Incentivising War Crimes: The High Cost of International Humanitarianism

Wars have never been the concern only of their combatants. Other states pay close attention to the geo-political implications and opportunities created by armed conflict, and interfere directly or indirectly when their cynical calculations suggest that would advance their interests.  For example, various countries - the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Qatar - have been involving themselves in Sudan's ghastly civil war, apparently looking to pick up geopolitical advantages - especially access to Red Sea ports that would allow them to threaten international shipping via the Suez Canal, or to prevent other states from doing so. When extended to material support to favoured factions this increases the resources of the combatants, increasing the ambition of their respective war goals and so extending the war by reducing the scope for a mutually acceptable peace deal.

Such amoral realpolitik in international relations is as old as war itself, together with its unfortunate consequences for human lives. What is somewhat more recent is the rise of international moral concern for the lives of civilians threatened by war, expressed through the increased influence of civil society. At least since the Greeks' 1820's war of independence, states have also been interfering in other people's wars out of humanitarian concerns to reduce civilian suffering.

The problem is that although each individual humanitarian intervention may be sincerely morally motivated - and even sometimes succeed in its goal of reducing suffering - the practise of morally motivated interference would seem actually to increase the amount of civilian suffering due to war. It makes civil wars more likely to start and harder to end, while incentivising crimes against civilians.

If Climate Change Is As Bad As Activists Say, Their Demand Should Be 'Geoengineering Now'!

Some climate activists claim to believe that climate change is an existential threat to humanity, if not the entire biosphere. This is the justification for groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil to engage not only in demonstrations and civil disobedience to raise awareness of their concerns and persuade fellow citizens to demand government action, but also blocking and disruptive actions aimed at coercing governments and businesses to speed up the transition to net zero.

Blocking public transport systems, vandalising art, offices, SUVs, pipelines, and so on are attempts to impose direct and indirect costs on society that will continue and escalate until we comply with the activists’ demands. It is a Mafia-esque strategy of extortion by a small minority that is clearly directly opposed to liberal democratic principles and values - especially, the idea that decisions should be made in a way that respects the equal moral reality of other people (by counting up opinions) rather than by consulting your own feelings of righteousness. Moreover, its logic is clearly escalatory, since a rational government will only concede when the costs of compliance (several percentage points of GDP per year) are lower than the costs activists can impose.

Yet many people who do not themselves feel the call to join such coercive actions remain sympathetic to the reasoning of those who do. From a distance these activists may even be mistaken for heroes. The human mind’s innate attraction to story book reasoning (previously) makes us easily slip into assuming that those taking extraordinary actions to oppose an extraordinary challenge must be the good guys, the heroes of the story of climate change.

But that reasoning is flawed. It is not enough that the cause be worthy of heroic action. The action itself must be worthy of the cause.

Israel’s Crimes Get Too Much Attention

A great many people around the world believe that Israel’s government and military have committed and continue to commit crimes against humanity, the ethics of armed conflict, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide in Gaza since the attacks by Hamas in October 2023. Many also believe that Israel as a state was and remains founded on a colonialist principle of ethnic supremacy and the systematic practice of mass atrocity crimes. Many of these observers conclude, further, that they have a moral duty to respond to these crimes by criticising and directing attention to Israel’s behaviour, and also by calling for intervention by relevant political actors such as their own national governments, but also (international) civil society organisations such as Human Rights Watch, universities, business corporations, and internationally authorised actors like the International Court of Justice and the United Nations Security Council.

The charges against Israel can be and are disputed. I will leave the adjudication of claims about the relevant facts and their legal and ethical implications to others more expert in such matters. For the purposes of this analysis I need only note that many people sincerely believe that these charges are substantially correct. In that case – believing what they do - those criticising Israel and calling for interventions may appear to be responding correctly. Injustice on such a scale would deserve the world’s attention, condemnation, and at least consideration of appropriate external interventions. Nevertheless, the cumulative result of many apparently individually correct actions can be unjust, and this is the case here. This much criticism of Israel is too much - a grave moral failure - insofar as it comes at the cost of neglecting other injustices that also deserve the world’s attention.

My argument comes in two parts. First I will take up the (deontological) principle that mass atrocity crimes straightforwardly deserve the world’s attention and condemnation, and show that directing a disproportionate share of the world’s attention to Israel’s crimes is inconsistent with this principle. Second I will consider the case from an alternative consequentialist principle that the world’s attention should be directed towards cases where it can be most effective at deterring, ending, or ameliorating mass atrocity crimes. Here, again, I conclude that the share of attention directed towards Israel cannot be justified because it necessarily entails neglecting many other ongoing and arguably more ameliorable mass atrocity crimes.

Inheritance Tax Is Largely Irrelevant to the Problem of Economic Inequality

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Lots of people think that a few people controlling a very large share of a society's economic power is a bad thing. It is unfair that some should have so much while so many have so much less. It is inefficient that so much wealth lies in the hands of people who already have everything they could reasonably desire. It gives some people an outsized influence on decisions that affect the whole society, and on democratic politics itself (previously). And so on.

These people often also worry that economic inequality is increasing and becoming entrenched as the rich pass their excessive wealth on to their children and more and more wealth ends up concentrated in ever fewer hands. Many of them think increasing inheritance tax is necessary to stop this. But this solution relies on a mistaken understanding of how wealth is actually transmitted between generations.

UPDATE: Now also on Substack

Google seems to have lost interest in the Blogger app and it is showing its age. 

I am trying out Substack, and if it works out will be migrating the blog there.

For now I am duplicating posts in both places. Check it out here.

Indigenous Knowledge Is Epistemically Inferior To Science

The view that ‘indigenous knowledge’ counts as knowledge in a sense comparable to real (i.e. scientific) knowledge is absurd but widely held. Moreover it seems to be increasingly dominant in political spaces, and in national and international institutions (such as school curricula, university humanities faculties, UNESCO and the WHO). 

My concern in this short and rather polemical essay is not to persuade those who hold this view that they are wrong. Rather, I mean to clearly state the rather obvious mistakes in this view so that those who already think there is something wrong with it will be reassured that they are not the only ones to think so. In cases like this, the obviousness of the fact that ‘the emperor has no clothes’ still needs to be repeatedly publicly stated and heard in order for it to be effective, by turning mutual knowledge into common knowledge.

My point is simple: knowledge is knowledge. Where it comes from doesn’t matter to its epistemic status. What matters is whether it deserves to be believed. The scientific revolution has provided a general approach – systematic inquiry into the independent evidential basis of claims (e.g. Strevens 2020) – together with specialist methodologies appropriate to different domains (such as mathematical modeling, taxonomy, statistical analysis, and experimental manipulation and measurement). It is irrelevant that this approach first appeared in North-Western Europe and that many of the domain specific techniques were first developed and refined by white men from the ‘west’. What is relevant is that modern science allows a degree of confidence in factual and theoretical claims about how the world works that has never been warranted before. And it has made this capability equally available to everyone around the world as the new standard for objective knowledge, i.e. knowledge that is reliably true no matter from what perspective you look at it. 

Tiny Countries Should Not Exist

There is no good reason for tiny countries to exist, and we should stop making more of them.

The World Bank classifies 40 countries as 'small states' on the basis of having a population smaller than 1.5 million (though, oddly, this list excludes some rich tiny countries like Luxembourg and Estonia). Some are as small as 11,000 (Tuvalu), and the total population of all of them put together is only 20 million. Nevertheless, each of these countries has full 'sovereignty' - meaning that the organisations recognised as ruling over the populations within these territories have special and equal rights under international law: to exploit the resources that fall within their exclusive economic zone, for example, or to vote on matters of global importance at the United Nations, or to make up their own regulations about corporate taxation and secrecy.

This is absurd, but also far from harmless.

Stop Occupying My University!

Update: Now also on substack

A University Occupation in The Netherlands - via de Volkskrant

Universities in several countries in the Global North have been targeted by activist groups using occupations or the threat of them to coerce these institutions into publicly renouncing any cooperation with Israeli universities and Israel based academics. I am not interested in the politics of university occupations -  and especially not the US politics of them, which is all mixed up with the Republicans' (culture) war on universities. 

I want to focus on the ethics: why some students (and non-students) think they have a moral right - or even a duty - to disrupt universities to force them to do certain things. 

Unconventional Ways To Contribute To Climate Care: World Peace, Ozempic, Economic Growth

Update: Now also on substack

It is widely recognised that climate change is so hard to deal with because it is a super wicked problem. Every part of it is connected to everything else and is continuously changing; billions of actors with different opinions and interests disagree about what to do; there is no right solution; every (expert's) way of understanding the problem is a misleading simplification; and so on (previously). 

It is less widely recognised that some of the very features that make climate care so hard also present opportunities for making it easier. In particular, the feature that everything is connected to everything else means that climate change is exacerbated by many other challenges at the same time that our efforts to manage it must compete with those other challenges for our limited resources - political, organsiational, and economic. For example, the New Cold War is geopoliticising international relations and diverting massive resources towards rearmament (in attempts to deter hot war). The New Cold War makes climate care harder. Conversely, however, we may see that any progress we might make in returning the world to more peaceful relations would be enormously helpful for the climate care project. 

Various other challenges - from the demographic transition to public health - may have the same feature. They appear to compete with climate care for our attention, but should actually be understood as complementary to the climate care project because wicked problems get easier to manage when the world gets easier.

The Climate Change Policy Problem: Why Can’t The World Do The Right And Obvious Thing?

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Many of those who care deeply about the environment find the climate change policy problem baffling. This includes the climate scientists who contribute to the increasingly pessimistic scientific consensus, as well the environmentalist activists who see that consensus as a call to action, and the many hundreds of millions of ordinary people (and my academic colleagues) who understand climate change as an existential danger to humanity.

Why can’t the world do the right and obvious thing about this huge and urgent problem?