Sitting Ducks?

One of my favourite blogs for IR geeks recently ran a post about a report from the Brookings Institution (pdf) about assassination as a means of foreign policy. I haven't read the entire 44 pages from the folks at the BI, so I'm going to consider this strictly in terms of what the Duck has to say about it. Be it resolved that a liberal state can legitimately assassinate individuals without due process?

Of course, assassination isn't a practice one generally associates with liberalism. Even the most vehement market liberals need some kind of harm principle to make inalienable rights like private property stick, and murder is usually considered harm with good reason. On the other hand, consider this little thought experiment: John Stuart Mill is driving down the street and sees little old Pol Pot jaywalking up ahead. Does/should Mill stop? Heck no! I think liberals can justify assassination/murder on the grounds of the categorical imperative, but they must be very careful in deploying it. The categorical imperative (at least the better half, if you ask me), for those who Kant remember, states "act only on that maxim that you would will to become a universal law." In other words, unless you would accept everyone behaving the way you are, what you're doing is wrong.

The tricky part is in formulating the maxim. In the example above, if Mill were following the maxim of "run over all old Asian men", he'd have to pull a u-turn and make roadkill out of the Dali Llama. If the maxim were "run over evil people", it would just beg the question of what's evil, and even it's "only run over those whose decisions caused thousands of deaths", there would be precious few two-term presidents in the States in addition to a doozy of an epistemological problem. So, the maxim of "runover anybody whose role in implementing genocide is indisputable, and don't cause any collateral damage while doing it" will at least serve as a first approximation.

A second, more technical problem is to make sure that everybody else knows what the maxim is. Of course, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and others are likely to claim a similar right. Not only must you make sure that your maxim is one that fits the situation at hand, you have to make sure it's one you'll be able to live with in the future - even when it might be applied to you.

A third problem is that you might let the cat out of the bag and give everybody license to start killing people with their own maxims, with which you might disagree. The world has seen people who wanted to kill all the rich, and if we can choose our maxims, what's to stop them from choosing theirs (besides our threatening them, which gets us nowhere)?

So I s'pose my answer is a very thin yes, that state-sanctioned assassination can be legitimate, but I disagree with the Duck's justification that "...someone has to have the job of playing cop in the international system." It's more complicated than that, as it should be.

United We Stand, Divided We Fall?

Today I was going to use Sarah Palin as a vehicle to bash the current state of the Republican party, but I quickly had the unpleasant feeling of beating a dead horse. Luckily, something else caught my eye.


As a polyglot living in a foreign country and studying spontaneous social order, it's hard to get around language. Language is the original spontaneous social order. There's a well-worn debate about how the EU should manage the fact that it has 23 official languages and should arguably have more. Leaving the technical, short-term efficiency arguments aside (i.e. how much easier would it make communication in the EU, and how much money would be saved, if there were a single language or a lingua franca), I'm torn between two longer term arguments for and against a single European language.


The long-term argument in favour relates to the potential to build a common identity. Showing cavalier disregard for standards of semantic rectitude, Americans would probably call this the "more perfect Union" argument, and it goes something like this. Most people, if they were sitting on a bus in Belgium, couldn't tell the Flemish from the Walloons. Ditto Catalans, Castellians, Basques. The same even applies across countries, which is clear if you've ever been to a big European tourist event (e.g. Oktoberfest, Love Parade, Bastille Day) and have heard the variety of languages spoken by spectators/participants. Similarly, many Europeans have pretty similar palettes with variation at the margins. Not everyone in Europe will enjoy regional delicacies like Swabian sour tripe or Czech fried cheese, but spaghetti, baguettes, schnitzel, kielbasa, and paella are welcome pretty much everywhere. Europeans used to fight about money, religion, borders, and ideology. Now they have a common currency, secularism (more or less), Schengen, and trans-European political parties. One of the few elements of European identity that still serves to create "otherness" and let Europeans make scapegoats of each other is language. Serbo-croatian is, for all intents and purposes, one language for everyone who doesn't speak it or is only learning. This is a very controversial statement, however, for native speakers. Greeks worry about Macedonian and Bulgarian migrants, but they would be hard pressed to identify these Balkan bugaboos if they all spoke a common tongue. In short, you can't understand people unless you understand people; a common language would unify European identity and induce greater social harmony. And if you agree that a common language would be a good thing, choosing which one should be a simple coordination problem.


The other side has banal and interesting variants. The banal form rails against monoculture and wishes to celebrate diversity. This is often accompanied by vapid sentiments amounting to a desire to use tie-dye as a social Leitmotif. The more interesting argument is pretty evolutionary. The Slovaks have a fantastic saying that, "With every language you learn, you gain a new soul." This is true in many ways. Every language seems to be able to express things that are ineffable in others. "Transitoriness" totally misses "Vergänglichkeit". "Whimsical" is not even a poor man's "rigolo". Thinking about words as organisms and semantic meaning as genes, you would want a certain amount of diversity to maintain a healthy population. Harmonizing language would restrict the number of possible ideas and their combinations. If you've ever tried to read Goethe or Rimbaud in English (never mind Shakespeare in German), you'll know what I mean. For much business and government, this is likely to be splitting hairs. A health care mandate is close enough to a Gesundheitsvorsorgeverpflichtung as to make no odds, but there's a lot of humanity that exists outside the technical categories. If we encourage politicians to harmonize their communication in the interest of harmony or efficiency, they might be inspired to encourage everyone else to do the same. Would this be the ideational equivalent of burning down rain forests or letting the Great Barrier Reef die?


And though I'm not concerned with being 'a good liberal' in anybody else's eyes, I can't for the life of me decide which is the better liberal argument.

The Elephant in the Liberal Salon, or All Who Were Created How?

The best definition of liberalism I can think of says that it's the disposition to assume that humans need and deserve as much freedom in their personal affairs as possible, and to ask what kinds of constraints are necessary to preserve that freedom. A sheep in a pen full of wolves isn't "free" in any meaningful sense, so some measures, like free education, free healthcare, a justice system and defence establishment are necessary to make sure that everyone has a fair shot at structuring their own lives as they see fit. This is list is illustrative, not necessarily comprehensive.

A big assumption here is that everybody starts off with equal means. To the extent that individuals' success or failure rests on their own decisions, the system is fair. You bet on a long shot and lose, it's your own fault; you play it safe and eke by, good for you; you strike it rich (whatever "rich" might mean contextually), well done! This system works really well so long as we can work with abstract assumptions about "human nature" in the style of the greats, like Kant, Smith, Hume, Mill, &c. For lack of knowledge how people are, we make an educated guess and extrapolate. The liberal idea would encounter serious trouble, though, if we had reason to believe that we don't all start on a level playing field, that the deck is systematically stacked in favour of some, that some of us are sheep and the rest are wolves.

There is trouble on the horizon. There was a piece in Slate a while back talking about genetic differences on IQ test results, and Steven Pinker has made a similar and more informed argument on similar lines. Some of arguments out there paint race as a big factor, but depending on your definition of race (and there are several ), I'm mixed race, so I don't have a stake in how that game, nor do I really want one. But it doesn't necessarily have to be about race at all. We've all interacted with people who just didn't seem to be able to keep up or who seemed to do effortlessly what we could only do with considerable toil. Our understanding of liberalism will work so long as the inherently disadvantaged or privileged are just marginal quantities. Most developed countries can deal fairly well with their own mentally handicapped. It would also be fine if everyone had a valuable skill. Modern service economies, which is the direction everybody seems to be moving, value only certain types of skills, and it seems that these might not be randomly distributed nor that there is a huge hump of mediocrity with a few high fliers and knuckle-draggers on either end. Rather, it seems that people are spread out in terms of intellectual ability, the distribution might depend on certain predictable factors, and intellectual ability seems to count extra relative to other abilities, at least in any country I'd want to live in.

Given that this could be the case, liberals have a lot of soul searching to do. The first big question is: does this represent a threat to the liberal way of doing things? If no, how can society be considered fair (without too much sophistry)? If yes, can liberalism or the system be reconfigured to deal with it? I mean, genetic engineering should make this a technical problem, provided everyone has equal access to improvements (note: these improvements would probably have to be chosen prenatally, so you'd be stuck with your parents' choice, like your name - is that any more liberal?). If everyone were engineered to have similar qualities, what could we still consider meritorious? Did you really earn it if you were designed from (before) birth to achieve it? If the status quo remains, the question of merit remains too, and it circles back to affirmative action-type arguments. Is a runner-up actually more deserving than the winner because the winner had inherently better odds of winning?

Without wanting to anticipate any easy answers, I'd like to get the debate rolling.