Politics and morals

When morality fails

To achieve truly effective politics we need to shift the focus away from our moral intuitions and the importance of their consistency, says Raymond Geuss

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, a group of experts on the Middle East met with Tony Blair to warn him of the possible untoward consequences of a decision to invade. The situation in Iraq, they claimed, was complex, and it would be easy to upset the delicate balance that existed between the various political, religious and national groups; one would have to have a very clear idea of what one planned to do, how one would organise the occupation and reconstruction of the country, and so on. Blair is said to have listened with evident lack of interest and increasing annoyance, and to have repeatedly interrupted the experts with the rhetorical question: ‘But Saddam is evil, isn’t he?’ In his own later formulation, his political credo was: ‘All I know is what I believe’, where ‘believe’ is not so much an epistemological as a religiously based moral category, the equivalent of George W Bush’s ‘gut feelings’. Some philosophers call these ‘moral intuitions’.  
 
‘Moralism’ in politics is the view that the distinction between good and evil is clear and easy to discern to all men of good will – that is, to all those who are not themselves morally corrupt – and therefore it is inadvisable to get bogged down in trying to get too detailed an understanding of any given situation. 
 
Excessive knowledge of the details is highly suspect because it might tend to obscure the bright line between the side of the angels and the forces of evil, or to undermine one’s resolve. The genuinely admirable moral agent sees the salient moral features of a situation quickly and immediately, and acts decisively to implement his ‘intuitions’. 
 
Few would consider this to be an adequate specification of moral action. Internal consistency of speech and coherence between speech and action are also, in one form or another, recognised as minimal conditions of morality. One must, at least, apply to oneself the standards one’s intuitions cause one to impose on others.
 
Perhaps another example will clarify this. At the end of April 2003, spokesmen of the US government warned the Islamic Republic of Iran against trying to expand its influence in Iraq during the unsettled conditions that prevailed there. The US, they asserted, would resolutely oppose the evil of `foreign interference’ in the internal affairs of a sovereign country. Given that the US had just invaded Iraq (a move not sanctioned by the UN Security Council), toppled its internationally recognised government, and was occupying its territory with a large military force, this delicacy on the issue of ‘foreign interference’ might have seemed surprising.  One might wonder whether this can be a truly ‘moral’ way to act, regardless of the ‘intuitions’ on which it might be based, because it is so inconsistent.
 
Similarly, it might be seen as problematic that Tony Blair’s desire to fight the good fight against evil was subject to such striking variations in its intensity. It had a particularly powerful hold on him when acting on it coincided with advancing his own interests (in the case of Iraq, he expected a politically useful ‘Baghdad Bounce’ after a quick military victory). On the other hand, the flame of righteous indignation did not seem to burn as bright when it came to issues that were not part of his project for self-advancement, such as effective condemnation of Guantanamo Bay, of ‘extraordinary rendition’, or of dodgy British arms deals with Saudi Arabia.
 
Is consistency really so important? After all, politics is primarily about action, and only secondarily about thoughts, beliefs, opinions or reasons. Take the two statements ‘Saddam Hussein has missiles capable of reaching London’ and ‘Saddam Hussein has no such missiles’. The beliefs that prompt these statements are contradictory. Consistency of beliefs is, of course, not unimportant, but at least equally important is coherence between thought and action.
 
However, ‘actions’ don’t always come packaged like determinate sentences, whose formal relations of consistency or inconsistency with other statements is easy to discover. Actions have to be interpreted. This is true even if the ‘action’ in question is the action of making a statement, because in order to understand the meaning of such statements, listeners will almost certainly need to fill in much of the background from the context. That always leaves room for different ways of reading these statements.
 
This is one of several fatal flaws in philosophical approaches to moralism that put overwhelming weight on consistency as a sufficient condition for morality. For them to be plausible, it would have to be the case that every human action always came, as it were, with a visible tag attached, an explicit statement which clearly specified the nature of the action in question and the reason the agent had for performing it. That, however, is not the way human action works.
 
These difficulties have motivated some simply to throw up their hands, abandon moralising approaches to politics altogether, and turn to ‘realism’. The apparatus of the realist, appealing to ‘values’, moral principles, or ideals, is mere window dressing. Power and self-interest are all that matter; everything else is mere pretext for the increase of power and the advancement of one’s own interests. The only limits are what you can get away with, so the vigorous use of the moralising flannel is maybe useful, but the preaching is of mere instrumental significance.
 
On the ‘realist’ view, when a contemporary government deploys the effectively vacuous vocabulary of ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘international community’, ‘human rights’, the only cognitively relevant thing going on is that it is trying to advance its power and, at best, the material interests of its real constituents, usually a small group of stratospherically wealthy representatives of the world of business, finance and industry. One unsurmountable internal problem with realism is the difficulty in specifying what is meant by a ‘perceived material interest’ or indeed ‘power’. If ‘power’ means, as it is surely natural to take it as meaning, an ‘ability to get things done effectively’, then political scientists are perfectly right to distinguish two kinds of real power.
 
There is the ‘hard power’ of standing armies, police forces, courts and prisons – agencies that can, if necessary, force recalcitrant agents to act in a certain way. Or there is ‘soft power’, the ability to get things done by less directly coercive means: persuasive talents, the ability to grant or withhold economic or other benefits, the influence that arises from exemplary action that invites emulation. One kind of power is sometimes incompatible with another. Therefore, the Red Cross has the power to do various things precisely because it has no coercive apparatus at its disposal, and cannot possibly be a significant ‘hard-power’ participant in conflicts. Which powers do governments always seek to maximise? To answer: ‘hard power’ seems wrong. One of the first things New Labour did when it came to power was to transfer from itself to the Bank of England various significant powers to regulate the British economy. To answer: ‘soft power’ seems to invite in through the back door those moralising conceptions (exemplary action, reputation for rectitude, high purpose, and so on) that the realist had ejected through the front gate.
 
‘Material interest’ is also a kind of accordion-like concept that can be expanded or contracted as required. Is the propagation of French as an international language a ‘material interest’ of the French Republic?  Is the support of Orthodox communities in the Balkans a ‘material interest’ of the Hellenic Democracy? If one allows the extension to be too wide, then anything would seem to count as a material interest and the realist scheme provides no genuine understanding. On the other hand, if the concept of a ‘material interest’ is taken in too narrow a way, for instance as bread, medical care, and housing, then the claim that governments always pursue material interests is surely false. 
 
The most important political philosopher of the 20th century, Max Weber, thought long and hard about the relation of moral conceptions to the responsible business of real politics. Weber thought that anyone who wished always to have tidy solutions — or indeed any ‘solutions’ whatever— in politics had made a bad mistake in choosing to be born as a human being. This is not an incitement to nihilism, but merely a remark about a common kind of modern misunderstanding of the nature of politics.
 
Even to think about politics as exclusively a collective attempt at ‘problem-solving’ is a huge mistake. We don’t find a solution to some problem, because situations don’t come with a tag describing their nature any more than human actions do. If we shift our focus from beliefs and their consistency, to action and the deployment of craft or skill, the very indeterminacy of human action, instead of being an obstacle, can come to our aid.
 
There may be some parts of politics, especially the highly routinised sub-areas of administration, that do look very much like standard problem-solving. Question: How to reduce traffic in the city without extra cost to the city government? Answer: Impose a congestion charge. Here there is a relatively clear difficulty (congestion) that can be described fully beforehand, and one can also antecedently specify the conditions which a ‘solution’ would need to satisfy. Weber, however, was a particular admirer of what he called ‘qadi’ justice, the informal arbitration exercised by a local judge (Arabic: ‘qadi’) in some Islamic countries. A qadi did not mechanically apply an existing written legal code, but used a wide variety of practical skills acquired through years of experience to confront what were often clearly unique and unrepeatable situations and change them so that satisfied the relevant parties. How often do two feuding women each claim to be the mother of the same infant? So rarely that no existing code is likely to cover the case. Who then should get charge of the infant? The qadi would be the person to decide and a good qadi would make a good decision. Weber thought that qadi justice, like the remarkably non-rule-bound justice practised by genuine democracies such as that of ancient Athens, or some modern revolutionary tribunals, often ‘worked’ admirably. It was often significantly more able to produce outcomes that really satisfied the contextually specific interests, and were compatible with the deeply held values, of all the participants than more formal legal systems would be.
 
Part of what politics is about is that we wish to be and live as people of a certain kind. This means, among other things, deciding what role ‘moral’ considerations, the pursuit of power and the realisation of our material interests will play in our lives. What kind of people we want to be, and how we can become those people are not really questions that are best described as ‘problems’ that have or do not have a ‘solution’. We make it up as we live with as much intelligence and practical skill as we can muster.
 
A moralising approach to politics is usually the result in the present of some bygone political struggle; the hand of a victor in some past conflict is reaching out to try to extend its grip to the future. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Our past is an essential part of what we are, which we ignore at our peril. We could not completely leave it behind even if we wished to do so, but recognition of this necessity gives us no reason to romanticise it. Nothing stops us from making our own moral judgements on our past, on our present way of life, or anticipating our future action or its probable outcome. There is nothing wrong with cultivating our own moral intuitions, but for them to have any value they must be realistic; that is, they must track the world as it is. There is no guarantee that our intuitions will spontaneously do this, so we must be on our guard against trusting them too blindly. 
 
Raymond Geuss is a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University. His latest book is Philosophy and Real Politics and is published by Princeton University Press.