The Purpose of Slogans

Some people may interpret the Black Lives Matter slogan as implying that racial injustice is greater than other forms of injustice. Those who experience other forms of injustice are encouraged to resent or even resist the Black Lives Matter slogan. Thus campaigners against different forms of injustice are divided rather than united.

No doubt this effect is most welcome to those who don't want any of these campaigns against injustice to succeed.

Ten years ago on this blog I discussed a talk by Amartya Sen on Reducing Global Injustice, in which Sen expressed his opposition to all kinds of injustice and refused to single out any one kind of injustice as greater than other kinds - whether gender or race or ethnocentrism or whatever. He argued that different forms of injustice were simultaneously incomparable and interconnected.

I was and remain convinced by this argument.

But I don't think it follows from this that campaigns against one form of injustice are necessarily wrong, simply because they ignore other forms of injustice. It may be tempting to counter "Black Lives Matter" by saying "But what about disadvantaged white lives" - but this whataboutery plays into the hands of those who would deny the existence of racial injustice altogether. 

I believe that those who suffer a particular form of injustice should be free to campaign against this form of injustice, without being obliged to simultaneously campaign against all other forms of injustice. Of course there may always be risks in such campaigns: risks of being misunderstood, risks of being deliberately misrepresented, risks of being divided from those who ought to be on the same side, risks of what Mark Fisher called snarky resentment, even risks of physical attack. But if the recommended alternative is to keep one's head down and suffer in silence, many will think that the fight against injustice justifies taking these risks. 

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Mark Fisher, Exiting the Vampire Castle (OpenDemocracy, 24 November 2013)

Wikipedia: Whataboutism

Related posts: Global Injustice and Moral Challenge (July 2010)

Asking Stupid Questions

A judge has criticized a jury for asking stupid questions. I am not a lawyer, but I've always understood that the jury is an essential component of our legal system, and I'm sure the judge will have been careful not to express his criticism in a form that could be interpreted as contempt.

But what counts as a stupid question?

1. Some say there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. When Bill Gates asks "What is a network?", this could either be interpreted to mean that Bill Gates is stupid or alternatively that he is very clever. (Smart money goes with the second of these two possibilities.) See my post What's the difference between judges and geeks? (April 2010).

2. A common purpose of a stupid question is to prompt a useful answer or insight. Socrates used to ask dumb questions to make his pupils think more deeply about some subject - this technique is known as maieutic (from the Greek word for midwife).

3. Where a group is required to come to some judgement, such as a jury trial, a member of the group may request clarification on some point, not because she is personally unclear about this point, but because she believes some other member of the group may be unclear. (So for example, if one jury member kept talking about religious belief, another member might pose a question to the judge to confirm that religious belief was not relevant to the case.)

4. This particular case raises challenging legal questions that have not been tested in court for a very long time. Where the defence of marital coercion relies on a private and unrecorded exchange between husband and wife, the interpretation of such common phrases as "reasonable doubt" may become problematic, as does the fine line between inference and speculation. A stupid jury might not have been troubled by such ambiguities, and the judge clearly expected them not to be troubled. @davidallengreen (Jack of Kent) affirms that "we should not be shocked that a jury dares to ask basic questions; we should be concerned that juries do not ask basic questions more often."

5. If the judge offers an opinion about the jury's competence without being aware of the discussion and group dynamics that may have given rise to the jury's questions, this appears to be based on speculation rather than inference. It's a fine line, of course.

Dissing the Pope

What is the purpose of the phrase "f...ing pope", shouted across a busy newsroom? A Catholic sub-editor at the Times newspaper felt that the defacto purpose of the phrase was "harassment on grounds of religion", with the (intended? predictable?) effect of creating an adverse working environment for himself and other Catholics. There is an interesting question here about conscious motivation and deliberate action.

The Employment Tribunal and the Employment Appeal Tribunal disagreed. If Mr Heafield experienced the environment as adverse, that was unreasonable of him. They didn't ask - but we might well ask - what was Mr Heafield's real purpose for pursuing the case?

Although some Renaissance popes allegedly led active sex lives (appointing their "nephews" to prominent positions in the Church), the term "f...ing pope" is probably regarded by Catholics and non-believers alike as a term that doesn't refer to any living person. (Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions could be relevant here.)

Screaming pope maybe. Would it count as "harassment on grounds of religion"to display a reproduction of Francis Bacon's famous painting?



Daniel Barnett, Harassment on Grounds of Religion (14 February 2013)

Global Injustice and Moral Challenge

@RSAevents My son is studying economics at high school, so I took him to a talk by Amartya Sen at the RSA last week on Reducing Global Injustice. (Follow link for audio and video. See also summary by Mick Yates.) Sen is undoubtedly one of the greatest economists of our time but he is not the most inspiring speaker, and spent much of the time explaining subtle differences between his position and that of other thinkers, rather than presenting a clear ethical argument from first principles. My son found Sen's conversation with Matthew Taylor extremely heavy going, despite Matthew's best efforts to draw out the more interesting aspects of Sen's recent thought.

Someone asked Sen to identify the greatest form of injustice, hoping that he would identify gender inequality, but he rightly refused to do so, saying that different forms of injustice are both incomparable (on what basis can you possibly say that gender inequality is greater or smaller than mass poverty or genocide) and interconnected (injustice against children, invalids, old people and women are not separate injustices). Sen has demonstrated his strong support for women's rights and feminism in his books, but that doesn't mean that gender ranks above all other possible injustices.

Meanwhile, the idea that gender inequality is the central moral challenge of the 21st century is being strongly argued by husband-and-wife team Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn - most recently at TED Global 2010. Their position: in the 19th century, the central moral challenge was slavery; in the 20th century, it was totalitarianism; but in this century the issue dominating moral debate is gender inequity. See for example Kristof Calls Gender Parity a 21st Century Moral Challenge, a report of a talk at Fordham Law School in February.

The idea that in 2010 we can already identify the central moral challenge of the 21st century seems farfetched. Totalitarianism didn't exist as an issue in 1910: nobody could possibly have identified totalitarianism as the central moral challenge of the 20th century until at least the 1930s and possibly not until the 1950s. For much of the century communism and fascism were widely perceived as opposites, and it took decades before people were ready to make sense of these as two contrasting manifestations of a single phenomenon which came to be labelled totalitarianism.

One might even argue that the various manifestations of totalitarianism grew up in the 1920s as a series of flawed responses to the very issues that were perceived as uppermost in 1910. So we should be very wary of declaring the central moral challenge of the century, as if we could predict the pattern of the next ninety years. History tells us that humankind is perfectly capable of creating appalling new injustices, which could make all present injustices seem trivial in comparison.

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are highly acclaimed journalists, who have won Pulizer Prizes for their earlier work, and perhaps the desire to punctuate history in convenient 100-year chunks is a journalistic meme. But in calling out gender inequality as the central moral challenge of a century that has only just started, this not only brings them into conflict with those who would see some other injustice as equally or even more important, as well as those such as Sen who object to singling out any injustice as central. It also brings them into conflict with those such as Nancy Kallitechnis who argue that gender inequality has been a central moral challenge for thousands of years already.

What is the purpose/effect of singling out one central moral challenge? Presumably the intended effect is to mobilize efforts around this challenge, and around some set of perceived solutions. But this kind of thinking is dangerously close to slipping back into the centralizing mindset that Kristof and WuDunn have already identified as the central moral challenge of the century in which they grew up. For the 21st century, perhaps we need fewer hedgehogs and more foxes.

Twists of Fate 2

"A mother drowned in a freak car crash as she drove home to tell her husband she had beaten breast cancer. Jean Allen, 66, had been forced to take a detour after arsonists set fire to a church and caused massive traffic disruption." [Cambs Times 15 July 2010, Daily Mail 15 July 2010]

The tabloid newspapers make far too much use of the word "tragedy", but maybe this is one of those examples where the cruel humour of fate does justify the word.

The bereaved husband is calling for the arsonists to be tried for manslaughter. “I don’t want vengeance, I just want justice." But this seems an odd idea of justice: I think the arsonists (if caught) should be tried for arson; and I doubt that threatening them with a more serious offence is helpful in getting someone to turn them in.

The arsonists may have been partially responsible for her driving along that particular stretch of road at that particular time, but in that case the oncologists are also partially responsible. Meanwhile, the local authority failed to drain the ditch in which she drowned.

 

Surely the point about twists of fate is that they are beyond human agency? We can imagine some cruel purpose behind any series of events, especially when we are able to construct some kind of meaningful narrative, but that doesn't mean that such a purpose really exists.

Mind-Forged Manacles

A number of campaigners for prison reform quote Blake's line about Mind-Forged Manacles.

• Eric Allison, Breaking the Mind-Forged Manacles (Guardian, 23rd November 2007)
• George Monbiot, Mind-Forged Manacles (Guardian, 24th June 2008)

While they make some good points about the ineffectiveness of prison, they are not talking about mind-forged manacles. Prisons are physical constraints, forge-forged manacles if you like.

So would mental constraints be better? In Blake's poem, the phrase "mind-forged manacles" can be understood as a reference to "hopeless and depressing thoughts [which] imprison the people ... on the street" [Planet Papers]. I don't think that's quite what the prison reformers have in mind.

Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains (Rousseau). I tried an Internet search for Blake's phrase, and found it used in a variety of contexts. In Mind-Forged Manacles and Habits of the Soul, Peter Lucas traces Foucault's notion of subjection back to Heidegger. Blake's phrase also crops up as the title of a book about cults, and in polemics about religious freedom.

As Monbiot points out, prison performs a socio-economic function, removing large numbers of people from the statistics of poverty and unemployment, so it makes the rest of us feel safer and wealthier. Surely no other mechanisms of discipline and punishment could have this comfortable effect?

Justice 2

UK Immigration Minister Liam Byrne has been fined for using his mobile phone while driving. His excuse: he was taking an important call "on a deportation matter".

Source: BBC News, November 2nd 2007

As a former police minister, he presumably knows that's a pretty feeble excuse. But why does he think it is an excuse at all? Not only is he endangering the lives of other road-users by devoting half his attention to some deportation matter, but he is also endangering the life of some potential deportee by casually considering his case while devoting half his attention to the Sutton Coldfield one-way system.

Perhaps it wasn't intended as an excuse at all - more like a covert threat. Me, I'm an important member of the government, I make important decisions affecting people's lives, you'd better be nice to me or else ...

Next time he gets caught, I think he should say he'd been chatting to his mum. I've never met his mother, as far as I know, but I feel sure she would commit perjury for him if necessary. Surely nobody else would?

Justice

A van driver has been jailed for causing death by dangerous driving. After a heavy night drinking, he reported to work as normal; after recklessly using his mobile phone, he appears to have dozed off at the wheel, colliding with a family car and forcing it off the road. The only survivor was an 8-year-old boy; he has lost his parents and siblings, and is being cared for by his grandparents.

Source: BBC News November 2nd, 2007

Of course it is right that the van driver should go to prison. But what about the boy? I think there would be greater justice if the van driver had to work for the next ten years (not driving obviously) and paying child support to the boy's grandparents. (I never thought I'd be finding more work for the Child Support Agency, but there you go.) Once the boy has grown up, then the van driver can serve his sentence in prison.

The way our legal system works, of course, a solution like this simply isn't available. We are (perhaps rightly) wary of giving too much initiative to judges, who are required to adhere to complicated legislation and procedure, with sub-optimal results in particular cases. So I have a nostalgic fantasy of some system of village elders that might be able to produce real justice in particular cases.