Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

The Problem of Dirty Hands

I am trying to understand the structure of the problem of dirty hands.

A clear example of a dirty hands situation is one in which a political leader authorizes the intentional slaughter of innocent non-combatants to demoralize the enemy and bring about the end of a war which, if it continues, could be reasonably expected to lead to the destruction of the leader's state.   The leader must act, but he cannot authorize the actions necessary for the state's survival without authorizing immoral actions.  He must act, but he cannot act without dirtying his hands with the blood of innocents.  In its sharpest form, the problem arises if we assume that certain actions are absolutely morally  wrong, wrong in and of themselves, always and everywhere and regardless of circumstances or (good) consequences.  The problem stands out in sharp relief when cast into the mold of an aporetic triad:  

A. Moral reasons for action are dominant: they trump every other reason for action such as 'reasons of state.'

B. Some actions are absolutely morally wrong, morally impermissible always and everywhere, regardless of context, circumstances, or consequences.

C. Among absolutely morally wrong actions, there are some that are (non-morally) permissible, and indeed  (non-morally) necessary: they must be done in a situation in which refusing to act would lead to worse consequences such as the destruction of one's nation or culture.

It is easy to see that this triad is inconsistent.  The limbs cannot all be true.  (B) and (C) could both be true if one allowed moral reasons to be trumped by non-moral reasons.  But that is precisely what (A), quite plausibly, rules out.  

The threesome, then, is logically inconsistent. And yet each limb makes a strong claim on our acceptance. To solve the problem one of the limbs must be rejected.  Which one?

(A)-Rejection.  One might take the line that in some extreme circumstances non-moral considerations take precedence over moral ones. Imagine a ticking-bomb scenario in which the bomb planter must be tortured in order to find the location of the bomb or bombs. (Suppose a number of dirty nukes have been planted in Manhattan, all scheduled to go off at the same time.)  

Imagine a perfectly gruesome form of torture in which the wife and children of Ali the jihadi have their fingers and limbs sawn off in the presence of the jihadi, and then the same is done to him until he talks.  Would the torture not be justified?  Not morally justified of course, but justified non-morally to save Manhattan and its millions of residents and to avert the ensuing disaster for the rest of the country?   One type of  hard liner will say, yes, of course, even while insisting that torture of the sort envisaged is morally wrong, and indeed absolutely morally wrong.  I am in some moods such a hard liner.

But am I not then falling into contradiction? No.  I am not maintaining that in every case it is morally wrong to torture, but in this case it is not.  That would be a contradiction.  I am maintaining that it is always morally impermissible to torture but that in some circumstances moral considerations are trumped by -- what shall I call them? -- survival considerations.  These are external to the moral point of view.  So while morality is absolute in its own domain, its domain does not coincide with the domain of human action in general.  The torture of the jihadi and his wife and children are justified, not morally, but by non-moral reasons.

(B)-Rejection.  A second solution to the triad involves rejecting deontology and embracing consequentialism.  Consider the following act-type:  torturing  a person to extract information from him.  A deontologist such as Kant would maintain that the tokening of such an act-type is morally wrong just in virtue of the act-type's  being the act-type it is.  It would then follow for Kant that every such tokening is morally wrong.  A consequentialist would say that it all depends on the outcome.  Torturing our jihadi above leads or can be reasonably expected to lead to the greatest good of the greatest number in the specific circumstances in question, and those on-balance good consequences morally justify the act of torture.  So, contra Kant, one and the same act-type can be morally acceptable/unacceptable depending on circumstances and consequences.   Torturing Ali the jihadi is morally justified, but torturing Sammy the jeweler to get him to open his safe is not.

On this second solution to the triad, we accept (A), we accept that moral considerations reign supreme over the entire sphere of human action and cannot be trumped by any non-moral considerations.  But we adopt a consequentialist moral doctrine that allows the moral justification of torture and the targeting of non-combatants in certain circumstances.

Now we must ask:  Do the consequentialist torturers of the jihadi and their consequentialist superiors who order the torture have dirty hands?  Suppose the hands of the torturers are literally bloody.  Are they dirty?  I am tempted to say No.  They haven't done anything wrong; they have the done the right thing, and let us assume, at great psychological and emotional cost to themselves. Imagine snapping off the digits of a fellow human being with bolt cutters or high-torque pruning shears.  Could you do that to a child in the presence of his father and do it efficiently and with equanimity?  Could you do your job, your duty, despite your contrary inclination?  (I am turning Kant's phraseology against him here.)  But you must do it because the orders you have been given are morally correct by the consequentialist theory.

Do the torturers have dirty hands?  It depends on what exactly it is to have dirty hands which, of course, is part of the problem of dirty hands.   On a narrow understanding, a dirty hands situation is one in which the agent acts, and must act,  while both accepting all three limbs of our inconsistent triad and appreciating that they are inconsistent.  A dirty hands situation in the narrow and strict sense is an aporetic bind of the practical and not merely theoretical sort.  You must act and you must act immorally in violation of absolute moral prohibitions, and you cannot justify your actions by any non-moral considerations that trump moral ones.  That's one hell of a bind to be in!  Some will be tempted to say that there cannot ever occur such a bind.  But if so, then there cannot ever occur a dirty hands situation.  So maybe talk of 'dirty hands' is incoherent.

If this is what it is to be in a dirty hands situation, then a consequentialist cannot be in a dirty hands situation.  He is not in an aporetic bind since he rejects (B).  And the same goes for those who reject (A) or (C).

(C)-Rejection. A third solution to the problem involves  holding that there is no necessity to act: one can abstain from acting.  A political leader faced with a terrible choice can simply abdicate, or simply refuse to choose.  He does not order the torture of the jihadi and and hence does not act to save Manhattan; but by not acting he willy-nilly aids and abets the terrorist.

Interim Conclusion

For now I will conclude that if we leave God and the soul out of it, if we think in purely immanent or secular terms, then we are in a genuine aporetic bind, and the problem of dirty hands, narrowly construed, is a genuine one, but also an insoluble one. For rejecting any of the limbs will get us into grave trouble.  That needs to be argued, of course.  One entry leads to another, and another . . . .

Philosophia longa, vita brevis. 

Recommended reading:

C. A. J. Coady, The Problem of Dirty Hands

Michael Walzer, Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands 

Thinking Clearly About Terrorist and Non-Terrorist Gun-Related Deaths

(Written 10 December 2015)

Robert Paul Wolff writes,

Fourteen people were murdered in San Bernardino, and almost two dozen were injured, several critically. That is perfectly awful. Since September 11, 2001, I believe almost three score people have been killed in the United States in similar terrorist attacks, or so one television commentator asserted. The number sounds about right. During those same fourteen years, 120,000 Americans have been killed by guns (including those who killed themselves, just to be clear .) I cannot imagine any rational mode of discourse that treats the former number as somehow more important than the latter number. And yet, people who would pass most tests for sanity, if not intelligence, are eager to take dramatic steps to prevent another San Bernardino although they would not even consider equally vigorous steps to diminish, say by half, the number of deaths from firearms in the next fourteen years. [Emphasis added.]

Let us first note that Wolff conveniently begins his count after 9/11.  The Islamic terrorism of that day  resulted in the deaths of 2,996 people and the injuries of 6,000 + others.^[107] That adds up to around 9,000 casualties.  As for the numbers Wolff cites, I will assume that they are correct.

Let us also note the phrase "killed by guns."  But of course no gun has ever killed anyone.  The plain truth is that people kill people and other animals often with guns, but also with box cutters, jumbo jets, and so on.  Surely the good professor will grant the distinction between weapon and wielder. Weapons are morally neutral; wielders are typically not.

The question is whether it is rational to take dramatic steps to prevent another terrorist attack while taking no steps (beyond the many steps that already have been taken) to prevent further non-terrorist gun deaths, given that since 9/11 the number of gun-related non-terrorist deaths is much smaller than the number of gun-related terrorist deaths.

Wolff is maintaining that it is not rational.  I say it is rational, and that Wolff's approach to the issue is not rational.

Wolff considers only the numbers of gun-related deaths while abstracting entirely from the motives of the gun-wielders and the effects that the deaths due to terror have on other people and the society at large.  But this is a vicious abstraction. Terrorists aim to spread terror and disrupt civil society by slaughtering as many noncombatants as possible in unpredictable ways.  They have a political agenda. Terrorism, unlike crime, is essentially political and essentially public.  But the sorts of crimes that drive up the gun death numbers often occur in private and the disruption they cause is miniscule compared to that caused by terrorists.

For example, non-terrorist suicides, as opposed to suicide bombers, directly affect only themselves and almost never act from political considerations. And the same goes for mafiosi and other organized crime figures who 'whack' competitors and potential witnesses and 'rats.'  The last thing they want is publicity. They are not motivated by political ideals or goals.  The Lufthansa heist was about making a big score and nothing more.   This holds too for ordinary criminals who kill each other and potential witnesses.  And similarly for gang-bangers and drug dealers and gun-related crimes of passion.  And there are the so-called 'accidental' shootings as when a careless gun owner leaves a loaded pistol where a child can find it or proceeds to clean a loaded gun. 

So while the number of non-terrorist gun-related deaths of Americans is much higher over the time-frame Wolff arbitrarily chose than the number of terrorist gun-related deaths, that fact plays a minor role in any rational assessment of the threat of terrorism.  Part of being rational is thinking synoptically, taking in the whole of a situation in its many aspects, and not seizing upon one aspect. 

One cannot reasonably abstract from the political agenda of terrorists and the effects even a few terrorist events have on an entire society.  Ask yourself: has your life changed at all since 9/11?  It most certainly has if you travel by air whether domestically or internationally.  Terrorists don't have to kill large numbers to attain their political goal and wreak large-scale disruption.  The Tsarnaev attack on the Boston Marathon shut down the city for a few days.  Same with Paris, San Bernardino, Madrid, London, etc.    

There is also the obvious point that jihadis would kill millions if they could.  Would they use nukes against the West if they could? Of course they would. 

Why are leftists so insensitive to clear and present dangers?  Why are they so eager to deflect attention from them by bringing up gun control and  dubious dangers such as 'climate change'?

Here is a theory.  Leftists favor losers and underdogs.  Terrorists are losers and underdogs both as terrorists and as Muslims. (Not all Muslims are terrorists but almost all terrorists at the present time are Muslims.)  So leftists downplay the terrorist threat.  They downplay it because losers and underdogs are their clients.  To them, the terrorist 'frontlash' is as nothing compared to the 'Islamophobic' backlash of the bigots, rubes, and racists of fly-over country.  This helps account for why leftists downplay the terrorist threat.

But why do they try to steer the debate away from terrorism to gun control?  Part of it has to be that guns and private gun ownership represent everything leftists hate such as self-reliance, individual responsibility, patriotism which they dismiss as 'jingoism,' limited government, rural people  and small-town folk, and conservative attitudes which leftists perceive as racist, bigoted, xenophobic, nativist, nationalist, fascist, etc.  Private gun ownership stands in the way of their totalitarian agenda.  This is why they continually call for gun control when we have plenty of it already.  They talk as if there is no gun control.  This is because what they mean by 'gun control' is confiscation of all or almost all firearms including all semi-automatic pistols and long guns.

Of course there is much more to it than this.  Leftists are anti-religion unless the religion is Islam, "the saddest and poorest form of  theism," (Schopenhauer) the religion of losers and underdogs, the gang religion.  As anti-religion, leftists are against God, the soul, and the freedom of the will.  Not believing in freedom of the will, they don't believe in moral evil -- which is perhaps their deepest error.  People are nothing but deterministic systems and products of their environment.  Part of the environment is guns.  Hence the repeated call to "get guns off the street"as if guns are just laying around on our highways and byways.  Not believing in free agency, leftists displace agency onto inanimate non-agents such as guns.  And so they think the solution is to get rid of them.

And of course this only scratches the surface.  But the sun is setting and battling the Wolff Man and his bullshit has conjured up a powerful thirst in this philosopher.  Time for a beer!