Today’s shameful news that a Pakistani couple have killed their daughter by beating her and then burning 60% of her body with acid for daring to look at a boy presents me with a dilemma.
I don’t believe that there is a moral order written objectively into the universe, whether by a deity or by any other source. I believe morality is constructed by humans to make life more peaceful, productive and pleasant for all of us (though should be no less forceful for that). Morals are a product of cultural evolution, meaning that they are relative, and that moral norms which serve the West do so because of cultural quirks that other societies may not share.
It’s a little tricky, therefore, for me to condemn an honour killing when the parents in question have justified it with reference to their own moral code.
But I’m certainly going to try. Rather than consider why the act of murdering one’s own child so cruelly for such an innocent act is itself wrong – because it should be clear – I argue for a minimum threshold of moral conduct. Behaviour above this threshold can be entirely morally relative, and no culture has a right to impose its values on another. However, any behaviour beneath this threshold must be universally condemned by all cultures that claim the responsibilities accompanying the adjective “civilised”. To my mind, killing your own daughter by pouring acid over her for looking at a boy is undoubtedly beneath this threshold, and any human being who attempts to defend such behaviour is simply wrong.
This is an us-or-them issue, as is all other below-the-threshold behaviour: either you condemn such actions or you are an apologist for them. The appropriate treatment for all such apologists is universal condemnation and scorn. They are to be forcibly removed from authority where possible and where the risk of preventable human suffering caused by their crooked beliefs is sufficient. They are not to be trusted with power over others, and maybe not even with other rights such as free speech, until their own morals have ascended above the minimum threshold.
Strong stuff, and I don’t say it lightly. I am myself made a little uncomfortable by the implications of this view; affirming that certain values are simply better than others creates all sorts of problems. Obviously, once one allows the precedent, one entitles dictators the world over to claim similar justification for imposing their own will on that of their citizens, and one raises the awkward question of how to guarantee the enlightenment of the authority that’s pushing their moral views. One of my favourite philosophers, John Stuart Mill, acknowledged this problem in criticising the governmental system of benevolent dictatorship, alongside the (far more damaging) problem that any dictator, even an enlightened one, harms the people by removing from them any sense of control over the future of their country. Perhaps, if the “enlightened” West were to push its morality on a community, it might create an analogous problem in removing their sense of moral self-determination? Then we have to consider the horrible mess caused by the invasion of Iraq, which was seen by many as a failure of US/UK liberal interventionism in foreign policy.
To consider the problem of moral self-determination: there is plenty of space for it – for a community or individual to grapple with endless moral dilemmas and thus arrive independently at a unique position – above the minimum threshold. Were the West to impose its values on communities that tolerate such barbaric practices as honour killings, it would not represent the imposition of a dictatorial moral code, as it’s intrinsic to Western values to permit a broad scope of freedom in moral debate (in a way that is not permitted currently in many such communities). The West would not be dictators, but liberators.
This is of course dangerous language and very much the way in which the invasion of Iraq was justified. On Iraq though, it’s my position in debates with friends that the West did the right thing, but badly, and for the wrong reasons. Whether or not you believe it was all done for oil, or to carve up the region’s wealth for Western multinationals, or Tony Blair’s inflated “evidence” that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction against Europe within 45 minutes, no one I know has denied that Saddam was a monster who did terrible things to his own people, and on a grand scale. That alone should have been enough to warrant his removal, as it was with the more successful interventions against Slobodan Milosevic, so the debate about the other reasons for invasion is superfluous. The failures in execution over Iraq made by the West are legion, beyond the scope of this post, and not denied by me. But for all those who oppose Western intervention in removing murderous dictators due to the example of Iraq, I would ask: given the ideal scenario, with an invasion and its aftermath better planned, suffering minimised, and a stable Iraqi democracy quickly established (assuming such a thing were possible, which is debatable), would you still argue the Iraqi people were better served by Saddam?
As a relativist in most senses I acknowledge and indeed celebrate the fact that life is complicated and contains shades of grey – especially on moral matters. I’ll debate with you at length your position on abortion or euthanasia. I wish the level of debate in the current US presidential election was a more nuanced and elevated one. But for humanity to rise above the nasty, brutish and short life of the state of nature, we have to recognise that certain behaviour simply lacks justification and must be universally shunned. This is the minimum threshold of which I speak, and unless one thinks modern Western society is morally indistinguishable from that of the Stone Age, one could argue that the history of its gradually being raised is the history of moral evolution. Theft, rape, child labour, slavery, the oppression of women by disenfranchisement among other means – these are examples of behaviour that is now (mostly) seen as below the threshold, where once it wasn’t. This is progress. Killing your daughter with acid because she casts her eyes in a direction you don’t like must join such behaviour in this state of condemnation. Beneath the shades of grey is a layer of black.
Finally, I’d like to add that I don’t direct these remarks against any particular government, as the authorities in Pakistani-governed Kashmir have made acid attacks a criminal offence punishable by life imprisonment, and indeed the offending couple are in prison pending trial now. Rather, this article opposes codified systems of belief whose foundations lie in the murk beneath the minimum threshold of what the rest of the world must now affirm to be acceptable moral conduct. Such belief systems continue to have a grip in people’s minds and persist in many areas of the world unopposed.
I feel a little stronger opposition would be a good thing.
Image: BBC
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It’s true that cultural relativism is a dangerous thing. However, it is logistically (and morally) unavoidable. The West simply does not possess the capability of liberating/dictating/invading all areas of the world where practices such as these occur. And even if we did, we would not possess any sort of moral high ground due to the long-term consequences.
Were the West to continue to forcibly impose its will upon other nations, we would bring disaster on the world. It would send a message to nations that could actually oppose us that we are belligerant, violent, and crusading. Right now, China and Russia are actively blocking Western intervention into Syria because they already fear exactly this. The Il dynasty of North Korea has brough immense suffering to the North Korean people (which would most likely fall below your moralistic threshold), but we cannot directly interfere without prompting a war with China. Such a war has a high chance of ending with a nuclear exchange. Were that to happen, WWIII would have resulted from the actions of the West and thus remove any sort of moral superiority.
I believe it is wrong and irresponsible to claim any sort of moralistic high ground when another, disparate culture affects its authority. In this particular case, as you pointed out, the people involved are facing legal punishment from their own society. Western grandstanding is inappropriate and unhelpful. Besides, it is more than a little arrogant to assume that our civilization (America specifically) is “better” when we execute our own citizens, allow for massive minimally assisted poverty, and do not freely provide for our people’s basic health needs.
Thanks for the reply. I’d agree with pretty much all of what you say – I intended this post as less a guide for real-world action and more a justification of a position. There’s no doubt that pragmatic concerns keep the West from pushing dictators out around the world and that there’s plenty that all Western nations could do to fix their own houses – in addition to the examples you name, we could talk about extraordinary rendition, demarcated free speech zones, Guantanamo, the PATRIOT act, etc etc.
Maybe that’s a subject for another post. It’s more my contention that this minimum threshold exists and that it’s possible to accommodate relativism above it while universally condemning behaviour below it, which might seem an odd view to take. I really sought to defend that view, rather than advocate policy based on it (beyond the scope of a blog and probably beyond me) or suggest that the West always lives up to its own values (it doesn’t).