There has already been much discussion in the blogosphere of the interview given by historian Benny Morris to Haaretz, since it appeared some days ago. I’m not going to excerpt it. It should be read in full. An adequate discussion of all the questions it raises cannot be encompassed in a blog post. I just want to argue for a distinction which Morris’s discussion does not observe.

That is the distinction between justifying crimes committed in the foundation and initial defence of the state of Israel, more generally justifying the origin of the state of Israel, on the one hand, and justifying its continued existence, on the other. War crimes and crimes against humanity are not justifiable, on any side, as a matter of state or organizational policy. That is precisely one of the meanings the global human community legislates by designating them so. Therefore such crimes committed in the foundation of Israel or its defence cannot be justified retrospectively. If, as Morris argues, such crimes were, and had to be, a part of the foundation of the state of Israel – if Israel’s very foundation, in other words, could not have happened without crimes of this kind – then the conclusion would have to be drawn that the foundation of the state was not justifiable at the time and so should not have happened. I leave this question open. It needs further thought. Or, at least, I want to think further about it. It’s a conclusion I myself would find unwelcome, but I am not shocked by it. It is thinkable. And I don’t know whether the premise, Benny Morris’s premise – that it could not have been otherwise, the new state without the crimes committed to establish it – is indeed true. But in any event, his reasoning seems to be that, since the existence of the state of Israel is, for him, justified, anything that was necessarily done in bringing it into existence must also be justified. This is an unacceptable moral logic and cannot be allowed to go through.

At the same time, an opposite moral logic is also not acceptable: the logic, namely, that because Israel’s original foundation was based (and perhaps necessarily) on grave moral crimes, its present and future existence cannot be justified – on the basis that grave crimes committed must be reversed. The question whether Israel now has a right to exist is not the same question as that of whether its initial foundation was justified. Consider that for the very greatest of crimes one can’t say ‘must be reversed’; because the greatest of crimes are, by their nature, irreversible. In fact, there’s a sense in which virtually any crime above a certain (lowish) level of seriousness is irreversible. The Shoah, the destruction of two-thirds of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its accomplices, was not and is not reversible. The fates visited by European colonists and settlers upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas, or of Australasia – the dispossession, destruction, the genocidal killing – are irreversible. In cases like this, subsequent and/or contemporary efforts to redeem or make amends for what was done (as nothing, in truth, can redeem or make amends for them) have to aim at whatever combination of reparations, compensation, bringing the principal perpetrators to justice if they are still living, reconciliation and memorialization, may be judged to be fit and right in the prevailing circumstances.

Israel has been in existence for more than half a century and the Israeli Jews constitute a nation, with a right to national self-determination as valid as is the same right of the Palestinian people. A forcible expulsion of the Israeli Jews, or the forcible imposition upon them of a state they could not regard as their own, would be a new crime in itself and it could probably only be accomplished by a whole series of constituent crimes against humanity in the strict sense – a road down which sections of the Palestinian movement have already begun to travel.

The constraints upon a just overall solution are hereby defined: unless and until the two peoples are themselves agreeable to living within a common state, there must be two states, Palestine and Israel. That of course leaves all the problems which we know about intact and to be resolved. But, outside of the constraints of this solution, there lies an abyss.

(See also the Benny Morris piece in today’s Guardian.)

The second objection to the concept of evil which I want to look at is the claim that it’s an unsatisfactory or defective concept because it’s not explanatory. Since it explains nothing, there’s no point in using it, on this view: it’s vacuous, and though it may reveal something about the prejudices of the speaker, it tells us nothing about the actions to which it is applied, because it doesn’t help to explain them. This is an interesting objection: it implies that firstly, respectable moral concepts must be explanatory; and secondly, that the concept of evil can’t play that explanatory role. But neither of these implications is obviously true. There are plenty of moral concepts which aren’t on the face of it explanatory. What’s explained when we call an action arrogant, for example? Not very much, at first glance; but then if arrogance is an acceptable moral concept even though it’s not very explanatory, then so will evil be. Of course if we dig deeper, reflect further, we’ll probably come up with an answer to this question about the explanatory force of arrogance: it will turn out that we’re explaining certain kinds of action – the arrogant ones – with reference to the particular character traits of the agent. But we can do this with evil too. Just what explanatory work the concept of evil can do depends on what account of the nature of evil we find convincing, and that will draw on theoretical work much of which is still to be done. But there’s nothing so far that rules out the possibility of doing that work, and of using the concept of evil to explain aspects of our moral behaviour. Of course, the concept won’t explain everything about the acts to which it applies, but that’s nothing special about evil. Appeal to the concept of wrongness doesn’t explain everything about wrong acts, but that doesn’t cast doubt on the legitimacy of that concept. And using the concept of evil to capture the nature of torturing children in front of their parents, for example, enables us to give that hideous practice a special, distinctive, place in the moral scheme of things, as many would wish to do.

Johann Hari, in a very interesting piece on this topic, raises what seems to be exactly the opposite objection – he suggests that it’s the uses of evil which do set out to be explanatory that are the objectionable ones. I think this is because he feels that the putative explanation cuts off too much. What he seems to have in mind are cases of explaining an evil action in terms of the evil nature of the person who committed it, and then supposing that there’s nothing further to be said by way of explanation of the act. If that were all there is to the concept of evil, then Hari might be right; its apparent explanatory power would be too shallow. We would seem to be saying that evil acts are just the product of evil characters, and that’s the end of the matter; no further explanation is needed or available. That’s clearly wrong, since so many other questions crowd in. How do evil characters get that way? Is there anything we can do about it? What’s the contribution from the genes, from the environment, from the political context? Hari is right to want to leave room for all these questions. And he suggests we should use what he calls a descriptive conception of evil. But this distinction between descriptive and explanatory concepts can’t be sustained. Most of our explanations, of all phenomena, involve the use of descriptions. Why did the car skid? Because the road was icy. That’s a description, playing an explanatory role. We explain events by providing more detailed descriptions of various aspects of them and their context. Description and explanation don’t involve distinct kinds of concept, and aren’t in fact sharply different kinds of intellectual activity.

Where does this leave us with evil? Well, we can identify an act as evil, while leaving open the explanation of what makes it so. Some people may think that it’s because the agent was an evil character; others may explain its being evil in terms of the terrible consequences of certain acts. And then there’s the question of how the acts, and their agents, came to be this evil way – some will talk about the genes, others about the wider socio-political contexts, and so forth. But all our moral concepts are like this: we disagree quite widely about many aspects of them. Some people think that morally right actions are made so because they’re done by people with good motives; others think that what makes them right is a matter of their consequences. And there are many quite profound disagreements about how people come to act rightly (or wrongly). This kind of disagreement doesn’t cast doubt on the legitimacy of the concept of rightness. Similar disagreements shouldn’t cast doubt on the concept of evil, either. There’s a lot we still have to find out about the nature and causes of evil actions. But that doesn’t make the concept any more problematic than our other disputed moral concepts.

The final objection to evil that I’m going to discuss is the view that it’s too judgemental. Who are we, after all, to say that Saddam Hussein is evil? He doesn’t think he is, and neither do his supporters – what gives us the right to impose our moral judgments on them? This is my very favourite objection to evil. It’s so richly confused, and so illuminating about the objector’s picture of morality. It displays such an efflorescence of double standards. It deserves a post all to itself, and I’ll give it proper space next time. (Eve Garrard)

[Part 1 appeared on Monday.]

Like Jackie, via whom, I scored 8 out of 10. WotN likewise.

(Updated at 5.00 PM.) A female reader writes:

I only got 6 out of 10 on that quiz, and all the ones I got wrong were by saying they were serial killers when in fact they were computer programmers. Still it’s better to err on the side of caution I reckon – means you’re less likely to be murdered by someone masquerading as an IT consultant.

Being by way of a round-up of various news items I thought worthy of attention.

> The BBC reports this from Afghanistan:

For the first time in more than a decade an Afghan woman has been broadcast singing on public television.

Kabul Television broadcast old footage of the popular 1970s and ’80s artist Salma singing a ballad. The footage marked the latest step towards liberalisation promoted by the moderate administration of President Hamid Karzai. No such images have been seen since the fall of communist President Najibullah in 1992.

(Via Emily Jones.)

> Dan De Luce has an informative account in today’s Guardian of the battle between reformists and conservatives in Iran:

Iran’s reformists raised the stakes yesterday in a power struggle with hardline opponents as the government warned that it would resign if top clerics kept their ban on hundreds of liberal candidates taking part in the elections.

> This item about Syria is from the Jerusalem Post (registration required):

Just last week, security sources revealed that the Syrian planes that brought relief to Iranian earthquake victims flew back with weapons for Hizbullah. According to The Miami Herald, Bush administration officials are debating taking military action against Syria “as evidence mounts that the government in Damascus is stepping up support for the terror group Hizbullah and allowing anti-American insurgents to reach Iraq.” The US has even reportedly cautioned Israel about responding too warmly to Assad’s diplomatic overtures.

The Miami Herald piece is here:

Civilians in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s office are pushing for military action against Syria short of an invasion and have drawn up plans for punitive airstrikes and cross-border incursions by U.S. forces, according to three officials.

But Bush’s White House advisors, backed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department, are arguing against a new military venture with much of the U.S. military tied down in Iraq and a presidential election year under way.

That view appears to have prevailed, for now.

Here’s an article by Bruce Hoffman on what follows on suicide bombings in Jerusalem – the clean-up, amongst other aspects:

Listening in on these alerts, or receiving notification on their pagers, are the devoutly religious members of ZAKA, a nongovernmental organization whose complete name means “Identification of Disaster Victims” and whose self-proclaimed purpose is to “rescue, save, and be part of the spiritual justice of truth” – that is, to deal with the tiny bits of bone, tissue, teeth, fingernails, and toenails scattered across the pavement and splattered against nearby cars, windows, walls, lampposts, commercial advertisements, and municipal signs.

(Hat tip: SdeW.)

There’s a discussion up at Slate, involving Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens and Kenneth M. Pollack among others, and billed as Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War (with follow-on page here). Paul Berman:

Are these strategic goals so impossible to see? On Sept. 10, 2001, the totalitarian wave in the Muslim world appeared to be at high tide. Many millions of people did think so, at least, and therefore felt inclined to give the various tendencies of the larger movement their support. In quite a few countries, the most gruesome tyrannies were in power, in the name of sundry versions of the totalitarian ideology. There seemed to be no prospect, none whatsoever, of seeing those tyrannies overthrown.

And today? The larger totalitarian movement in the Muslim world has been dealt two very powerful blows. The Taliban no longer rules Afghanistan and has been reduced to a guerrilla insurgency. The Baath in Iraq has likewise been reduced to a guerrilla insurgency. Some 45 million Afghanis and Iraqis, who had previously been confined to the lowest ranks of hell, are now engaged in a very tough fight – a fight in which there is at least a plausible hope of achieving a better society, animated by liberal values in a suitably Muslim version.

On Sept. 10, 2001, liberal-minded people in those two countries had no reason to think that life would ever be better. Today the liberal-minded Afghanis and Iraqis have been given a somewhat shaky boost, but a boost, nonetheless, which can only encourage their fellow-thinkers in other parts of the Muslim world. Strategic goals? These are the strategic goals.

Why don’t people understand these goals and accomplishments? (And, therefore, why don’t they lend their support, which is desperately needed, if only to undo the American blunders that Fred [Kaplan] correctly identifies?) The blame, a lot of it, does fall on Bush, who, in addition to his other errors, has given a very muddy picture of the reasons for war and its goals, sometimes making one argument, sometimes a contradictory argument. Really, the man has a lot to answer for. I don’t see how Powell has helped (though it’s good to have someone with personal charm speak for the country and not leave it to Rumsfeld to give the world the willies).

But some of the blame falls as well on the anti-Bush naifs who pretend not to hear when anyone speaks about the larger reasons and goals – the people who pretend that WMD and non-existent conspiracies were the only reasons for war and pretend that the only serious goals were the arrests of a couple of men, or the achieving of a magical utopia tomorrow, and pretend that if war has still not ended, we have gotten nowhere at all. It’s all too true that better leaders could have made better plans, and the French and the Germans and the United Nations could help even now, if only they would. But it ought not to be so hard to see that, even so, the prospects of the totalitarian movement are looking a lot less healthy today than they did on Sept. 10, 2001 and the prospects of Muslim liberalism are looking up, somewhat.

(Hat tip: SdeW.)

Meanwhile Down Under, Jim Nolan, ‘an old fashioned social democrat… with an interest in Human Rights… [and] a long-standing member of the Australian Labor Party’, takes John Le Carré to task:

[quoting him] “What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America’s need to demonstrate its military power to all of us… poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East.” Curiously, not a word at all about the estimated 200,000 political prisoners held in starvation in the Gulag state of poor mad little North Korea just as the 200,000 Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of forced exiles and other victims of Saddam rated not a syllable.

Jim also says that ‘what passes for much of the political left these days has sheared its mooring from enlightenment values and is increasingly willing itself into political irrelevance’. I think the first proposition here is true of some of the political left, though I wouldn’t care to estimate how much of it. I’m rather less sure of the second proposition.

That’s Manchester, as in:

Manchester England England
Across the Atlantic Sea

Except for me and some hundreds of thousands of others, for whom it’s Manchester right here. And, now, a proposition for you: Manchester, the Barcelona of Britain? Don’t laugh, this is being discussed, and given a serious run for its money, by Richard Morrison in the Times. It is complemented by these Twenty reasons to love Manchester. My own top five (unranked) amongst them:

Cornerhouse Manchester’s venerable, but still deeply meaningful, “alternative” film and exhibition space

Bridgewater Hall Dazzling glass-fronted home of the Hallé and BBC Philharmonic

Royal Northern College Top music conservatoire. Currently mounting enormous string-quartet festival [and site of many a jazz gig: David Murray, Steve Coleman, Andrew Hill, Esbjorn Svensson Trio etc. – Ed.]

Central Library Massive, round and domed, like the BM Reading Room

Theatre of Dreams How could we forget Man Utd’s little place at Old Trafford? [Indeed – Ed.]

I don’t think of Richard Williams as Manchester United’s greatest friend, but this piece gets Nicky Butt, and the feeling for him at Old Trafford, exactly right:

[T]here will be sadness at the impending departure of a man who, while never demonstrative or attention-seeking, played an important role in a glorious era.

(Update at 1.50 PM.) Reader Tony Hutchison writes:

As a Manchester City fan I don’t mind admitting that I have long been envious of the Butt-Scholes-Beckham-Neville brothers youth axis responsible for much of United’s success. Genuinely sad to see another link in the chain broken. Strange, though, as Butt’s game did seem to step up a level during the 2002 World Cup. His performance against Argentina was outstanding with some short and long range passing that belied his reputation as a ‘water carrier’. Kleberson and Djemba-Djemba are still relatively unproven by comparison.

Rumour does have it, however, that Butt has a City tattoo on his upper arm (hence his penchant for long sleeves), being a big Blues supporter as a boy. But maybe we shouldn’t get carried away… [The] mania for conspiracy theories… could be contagious.

Just from reading this, tired is what I get.

No greater joy in this world than to watch a young child that you love grow: to contemplate each new step, rudimentary word, each fresh understanding; that unique combination of the faintly comical and the seemingly miraculous.