A link to Ted Honderich’s essay Terrorism for Humanity [sic] was recently forwarded to members of the Radical Philosophy Association listserv. Several members of the list wrote posts dismissing Honderich’s essay as nauseating–including one post wondering whether it was a hoax in the tradition of the Sokal affair. In response, Edward D’Angelo writes:

Ted Honderich is a respected contemporary British philosopher. He has contributed some important philosophical works in the latter part of the twentieth century. The remark that his paper Terrorism for Humanity, presented at the International Social Philosophy Conference, can be equated with the spoof on postmoderism is discounting the content of the paper. Additionally, saying that one can be nauseous about Honderich’s views is an emotive apppeal. I suggest that we examine the logical content of Honderich’s paper instead of using nonlogical devices to reject his viewpoint.

It seems to me that a flippant dismissal of the paper, or a feeling of nausea, is far from discounting the content of the paper–it is, rather, a very reasonable response to the content of the paper.

Nevertheless, D’Angelo’s suggestion that the logical content of the paper be examined is also a perfectly good one. Therefore, let’s do a bit of analysis, borrowing from the methods advanced by another respected British philosopher, Mr. G.E. Moore:

1. If everything in Ted Honderich’s essay is correct, then the use of terrorist tactics to commit mass murder against civilians is sometimes acceptable.
2. But the use of terrorist tactics to commit mass murder against civilians is never acceptable.
3. Therefore, it is not the case that everything in Ted Honderich’s essay is correct. (M.T. 1, 2)

And thus, something in Ted Honderich’s essay is wrong. Q.E.D.

The form of argument that I have adapted here is, of course, Moore’s famous refutation of external world skepticism; I have, I think, conclusively shown that Honderich’s argument, like the skeptic’s, . . .">deserves nothing more than a certain gesture of the hands.

[This is a somewhat modified version of an e-mail response that I sent over the RPA listserv.]

Notes

1. I leave the identification of which parts of his essay are wrong as a matter for further discussion.

2. It may be objected against my argument, as it was against Moore’s here is one hand, that it merely begs the question. But what meaning is being given to the term begging the question here? Question-begging is a term of logical criticism; what is being claimed is that a fallacy has been committed. One common way to gloss the fallacy involved, which would seem clearly to indict my argument, is that your argument begs the question if it depends on one or more premises that your interlocuter does not accept. If that is a logical crime, then, since Honderich readily denies the crucial premise (2), I (and, mutatis mutandis, Moore) am certainly guilty. But then so is Honderich, whose argument proceeds from the denial of (2); the objection cannot rule my argument out-of-court without doing the same to Honderich’s.

   Indeed, it is much worse than that–a charge of begging the question would, on this account, rule out any argument whatsoever if only some sophist is willing to pick a premise to deny, and stick to it relentlessly until the dialectical game is left in a complete stalemate. (Karl Popper pointed out that a resolute partisan could defend any empirical hypothesis, at the last resort, by simply insisting that any putative counterexample you discover must be a hallucination.) Now I don’t want to deny that someone could use just such a strategem to stalemate any attempt at argument–indeed, sophists sometimes do just that. But the point here is that when they do, it is silly: a sophist who does this is not playing by the rules. The point of dialectical discourse is to hash out reasons for what is said; the point of doing that is to fit what we say as closely as possible to the truth. It’s obvious that it is the sophist who is frustrating this aim, not the person who is actually giving arguments. If begging the question is supposed to pick out a fallacy, then that means it is the question-begger’s fault that the argument gets nowhere. But here it is not your fault, even though your argument depends on premises that the sophist denies.

   A better gloss of what begging the question means—one which nicely solves this difficulty–might be: an argument begs the question when it is less plausible to affirm the premises than it is to deny the conclusion (the word plausible here has to indicate something like objective grounding, rather than the mere willingness to assert a proposition–otherwise this picture merely reformulates the one that we just rejected). Our new gloss is much better fitted to what we think charges of question-begging ought to do: you make an argument in the course of dialectic in order to give reasons for a particular conclusions, and inferring Q from P only counts as giving a reason for Q if there are stronger reasons for affirming P than there are for denying Q. Thus, consider Moore and the skeptic: the skeptic claims to have a deductive argument from philosophical intuitions to the conclusion that one cannot know that Here is one hand. But what’s more obvious? Some murky philosophical intuitions about evil deceivers and the immediate objects of perception? Or the hand in front of your face? It is the skeptic, not Moore, who begs the question: any argument against a Moorean proposition must depend upon something far less plausible than the mundane truisms that one is supposed to be attacking.

   What I maintain, then, is that the massacre of civilians is always and everywhere wrong is a Moorean truth. So, too, is there is no excuse for making shrapnel tear into the guts of little children. So, too, are many others. Honderich thinks he has an argument to show that these are not true, based upon his speculations about the nature of moral philosophy and the hegemonic structuring of ethical sentiments among those benighted souls who disagree with the slaughter of helpless civilians. But Honderich is wrong–he offers no reasons in support of terrorism, because there are no such reasons. All that he can offer is a logical demonstration of the urgent need to reject his premises.

Do not worry, gentle reader: I’ll be wrapping up my discussion of recent events surrounding Roy Moore soon. First, however, I have a minor personal matter to get out of the way: a brief open letter to whoever it is who has been posting a number of comments lately to several unrelated entries on Geekery Today and my Letters to the Editor:

Dear Anti-Semitic Asshole:

I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know why you feel that my letters on the war in Afghanistan, prison overcrowding in Alabama, and other topics are crying out for incisive commentary like the following:

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL or ZIONAL? ** – Are there a true Amnesty International office in Swedish Kingdom? – No!.. We have multi-faced Amnesty Bolaget in SvekJa Kingdom!.. – What does “Bolag” means? – Financial coup runs by the Evangelian Jewish lobbies… Administration serves for the Zionist Imperialism, if you listen to the insider analysis…

[… And so on, and so forth …]

Whatever your reasons, however, this web page is not the place for off-topic, anti-Semitic diatribes. While I want to provide an open forum for commentary, including those with whom I strongly disagree, your long-wided conspiracy theory postings about the International Jewish Conspiracy^TM‘s long arms in Swedish affairs do not have anything at all to do with any past comments or with any of the content on the pages. They are nothing more than hit and run spam that is wasting perfectly good space in my disk quota. They have, therefore, been deleted.

For some time now, I’ve wanted to put together and post some of my thoughts on the issue of anti-Semitism on the Left, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. What I have to say consists mostly of warnings from more than one direction–I think we need to be very critically aware both of the way that charges of anti-Semitism are wrongly used to abuse and dismiss critics of Israeli government policy, and also of the dangerously uncritical and cavalier atmosphere that the Left generally and the anti-occupation movement particularly have begun to take towards real, mounting problems of anti-Semitism in the movement and in the world at large–problems that need to be seriously faced down and critically confronted if we intend to do any work for justice. However, thanks to you, my dear anti-Semite, I will have to put all that on hold for the time being, because you offer no opportunity for constructive engagement or critical dialogue. You offer only off-topic bullshit that wastes perfectly good disk space on my web host.

Please do not continue to spread this blight on my web-page. You can use the time for many other productive purposes, such as seriously examining the worrisome trend of anti-Semitism in the international Left, or reading more about what horrors sprung up when the dragon’s teeth of anti-Semitism were last sown across the European continent.

While Donald Rumsfeld and his chuckle-headed apologists crow about the outcome of the Bush administration’s use of lies and deceit to justify war on Iraq, we might remember that the war zone created in Baghdad has led to a couple things: armed Islamist militias controlled by local clerics and the rise of rape and terror against women.

Zeinab, a 24-year-old computer science major who declined to give her last name, would drive her own car to college before the U.S. invasion, but now she’s only permitted to leave the house for school with the man she jokingly calls her driver-bodyguard-chaperon.

The beauty salons she used to frequent for pedicures and conversation are closed, so Zeinab spends much of her long hours at home in front of a mirror, practicing different hairstyles for the day she regains a social life.

Girls lost most of their freedom here a long time ago, but now we’ve lost it all, she said angrily. They want to protect our honor.

[LA Times]

And:

Sheik Nasseri, for instance, has been giving the Friday sermon at the main mosque in Sadr City, where he has railed against Americans as infidel colonizers and sanctioned the killing of unveiled women who refuse to comply with his rules, as well as the killing of Muslims or non-Muslims who sell liquor.

[NY Times]

Just in case you have forgotten: these are the same conditions–precisely the same conditions–that led to the establishment of the Islamist tyranny in Iran, and were used to justify forced veiling and other misogynist repression. And they are also the same conditions–precisely the same conditions that led to the horrors of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

So thanks, Donald, for lying to us about weapons of mass destruction in order to carry out your dirty little war. What an awful outcome indeed.

Editors, The Plainsman:

In a recent letter to the editor of The Plainsman, Jonathan Melville took a rather odd tack in his support for war against Iraq:

As for the argument that Iraq doesn’t pose a threat to us, this statement is completely irrelevant with respect to whether we wage war.

Mr. Melville may not believe that it is relevant whether the United States is unleashing its deadly military might in an act of self-defense or in an act of unprovoked conquest. This is, however, an odd position to take, and requires some explanation. Unfortunately, nowhere in his letter does Mr. Melville support his claim that the United States can be justified in waging wars based on aggression rather than self-defense. Nor does he provide any principle which he thinks is relevant to whether we wage war.

I would like to propose the following test for whether or not the United States is justified in going to war with Iraq. A war is justified if all of the following conditions are met:

1. The Iraqi government possesses, or is likely soon to possess, significant weapons of mass destruction.
2. There is a specific threat that the Iraqi government will use such weapons against citizens of the United States.
3. There is good reason to believe that a war will substantially remove this threat.
4. There is good reason to believe that the destruction caused by the war will not be worse than the threat left without a war.
5. There are no options for removing the threat through less destructive means than war.

Now, neither Jonathan Melville nor myself is a U.N. weapons inspector. Neither of us has any particular access to whether (1) is true or false. As it happens, Hans Blix, who is in charge of chemical and biological weapons inspections, and Mohamed El-Baradei, who is in charge of nuclear weapons inspections explicitly deny that they have discovered anything which should prompt a war against Iraq. Since Mr. Melville claims to know that Iraq does in fact possess banned chemical and biological weapons, and also claims to know that they are about to have nuclear weapons, perhaps he has access to secret intelligence that the U.N. weapons inspectors do not. But he can hardly expect us to take his assertions on blind faith.

But even if (1) turns out to be true, neither the Bush administration, nor Jonathan Melville, has bothered to present any evidence whatsoever for (2)-(4). There is no evidence at all that Saddam Hussein has any more plans to attack the United States now than he did for the past twelve years. Has something changed in that time to transform a broken, beaten, third world country into an imminent threat to the world’s last unchallenged superpower? If something has changed, then the War Party should point it out. But, as far as I can tell, no-one has shown that anything has changed except the belligerence of the ruling party in Washington, DC.

How about (5)? Are there any options other than war? Certainly there are. For example, the United States can step back and let the inspections process continue to work–as Hans Blix and Mohamed El-Baradei have indicated they would be willing and able to do.

Mr. Melville and his fellow epistolator Charlie Vaughan do not present any evidence for believing that (2)-(5) are true. Instead, they both try to use an analogy with the struggle against fascism as a historical backdrop for the Bush administration’s plans for war–by accusing peace supporters of favoring appeasement of Saddam Hussein, as Neville Chamberlain favored appeasement of Hitler.

The attempted comparison is a grotesque abuse of history. Saddam Hussein is certainly a ruthless dictator with a lot of blood on his hands. However, comparing him to Hitler simply blanks out one minor detail: while Hitler stood atop a massive military machine that conquered nearly all of Europe in a few short years, Hussein is the tinhorn dictator of a devastated third world country, completely surrounded by hostile and militarily superior forces. There is no appeasement of Hussein to be done, because he poses a threat to no other country. What peace supporters ask is that we do not go out of our way to unleash the destruction of war on the Iraqi people when we can deal with Saddam Hussein through peaceful means.

Mr. Vaughan also angrily accuses Dr. El Moghazy of comments that are a slap in the face of those currently serving in our military. But El Moghazy never criticized women and men in the military–rather, his criticism was directed against the Administration that is dead-set on putting those brave men and women in harm’s way. It seems to me that it is no disrespect to our troops to try to keep them from being sent off to die in another dumb foreign war. If I were in the military, I’d rather have people support our troops by keeping me alive, rather than by giving me a medal after I’m dead.

Lest you fear, gentle reader, that I have lost myself in the Bush administration’s house of mirrors and can no longer talk about anything but the damned war, I would like to take this time to mention the fact that, contrary to the claims of the Right’s war marketing gurus, women in Afghanisan continue to face brutal attacks, and it turns out that women’s liberation was not particularly served by bombing the hell out of Afghanistan and imposing a puppet government dominated by jihadi thugs (you know, the jihadi thugs who chased out the old jihadi thugs… who in turn had chased out the jihadi thugs that we put back in power).

Over the past several weeks, eight terrorist attacks have targeted girls’ schools with bombs, arson, and gunfire. In Kandahar, the site of the most recent bombing, hand-written pamphlets were distributed back in April threatening violence if women took jobs or attended school. The city was also recently the site of the attempted assasination of Gul Agha Shirzai and Puppet-in-Chief Hamid Karzai. Thanks to the US, the country is no longer in the iron fist of jihadi dictatorship; instead, it is now being blown to hell all over again by a whole host of self-appointed holy warriors and straight-up marauders and goons.

Afghan women have been crying out for more security, but the Bush administration is too busy figuring out its next war for liberation to do a damn thing. Given the fact that the US government put Afghanistan in this horrible mess, and most Afghans (other than the warlords themselves) are begging for us to help restore peace and stability, it seems to me that maybe, just maybe, the U.S. government ought to consider expanding the presence of international peace-keepers outside of just Kabul. Indeed, it would be nothing less than evil to carelessly skip around the globe spreading death and destruction while ignoring the mess that was already created by the war for regime change in Afghanistan.

Take Action!

Stand in solidarity with the women and girls in Afghanistan who are facing constant attack from the self-appointed holy warriors of the male supremacist counter-revolution. You can help support embattled girls’ schools in Afghanistan by donating money and/or school supplies to RAWA and the Afghan Women’s Mission. These attacks on Muslim women cannot be allowed to stop girls’ education again.

Second, contact the Bush administratin to demand that the U.S. government live up to its claims to support a safe and free Afghanistan, by responding to the Afghan people’s requests for an expansion of international peace-keepers beyond Kabul.