Facing Others As Subjects (and failing to do so)

Anscombe:

I have long been puzzled by the common cant about President Truman’s courage in making this decision [to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki]. Of course, I know that you can be cowardly without having reason to think you are in danger. But how can you be courageous? Light has come to me lately: the term is an acknowledgement of the truth. Mr. Truman was brave because, and only because, what he did was so bad. But I think the judgement unsound. Given the right circumstances (e.g. that no one whose opinion matters will disapprove), a quite mediocre person can do spectacularly wicked things without thereby becoming impressive. ("Mr. Truman's Degree," 1956)

Nagel:

...let me try to connect absolutist limitations with the possibility of justifying to the victim what is being done to him. If one abandons a person in the course of rescuing several others from a fire or a sinking ship, one could say to him, "You understand, I have to leave you to save the others." Similarly, if one subjects an unwilling child to a painful surgical procedure, one can say to him, "If you could understand, you would realize that I am doing this to help you." One could even say, as one bayonets an enemy soldier, "It's either you or me." But one cannot really say while torturing a prisoner, "You understand, I have to pull out your fingernails because it is absolutely essential that we have the names of your confederates"; nor can one say to the victims of Hiroshima, "You understand, we have to incinerate you to provide the Japanese government with an incentive to surrender." ("War and Massacre," 1972: 137)

And why could one not? I'm nearing completion of a full version of my thoughts on "moral courage," and the short of it is that where one shows moral courage by facing others in a moral struggle, one must face them as particular moral subjects. If I objectify those against whom I struggle, then they are no longer moral agents--and more importantly, particular persons--in my eyes. And so the idea that I might be engaged in a moral struggle against them no longer makes sense. We don't take moral stands against mere objects, or monsters. And where our justifications objectify the other, they could only accept our so-called justifications by objectifying themselves (that is, by seeing their own individuality as not mattering from the moral perspective).

This is not to say that dragon-slaying is not courageous. But that is what we might call physical courage. By moral courage I mean the courage of the person who takes a moral stand in the face of other moral subjects (or agents). What I am trying to track with this restricted, and somewhat technical construal of moral courage is that it can be hard to face others as moral subjects, because it is tempting and all-too-easy to demonize and objectify those who threaten our our sense of what is right and good. And with that comes both a risk of recklessness, in the form of easy justifications of violence against the objectified other, and of cowardice, in the form of a failure to fully face those particular others who, because they are scary, foreign, or threatening, we cover up with abstractions. When we objectify those we oppose, we flee from their particularity as individual subjects. It is often hard not to do this.

Sneaking Around

I've been trying to write a little bit about courage. (Some initial thoughts here and here.) It's a messy topic. The puzzle of the moment has to do with the relationship between fear, danger (and risk), and action. In particular, it would seem that a courageous act is one knowingly performed in the face of some risk or danger to oneself. Often, this involves confronting the source of the risk or danger (and thus, the possible cause of fear), as in the case of confronting a bully.

Suppose instead that I tie the bully's shoelaces together while he's napping, and then he gets his comeuppance later on when I'm not around (or am watching in the bushes). This doesn't strike me as a courageous act. It's certainly not as courageous as directly confronting the bully (assuming I could at least make my point, with fists or words, before he pummels me). But on the other hand, the sneaky act does involve some risk and danger. The bully could wake up. I could get caught.

There are plenty of other cases where the element of sneakiness might seem to problematize attributions of courage. Terrorist acts, for example. Or, by contrast, the killing of bin Laden. Now, in both those cases, there is no doubt a great deal of risk to the operatives (and in the case of suicide bombing, one knows in advance that one is making the ultimate self-sacrifice). A recent point made by Jean Kazez about how we should feel about the bin Laden deal--that we are happy about things only under some particular description or other--might be relevant here, too. Participating in the raid on the compound where bin Laden was hiding might have required some courage, but the actual killing of him might not have been. (I'm not thinking here about whether killing him was the right, or best, thing to do, just where to locate the courage of the Navy Seals, if anywhere.)

The bully and bin Laden cases share, I think, at least that the object of one's action was a direct and specific adversary. Terrorism cases lack that feature, insofar as the targets are non-specific. They are also themselves not a direct threat to the agent who acts (if we think of terror bombings on civilian populations). But all three share the element of sneakiness (and, if you want, guile and opportunism). And being sneaky means that you are, as it were, going behind your adversary's back, not giving that person (or group) a fighting chance. Of course, I don't think bin Laden was owed a fighting chance. (Whether he should have been killed is not a question I'm prepared to address.) I also don't think a terror bombing would be more courageous if the civilians were warned ahead of time (however that might work).

Somewhere in his (good) book on courage William Ian Miller talks about the style of courage, and perhaps my gut feeling here is that sneaky acts lack the right kind of style. Even if they involve taking great risks, they don't involve the kind of direct confrontation with the other, as a subject, that an old-fashioned fight involves. And in the case of terrorism, the object(s) of one's would-be brave act usually aren't themselves the source of one's fear (which would be the fear of being caught, or of dying, etc., though they might be very abstractly linked to some larger fear, say, of an "evil empire" of which they are anonymous citizens).

What I'm trying to work out is how to express the dependency of courage--particularly, courageous acts--on the nature of the object (or recipient) of one's acts and of what one does to that object. Some of this is obvious: kicking a person who is already down is not courageous (even if one had fought courageously up to that point). Similarly, then, killing innocent people is not courageous, even if the preparations required what Aristotle would have called a semblance of courage. Then: storming the compound where bin Laden hid took courage, but killing him was not itself courageous. (I.e. that is not what makes what the Navy Seals did courageous, if it was courageous.)

Of course, we could just say in some cases, "What they did took courage, but it was also horrible," and I sort of get that. An act may be other things in addition to courageous. But there are certain things that one might be able to do by sneaking around which, even if risky, seem too underhanded to count as courageous. (Again, in the bin Laden case, I would just say that the issue of courage is mostly irrelevant to the particular description--the killing of bin Laden--that is of most interest to most people.)

Courage & Terrorism

In "Courage In Dark Places: Reflections on Terrorist Psychology," Andrew Silke suggests that terrorists can display courage. The background for this claim is what Silke describes as the tendency to see members of terrorist groups as brainwashed fanatics--crazy people--who have no feelings and so on. Almost everything Silke says against this kind of common caricature seems fine. But the discussion of courage leaves a great deal to be desired. First, Silke offers no clear account of what a virtue is besides a "feature." Silke's definition of courage specifically is pretty thin:

1. the individual perceives risk and danger in a given situation or behavior;
2. the individual experiences fear and anxiety in relation to this perceived risk; and,
3. the individual nevertheless enters the situation or proceeds with the behavior (p. 184)

Now, I've been teaching and thinking about Aristotle, and so my first problem with this definition of courage is that it doesn't say anything about "false" forms of courage--viz. rashness. Without that, as Silke acknowledges, the claim that terrorists can exhibit courage is unremarkable, since all that needs to be shown is that they satisfy the three conditions above--which he shows is often the case.

But from here, Silke questions "whether courage warrants consideration as a virtue in and of itself" (p. 195). The answer seems obvious: not if that's how you characterize courage. Or perhaps: it has no moral value in the absence of other virtues. (To be fair, this question has been discussed by some philosophers, too, but I'm not yet in a position to discuss that.) This is where the failure to consider what a virtue is reveals the relative shallowness of Silke's discussion of courage. Is courage a one-off deal? How stable must the disposition to act in the face of fears be?

I think it is a legitimate question whether we could/should withdraw ascriptions of courage because the person is acting upon a mistaken/misguided judgment or commitment. How far can one deviate in good judgment before this makes the ascription of courage problematic (and not just uncomfortable)? I'm just starting to think about this, so input will be quite appreciated.

One other thing that bugs me about Silke is the extent to which he emphasizes how "normal" terrorists are psychologically. This leads him to say: "it remains true that our enemies are capable of all the qualities of humans. They can be cruel or gentle, malicious or considerate, selfish or generous, stupid or intelligent. They can also be courageous or cowardly" (p. 195). On a few of these, I want to ask: to whom? Bat-Ami Bar On makes a powerful case, in "Why Terrorism Is Morally Problematic," that because terrorism involves terrorizing (often innocent) people, it is an inherently cruel practice. If she's right, then qua terrorists (or freedom fighters, if you prefer), terrorists cannot be "cruel or gentle."

My sense is that a lot more work needs to be done on (3) above. Or at least, an Aristotelian approach would have to say more than "nevertheless." The point above about cruelty raises a question about whether it makes sense to say that a person who employs inherently immoral means can be said to have acted with, or exhibited, courage. Recall that in Aristotle's thought, the first requirement of virtuous action is that you have to know what you're doing. And if it's true that what terrorists do is cruel, and if they are unable to see (or acknowledge) that--which some of what Silke discusses would seem to confirm (since there's a lot of abstraction away from the humanity of the targets)--then this might be a clue to why it seems problematic to attribute courage to them.