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.

Israel Should Have Fought This War Very Differently, But Thousands Of Innocent Palestinian Civilians Were Always Going To Die

Source: Hotpot.ai 

Human psychology seems to drive us to pick a side in conflicts and then go all in. Hence a disappointing number of those observing the Israel-Hamas war even from a safe and comfortable distance argue not only that one side is in the right, but that it can do no wrong and that the other side is entirely evil. This tribalism also encourages the reduction of sides to 'us' and 'them', despite the fact that wars are always between political organisations, not peoples. 

Objectivity is the attempt to apply the same moral standards in the same way to all sides. In my view the recent ICC indictments of leaders of Hamas and the Israeli government reflect an attempt to do just this. It is obviously true that Hamas started this war, and that it deliberately committed many atrocities against civilians, but that fact doesn't make any and all actions by the Israeli military justified. 

Here I want to focus on a point that many passionate critics of the war seem to be missing. This is the mistaken belief that there was some way for this war not to result in the deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians. Once Hamas launched its initial attack, it was inevitable that Israel's government would use military means to try to prevent it from doing such things again. Since Hamas is deeply embedded in a heavily populated urban environment, mass civilian casualties were inevitable (and probably expected and intended by Hamas). 

Could The Threat of Information War Deter China From Attacking Taiwan?

Source

Taiwan is an independent prosperous liberal democracy of 24 million free people that the Chinese Communist Party solemnly promises to annex to its empire by whatever means are necessary. Although Taiwan's flourishing capitalist economy once allowed it to outgun and hence straightforwardly deter China from a military invasion, this military advantage has switched to China over the last 20 years. If Taiwan is to be kept free it must find another means to deter the CCP.

Taking Decolonization Seriously Means Recognising the Moral Agency of Non-Western Political Actors

In the context of the current decolonisation movement it is rather strange that whenever bad things happen in a non-Western country they are still routinely analysed as the moral responsibility of actors in the West - (former) governments, companies, ideologues, consumers, etc.  For example,

1. War: If a Western country is involved in a war (or an ally - as in the case of Saudi Arabia in Yemen) then they are routinely assigned the entire responsibility for that war, including for all the terrible things done by those they are fighting.
2. Illiberalism: Government oppression of religious and sexual minorities, political opposition, free press, and so on is routinely attributed to 'colonial era laws' or continuing Western ideological influence. 
3. Misgovernance: Government dysfunction and corruption are routinely blamed on Western consumers/companies' demand for natural resources; terrible environmental and labour regulations (or enforcement) are likewise blamed on Western demand for cheaper products 

This way of looking at the world is unfounded, patronising and unhelpful. It betrays a pernicious asymmetry in the recognition of moral agency between Western and non-Western actors. Western actors are assumed to have the power to make decisions that matter and to bear moral responsibility for their choices. Non-western actors are not. Although many of those who are so ready to blame Western actors may think they are opposing 'colonisation', this asymmetry actually continues rather than repudiates the patronising moral hierarchy that characterised the West's unfortunate colonial history.

In reality non-Western political actors make important decisions all the time that affect many people's lives, and these are not merely overdetermined reactions to external forces but actions initiated by them for their own reasons. There is no good reason why they should not be held as morally accountable for their choices as they would be if they were making such decisions in a Western country. 

What Good are Nuclear Weapons to North Korea? Analysing Kim Jong-un

North Korea's development of fission bombs and ICBMs is very worrying. Unfortunately the analysis of it in the news media is woeful. Some commentators assume that North Korea works like a normal country (like their country); some clearly don't understand how war works; some believe the regime's propaganda; some seem unable to think in a straight line at all. Some manage to make all those mistakes at the same time and more. One can only hope that the US, South Korean, and Japanese war ministries have better experts. In the meantime, at least we can throw out the worst nonsense.

Only Human Rights Are Worth Killing For

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” John Kerry challenged Congress about the Vietnam war in 1971. There in a nutshell is the standard test by which democratic republics assess their military adventures: Is this cause worth dying for? 

The idea of such a test is a good one. War is a question of politics, indeed the oldest question of political power: ‘Who's in charge here?' Specifically, governments contest each other's sovereignty – their ability to get their own way – by employing or threatening the means of extraordinary violence. Since war is defined by its terrible means, it can only be justified by some extraordinary purpose. Ordinary political goals will not do. Hence the need to find some measure that will be immune from the merely personal or factional interests of politicians or their hubris.

Nevertheless, Kerry's test is not quite right. The most ethically significant thing about war is not that our soldiers are ordered to risk their lives to further the interests of our state – or perhaps just our politicians – but that they are ordered to kill for it. The real ethical test of a war is whether our cause is worth killing for. If that is not satisfied then our soldiers are mere murderers and we are the ones who made them so.

This test turns out to be much harder to meet.

What Terrorists Want - and How to Stop Them Getting It

After every new atrocity or catchy ISIS video the armchair psychologists and amateur Islamic theologians take to the air. Their low grade psychobabble turns tragic events into compelling TV narrative and brings mainstream attention to political opportunists. But even if it made better sense it would still be irrelevant. All these pundits are focused on the wrong thing: how particular individuals are recruited to terrorist groups and causes.

Source

Terrorism is not a personality type, a psychological illness, a theology, or a goal in itself. Terrorism is a technique, a particular form of warfare that the weak wage against the strong.

If we want to stop terrorism we have to first understand it. That means acknowledging its rationality as a means to an end. The question we should be asking is, what are terrorist acts supposed to achieve and how?

Why I do not wear a poppy

It is that time of the year again. Volunteers at train stations and shopping centres, often wearing military uniforms, are selling little red paper and plastic poppies to remember the service of British veterans. These little paper poppies have long taken over the official remembrance day and converted it into a month long ritual from which one cannot opt out without having to take a position. Well, here is my position.

I reject the coerciveness of the poppy ritual, the way it tries to bring everyone together around a single shared narrative of remembrance, with its compulsory yet glib emotions of gratitude and sorrow. I reject the unquestioning acceptance of the value of that military service and the implied necessity and meaningfulness of war in general. And I reject the government's intimate involvement. What should be an occasion for remembering the political failures that lead to wars has been neatly converted into a propaganda exercise that forecloses reasoned public scrutiny of our government's past, present and future militarism.

Holding tyrants personally accountable

The newspapers today are full of pictures of Syrian children gassed in their sleep. An atrocity that, like those which preceded it, the world seems powerless to prevent or punish. Our inter-national institutions are manifestly unable to secure peace and justice. Their tools - diplomatic, economic, and military sanctions - are limited in effectiveness even when they can be used at all. Yet perhaps there is something that we can do about such moral outrages. It was long believed to be a duty of all good men to kill a tyrant. My suggestion is that we revive the tradition of tyrannicide, but make it even more effective by finding a way to give bad men a good reason to kill a tyrant.

Human nature and the human condition

Aspects of human nature - like our capacity for language, reasoning or emotions - are amenable to scientific analysis that looks at where they come from and how they work, using tools like evolutionary biology, genetics, or neuroscience. But not everything about us that is important is innate. Many deeply entrenched features and characteristics of human life are contingent not essential. They come from our human history, not our human biology. Such aspects of the human condition - like marriage, sports, and war - resist scientific analysis and must be studied in a more humanistic way.