Since at the most base level the use of force is necessary to create laws, bombing is its own legal justification. We're making an international law that says don't use chemical weapons, although the amount of force probably won't be high enough to make it clear how serious an offense it is, meaning that it will probably do not much. Then again it appears slightly better than letting the use of chemical weapons slide.
False dichotomy. It is entirely possible to hold people responsible for war crimes without killing people. A good first step for the United States would be to ratify the 1977 protocols to the Geneva Convention, which explicitly define these actions as crimes against humanity and thus require certain legal responses.
Oh, I didn't mean that killing people was the only way to make laws. Locking them up or taking their stuff away works too. But upholding a law against people who don't want to comply always requires the use of force.
You missed the point. The United States has not ratified the Geneva Protocols. The first step in upholding international law in this case should be ratifying those agreements.
I am in favor of those responsible for these atrocities being tried in court. But if the United States does not believe this law applies to itself, it is hardly the appropriate agent for enforcing it on other countries which have not ratified it, especially since its solution (killing) is as morally problematic as the original crimes.
Okay, so agreed that the US is being hypocritical here. My point was only ever that regardless of morality, the use of force is always legal, and synonymous with establishing law, unless there is a greater force making it illegal. There is nobody that will punish the US for punishing Syria, so therefore the US gets to make the law.
If legality is nothing more than the will of the strong then the concept of "law" is meaningless as nothing can be illegal by definition. It is also senseless to argue that force "establishes" law, since you have already claimed that legality is at all times subject to the whims of the powerful.
Quite seriously, you might want to read The Republic if you haven't yet. Thrasymachus and Socrates have an exchange somewhat along these lines over whether might makes right, and Thrasymachus does not end up the better for it.
I don't really understand. Why can nothing be illegal by definition? The use of force is only illegal if there is somebody stronger stopping me. Can you point to an instance where this is untrue? If there isn't such a person, I'm creating a law. For example, if I spank my children for swearing, I'm making a law against swearing, and if there's no local, state, or federal law prohibiting it, then nobody will initiate force against me. Depending on how a law is made, it may be inconsistent, unjust, totalitarian, etc.
I also don't understand why it is senseless to say that force establishes law. That's what law enforcement officers do, they use force to establish / enforce the law. Of course legality is subject to the whims of the powerful; in a democracy, "whims of the powerful" approximates majority rule.
A "law" is just a rule that is punished when broken. If there is no punishment, it is a guideline or moral.
By definition, if the actions of the powerful determine what is legal, then the acquiescence of the powerful to the status quo defines legality as much as their embrace of force. And that leads you into Panglossian absurdity: there is nothing in the world which is illegal because everything which happens has been implicitly permitted to happen.
You can get around this by saying that sometimes the powerful do not act in their own interest (perhaps they lack foresight to take preemptive action, or misperceive their own interest), but this puts you in the same paradox that Thrasymachus found himself in his debate with Socrates.
The core problem is that you are making a very cynical argument that there is no law or morality which can or should prevent us from killing other people, but then use words like "legal" and "law" to try to disguise the moral bankruptcy of this position. Yet you cannot have it both ways. Either law and morality exist or they do not. And if law does not exist as anything except the interests of the powerful, then you are either trapped in Thrasymachus' paradox, or forced to the conclusion that this is the best of all possible worlds and nothing is by definition ever illegal.
It feels like you're taking what I'm saying and trying to shoehorn it into an old story you know. What you're saying about Socrates doesn't really match what I'm saying, as far as I can tell. I also don't see how my arguments are cynical, morally bankrupt, paradoxical, deceitful, meaningless, senseless, or as you started this whole thing, a false dichotomy. Like, I get that perhaps the character of Thrasymachus was like this, but I'm not that guy.
So, to be clear, I'm not arguing against the goodness of governments, democracy, laws, morals, or keeping people alive. I'm just trying to clarify the facts about how force, law, and morals are related to each other, in practical terms as they apply to all power structures.
> there is nothing in the world which is illegal because everything which happens has been implicitly permitted to happen.
Where did I indicate that I believe this? The illegal things that happen get punished, at least some of the time. In the other direction, if something gets punished at least some of the time, it is an illegal thing. It's a stronger law if it gets punished more often, but punishing only a percentage of offenses is still enforcement in general. If it's a law that is never upheld, it's a law in theory but not in practice. If it's a law in practice but not in theory, something like "don't be impolite to the cops" or "don't make Daddy angry when he's drinking", it's an unwritten rule. Why is this an incorrect perception?
> The core problem is that you are making a very cynical argument that there is no law or morality which can or should prevent us from killing other people
First, morality and law are distinct. Anyone can say we should or shouldn't kill people on the basis of their own morality. Morality is converted into law by the use of force. For example, natural / human rights, which correspond directly to morals, are not guarantees, they are ideals about how we would like things to be. However, they are converted into legal rights by the use of force, or the threat thereof. This provides some semblance of a guarantee about things.
At the international level, there are no hard laws stopping the US from doing a lot of different things, because there is no world police. As such there is only really morality, no guarantees, and so by using force we are effectively making laws out of our own morality, in the same way that a dictator does.
And, I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be prevented from killing people, nor in this thread am I arguing that it's morally okay for the US to attack Syria (it seems slightly better than doing nothing, but it could be a big mess), I'm really just stating the fact that bombing Syria is its own legal justification because there is no higher authority making laws that will stop the US from doing so.
I personally like the idea of one world government to stop this kind of ad hoc lawmaking, but that doesn't stop it from being ad hoc lawmaking. I even agreed with you that it would be better if the US ratified the Geneva Protocols first, but I don't see that's inconsistent with my understanding of what's actually happening here.
Basically, I feel like we are talking at cross purposes.
P.S. I realized after some thinking that maybe the problem is this: I'm claiming might makes legally right, whereas you seem to think I'm claiming might makes morally right, which I'm not.
Maybe you can look at it this way: if you take your original post and re-write it so that it doesn't contain the words "legal" or "moral" or reference any abstract principles other than the interests of the powerful, you'll have the same argument you are making, except it will come across as absurd:
> Since at the most base level the use of force is necessary to [exert force], bombing is its own justification [for using force]. We're making a [use of force] that says [we are using force]....
The words "legal" and "international law" make your argument sound more reasonable, but only because the reader assumes they mean something like a codification of moral or social principles.
My goal is not trying to be argumentative. It's that I'm reflexively pacifist and deeply skeptical of arguments which seek to justify violence, especially when made from a position of relative power or hypocrisy, and in a way which glosses over the moral problems in killing people.
> The words "legal" and "international law" make your argument sound more reasonable, but only because the reader assumes they mean something like a codification of moral or social principles.
I think the assumption that laws actually correspond to widespread morals and social principles is the fundamental problem here. It's not a valid assumption. I think it's actually immoral to believe that because something is lawful it must be good. In other words, if somebody actually does have "legal justification" to kill someone else (no greater authority will stop them), that doesn't necessarily make it a good thing, e.g. in the case of capital punishment in the US, or in the case of using chemical weapons in Syria absent some kind of foreign intervention, or in the case of the US bombing Syria.
Morals are relative, and not everyone will agree with a law. Illegal things can be moral, immoral things can be legal. In the best case everyone's morals contribute to the law, in the worst case it's only the lawmaker's morals that truly matter. None of that changes the fact that for something to be a law there has to be a punishment for breaking the law, and that punishment for doing something makes it into a de facto law. It's unpalatable but there it is.
I'm a pacifist too, for what it's worth; I believe violence is only a good idea when it prevents even greater violence, I believe it's a good thing for power to be concentrated by governments, and I don't like the current state of international relations where rich countries tell poor countries what to do. But, I'm not an anarcho-pacifist.
Fair enough. My complaint was with the statement that bombing is its own legal justification. As above, it is always ethical or moral considerations that "justify" action (make them just). To the extent that law is simply an expression of the interests of the powerful, the argument for use of force becomes absurd.
1. Laws are a system of agreements that a community agrees to. The "law" created by this action will be weakened because it is the outcome of political circumstance, not a defined and objective system.
2. Intervention by the U.S. may backfire by incentivizing dictators to stockpile chemical weapons. One of the major reasons that a boots-on-the-ground invasion is not an option is the presence of these weapons.
Hate to say it, but international "law" has as much actual basis as the scare quotes I give it. Much of it is built more on custom than on ironclad stricture, and the parts that are very strict the U.S. has never bothered to ratify, so claiming that the U.S. must comply with Russia's demands makes as much sense as saying that Minnesota should enforce Saskatchewan's legal code.
The Kosovo bombings in the late 90s were also not sanctioned by the U.N. and yet the world didn't fall apart then (and in fact, can be argued that it was indeed instrumental to bringing peace).
And really, it's hard to argue that there's ever a persuasive strictly legal basis to employ the use of force against nations in a role other than self-defense, which has very interesting corollaries of its own. For example, was the U.K.'s and France's opposition to Germany's war in Poland even legally just? Especially in the U.K.'s case, they almost certainly could have made a separate peace with Hitler but chose to declare a state of war for some other nation entirely. Don't talk about treaty obligations either, they certainly demonstrated they were willing to part ways with that given their treatment of Czechoslovakia.
As for your second point, it's pretty apparent that dictators are already incentivized to stockpile chemical weapons. Dictators have had (and used) chemical weapons for war for decades and if anything, should be more incentivized to use them after seeing the tepid world response to thousands of non-combatant fatalities in Syria.
Hey, this is a tangent, but I have two questions since I like hearing your thoughts on these matters even if I don't always agree. 1) Is it accurate to see international relations today as anarcho-capitalism? 2) What do you think of world federalism?
I'm not quite in tune enough with my inner PoliSci to give a good compare/contrast argument between anarcho-capitalism and international politics, at least not without re-reading the Wikipedia.
However it's an insightful argument. Certainly there are the similarities that in both systems there is no central force-monopolizer that adjudicates disagreements, there is only whoever has the bigger stick in a given area.
Likewise countries can choose their own economic adventure in many ways by choosing which currency to use, what fiscal policies to set, and what major ideological alignment they will fall in with (which has large implications for things like trade). Here though the U.S. has been fairly successful in trying to standardize a lot of the economic interplay amongst the nations (e.g. the Bretton Woods accords), but again other nations could do something different if they wished.
As far as world federalism, I'm assuming you mean some type of world-wide central government that has specific delegated responsibilities and authorities and that would operate "on top" of the existing national governments.
There's a lot to be said for the idea... you'd finally actually have "international law", ways of resolving conflicts amongst nations (since there will be actual "world police" of some sort), etc.
Certainly the normal example in the U.S. is the slightly wiser Federal government sometimes have to lead state and local governments to Do the Right Thing by the nose if necessary (e.g. voting rights for minorities).
But on the other hand such as system tends to accrete power towards the top over time, and you would thus tend to end up with the needs of the many (i.e. China, India) outweighing the needs of the rest, or (more likely) the needs of the already rich (U.S., E.U., etc.) outweighing the needs of the rest of the developing nations.
Either way I can see that going poorly for nations like the Philippines or Malaysia, who could over time be gerrymandered right out of resources that would otherwise contribute to their economies.
I used to be real idealistic about such Star Trek-style world governments but at this point the idea would probably introduce more worries for me than potential benefits.
My guess is that if it were to arise, the path to world government would first see all nations governed by unions like the EU, and then from there a union of unions. But seeing as the EU is really struggling now, we have quite a ways to go.
1. Dictators can make laws without the agreement of a community; enfranchisement is not required for lawmaking. The only thing that establishes a law is the use of force as a punishment for breaking it. There is no other condition, although other things may be involved in the process.
2. I have no real idea whether the outcome of this will be good or bad, it seems like it could go either way. I'm mostly just clarifying that the words law and force go hand in hand; this is neither good nor bad, it just is.
Examples, which have been widely discussed in Syria decision talk, include Libya (2011) and Kosovo (1999). Bosnia (1995) would seem to qualify. 90's Gulf war and subsequent events have some relevance.
I'm not saying I'm unquestionably in favor of bombing Syria. But I am in favor of intellectual honesty and to claim that Syria (2013) would be Iraq/Afghanistan seems outrageous. Jonathan Chait put it best: Syria Isn’t Iraq. Everything Isn’t Iraq.
Yes actually.