A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Double effect double standard

This post by the Bull Moose blogger (via Marvin) brings to mind a point made by Robert Holmes in his excellent On War and Morality (I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may not get all the details right).

Pacifists and anti-interventionists are often criticized for their unwillingness to take up arms in the defense of the innocent. According to interventionists, the blood of those innocents is on their hands.

However, Holmes points out, interventionists usually deny that they are morally responsible for the innocent lives lost in the course of waging war. But how, he asks, can they fail to be responsible for the deaths of people they actually kill, while pacifists are held responsible for the deaths of people they had no part in killing?

In other words, if double effect is sufficient to get the “warist” off the hook for the innocent deaths the war he supports causes, it should be more than sufficient to get the pacifist off the hook for the deaths he merely fails to prevent by refusing to wage (or support) war.

This doesn’t show whether, say, intervention in Darfur would be on balance a good or bad idea, but it would be nice if interventionists canned the self-righteousness.

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2 responses to “Double effect double standard”

  1. Brandon

    I agree that interventionists should can the self-righteousness, but I’m not sure this is quite the right argument. I take it that anti-interventionists are criticized for nonaction where they could act to defend the innocent. But this isn’t parallel to the interventionist scenario at all; the interventionist is (charitably understood) actually trying to defend the innocent, and the innocents lost are in spite of the aim of the defense (even when they are occasioned by the defense itself). The anti-interventionist is (an interventionist would argue) culpably responsible for the deaths, even if not fully, because he is responsible for the inaction and it is itself culpable (again, according to the interventionist, because it is a failure to defend the innocent). The consequences are consistent with the inaction. But the interventionist is claiming to engage in the act of defending the innocent; this is the act he is responsible for, and it is not itself culpable. The consequences are inconsistent with the action, which is why people are often inclined to blame them on the sad state of the world rather than the well-intentioned action.

    I think rigorous pacifists, though, if they are actively trying to bring about peace, are on much stronger ground than other anti-interventionists, because such a pacifist is indeed in a situation that is closer to being parallel. But it does require the pacifist to be doing something — in a sense, the parallel only arises if the pacifist is also interventionist, but in his own pacifist way.

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  2. Lee

    I guess I’m a bit fuzzy on the notion of consequences being “(in)consistent with an action.” Are we talking abou the action’s object here? But if that’s the case isn’t there a parallel in that both the interventionist and non-interventionist are pursing (or advocating) courses of action which they can forsee will result in the deaths of innocents even though neither has those deaths as part of the object of their action (or, as part of the state of affairs they’re seeking to bring about)? Even if those deaths aren’t part of the object of the interventionist’s action, they are (at least in many cases) virtually certain as side-effects. Meanwhile, the deaths of innocents are not part of the anti-interventionist’s object, even though they are, again, forseeable results of his inaction. Surely in either case the innocents are lost in spite of the aim of their respective actions.

    Maybe the problem is that this can’t be addressed outside of the context of some overall balancing of the goods and evils of any prospective (non)intervention.

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