“Morality is nothing other than the Advantage of the stronger Party…” Simon Blackburn’s Lewis B. Frumkes Lecture at NYU
Published by Hanno Kaiser November 16th, 2005 in Kant, Philosophy, Law and SocietySimon Blackburn, in a recent public lecture at NYU, tackled one of the classic problems of political philosophy: How do you convince a ruthless, powerful, yet entirely realistic enemy, not to invade your country? Blackburn’s short answer is: You don’t. As a backdrop, Blackburn chose Thucydides’ famous Melian Dialogue, the first clear articulation of political realism, pursuant to which all states and nations seek as much power as they can get, not just as a means but as an end in itself, if for no other reason than people, by their nature, go to war out of “honor, fear, and interest.” Thucydides describes how the Athenians arrive at the shores of the isle of Melos, a neutral in the Peloponnesian war, with overwhelming force. The Athenian envoy, in its first and only meeting with the Melians, cuts right to the chase: We are here in the interest of our empire and surrender is your only responsible option, “because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you.” Neutrality, the Athenians make clear, is not an option. You’re either with us (as tributaries, that is) or against us, “for your hostility cannot so much hurt us as your friendship.” The Athenians then shift the burden of persuasion to the Melians by asking them to make their case against the invasion, but not before dictating the terms of the debate:
For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretenses [of right or wrong], since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Having been “enjoin[ed] to let right alone and talk only of interest,” the Melians make the following arguments:
- It is in Athens’ interest not to “destroy what is our common protection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right.” Normative constraints are common protections, or so the Melians argue, because they would also be available to the Athenians in the event that their empire should fall at some point in the future. The Athenians grant that point, but quite simply say in response, that this “is a risk that we are content to take.”
- If you destroy us, the Melians argue, you will make “enemies of all the existing neutrals who shall look at case from it that one day or another you will attack them. And what is this but to make greater the enemies that you have already, and to force others to become so who would otherwise have never thought of it?” Again, the Athenians are unconcerned, because the “continentals give us but little alarm. [I]t is rather islanders like yourselves, outside our empire” who could cause trouble, and picking them off one by one is, from a military point of view, a rather attractive option.
- Since you have us cornered anyway, the Melians say, we might as well take our chances and fight, even though we are outnumbered. “[W]e trust that the gods may grant us fortune as good as yours, since we are just men fighting against unjust. … Our confidence, therefore, after all is not so utterly irrational.” To which the Athenians have the following, chilling rejoinder:
When you speak of the favour of the gods, we may as fairly hope for that as yourselves; neither our pretensions nor our conduct being in any way contrary to what men believe of the gods, or practise among themselves. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. Thus, as far as the gods are concerned, we have no fear and no reason to fear that we shall be at a disadvantage.
The Melians ultimately decided to take a stand and “not in a moment deprive of freedom a city that has been inhabited these seven hundred years,” whereupon the Athenians attacked, and after the Melian surrender “put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.” So it goes.
What else could the Melians have argued? What would our argumentative strategy be, 2,500 years later?
- Kantian universalism, Blackburn argues, wouldn’t do the modern day Melians any good, because the Athenians agree with the universal rule that right or wrong is only a concern among equals. (The moral risk taker can’t be defeated by abstract universalism.)
- The same is true for contractual theories and other forms of rationalism. The modern day Athenians could either say: “Who cares?” or, more frighteningly, “We’ve just reasoned with you, and guess what, we don’t find your reasons compelling.”
- Virtue theorists don’t fare much better. The Athenians expect to flourish from conquering Melos.
As an alternative, Blackburn suggests a Platonic argument, amalgamated with a modern version of Scottish enlightenment sentimentalism, specifically based on Hume and Smith. The Platonic idea is that the political order of the state is a fractal representation of the order in the citizens’ souls ÇƒÏ and vice versa. Put differently, external disorder reveals (or necessarily leads to) internal disorder. It is impossible to pursue an aggressive foreign policy while maintaining a liberal order domestically. The source of the disorder, Blackburn argues, is not a flaw in reasoning but rather one of sentiment. A lack of sympathy is a moral flaw, and if the leaders of a nation suffer from such sentimental disorder, as did the Athenian envoy, the resulting ills will not only afflict foreigners such as the Melians but also, in short order, the citizens of the domestic body politic.
But would that argument have stopped the Athenians? I don’t think so, and I suppose that Blackburn would agree. When the Athenians showed up in Melos, it was too late already. Once the time for words had passed, there simply was no “bazooka argument” (Blackburn’s term) that could have stopped the Athenian army in its tracks. At some point, then as now, only real-world bazookas can make a difference, a point with which the Athenians would certainly agree. So are we to conclude that nothing has changed in the intervening 2,500 years?
I am slightly more optimistic, because there is one argument that the Melians didn’t raise and Blackburn didn’t address, an argument that, in my view, could have made a difference: international law. Of course, as Michael Glennon and others have pointed out, international law has failed over and over to prevent armed conflict, but its influence on the world post WWII can nevertheless not be overestimated, because in today’s world, adherence to the rule of law has become a conditio sine qua non for the legitimate exercise of power. And here is where Blackburn’s Platonic argument may be at its strongest: A state, whose domestic legitimacy is based on the rule of law (Rechtsstaat), cannot consistently pursue policies in violation of international law. Laws, conferring rights, have a non-consequentialist kernel. Having a right is a license to be exempt from a majoritarian cost-benefit calculus with respect to the subject matter of the right. Repeatedly violating laws, irrespective of their classification as national or international, is a performative contradiction as it exhibits a character of disregard for the law, which is, arguably even in the not-so-long run, incompatible with the legitimate exercise of power, domestically and internationally. In addition, the barrier between international and domestic laws is becoming increasingly porous, as evidenced by the outright incorporation of international law into the body of laws governing the European Union and, to a lesser degree, by the U.S. Supreme Court’s (unsurprisingly controversial) practice of interpreting domestic laws in light of international laws.
So maybe we are in a better position today than the Melians were 2,500 years ago. And it may well be a special obligation of the lawyers and the legal philosophers as guardians of the rule of law, to prevent exercises of unmitigated Realpolitik by insisting on respect for the rule of law in all affairs of the state.
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Thanks for a thoughtful and accurate summary of the gist of my lecture, and for a useful direction to pursue. I would classify the habit of deference to law (and law extended to cover international relations) as a good result of what I called a sentimental education - an education here into a certain pattern of respect. Perhaps that sounds odd, and if it weren’t for the Scottish tradition the word ’sentiment’ would sound out of place. I like it because it rescues respect for law from its Kantian and rationalist overtones. But however that pans out, putting law more central is certainly warranted. So - thanks for the suggestion, and I hope it prompts more comments. And thanks for the appreciation of the lecture.
I’m not convinced, even though as a good little Habermasian, I want to agree.
Your argument begs the question by incorporating the notion of a “legitimate exercise of power.” The Athenian case, as I understand it, is: “legitimacy be damned.” Perhaps compliance with the rule of law is a precondition for the legitimate exercise of power, but if those who hold power care nothing for legitimacy, and don’t expect to be divested of power if that lack of care is revealed, then this argument is just as unlikely to deter them as all the others.
In response to Paul, I agree that “if those who hold power care nothing for legitimacy, and don’t expect to be divested of power if that lack of care is revealed, then this argument is just as unlikely to deter them as all the others.” (Very well put, Paul!) But I suggest a somewhat different angle or rather, a different audience for the argument, an audience where we can still reasonably expect “certain patterns of respect” (see S. Blackburn’s comment above). The hope is that “those who … care nothing for legitimacy” cannot ignore that audience, e.g., a domestic constituency, international allies, trading partners, etc. for long. And that hope may not be entirely misplaced, either because a more realistic assessment of power reveals instrumental reasons for maintaining (the appearance of) legitimacy, or, and I think more importantly, because most people are not fully committed instrumentalists, that is, instrumentalists in every realm of social interaction. So we might find that “patterns of respect” have genuine normative force in one realm (e.g., a belief in due process domestically) even for those who deny the force of such concerns in another (e.g., vis-?Ü-vis real or imagined external foes). The appeal of Blackburn’s argument is to harness “patterns of respect” where they exist, in different audiences, in different realms of social interaction, and to point out the inconsistency and ultimately self-defeating nature of the criticized behavior.
Stimulating post (and speech). This is my first look at this blog, but if it’s all like this I’ll be back. I wonder, though, if it isn’t missing something.
Henry Kissinger would say the Melians actually have a simple and effective “bazooka argument.” If the Melians had said the following, the Athenians would have packed up and gone home: “Yes Athenians, we will tear down our walls and promise to give annual contributions to support the Delian League’s fleet which protects the security of all islands.” That is what the Athenians wanted and their behavior towards other Aegean Islands throughout the imperial era suggests that hostilities would have ended immediately.
Obviously, this response misses the point of Blackburn’s speech somewhat–I presume there was an implied “…without surrendering to their demands” at the end of his question. Yet still, it seems to be relevant.
Remember the situation. Sparta declares war on Athens. Athenian survival depends on keeping its island empire secure. Melos lies at the far west of the Cyclades (closest to Sparta). Given that triremes could only travel short distances and generally made landfall each night, that made control over Melos crucial to Athenian security–Spartan control would give it access to the other Cyclades, in constrast, without Melos it would be difficult for them to mount a serious amphibious challenge. In other words, the admitted Melian pro-Spartan tendency posed a distinct risk for the Athenians.
This sounds like I’m making a case for “preventative war” but I’m not. I do think, though, that this case illustrates how in our discussions of rights under international law (e.g. not to be invaded), we also need to include the notion that rights (even the most basic rights) have limits and can be abused.
Remember that Athens was attacked and was fighting for its life. Melos, for geographic reasons, was crucial to that struggle. Melian inistence on its immunity to Athenian influence and the military implications of its fortifications placed a very real burden on the Athenians. It seems to me that while we can and should condemn the Athenians for their “lack of sympathy” (as the post describes it) (and Thucydides implicitly does so, with the location of this episode in his narrative) we also have to consider whether the invadee has met their _own_ prior obligations of sympathy for the country that is threatening to invade them.
I’m sure Dr. Blackburn has thought about this issue, but it cropped up in my own teaching recently so I thought I’d throw it out there.
Wouldn’t this response presuppose a level of determinacy to the law sufficient to say that an invasion in a particular case was legal or illegal? Most states, when embarking upon some international violent action, attempt to frame their action in terms of international legal norms. Thus Saddam Hussein put forward several arguable legal justifications for his invasion of Kuwait.
Essentially, if one adopts the line that Martti Koskenniemi puts forward in From Apology to Utopia then most actions can plausibly be argued as legal, utilising either a descending or ascending argument (one based on sovereignty *or* the ‘world community’). These arguments are of course irresolvable. In his book ‘Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law’, China Mieville postulates that these ‘arguments’ are resolved precisely on the basis of material strength (insofar as argument cannot resolve them). On this reading international law will almost never serve to defend the weak, as it is through international law that ‘material’ strength is articulated.