Well said, Damir. I see international law as a tool: one option among many, that states big and small can point to when it suits their interests.
So much of what we in the West think of as universal values or obligations only appear that way because the country that came out on top in 1945 said they were universal. And it's not like immediate-post-World War II Westerners really, truly, thoroughly believed in universal human rights. The US was still rife with segregation, Europeans still subjugated Africans, etc.
There's nothing inherently wrong with prioritizing some human lives over other human lives. That's what humans do. Humanity sucks that way. The sooner liberals realize that, the better.
Before breezily dismissing international law, it would be nice if. you demonstrated some awareness of its woeful history. There was no preening in 1945 when the UN Charter was formulated. It derived from a very sober understanding that the anarchic great-power system that had nearly destroyed Europe twice, along with much of Asia, was simply too irrational and dangerous to be allowed to persist, especially in a world of nuclear weapons. The resulting Charter was very sensible and efficient, though fatally flawed from the outset by the unwillingness of the great powers to give up their veto in the Security Council, to allow their crimes to be referred to the Council for debate and judgment, or to abide by resolutions of the General Assembly (even, in the case of the US and Israel, unanimous ones). As Soviet, American, and Israeli crimes mounted in utter indifference to international condemnation, hopes for a law-abiding world -- always stronger among the weak, for obvious reasons -- guttered out. The last stage of the process is First World intellectuals professing contempt for the very idea of a world of equals under law, in apparent ignorance of what destroyed the possibility.
Calling the Security Council a flaw misses the point of it. The veto power of the Security Council is the only thing that made it work; it ensured buy-in from the nuclear powers (chiefly the two superpowers) on whose support the entire system hinged. Without this inequality there wouldn’t be a UN.
After the fall of the Soviet Union this already started to fray under the brief unipolar moment (Iraq as the biggest example) and now that framework is gone as the new supposed counterbalance to the US is blatantly uninterested in subjecting itself to decision-making by third parties. The sensibility of the charter is irrelevant if nuclear powers can just ignore it at will without being checked by others.
Yes, obviously the UN would never have gotten off the ground if the five great powers had not been allowed to immunize themselves from international public opinion. So the UN came into existence with -- as I said -- a fatal flaw, which has allowed the US and the USSR (and soon, no doubt, China) to violate human rights and national sovereignty at will. It's not inconceivable that the US, the USSR, and the other great powers could have decided to subject themselves to the rule of law, however inconvenient that would sometimes have been. But "national interest" -- in practice, the determination of elites on all sides to preserve their privileges -- won out. As you suggest, it was not a close contest.
What's interesting to me is that George and Damir have fundamentally the same metaphysical worldview: Lucretian materialism. Atoms and void. Everything else is a secondary discussion about how much moral weight one should give to epiphenomena that don't really exist according to the atomistic worldview (for example, international law).
Of course international law exists. It is a Wittgensteinian language game.
Do you seriously think Mill, James, Russell, Dewey, and Chomsky and innumerable others spent a good part of their lives advocating for something that, according to you, they had no reason to believe existed? It's generally a lame argumentative strategy to accuse your opponents of dumb mistakes, even when they're great philosophers.
I am not accusing them of having made a mistake. I did not bring them up. (I think Chomsky is probably not a full materialist.)
George, you always want to have your cake and eat it, too. You are always a partisan for the most scientistic, reductive understanding of the human person. Yet you also have a highly moralistic tone, which rhetorically is a match for Christianity, but without the beliefs and convictions that would support it.
Waving away the question of nihilism with phrases like, "Its a Wittgensteinian language game" (something Wittgenstein himself -- a mystic -- would not do), is not adequate to the realities of the 21st century. Today, we literally have leaders of industry telling us that they do not necessarily know whether the human race deserves to survive, or be replaced by robots. We need stronger stuff that motte-and-bailey pragmatism.
Yes, I'm part of the now very large and distinguished caucus which holds that the "beliefs and convictions" with which Christianity supports its morality -- even that part which it shares with the liberal, socialist, utilitarian, and other secular traditions -- simply cannot be sustained. It is by now a very old argument, though we can rehash it if you wish.
Also very old and tired is the accusation that skeptical unbelief must issue in nihilism, despite the luminous counter-examples of Spinoza, the philosophes, Hume, Adam Smith, Paine, Priestley, Godwin, Mill, Marx, Morris, James, Russell, Dewey, Luxemburg, Serge, Orwell, Camus, Chomsky, Rorty, and countless others, who together have done at least as much to render the world more rational and less cruel as Christianity has. That you apparently think that all these intellectual and moral heroes were really nihilists but didn't know it does not, I'm afraid, prove that they were.
Yes, Chomsky is, for the purposes of this discussion, a materialist, and no, Wittgenstein, whatever his mysticism amounted to, was not a supernaturalist.
Much better to ask: what did they mean -- or think they meant -- by "international law" (or whatever), and how would they have explained/described it, given their materialist/pragmatist ontology?
Well said, Damir. I see international law as a tool: one option among many, that states big and small can point to when it suits their interests.
So much of what we in the West think of as universal values or obligations only appear that way because the country that came out on top in 1945 said they were universal. And it's not like immediate-post-World War II Westerners really, truly, thoroughly believed in universal human rights. The US was still rife with segregation, Europeans still subjugated Africans, etc.
There's nothing inherently wrong with prioritizing some human lives over other human lives. That's what humans do. Humanity sucks that way. The sooner liberals realize that, the better.
Before breezily dismissing international law, it would be nice if. you demonstrated some awareness of its woeful history. There was no preening in 1945 when the UN Charter was formulated. It derived from a very sober understanding that the anarchic great-power system that had nearly destroyed Europe twice, along with much of Asia, was simply too irrational and dangerous to be allowed to persist, especially in a world of nuclear weapons. The resulting Charter was very sensible and efficient, though fatally flawed from the outset by the unwillingness of the great powers to give up their veto in the Security Council, to allow their crimes to be referred to the Council for debate and judgment, or to abide by resolutions of the General Assembly (even, in the case of the US and Israel, unanimous ones). As Soviet, American, and Israeli crimes mounted in utter indifference to international condemnation, hopes for a law-abiding world -- always stronger among the weak, for obvious reasons -- guttered out. The last stage of the process is First World intellectuals professing contempt for the very idea of a world of equals under law, in apparent ignorance of what destroyed the possibility.
Calling the Security Council a flaw misses the point of it. The veto power of the Security Council is the only thing that made it work; it ensured buy-in from the nuclear powers (chiefly the two superpowers) on whose support the entire system hinged. Without this inequality there wouldn’t be a UN.
After the fall of the Soviet Union this already started to fray under the brief unipolar moment (Iraq as the biggest example) and now that framework is gone as the new supposed counterbalance to the US is blatantly uninterested in subjecting itself to decision-making by third parties. The sensibility of the charter is irrelevant if nuclear powers can just ignore it at will without being checked by others.
Yes, obviously the UN would never have gotten off the ground if the five great powers had not been allowed to immunize themselves from international public opinion. So the UN came into existence with -- as I said -- a fatal flaw, which has allowed the US and the USSR (and soon, no doubt, China) to violate human rights and national sovereignty at will. It's not inconceivable that the US, the USSR, and the other great powers could have decided to subject themselves to the rule of law, however inconvenient that would sometimes have been. But "national interest" -- in practice, the determination of elites on all sides to preserve their privileges -- won out. As you suggest, it was not a close contest.
What's interesting to me is that George and Damir have fundamentally the same metaphysical worldview: Lucretian materialism. Atoms and void. Everything else is a secondary discussion about how much moral weight one should give to epiphenomena that don't really exist according to the atomistic worldview (for example, international law).
Of course international law exists. It is a Wittgensteinian language game.
Do you seriously think Mill, James, Russell, Dewey, and Chomsky and innumerable others spent a good part of their lives advocating for something that, according to you, they had no reason to believe existed? It's generally a lame argumentative strategy to accuse your opponents of dumb mistakes, even when they're great philosophers.
I am not accusing them of having made a mistake. I did not bring them up. (I think Chomsky is probably not a full materialist.)
George, you always want to have your cake and eat it, too. You are always a partisan for the most scientistic, reductive understanding of the human person. Yet you also have a highly moralistic tone, which rhetorically is a match for Christianity, but without the beliefs and convictions that would support it.
Waving away the question of nihilism with phrases like, "Its a Wittgensteinian language game" (something Wittgenstein himself -- a mystic -- would not do), is not adequate to the realities of the 21st century. Today, we literally have leaders of industry telling us that they do not necessarily know whether the human race deserves to survive, or be replaced by robots. We need stronger stuff that motte-and-bailey pragmatism.
Yes, I'm part of the now very large and distinguished caucus which holds that the "beliefs and convictions" with which Christianity supports its morality -- even that part which it shares with the liberal, socialist, utilitarian, and other secular traditions -- simply cannot be sustained. It is by now a very old argument, though we can rehash it if you wish.
Also very old and tired is the accusation that skeptical unbelief must issue in nihilism, despite the luminous counter-examples of Spinoza, the philosophes, Hume, Adam Smith, Paine, Priestley, Godwin, Mill, Marx, Morris, James, Russell, Dewey, Luxemburg, Serge, Orwell, Camus, Chomsky, Rorty, and countless others, who together have done at least as much to render the world more rational and less cruel as Christianity has. That you apparently think that all these intellectual and moral heroes were really nihilists but didn't know it does not, I'm afraid, prove that they were.
Yes, Chomsky is, for the purposes of this discussion, a materialist, and no, Wittgenstein, whatever his mysticism amounted to, was not a supernaturalist.
Much better to ask: what did they mean -- or think they meant -- by "international law" (or whatever), and how would they have explained/described it, given their materialist/pragmatist ontology?
Who cares? It's a bourgeois delusion to think you can avoid hard questions forever.