica. They are not inter­ested in any­one else’s per­spect­ive in the slight­est. Any attempt to arrive at a judge­ment out­side the self-serving Amer­ican one is met with incred­ible viol­ence. That is why Amer­ica lets no sol­dier face trial in the Inter­na­tional Court. That is why Amer­ica has passed a law leg­al­ising (to them­selves) the poten­tial inva­sion of Holland.

That is the height of illu­sion. The attempt to force your per­spect­ive onto the world through the strength of your coun­try. Even­tu­ally it will neces­sar­ily fail. It can­not do any­thing else.

So, lets us take war.

War is neither right nor wrong. It is tra­gic, spite­ful, unne­ces­sary and — from the moral per­spect­ive of those attacked — “wrong.” It is how­ever, not actu­ally “mor­ally wrong” since such a judge­ment is impossible to decode from the web that sur­rounds any action, let alone a country’s actions, or a President’s actions.

We can make up some rules, but then so can any­one. We can mor­al­ise, but we can only do this within the frame­work of the com­munity we live in, and in the well of self-centred illu­sion we all wal­low in.

What can be done?

That is a much more dif­fi­cult ques­tion. I am a Daoist. My per­spect­ive is that of Dao­ism. There­fore, my answer is going to be one express­ing Daoist val­ues. To the Daoist, one should always live in tune with nature. Expres­sions made nat­ur­ally and peace­fully. Not beat one­self up about moral rights and wrongs and simply allow all to be. How­ever, as a philo­sopher, I can use the tools and skills taught to me. But, I must recog­nise the futil­ity of this. My tools are those of my soci­ety passed to me. My train­ing is based in a West­ern model of under­stand­ing, stretch­ing back all the way to Plato. I must sub­lime these two parts of myself.

To find an answer that is cor­rect we must face the facts. It is the whole frame­work that is wrong. Our natural-perspective-judgement had built a col­lec­tion of self-serving, selfish, cruel, and deluded soci­et­ies based on a simple false pre­dic­ate; mor­al­ity can be judged. Well, I am sorry, it can’t.

This is also a moment of pause, for I am also not sug­gest­ing that the Hip­pies had it right either. I am not par­tic­u­larly a paci­fist. I am a, if I may bor­row a phrase, a “naturalist”.

For me, the answer is this: life is not about goals and wants. Life is not about desire. By strip­ping away the illu­sion sur­round­ing us, we can real­ise a con­nec­tion with life and nature that nat­ur­ally leads to peace. Desire for things, for objects, for con­trol, for dom­in­a­tion, is a waste of everyone’s time and effort. A waste of life. Desire for stuff, for iPhones, Play­sta­tions, houses, for “own­ing”, is wasted life.

I spoke to someone the other day, who was unhappy about their life, and wish­ing it was more like so-and-so’s. “Why should they have all that? Why can’t I have some of that life, they are so lucky.” Really? I know the other party well. They are no hap­pier than the first. No mor­ally bet­ter off. No per­son­ally richer. They just have more “stuff”. This is not the path to hap­pi­ness. This is not the path to peace. Peace comes from a real­isa­tion of real­ity, a real­isa­tion that leads to “let­ting go of grasp­ing”, to con­tent­ment. In a soci­ety built upon the need for “stuff”, for con­sump­tion, for cap­it­al­ism, one can never reach a level of peace. The soci­ety will always want more, the indi­vidual will always be unhap­pily grasping.

In a way the cap­it­al­ist soci­ety already knows this. Con­sum­ing is life to most. The coun­try is setup to drive this con­sumer­ism in a feed­back mech­an­ism that is con­sidered the drive to growth. The idea is that this mech­an­ism (called, “The Mar­ket”) is the nat­ural order. It is really a way of grow­ing wild and dan­ger­ous. Like the marbles boun­cing down the stairs, we are unable to stop the momentum of this mech­an­ism (after all I am writ­ing this on the train to work!). Where does it lead? If want­ing things is a way of exist­ing — if it can be called that — It is actu­ally a way to frus­tra­tion, to desire driv­ing action.

It leads to destruction.

Destruc­tion of the people, the planet and the per­son. This is com­monly expressed as war. For what is war than simply one nation try­ing to take the “stuff” of another? Sure, all sorts of excuses are made up for this, usu­ally the argu­ment of act­ing in self defence. An argu­ment that tries to claim the “coun­try” involved is only express­ing the “right” I men­tioned at the begin­ning of this art­icle. But, as I also men­tioned, coun­tries don’t have rights. Only liv­ing things do. Coun­tries, as we know them, are made up of people all lost in the two illu­sions, those of desire and the excuses of natural-perspective-judgements to explain those desires. To call them morals.

We say that life is like a jour­ney, with a reward wait­ing at the end. But, really, life is like a dance, and one you will only dance once.

So, hav­ing – as my friend would say — “root­ing around in the mud”, we come to the end. In the end the con­clu­sion is one of prac­tical advice ahead of the fact, advice most can­not give from the truth I expounded at the begin­ning, only from a huge frame­work of “moral laws”.

Here it is:

For the gen­eral express­ing his coun­tries “will”, the action can­not be judged to be wrong. Nor can it be judged to be right. Invad­ing one city, bypassing another, killing in the name of, is what it is. It is a heck of a lot of dead people.

Remem­ber that.

For the pilot press­ing his bomb­ing but­ton, the tank com­mander order­ing, “fire!” and the mis­sileer tar­get­ing a city, you are not immoral, but neither are you moral. Don’t believe such a thing is neces­sary, it is not. No one can tell you that it is the “right” thing to do.

Act on your own conscience.

For the sol­dier trapped in the web of those who live in illu­sion about the nature of life (includ­ing him­self), if he has the abil­ity to express his right to life, then he is never wrong. Killing in war is not wrong. But, neither is it right. There is no moral right and wrong. Only the chaos of life, the dis­order of per­spect­ive and the illu­sion of desires. Defend­ing one’s right to life is never wrong, in the sense that this is not a waste of life to do so. While you can decide to sac­ri­fice your­self, real­ise, under­stand, you are neither right nor wrong.

You are only dancing.

Basho.

Agree? Dis­agree?  Then step up to the plate my friend and join the debate! You can leave a com­ment here or email me through the form at the top.

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