Post WWII, Hanah Arendt made a valiant effort to turn moral and political attention to the ways that unexceptional individuals performing actions that, when looked at locally, were unexceptional yet contributed to exceptionally evil systems. Sadly, current attitudes across the professions, literature, the press, and philosophical ethics suggest that her efforts were a failure. And that is, in my view, a bad thing. The overwhelming majority of the violence in the world today is what Galtung has labeled "structural violence" - roughly, the point is that far greater harm is done to people as the result of complex social forces than by individual actors. And in my view it is a scandal of philosophy that this is not a central issue in applied moral and political philosophy. (Of course there are philosophers who address such things. But I doubt that anyone could claim that such work is generally treated as central to philosophy.)
Similar points could be made about the millions of deaths each year from poverty, or the ongoing destruction of our environment, or, indeed, the creeping police state conditions of our socieety.
These are the pressing moral concerns of our time. People dying in the tens of millions from poverty and preventable disease, massive social destruction as a result of policing, and an impending environmental disaster. Since none of these require ill-intent, or projects directly designed to do evil, it simply follows that if we want to address these concerns seriously, we need to think about forms of support other than explicit endorsement that our actions give to these systems.
It is, I think, easy to formulate a couple extreme positions that deserve little intellectual respect. One position would be to say that if one's action could in any possible scenario contribute in any possible way to structural violence, then one should not engage in this action. One can go further: even if one can see that there is some way that one's actions do actually contribute to structural violence, it does not automatically follow that the action is wrong. (I think that virtually any purchase at a mainstream grocery contributes to labor exploitation and environmental degradation. I do not, therefore, conclude that everyone is always doing the wrong thing if they shop at the grocery.)
Pretty much no one endorses this extreme position. But there is another mirror-image of this position that is endorsed. It goes like this:
Most any activity, or product, can contribute to good things and contribute to bad things. It is really hard to figure out what is more likely in that regard. So we should just pursue our research and leave it up to someone else to determine how to use it.
To endorse this argument is precisely to embrace the role of the "Good German". It is to eschew any effort to address our own relation to structural violence. Note also the extraordinary level and convenience of the "epistemic humility" embraced by this point of view. Philosophers who think nothing of diving into such issues as the nature of rationality, the fine structure of semantics, or the way that Quantum Gravity relates to the manifest image throw up their hands at the possibility of having substantive thoughts about the effects of their actions on complex social systems. (Hypothetical philosophers who endorse the argument that is.)
This attitude is no more morally or intellectually defensible than the previous extreme position was. Which is not, of course, to say that the task of understanding complicity in complex structural violence is easy. Sometimes particular cases are clear. Back when I was a grad student, I thought - and still do - that doing computer science research at CMU under the funding of the Strategic Defense Initiative was clearly wrong - work that would be used, if successful, for projects that increased the likelihood of nuclear war. Psychologists participating in CIA studies about keeping torture victims alive? Yep, evil. NSA-funded research on data management today? At least worth very careful scrutiny. One could go on.
Things are a lot harder when work is likely to be used for both good and ill. Or when the applications of work are not yet clear. Or when the work is likely to be done anyway by others.
Yeah, all that makes the problem hard. But do we want to put on ideological blinders of the "just doing my work, I've no responsibility for how it is used by others" sort? (Tom Lehrer once parodied the work of Wernher Von Braun: "Don't say he's hypocritical; say rather apolitical; once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department says Wernher von Braun.")
It seems to me that pleading a priori impossibility of the problem is just exactly to embrace such ideological blinders. Let's not. Let's recognize that the problem of complicity with structural violence is the most important applied moral and political question of our time - because orders of magnitude more harm comes from structural violence than from direct violence traceable to individual actions - and start taking it seriously.
Note on the norm of staying on topic: I did not say anything much in this post about Eric's provocative tone in his previous three emails. (fwiw, I think his first title was a bit much, but that the rest was just normal provocativeness along with what should be completely uncontroversial moral conclusions.) Nor did I say much about Rand and the Cold War. (fwiw, I disagree pretty strongly with Mohan's assessment of each.) And finally, this was not a post at all about the specific responsibilities of formal philosophy.
One can discuss any of those specifics on the relevant threads including the views in the previous paragraph in parens. I'm going to enforce staying on topic in the comments. This is a thread about the importance in general of thinking about professional complicity with structural violence. The argument I'm making is that this needs to be on the philosophical agenda - and not just the philosophical. (I think also that doing it well will require lots of collaboration with social scientists.) Feel free to disagree with that all you like, but nothing here about whether Eric was unfair to Wheeler or whether formal philosophers are picked upon generally.
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