Against Clarity, again (with some Stebbing and Diplomatic practice)

Susan Stebbing’s Thinking to Some Purpose (1939) appeared in the Pelican imprint. The official topic of the book is announced in the prologue:

I am convinced of the urgent need for a democratic people to think clearly without the distortions due to unconscious bias and unrecognized ignorance. Our failures in thinking are in part due to faults which we could to some extent overcome were we to see clearly how these faults arise. It is the aim of this book to make a small effort in this direction.--Preface to the 1939 edition, pp. xxix-xxx [All my quotes/page-numbers are from the 2022 Routledge reprint with an introduction by Peter West and a foreword by Nigel Warburton.]

This commitment to clairity in what I will call ‘public thinking’ without such distortions runs through Stebbing’s book. Stebbing takes for “granted that to be clear-headed is worth while for its own sake.” As she goes on to write,

Without this assumption I should not have wanted to write this book. It is, however, enough if you will admit that muddled thinking ends in bungled doing, so that to think clearly is useful for the sake of achieving even our most practical aims. Unless you admit at least as much as this, there will be no point, so far as you are concerned, in what I have to say. Our points of view would be too different for discussion to be possible. (p. 34)

Now, in an existing paper on Stebbing’s views on clarity (see here) I noted that there are political persuasions that may well deny that clarity in ‘public thinking’ is always necessary to achieve our most practical aims. Think of (conservative leaning) ones that treat inherited tradition as a guide to life.

I suspect that among analytic philosophers it is an article of faith that more clarity is always better than less clarity. While the argument for this stance is (recall) often consequentialist, the underlying motive is ultimately aesthetic. And we find it hard to engage with projects that rejects this foundational dogma (recall my posts here, here, and here). Some of the most important philosophical projects (think of regimentation, decoding dog-whistles, etc.) are projects of unclarity removal.

But it is worth asking whether there are practical and politically salient contexts where constructive ambiguity and equivocation are to be preferred over clear public thinking? Last night, during dinner, the distinguished philosopher Margaret Gilbert did just that when I mentioned my interest in disagreeing with Stebbing’s faith. So, today’s digression begins to develop my thoughts on this.

If one is a consequentialist cases that undermine or at least make defeasible the commitment to public clarity must involve episodes where the gains from equivocation far outweigh any commitment to clear public thinking. So, let’s say these must be circumstances where many lives can be saved durably, that is, (for example) peace or armistice treaties. Unsurprisingly, then, ambiguity can perform “an important diplomatic function. International agreements, especially peace agreements, are one obvious case in point.” Dražen Pehar (2005) “Diplomatic ambiguity” Polemos 8, (p. 157. See also, “Ambiguous provisions of the peace agreements, those par excellence instances of diplomatic ambiguity, usually cover highly contested fields.” p. 177).

Pehar goes on to give an account of the mechanism involved:

By making an important treaty provision ambiguous, a treaty-maker hopes that she can temporarily meet the conflicting demands of the parties to the treaty. One party will focus on ambiguity’s possible meaning A, whilst the other will focus on possible meaning B. Both parties will, at least provisionally, hope that the ambiguous provision carries enough substance to satisfy their demands. (p. 157)

Notice what’s crucial here is that Parties A and B are not fooled by the ambiguity. They know that the mediator/treaty-maker has different aims than they do, and, if they are experienced diplomats, they also know that such constructive ambiguity in treaty-making has a long history. They expect to gain something from such ambiguity. What they gain directly is “hope,” but presumably a hope grounded in realistic perception of their circumstances.

Pehar himself reminds his audience of a celebrated contemporary case of diplomatic ambiguity, namely security council resolution 242, which was intended to put an end to fighting in the 1967 armed conflict between Israel and its neighbors. I mention this instance of diplomatic ambiguity (of ongoing relevance obviously) because the source of ambiguity here is, as Pehar notes, not the use of obscure language or equivocal terminology, but rather (i) the resolution’s “brevity” which left a number of steps and their order simply unstated and its implied reliance on (ii) the “application of a number of principles that seemed to be difficult to reconcile.” (p. 157) Here is a copy of the resolution. I myself would add that demand for (iii) a ‘just’ peace and 'a just settlement of the refugee problem’ are potential source(s) of further ambiguity in the wording of resolution 242, but that’s not Pehar’s focus.

Of course, there will be cases of diplomatic ambiguity where one sides takes advantage of another’s ignorance. Pehar reports how in (1716) The Art of Diplomacy, “De Callieres, the 18th century author of the first influential treatise on negotiations, pictures diplomatic ambiguity: “it is from this ignorance of one of the contracting parties, and the dexterity of the other, that the difficulties arise between Sovereigns, touching the explanation of the conditions of their treaties; which occasions fresh disputes, and serves as a pretext for a rupture, to him who has a mind to begin the war again, by giving a favourable interpretation for his own advantage, to the terms and expressions which are obscure, ambiguous, or equivocal in some of the articles of their treaties.”” (p. 157) In such cases, diplomatic ambiguity may be a source of manipulation or even exploitation by a stronger or more informed side than the other. And, in fact, Pehar treats Kissinger and Edward Said as agreeing on the risks of this practice. As Pehar notes in a world of unequal power relations ambiguity is also often a possible source of advantage to one side. Pehar has a battery of arguments that suggests that when there is diplomatic ambiguity it serves all parties (perceived) interests.

But despite the existence of such power imbalances shaping ambiguity, I am friendly to Pehar’s case that constructive ambiguity is an important part of the diplomat’s toolkit, and that even if one has a power-centric focus of political life, in diplomacy, it “also depends on the readiness of the exploited to think of ambiguity in the power-centric terms.” (p. 168) So, while there may be cases of diplomatic ambiguity where one side is inferior in linguistic and legal skill (for example when they are too poor to have access to certain technical knowhow [this occurs in bits of maritime law today]), in general all sides understand what they are negotiating about and what the foreseeable effects of their draft texts imply.

An important example in Pehar’s treatment (that is favorable to the side he argues against) occurred when I was young, the so-called Rambouillet (1998) draft agreement. Pehar quotes one of the negotiators as follows:

Kosovo was to de facto become a temporary protectorate. As to the institutional part of the agreement, provisions of the agreement were deliberately formulated in an ambiguous fashion to ensure a wide space (Spielraum) for interpretation:

Pehar goes on to describe how quite a few elements of the negotiations were about the scope and kind of ambiguity!

At this point a consequentialist defender of clarity in public thinking may well interject that such ambiguity is also a possible source of downstream conflict. After all, Rambouillet actually produced conflict, and arguably was designed to produce military intervention. (Pehar 2005, p. 166) And, indeed, if there are no mechanisms of what we philosophers like to call ‘precisification’ or institutional ways of holding the ambiguity-originating-conflicts at bay, then the worry may well be apt. But treaty-makers and experienced diplomats know this, and often inscribe such conflict-management procedures in the treaty language: binding tribunals and mediators are often part of the treaty (say at WTO).

Within the EU, it is by now a familiar practice that years after a treaty has been finalized at some ungodly hour after a marathon session of negotiation by government leaders, a European court process (with mechanism of appeal) will make precise the exact meaning of terms governing the behavior of citizens, corporations, and governments. In such cases the expected gain from allowing an ambiguous treaty to commence far outweigh the costs of temporary ambiguity.

Interestingly enough, Pehar also claims the role of ambiguity has not been theorized systematically (before his own dissertation), “the theorists and theories referred to in this section are simply reporting on a particular diplomatic practice. The fact that ‘practice’ often gives an impression of a tangible phenomenon known to everybody probably explains why they did not put more effort into further developing their comments and opinions about diplomatic ambiguity.” (p. 158)

Let me wrap up. In diplomatic affairs, ambiguity “can enable major issues to remain unresolved over long periods” but, thereby, prevent war and outright hostility. (I have just quoted the abstract to Hu, B., & Pym, A. (2019). Constructive ambiguity and risk management in bilingual foreign-affairs texts. The case of “One China.”) These are cases that challenge us to take seriously the limits of clear public thinking.

I have focused on diplomacy because in a consequentialist framework the stakes will be high and the gains from deploying ambiguity (countless lives saved) fairly straightforward in many cases. These are normatively salient examples.

But as my example of the EU suggests, there are also cases of ambiguity within a federal structure, where the gains of diplomatic ambiguity are less existential. In such cases an unclear decision is preferred over a fully clarified one. There are, after all, costs to delay, and even though precisification is costly and often quite slow, the gains from an ambiguous treaty seem to be preferred regularly in multi-party negotiations where the agents involved have at least some trust if not in each other than at least in the fact that they will be negotiating again before long. And as my repeated use of ‘federal’ hints at, what’s true of the EU is also true of federal countries, and ordinary domestic legislation in most countries. And while it would be a mistake to treat such cases as morally desirable, they do represent ubiquitous practices that are not generally seen as morally dubious.

Nothing I have said undermines commitment to clear public thinking as such. But I hope it’s clear that at times it is worth constraining it a bit.