Anscombe, Suetonius, Schmitt, and common good Humanitarian Intervention.
After this recent post on Anscombe, Justin Weinberg noted, while generously sharing my post on Twitter and the DailyNous that I interpreted “Anscombe with a charity she did not afford her targets.” I responded cheekily that just is staying on brand in these digressions. More seriously, I hold that our times requires a willingness to bracket polemical disagreement. But about that some other time more. I return to Anscombe today, even though I may be a bit less charitable.
I currently believe that Anscombe’s famous essay, “Modern moral philosophy,” has to be understood in light of her evolving reflections on, and her disagreement with, Oxford University’s awarding then former President Truman’s honorary degree. All the evidence suggests she found herself standing alone against the university’s and her peers’ positions (including then ruling ideas in academic philosophy). This willingness to stand alone against authority inspires admiration and awe not the least because she was a rare woman in a then overwhelmingly male environment.
As I have suggested before, Anscombe also developed her views in “War and Marder” in Nuclear Weapons: A Catholic Response (London, 1961), Walter Stein (ed.),pp. 44-52. This essay is of wider interest because in it Anscombe also develops a distinctly catholic political philosophy that has, in fact, close affinity with conservative thinking of the age.
Today’s post centers on the following passage:
The same authority which puts down internal dissension, which promulgates laws and restrains those who break them if it can, must equally oppose external enemies, These do not merely comprise those who attack the borders of the people ruled by the authority; but also, for example, pirates and desert bandits, and, generally, those beyond the confines of the country ruled whose activities are viciously harmful to it. The Romans, once their rule in Gaul was established, were eminently justified in attacking Britain, where were nurtured the Druids whose pupils infested northern Gaul and whose practices struck the Romans themselves as “dira immanitas”. Further, there being such a thing as the common good of mankind, and visible criminality against it, how can we doubt the excellence of such a proceeding as that violent suppression of the manstealing business which the British government took it into its head to engage in under Palmerston? The present day conception of “aggression”, like so many strongly influential conceptions, is a bad one, Why must it be wrong to strike the first blow in a struggle? The only question is, who is in the right.—p. 47
The idea that the the practices of the Druids are dira immanitas (terrible inhumanity or cruelty) comes out of Suetonius’ account of the emperor Claudius: “Druidarum religionem apud Gallos dirae immanitatis et tantum ciuibus sub Augusto interdictam penitus aboleuit;” (Divus Claudius 25.5)* Presumably, this is a reference to human sacrifice by the Druids.
In fact, Anscombe articulates (at least) two grounds why the Romans were “eminently justified” to attack Britain: first, to secure their external border from foreign meddling (the infesting of northern Gaul by a foreign power). Second, as a kind of humanitarian intervention in the service of “the common good of mankind.” These are quite distinct justifications, but they also converge. (I return to that below.)
It’s the second one that primarily interests me here. That Anscombe is committed to a view like this was already visible in her earlier “Mr. Truman’s Degree,” where she wrote that “the state actually has the authority to order deliberate killing in order to protect its people or to put frightful injustices right. (For example, the plight of the Jews under Hitler would have been a reasonable cause of war.)” (p. 68)
Anscombe’s views on humanitarian intervention fit the post WWII evolving zeitgeist. But it is worth noting that Anscombe’s articulation echo two distinct strands of thought. First, (recall) it echoes Sepúlveda’s argument in his celebrated debate with Las Casas. For present purposes this had two key features: (i) that the violent extension of civilization, conquest, is to be pursued because it ultimately benefits the backward and savage. And, especially, (ii) that immoral and wicked practices (like human sacrifice) may invite humanitarian intervention. Second, (recall) it echoes Hume’s praise for Edward I’s policy of the annexation of Wales (and the accompanying cultural destruction of barbarous practices) in the service of the expansion of civilization in the History of England.
That is, Anscombe’s defense of humanitarian intervention echoes standard arguments that justify imperial expansion within an older catholic social theory and realist thinking. And while one may fairly doubt whether Sepúlveda’s argument was offered entirely in good faith (although he may well have been sincere about his views on the practices of American indigenous peoples), such doubt would also have to extend to the Roman invasion of Britain.
I don’t mean to be perverse by introducing Carl Schmitt (who lacks many of Anscombe’s admirable qualities), but he offers a useful contrast here because he is also engaged in a kind of catholic social theory. And since he is being revived by common good integralists, it may serve as useful comparison.
As can be gleaned from the first sentence of the passage I quoted above, Anscombe herself defends political authority in what Schmitt can recognize as distinctly political terms: (sovereign) authority is designed to defeat internal and external enemies. In fact, Anscombe’s argument for the necessity of political authority is one any (secular) realist could endorse: “the world is less of a jungle because of rulers and laws, and that the exercise of coercive power is essential to these institutions.”
In a footnote to the “Concept of the Political,” Schmitt confronts a case of the sort that we have been considering in Anscombe:
Pufendorf (De jure naturae et gentium, VIII, 6, #5) quotes approvingly Bacon's comment that specific peoples are "proscribed by nature itself," e.g., the Indians, because they eat human flesh. And in fact the Indians of North America were then exterminated. As civilization progresses and morality rises, even less harmless things than devouring human flesh could perhaps qualify as deserving to be outlawed in such a manner. Maybe one day it will be enough if a people were unable to pay its debts.
Schmitt takes this as a reductio of humanitarian and liberal thought, and rejects it because it risks turning all humanitarian war into wars of extermination.
To be sure, Schmitt’s position in “The Concept of the Political” may well be compatible with the idea that one is permitted to attack “pirates and desert bandits, and, generally, those beyond the confines of the country ruled whose activities are viciously harmful to it.” But it is incompatible with humanitarian/civilizational imperialism of the sort that Anscombe explicitly defends in her own voice.
While Westphalian non-interventionism is not an especially attractive policy, the example of Sepúlveda suggests that common good humanitarianism/imperialism also has serious problems. (A friend of the Westphalian order may well argue that the means to pursue the common good are best served by non-interventionist stance.) Anscombe herself sidesteps the challenge by asserting that “the only question is, who is in the right.”
Famously, as Hobson showed in Imperialism: A Study, powerful interests within imperial states do not find it difficult to manufacture concern over infestation of the imperial borders in far away land. (This is how Hobson partially explains how the country of noble Palmerston also became a global landgrabber.) If all that matters is who is in the right, then any concerns one may have about the prudential effects of and epistemological challenges to her position during war-time or under an imperial, expansive regime must be left aside; even if rectifying “dira immanitas” in the name of the common good also may make the world more of a jungle.
* This is is in the same paragraph in which we are told that Claudius banishes the Jews from Rome in the name of public order.