On The Unidentifiability of Priests

Just to put Dworkin finally to bed - I really do find it quite baffling that anyone with any philosophical training at all can take any of his arguments for his theory remotely seriously: confusing, for example, a dispute about canons of interpretation of some text with a dispute about what the text is, as he does when he says in a 2004 article that disputes over the meaning of the clause in the US constitution forbidding cruel and unusual punishment show that legal positivism is false, is just stupid - let's observe what his general account of how to define social practices would involve. Dworkin's interpretative and so normatively guided theory of law depends on the view that since law is a normative practice, it cannot be defined or picked out except by interpreting it so as to put it in its best possible light. Science is also a normative practice - it seeks truth - so does that mean that we cannot define or pick out instances of science without making them seem as close to truth as possible? Is it true that unless I assume that Newton was as right as he could be, I would somehow fail to satisfactorily identify him as a scientist and the Principia as a work of science? Of course not. It's crazy to think that as soon as some practice is normative in any way, any definition of it must be structured around an assumed success in its attempt to guide itself by some value or other. If adopted as a general canon of attempts to say what some x is, this would totally undermine our use of all kinds of perfectly sensible descriptive terms. Either we would have to claim that people were guiding their participation in practices by some value which they did not recognise or had misconstrued, or we would have to claim that despite appearances, the practice in question did not exist there and then. We might imagine a Dworkinian theory of government denying that any had ever taken place anywhere before the Warren-era Supreme Court decisions, as governing just is a highly particular kind of equality - or, in a way even worse, claiming that every tinpot despot, bloody tyrant, racist, and genocidal maniac was in fact aiming at the distinctive goods of the practice of governing. How on earth anyone could think that this stood as a way of respecting the internal character of a practice, I do not know; it is subversive of the very idea of a practice by turning that into a claim about pursuit of goals when of course participation in any given practice is differently motivated for different people in different times and different places. Idiocy.

On Fetishes

I think it is safe to say that I am generally of a fairly Kantian bent; I'm all for all that secularized puritanism - what's so bloody great about happiness anyway? So you'd have thought that I'd quite like Arthur Ripstein's Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy. I don't, and I think Ripstein may be a bit mad. Ripstein's reconstruction of Kant's view starts with an exploration of Kant's idea of innate right. I don't know whether Ripstein is right about the interpretation of the relevant bits of Kant, since I don't know the relevant bits of Kant, but what he says seems to me wrong, at least as claims about the coercively enforceable rights we have over our bodies. Ripstein's claim I think is that because we are entitled not to be subject to anyone else, we are entitled to set our own purposes, and that because we are entitled to set our own purposes, we are entitled to exclude others from any control over our own bodies. If others controlled our bodies at all, they would be setting our purposes by eliminating certain ways in which we could act and so making us unable to pursue certain ends.

Now, this, independently of anything else Ripstein says seems to me implausible. I do not lose my ability to act if you can choose whether to make my left ear twitch at five minutes intervals. I simply do not need full control rights over my body in order to be able to act as I please; some instances of control by others over my body are simply irrelevant to my ability to act, because there are many things my body does or can do which have no impact on my use of it to pursue any given project. If my left ear involuntarily twitches at five minutes intervals, this does not impact on my ability to act as I please and so it can hardly impact on it if you can choose whether it twitches or not. You may be using me as a means, but I can still set my own ends.

When added to other things that Ripstein says, it seems even more crazy. Ripstein apparently thinks that no-one else having control over your body is not only necessary but sufficient for you to be setting your own ends. If he did not, then he would not be able to restrict innate rights to rights against having your body controlled by others; indeed, he would have to admit some rights of others to control your body by requiring you to do provide others with control over objects other than their bodies necessary for them to act. Not only does Ripstein want to say that if I can make you twitch one ear, you are under my control, but also that I can set my own ends even if I am so crippingly hungry all I can think of is food. The distinction Ripstein draws between our capacity to act and the world in which we act in order to sustain this sort of claim clearly does exist - that I cannot achieve an end I set myself does not mean that I cannot set it - but it is either it is not as sharp as he imagines or not in the place he imagines. He says, for example, that although "[p]urposive beings that were unable to manipulate or modify physical objects could not have property in them, because those objects would not be available to them as means", such beings "would still have a right to their own person". What kind of right could this be? How could I have a right to a physical body that could not manipulate or modify physical objects? What could possibly explain or justify such a right?

With God On Our Side

In 1997, in the aftermath of that year's Education White Paper, an Advisory Group on citizenship education was set up. In its report, published the next year, it approvingly quotes from a submission by the Hansard Society.

Programmes should be established to promote political discourse and understanding, as well as encouraging young people to engage in the political process. Further, they should encourage tolerance and respect for individuals and their property, irrespective of a person’s gender, race, culture or religion. They must also encourage young people to behave honourably and with integrity, as well as promote respect for the rule of law. Young people must be encouraged to develop leadership and team skills in order to promote self-discipline and self-motivation. They should be encouraged to take pride in themselves and the communities to which they belong, as well as to see themselves as citizens of the world.

Other than the last clause of the last sentence, which invokes a non-existent polity to imagine oneself a member of, after the first sentence I fail to see what any of this has to do with citizenship in particular at all. Citizenship is presumably to do with it is to be a citizen. What it is to be a citizen is presumably something to do with your relationship to political authority; in particular, to be a citizen is to have certain political foundational rights, including the right to have rights. Whether political power can rightly be exercised over me without any formal mechanism for me to hold it to account seems to me to have pretty much f*ck-all to do with whether I am capable of motivating myself or not. You don't get to be a citizen because you're a paragon of moral virtue; you get to be a citizen because your life is profoundly shaped by the political institutions you live under and so you have a right to hold it to account in certain ways.

Using the idea of citizenship as a convenient banner under which to gather everything that you might think would be desirable isn't just evidence of an inability to make fairly elementary distinctions, but also I think rather politically dangerous. For one thing, it disguises trade-offs. In a community which isn't tolerant of people irrespective of their gender, race, culture or religion, presumably it's quite difficult to be both tolerant in that way and proud of one's community. Which of the two goes? What if political participation requires me to make compromises damaging to my sense of self? Where's my integrity then? A policy programme which has ruled out, a priori as it were, the possibility of conflicts amongst its various ends by seeing them all as part of the same idea is going to fail because it cannot understand that sometimes it has to make choices between them. Either no choice gets taken at all and so resources are wasted pursuing competing ends, or, rather than publicly laying out their grounds for choosing some ends over others, officials choose on their own private and probably confused grounds, and political power is made a little less accountable - which is rather ironic in a programme designed to promote citizenship.

That's not all either. There are at least two other things wrong with this kind of project, centred around a notion of citizenship which fails to see that it is but one, rather specific, political relationship. First, it puts the onus for dealing with any structural political failings a system has on the average citizen, rather than on the political actors who are both familiar with and presumably benefitting from the failing system. If politicians are worried about the way in which the population at large seems ill-informed about and contemptuous of them, they might think about what they've done wrong rather than what the population at large has. Second, hand-waving in the general direction of citizenship seems to encourage all kinds of disturbingly illiberal communitarian claims about what's best for us. For example, quite apart from thinking that we should generally be proud of our communities, apparently without any consideration of what they or we are actually like, the report ends by endorsing remarks made by the then Lord Chancellor, in which he said that "[o]ur goal is to create a nation of able, informed and empowered citizens who... recognise that the path to greatest personal fulfilment lies through active involvement in strengthening their society". What if I don't like my society? What if what society wants to do to strengthen itself is something I find vile? What if I'd rather stay at home and read a book, or indeed, sit on the sofa, drink beer and watch football? Can I not achieve personal fulfilment like that? Will Kymlicka said of citizenship theory that it is mostly 'old wine in new bottles'; it seems more like vinegar to me.

I Can Do No Other

I was reading - in bed: devotion to the cause I tell you - one of the early, pre-A Theory of Justice Rawls papers last night, entitled 'The Sense of Justice', and was struck by its explanation of a sense of justice in terms of guilt. The idea is, perhaps more commonly than I'm aware, that it is our capacity to form relationship both with others and to principles where failures to live up to the terms of those relationships generates guilt that accounts for and makes sense of our idea of justice and so our inclusion in the scope of principles of justice. In the absence of a sense of justice, we wouldn't be able to have those relationships; we might be able to have relationships of a similar sort, but since those relationships are marked by the way in which we conceptualise our failures to live up to their terms, we wouldn't be able to have them. Now, what's interesting about this is its foundation in guilt. People have been criticizing Kantianism for secularising - more and less successfully - the fiercely self-directed and often self-critical religious sentiments of mid-to-late eighteenth century Prussia for some time; it's been a persistent theme of Alasdair MacIntyre's writings, for example. For a Kantianly-minded philosopher to begin from guilt though, is perhaps rare. It's also revealing, because it makes it clear how central an ethic of responsibility is to Kantians, or at least Rawls. Unlike shame, guilt is only an appropriate response to something you're responsible for, so to make the capacity for guilt central to being a subject of justice is to make one's sense of responsibility, of having to bear the costs of your actions, central to being a subject of justice.

Outgrown Those Basic Feelings Anyway

For the first time in 9 years - the first time since I moved here as an undergraduate - I'm leaving Oxford tomorrow without knowing if I'll be back for longer than a night or two here and there. Admittedly, I'll probably be back to teach - and hopefully play football - pretty regularily next academic year, but it's not really the same; even if I do find a spare bed or sofa, it'll only be for a night - I won't be settled here. I describe myself as a Londoner and, more, am quite prepared to attempt to police who gets to make that claim - the postcode plays a generally under-appreciated role: Richmond is, for example, not in the relevant sense in London - but in lots of important ways I was formed here and not there. That's not just because I first lived away from my parents here, and not so much because of the place in a general sense - this is a university town, and for 8 of the 9 years, I've been a student, so I've never really felt like I knew the town separately from being a student in it - but more because of people whom I've been close to: friends I made when I was an undergraduate and lived with when I was a masters student, various people in what I feel really is a community of political theorists, some others I've accumulated, more and less purposefully, along the way.

There was a time when I really wanted to leave, felt like I couldn't bear to be here any more, but even then, that was a fairly explicit piece of self-repudiation: what I thought I couldn't stand was the life I had made for myself here. Like it or not, here is a central piece of who I am: although surely other things underlie them, so much of what has shaped me into the person I am now happened here and in ways that I suspect are often would really only have happened in as a student - and perhaps particularly a postgraduate student - at an elite university in an otherwise rather nondescript provincial town. There are habits, even a habitus, that I've acquired here that it is difficult to imagine having acquired elsewhere; ways of thinking but also habits of mind in a broader sense, learned psycho-social behaviours. This isn't meant as a communitarian paean to the form of life I suppose I now know best - I hope I have the sense to be far more ambiguous about the value of that set of more and less conscious institutions and my way of negotiating them: after all, I did once want little more than to abandon them - but rather an acknowledgement that if I am to maintain a well-founded sense of integrity, of who and what I am and its significance, then I need to see Oxford's role in making me and how suited to it I am. I've not been away for more than 3 weeks for 6 years; it'll be odd to leave.

By The Japanese War Memorial

From Geuss's 'Liberalism and its Discontents', Political Theory, 2002.

[I]f some of the deficiencies inherent in adopting a pure normative standpoint are visible even in a philosopher who has moved as far beyond Kant as Rawls has, this seems to me to give further weight to suspicions about the normative standpoint as a whole.

Setting aside the 'pure' for the time being, I think it's worth marvelling at just how perfect a piece of self-disembowelling this is. Our suspicions about the very idea of a normative standpoint and its deficiencies can have more and less weight; by what measures are we to establish this weight, and by what standards are we to judge these failings? Presumably not normative ones, since they ground suspicions about the very possibility of normativity, and so presumably not ones which are supposed to compel or even count in favour of agreement on them. I suppose anyone who disagrees with Geuss then has no reason to carry on reading him then.

No Reason Not To Try

Trying to do a careful analytical unpicking and undermining of Glen Newey's recent LRB piece on Raymond Geuss' new book would be mostly pretty tedious and anyway miss the point, which is its polemical character; I'm assuming, for example, that Newey doesn't really think that taking moralised stances about political arrangements makes one a supporter of the present Iranian state. More briefly, I note that even Bernard Williams, hardly friendly to Kantian-inspired liberalism, understood that the point of that liberalism is that it is about the conditions of the legitimate exercise of political power, so it can hardly be that it ignores the fact of the exercise of political power, since it is premised on it; that the presence of disagreement does not mean there is no right answer, and certainly not that there are not better and worse answers; and that if the problem is that ignoring the fact of political power generates undesirable results, then we better have something to say about the terms on which those results are undesirable. When one wants to say what political philosophy properly is, standards by which that properly can be assessed are necessary, and that pitches us right back into making evaluations of some sort or other; maybe not moral(ised) ones, but evaluations of some sort, and so the possibility of disagreement.

Not Here And Not Now

There was a time when I would have found this little local dispute a cue for immediate, confident, intervention. Partly I don't - except when applying for jobs - think of myself as a philosopher any more really: sometimes I think of myself as a political theorist, but more often as a Rawlsian, and more often even than that as a graduate student who's grant has run out and is about to submit and, in all probability, be more or less unemployed. Some hard-nosed and pithy, ideally Marxian, aphorism along the lines of not being able to live on bread alone telling you something important about bread, and its sources, would presumably be appropriate here. That's not all of it: political theorists are not wholly a subset of philosophers; our canon is different, which means we ask slightly different questions and expect answers to begin from slightly different places.

For what it's worth, I can find philosophers and the more philosophically inclined amongst political theorists quite annoying, but not because they present themselves in ways which I find rude, although some of them do tend towards distinctly socially awkward - which I'm hardly one to be casting aspersions on the basis of, I suppose - and like any discipline, philosophy has its share of shits. I find them annoying because - which may not be unconnected to the social awkwardness and the share of shits - I don't think asking highly abstracted questions about increasingly denatured cases is actually a particularly sensible way of going about answering questions, at least in moral and political philosophy. Who are those questions for? Perhaps philosophers qua philosophers, but less often, it seems to me, philosophers qua human beings with lives that go on in a world characterised not by questions about the precise character of the betterness of this state of affairs from some universal perspective but ones about considerably more situated and uncomfortable difficulties. Certainly not for ordinary people whom one would hope do not spend their time being crippled by agonising over the infinite varieties of trolley problem.

I went to a presentation a while ago by a friend who is - to my mind at least - a little too interested in right-libertarianism; here, one wants to paraphrase Linda Smith and say if not the oxygen of oxygen, at least the oxygen of academic respectability; a fellow attendee described right-libertarians as the gift that just keeps giving, which I think expresses just the right amount of scorn. Anyway, the friend argues - fairly convincingly to my mind, but that's not really the point - that right-libertarians need the first property-owners to have been individuals for their claims about individual rights to follow, and that all the evidence from anthropology indicates that that's not the case: actually, the first property-owners were almost certainly collectives of various sorts, who then passed over their property to individuals later on.

What's interesting about this is that this was well-known to, say, the Scottish Enlightenment, as was pointed out during the presentation, begging the question of how that richer, more humane, understanding of how we go about political philosophy in particular has disappeared. What presumably structural forces have caused us to forget that sort of knowledge? Bernard Williams had a view about this, contrasting the "intense moralism of much American political and indeed legal theory" with what he thought was its predictable counterpart, a concentration in American political science on "the coordination of private or group interests": "a Manichean dualism of soul and body, high-mindedness and the pork barrel... [where]... the existence of each explains how anyone could have accepted the other". He goes on to contrast that combination of piety and sordidness with a view in which conflict is central but contained; where what a political decision announces is not that someone is wrong, but "that they have lost", where of course that implies acceptance of some rules under which they lose.

Predictably, I find that view congenial, if wrong in its reading of Rawls. Whether it's generalizable I'm not sure. I tend to think so, although I've no real evidence to base that claim on. It seems to me that just as idealism lives under the shadow of Tamanay Hall and vice versa, the colonization of the social sciences in general by various forms of physics envy, with economics typically in the vanguard of this assault, will similarly generate attempts in philosophy to both distance oneself from and approximate those degrees of precision through abstraction. If that's true though, then it could well be the driving force explaining philosophers' apparent comparative failure at the grant stage and the general hostility of both humanists and social scientists to philosophers: social scientists because after all, philosophers end up behaving like their poor cousins, faffing about ineffectually with third-hand pieces of maths and no real sense of life as lived, and humanists because, really, they'd like them to be talking about actual people. Rudeness doesn't come into it: it's that they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing; illuminating, through careful conceptual analysis, the conditions of life as we have to live it without in doing so destroying the possibility of it. Eh; of course, that's over-general and, more, unkind, bitter. There'll always be exceptions; what's important though, is whether they are exceptions.

I Have Filled My Heart With Hate

I have had a vague desire to see 300 since I saw trailers for it a couple of years ago; the photoshopped, crazed hyper-realism of it, a fetishism of gloriously bloody violence, all impossible slow motion decapitations and exquisite showers of carefully rendered drops of blood, seemed like it would be ridiculously entertaining. And indeed it was ridiculously entertaining: the sudden pull back to a carefully framed landscape view of the Spartan king, having just gravely intoned that this is not madness, but Sparta, planting his foot on the Persian emissary's chest and flicking him backwards into a perfectly circular large black hole, which lurks in the middle of a courtyard for no obvious reason, is quite beyond the idiotic in a really rather wonderful way.

Of course its politics are barely disguised fascism: anything that enjoyed violence quite that much could only avoid being hateful by placing itself in a world in which only relentless brutality could avoid abject subjection. The problem with Sin City, after all, was that it tried to locate itself in a world not totally distant from ours: where violence's victims are not just effectively nameless soldiers or evil beyond imagining, there is a way of getting along that means perfecting the art of killing is not the only way to live. If there was any other way of living a life, then a life which took all its meaning from the total destruction, the utter crushing, of other lives, would seem, as it is in reality, at best quite hopelessly gratuitous. When we cannot live together, then someone has to die, and their death may as well be glorious, whether that triumph is found in the killing or in the act of dying.

This is a vision of politics as a kind of impossibility, a negative-sum game where compromise means humiliation and if not enslavement, then a kind of betrayal. If political action is always and everywhere either submission or triumph, then that is what we are left with; a politics of rousing speeches and good deaths, of killings stylised out of reality and of honour become vengeance stretched into infinity. Its aesthetics may be wonderful - the glowing embers of the Spartans' cloaks, the sodium lamp sunrises, the snarling monochrome of the Immortals' masks, the sudden stop-motion of bodies flying away from and into sword and shield blows: it's all quite beautiful - but tragedy has always been heartarchingly beautiful from a distance and grindingly awful up close.

On Not Helping

I've recently been reading this collection of Michael Walzer's essays. I'd not really read anything by him other than Just and Unjust Wars before, and it's quite fun: it's not as pithy or as astute when interested in something - there's nothing as good as Williams' reading of the torture scene in in 1984 in Truth and Truthfulness, for example - but it tends towards a Bernard Williams-esque valorization of the political, except with a kind of quite intriguing and probably distinctly American civic republican spin; if Williams had wanted to defend a principle of non-intervention, then one feels it would have been on the negative grounds of the tendency towards of disaster of interventions, rather than on the positive grounds of self-determination Walzer appeals to (in this paper).

Walzer appeals to an example where we could, by putting some chemical in the water supply, costlessly and permanently turn the post-independence Algerian government into Swedish-style social democrats. Presumably we feel there's something undesirable about this; at least I share Walzer's thought that something's gone wrong here, and plausibly something about self-determination. Williams, I think though - and this is probably a pure rhetorical device here: who really knows what Williams would have thought - would just ask what the moral evaluation of the acts of gods are supposed to tell us about what we, who are not gods, should do here and now. We can't costlessly lift a whole nation from the place history has brought it to so as to carefully put it down somewhere else instead; the point of politics is that we can't go round doing things like that. There are costs, and we have to work out whether they're ones we can bear, and ones we can impose. What should be done when there are no costs at all is a question for someone else entirely. It may be worth noting here that Walzer talked about a ticking bomb case in a paper in the early seventies.

Anyway, so Walzer wants non-intervention, including neutrality in civil wars, on grounds of self-determination. Even if we can partly set aside cases involving the total change of political, economic and cultural institutions and attitudes simply through an act of will, we cannot totally set them aside: even if we think that part of what has gone wrong in the case he uses is that gods shouldn't treat mere mortals like that, or that our moral reactions aren't supposed to be callibrated for those kinds of cases, it's still seems like a wrong against self-determination. So it looks like the pro-interventionist still has a case to answer: alright, this society is by any plausible standard less than fully just, but you can't make it fully just; properly, it is for its own people to do that. Walzer doesn't want to push that as far as it might go: he allows that in cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or mass enslavement, intervention is allowed. Other than those, though, he is prepared to require the citizens - better the inhabitants perhaps - of an unjust state to suck it up: it would be wrong for outsiders to help them make their state more just.

I think this is probably wrong, but I don't have to think it's wrong because self-determination doesn't matter: ecumenically, I might think it's wrong - and this is probably something that's been said before, but because of my unfamiliarity with the literature, I just don't know it's been said or by whom - because self-determination is not a zero-sum game. For Walzer to be right that self-determination rules out active interference, it has to be the case that active interference would always in some way infringe on self-determination: maybe not self-determination across all time, but at least self-determination in the roughly here and now. That, though, doesn't look plausible about other cases of self-determination, and is likely to be even less plausible about self-determination for groups.

Consider an individual who is in a domineering relationship. Although there might be a dispute about what counts as active interference, it seems to me we could fairly actively interfere with them and yet increase their self-determination, under certain conditions at least: encourage them and provide them with resources to leave or otherwise restructure that relationship, for example; if not that, at least give them the option of doing so. That looks like active interference, and certainly like the sorts of things Walzer wants to analogously rule out for societies: helping one side in a civil war by providing it with certain resources unavailable to the other; here, not encouraging the individual to stay in the domineering relationship. Yet that could certainly increase their self-determination in the roughly here and now: an abusive partner doesn't have to be beating you to within an inch of your life - presumably the analogue of Walzer's 'no intervention without genocide, ethnic cleansing, or mass enslavement' condition - for you to become more autonomous by leaving them.

More, note that individuals are singular, whereas societies are plural, and so the dispute about what counts as self-determination for a particular individual within that individual is unlikely to be as radical as the dispute about what counts as self-determination for a particular society within that society. Nor are parts of individuals able to silence other parts of individuals in ways that parts of societies are able to silence other parts of societies. A society where everyone is involved in the self-determination is more self-determining than a society in which only some are so involved. Then, though, there are trade-offs to be made: we might be able to raise the voices of some without lowering the voices of others quite as much, or even really at all. If self-determination's not a zero-sum game, then interference doesn't have to limit it, and Walzer's argument against interference fails, but it doesn't seem that self-determination is a zero-sum game, even for individuals and surely not for societies.

Putting Away Childish Things

One of the most annoying things about Bernard Williams was his deep suspicion of assertions of normativity which separate themselves from practice. For example, in the posthumously published In The Beginning Was The Deed, along with asking what the point of being Kant at the court of King Arthur might be, he quotes Habermas demanding that participants in the political process

drop the role of the private subject... The combination [of facticity and validity] requires a process of law-making in which the participatory citizens are not allowed to take part simply in the role of actors oriented to success

and himself goes on to say

But what is this "are not allowed to"? It cannot be blankly normative. Suppose, one is bound to say, that they do? It may be replied: it will defeat the point. But what if it does? And how can we be sure, in the light of the possibility, what the point really is?

Since this is in the course of making an argument about how political philosophers ought to theorize, this is in a certain sense a little bit rich. If we ignore that what political decisions do is not "announce that the other party was morally wrong or, indeed, wrong at all [but that] they have lost", then he had better think that there is a sense in which we have gone wrong, or else it is unclear what point he thinks he is making. In the sense that it is an interpretative point in favour of a refusal to admit certain kinds of normativity to politics, it is fairly elliptical, and in the sense that it is just a blunt refusal to admit that we might reasonably want things to go other than they do, it not only undermines his own position but is deeply unphilosophical.

On the other hand, one of the most wonderful things about Bernard Williams was his deep suspicion of assertions of normativity which separate themselves from practice. There's an early passage either in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy or Morality: An Introduction to Ethics where Williams pours utter scorn on the idea that what people are really like is the way that they would behave in a lifeboat which is sinking because it is overfull. The idea is that just as we would not expect to see what a tropical plant is like by placing it in the Antarctic, we hardly find out what humans are like by imagining them under conditions where cooperation and compromise are pretty likely to result in them dying. Similarly, the integrity objection to utilitarianism importantly relies on the thought that it matters to use what we as individuals do, rather than how the world ends up being once are acts and omissions are endlessly mediated through the agency of others. The thought seems to have been that philosophy is an account of what we do as humans, and if it stops being intelligible as such an account, then it has failed. Philosophy is a humanistic discipline, and the ones we really ought to hate are the reductionists, just as relativism - and I think this is probably my favourite of Williams' aphorisms - is either too early or too late; because either it answers the question, should we tolerate those people we have no straightforward way of persecuting, or because it does not answer the question, given that you and I have some practical disagreement about the moral status of some act, how do we and ought we to resolve that disagreement without bloodshed.

All this is by way of objecting to another way of understanding philosophy. One of my colleagues was talking a couple of weeks ago about some research which claims that children are much more philosophical than adults. Unlike adults, apparently children go round constantly questioning things; they're forever asking about the sources of authorities they encounter, demanding causal histories of events or explanations that they're given, and so on. They always want to know why, are resolutely independent, critical inquirers, whereas adults are in contrast dupes, with both the ability and the will to tear back the veil and see what lies beneath atrophied, beaten down by time and the need to get by in a world which has limited patience for a refusal to acquiesce in the way things are. Time and the need to get by in world which had limited patience for a refusal to acquiesce in the way things are, at least for some values of 'the way things are', though, are central features of human existence. The reason children don't (always: children don't go round asking why their parents love and care for them, or not usually at least, or, minimally, don't usually behave like they've been asking that question, for example; one should always ask which questions aren't being asked, what forms of life are being privileged) behave like beings which have got used to them is because they aren't beings which have got used to them. That, though, doesn't mean that no-one should have got used to them, that the presumption should be against having got used to them, that philosophy is constituted by not having got used to central features of (adult) human life. Who would this philosophy be for, which goes round always demanding why? What would it not demand why of? Would it demand why it wants to know why, and what answer would it accept to that question? Where would it begin from, and who would recognise the world the answers to its questions left?

Another way of expressing this worry is to wonder about the conditions which might fulfil what Williams called the Basic Legitimation Demand, which requires that political orders are intelligible to those who live under them as solutions to the problem of providing order - without themselves becoming a problem in precisely those terms. I spoke to another colleague about this some time last week, who was fairly insistent that the work that intelligibility was doing there was not just a black box in the general sense which Williams obviously intended it to be - so that we could be Lancelot at Camelot and John Rawls at Harvard - but similarly indeterminate in any concrete situation - who could tell whether we ought not to be Lancelot at Harvard and Rawls at Camelot? In particular, they wanted to insist that Robert Nozick's right-libertarianism was a viable answer to Williams' question; that if the sorts of political orders we have round here now could tell all those they exercise their coercion over that in some imagined state of nature, they would not be worse off, that in the midst of riches being in the same state as a hunter-gatherer is sufficient to legitimate (being coopted into ensuring) coercive denial of access to those riches. I saw the tail end of a BBC4 documentary on the Miner's Strike this evening: I would have liked to see someone walk up to a striking miner in 1984, and tell them that since they weren't yet starving to death, the political order they lived under was legitimate. It's hard to explain to a crying child, after all, and we shouldn't make people do it unless we have to.

On Not Speaking Italian

After reading Peter Bradshaw's review, I decided against going to see The Reader: he articulates, how accurately I don't know, a worry that the film is unacceptably exculpatory of one of its main characters, a Nazi extermination camp guard; if not no poetry after Auschwitz, at least no poetry about Auschwitz. Having not seen the film, I suppose I'm in no position to judge whether that's fair or not; Bradshaw makes it sound fair, at least, and for all his predictable foibles, I think he's usually pretty good. Apparently a complaint in the same kind of area has been made about Waltz With Bashir, the thought being that the more or less total absence of the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacres or of the context in which those massacres took place makes the film's attempt at reconstructing the details of the narrator's (limited) participation in those massacres a denial of the wrongs done either in the massacres or in Israel's 1982 invasion more broadly. For example here, the film is described as first "an act not of limited self-reflection but self-justification" and then "striving towards working through qualms to restabilize the self as it is currently constituted... [and not] asking challenging questions that would destabilize that self".

I'm not quite sure about this kind of claim: although it's right that the film is not primarily about the suffering of the victims of the Israeli invasion, it seems to rely on that suffering and, more, the wrong of that suffering to generate its narrative force. If it couldn't have been wrong to do what the narrator did, then his attempts to understand and come to terms with it would be adolescent pieces of self-obsessed introspection, tedious and whiny. The absence of the Palestinian victims at Sabra and Shatila, although perhaps not always of the victims of the conflict more broadly, is then a presence looming over much of the film. The figure of the psychiatrist, for example, seems much more ambiguous than the piece linked to above suggests. As well as saying that memory takes us where we want to go, and hence positing a kind of therapeutic effect for the narrator's nightmares reliving his experiences in Beirut, he tells an ancedote about how easy it is to plant false memories: apparently, doctored photos of themselves as children are almost inevitably assimilated into their recollections of their childhood by adults. Memory then might be hiding something much worse than the mere lighting of flares. Similarly, the apparent self-absorption of the reference to 'the other camps' is hardly exculpatory: presumably the last thing an Israeli of all people wants to justly compared to is a Nazi.

That may not get the film off the hook as far as ignoring the rest of the conflict goes, although it's worth noting that the songs about bombing Beirut are accompanied by scenes of Israeli soldiers being bored and boorish; it's not like the film endorses that act. But then, films may choose their own subjects, and one can easily imagine that Israeli attempts to conceptualise what has been done in their name would be seen as patronising and self-serving. What absence, then, is doing in the film could even be seen as a kind of respect: a refusal to try to capture what something must have been like for someone else can be a tribute to their subjectivity, rather than a denial of it. The use of the real footage at the end of the film, rather than Othering the Palestinian victims, seems to me to bring the question at the heart of the film back into sharp focus: what the hell did we do to do this to someone? Everything else becomes a shadow-play, a kind of paper screen which is eventually ripped aside to reveal what was really going on, which was the creation of figures of almost pure grief. Arabic is notoriously difficult to learn, while most of us can become fluent in violence in just under a semester indeed.

Weaving A Jumper From Your Own Hair

Lampooned, here.

Or, more seriously, if we're thinking about rules which apply to large groups of people across long periods of time, shall we perhaps think about some cases of rules which apply to large groups of people across long periods of time? To put it another way, stealing from Jo Wolff, why is that in the luck-egalitarian universe, everyone is self-employed?

On Being Hard

J. G. Ballard, in the more recent novels, I think made a living out of a kind of rather virulent reactionary politics: the recurrent thought seems to be that there is no political solution to the problem of violence, that any attempt to solve that problem simply displaces and even excerbates it. The plots take place against a backdrop of vaguely leftist concerns, it's true - the gated communities of a moneyed leisure class - but what is crucial is not that that shapes the members of that class: it rather liberates them, allows them to do what they've always (really: it's the really that gives it away) wanted to, which is experience the visceral thrill of exercising brutal, sadistic power. The insistence that humans are fallen, cannot but revert to bloody type is doubly obssessed with violence; both in that it insists that violence is inevitable, as if peaceful societies have never existed, and in its own self-image, as able to bear truths others dare not face, engaged in a kind of masochistic proof of its strength. As with Houellebecq, there must be a suspicion that there's an explanation in Ballard's personal history: a childhood in the cantonment in Shanghai and an internment camp must mark you in certain ways. What they don't do, as Ballard seems to think judging by his autobiography, is function as adequate models for what societies are generally like: contrary to what all kinds of saloon bar philosophers may think, people aren't really like what they're like under great stress; the whole point of being under great stress is that it's not how you normally are.

Not everyone is a psychopath, whatever Ballard may say: that's how we're able, in the end, to distinguish psychopaths from everyone else. Saying so might even border on the psychopathic itself: if the total failure of empathy is definitional of psychopathy, then an inability to see the motivations of others as other than brute data, as having a lived history which give them content and meaning, could be a kind of psychopathy. There's a kind of liberal piety which plays into this, though, where everything good is morally costless, where political conflict gets erased, and so generates the temptation to bring it back, bubbling up through the gaps all orders must leave somewhere. Regretting, as Obama's appointment to head to C.I.A. does here (via), that a majority of a given public do not believe in a absolutely exceptionless prohibition on torture, totally setting aside any questions about what tradeoffs you are prepared to make, does that. It invites the machismo of ticking bomb cases, when what you want is this (via), notes on the economy of torture, of its politics: thinking that the prohibition exists in a vacuum allows that exceptions to it might to, when our reasons for the prohibition are importantly to do with the fact that torture does not happen in a vacuum; it needs torturers, equipment, places and times for the equipment to be used, information that it confirms and that verifies it, and so on. I suppose then it is that kind of pious liberal that Ballard thought of himself educating in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, who thinks of goodness without a (real) history, as just how people are. Notice, though, that his posturing suffers from exactly the same flaw: it is stripped of its institutional context. People aren't usually evil because that's the way they're doomed to be; they're terrible because they ended up that way. Even Hobbes saw that; Ballard can't.

Like A Daydream, Or A Fever

Apparently the little author biographies of Justin Cartwright's novels used to contain a not-so subtle dig at his ex-wife: he lives in London, sometimes with his children. In The Song Before It Is Sung, he only lives in London, which is perhaps for the best. You can well imagine why his wife might have left him; the book concerns Conrad Senior, a somewhat self-absorbed man in early middle age who is using the bequest of an old professor's letters to a German friend executed by the Nazis as an excuse for doing not very much other than think rather vague thoughts about the grand sweep of history, swan about in London, and have pretty women - including his wife when she comes to divide up the marital goods having had quite enough of this extended adolescence - f*ck him at the drop of a hat. The women are ciphers, nagging shrews melting into his arms as he passive-aggressively refuses to engage with them or empty-headed wantons whose short skirts and drug use are indicative of their sexual licence. Even Senior himself is something of an empty vessel, not much more than a vehicle for the author's persistent equation of objectivity in morality with teleology in history: as if because we must give up on the idea of ineluctable progress we must give up on the idea of must.

Although the book has its moments - the scene where Senior meets the cameraman who filmed the execution of the German in Berlin is really rather well done, and there are some nicely catty asides - there are some passages which practically beg to be taken out and shot. There's a meditation on Grosz's remark that his work was a reaction to commanders in the field painting in blood that works itself up to the full height of imagining Hitler, the former art student, as the modern master of the genre. Or the observation, after a rather self-satisfied, condescending little list of the relevant features - illegal immigrant cabbies, hookers, greasy fast-food joints, and any number of stereotypes out of central casting - that metropolitan railway stations are a bit seedy; no shit, Sherlock. The prose is often just lazy: I suppose it thinks of itself as having the wonderful economy of someone like William Gibson, but it hasn't got anything like the self-control, the precision of Gibson's careful accumulation of exact detail; it just doesn't think carefully enough. This isn't just evidenced in the banal vignettes collapsing under the weight of meaning they're supposed to be bearing but in the theme: using a heroic good German to try and make a barely even sophomoric point about how Hegel said some crazy shit once and then, like magic, there were Nazis and everything else terrible in the world and so we should all be relativists, since what was so terrible about the Nazis was that they believed in objective morality and not that they started the bloodiest war the world has ever seen and murdered millions. Or something.

Anyway, don't bother. Or with Howard Jacobson: a less funny Philip Roth, with much more portension. What you should bother with is I Am Cuba, a hallucinatory, black and white propaganda film made by a Soviet director about the run-up to Castro's revolution in the mid-sixties. The white looks burned on to the camera, like anything not actually black the director pointed it at was sodium blazing away under an inevitably cloudless sky, so that sugar cane fields look like they're full of brilliant incandescent triffids and a crowd marching down monumental steps into water-cannon like innocents claiming their birthright and walking into heaven. That doesn't do it justice: it's full of mad, looping takes, framing characters from above and below, against hillsides, brightly-light shop windows, collonades, burning over-turned cars. It's so alive, so eager. I liked it much more than a kind of companion piece at least in subject matter, The Battle Of Algiers, which I saw a while ago but seemed to me to have no heart at all and to be very pleased with its achievement of that pitilessness, as if that was precisely the attitude one ought to adopt to violent rebellion. I Am Cuba was so much more human, was not just attempting to be a document of retrospective historical inevitability, if it was even attempting that, but to give life to those living through that inevitability.

On Empty Formalism

Libertarians claim to be interested in making people as free as possible. Motherhood and apple pie, you'd've thought; who has anything to say against people being free, after all? On the other hand, there's something pretty suspicious about appeals to values which no-one disagrees with. Why not just offer the moon on a stick along with that magic pony? It's not really 'all moral worlds contain loss', is it? donpaskini doesn't get it quite right here, when he says that "[i]t's not the arguments against libertarianism that are most devastating for its adherents, it's their own attempts to apply their beliefs to the real world", since running around waving your arms and shouting 'freedom! freedom!' is hardly really an argument. What really matters is what the libertarians mean when they run around waving their arms and shouting 'freedom! freedom!', and in the absence of anything else, it seems like the policies probably are what they mean. Freedom is having to apply to an unaccountable charity to get a licence to procreate, or being mugged because the police are busy raiding your house to check whether you're beating your kids. Your take-home lesson today: the plausibility of a general claim is the plausibility of its instances.

Me And God In Co-Production

Last night, with my mother, I saw Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes The Barley (spoilers), which is of course quite as didactic as one would expect. With Land And Freedom, I think I minded this less: I knew it was quite unsubtly manipulating me, but I didn't particularly care since it's so easy to summon a relatively uncomplicated attitude to the Spanish Civil War; for the Republicans and against everyone else, including the Soviets. Partly because I have a not-quite-fully examined hostility to Irish nationalism and particularly what seems to me the centrality of an idea of victimhood, I was much more hostile to Loach's attempts to garner sympathetic identification for rebels fighting for what they'd have probably been given anyway. Starting a civil war in which thousands died over whether or not you had to swear an oath of allegiance to a foreign head of state - which, accurate or otherwise, seemed to be the sum of the actual, practical difference between the Free Staters and the Republicans according to Loach - is, so far as I'm concerned at least, pretty reprehensible: you don't kill people just so that you can avoid breaking your word. That is a moral vanity of a pretty monstrous kind. Nor is one extra-judicial execution or reprisal much better than another. Yet Loach wants people who hold their honour so high they'll kill their comrades so they don't have to lie or to send a message to others to be the focus of our sympathetic identification in the film. It is hard to identify with someone who kills in the service of some cause they consider just, particularly some left-wing cause they consider just I think, and does not wonder whether what they are doing is just, whether what they're sacrificing is worth what they're getting, whether anything could be worth what they're sacrificing.

The best moments, then, of the film are when people do start to ask whether what they're doing is just, as when the film's hero Damien tells the story of taking a mother of an informer he executed whilst fighting the British to her son's grave to his brother, now on the other side of the civil war. Or when the brother stoically delivers the perhaps implausibly forgiving letter Damien wrote to his sweetheart, as deeply implicated as either of the brothers in the independence struggle herself, before being executed for refusing to give up his comrades. That's where the tragedy and so the drama lies, at points where one's public and private commitments start to unavoidably conflict, where forces beyond your control make sure you have to lose something that you cannot afford or fairly be asked to give up. That's when politics becomes personal, when commitments of one sort or the other have to be sacrificed, when you have to tell your brother's lover or your friend's mother that you've shot them. Part of the point of what we might call normal politics, then, seems to be to eliminate or at least mitigate the ways in which people are pushed into making those kinds of choices: a world in which we constantly find ourselves wondering how exactly it is that ought is supposed to imply can is not a very hospitable one, and only political institutions, by controlling forces beyond the power of individuals acting alone, can deliver us from such an outcome. So then, we end up returning, almost ineluctably, to an argument against G. A. Cohen. It's almost ironic.

Really, Burn After Reading

Since there hasn't been any fiddly and probably totally inconsequential political philosophy here for a while, I present to you, some fiddly and probably totally inconsequential political philosophy! As regular readers may remember, my doctorate is perhaps frighteningly obsessed - notice how I put distance between the mental states of what is after all a piece of writing, and those of its creator - with G. A. Cohen's attacks on Rawls. Those attacks began by observing that Rawls' difference principle, which legitimates inequalities in income and wealth (roughly) that maximize the income and wealth of those who have the least income and wealth, seems to treat the intentions of those who would recieve the proposed inequalities as fixed. They blossom into a whole host of variously methodological and conceptual attacks, but it all starts with that observation, and the claim that that shows that at least the levels of inequality Rawls thought were justified by it are not, that in fact it legitimates very little inequality.

The idea is that like a kidnapper who demands that you pay up, or the kid gets it, ignoring the fact that it's them that makes it true that the kid gets it, Rawls' economically productive, instead of just producing as much as they could, ask for incentives to do so even though they could make more without the incentives. Like the kidnapper, that paying them will produce a good outcome is dependent on their will. Someone asking for medical treatment is usually going to be ill whether or not they decide to be ill, but how much they work is something people have control over. Cohen then says that a productive egalitarian ethos is a demand of justice, since it will increase the take of the well-off, roughly (more technically, for any given level of output that could be achieved by providing financial incentives to the productive, there is a more egalitarian distribution in which the productive are not so incentivised, and the least well-off have larger holdings, a distribution achievable if the productive have a productive egalitarian ethos).

Now, I think this kind of thing is totally crazy, mostly because I think that there are good reasons for thinking that the justice of distributions of property rights ought to be sorted out by features of systems of property rights, rather than people's motivations, and particularly their motivations about how much and at what to work. Leaving people space to live their lives is, on reflection, a more or less foundational requirement of just political systems, and if you have to take decisions about which job to do at what rate of pay on the basis of how it'll effect the distribution of property throughout your society, that requirement is not met.

But that's by the by here. The fiddly, inconsequential bit of political philosophy concerns Cohen's claim that a productive egalitarian ethos would not limit people's freedom. Cohen argues this on the grounds that moral demands in general are limits on freedom or are in general not, and so it can't be an argument against any particular moral demand that it limits freedom. It could be an argument against a law that it limits freedom, since laws coerce people, but it's not an argument against a moral demand, and the ethos is a moral demand, which he doesn't call for the legal enforcement of. This may or may not be true in general, and it doesn't matter for my argument against Cohen's position, which is that the demand is too demanding and so different from a claim about freedom. However, I think I can show that Cohen is wrong about whether or not the ethos limits a potentially significant freedom.

More or less ex hypothesi for Cohen, a society's coercive legal structures cannot distribute stuff justly: people's behaviour within those structures matters, which is why he thinks that an ethos is a requirement of justice. That means that whether or not one is complicit in injustice is going to be dependent on people's choices within coercive structures: so far as Cohen's concerned, it is only if other people chose to follow the demands of the productive egalitarian ethos, for example, that I can avoid living under a set of institutions which end up distributing stuff in a way which treats people unjustly. Obviously, in order to make his argument that the ethos does not limit freedom, Cohen has to insist that the ethos cannot be a legal requirement: indeed, otherwise it wouldn't be choice within a society's coercive legal structures. That means, though, that I have a positive right to not meet the demands of the ethos, that no-one can force me to meet the demands of the ethos. Unless everyone does meet the demands of the ethos though, for Cohen our society will be unjust: when the law prevents people from forcing each other to meet the demands of the ethos, it prevents them from making their society just. Cohen's ethos then does conflict with a certain freedom, the freedom to live in a just society. If Cohen's right, then even the best possible legal system may coercively prevent me from having to live in a society which distributes goods unjustly.

A Man's Gotta Have A Code

Miller's Crossing, possibly one of my favourite films, begins with a prohibition-era Italian gangster coming to see the head of the Irish mob, who runs the town, to ask whether or not the Irish will lift their protection of a bookie, whom the Italian believes is leaking information about fixed fights. As he explains the situation, Jonny Caspar, the Italian, in a piece of what we are never quite sure is transparent self-justification, describes the problem as a matter of ethics and the bookie's lack of them: fixed fights may be fine, but selling which fight is fixed - that places you beyond the pale, endangers the smooth running of the town by endangering what was previously a sure source of income. The reason we are never quite sure if the description of the issue as an ethical one is totally self-serving is that it looks like Caspar believes it: if you can fake sincerity, then you've got it made, but Caspar, forever looking for an opportunity to be slighted, clearly sincerely thinks the world owes him rather a lot. It is that that he has to think though: the reason that casting rules which benefit you as absolute moral precepts is always suspicious is precisely that they benefit you, and no more; you have to be entitled to the benefits.

That the justification is forever teetering on the edge of becoming an insult to everyone else's intelligence may be why Caspar also casts it in terms of a more general pursuit of rational self-interest, that if fixed fights get sold, then nothing is sacred anymore and everyone loses in the resulting chaos. That doesn't really work either, because although it's not a piece of such naked self-interest, its distance from Caspar himself seems to deprive it of that fierce sense of constantly being wronged, and so the combination of the instrumental with the moral becomes much more difficult to sustain. Regardless, Leo, the Irish boss, refuses to sell out the bookie, and Caspar huffily blusters that he was only doing Leo the courtesy of informing him in advance of the killing, thereby setting the stage for the gang warfare which the rest of the film is punctuated by.

Despite a couple of scenes where the police, under orders from one or other of the mobs, raid speakeasys, and a piece of gloriously self-possessed violence by Albert Finney as Leo in which he is indeed an artist with a Thompson, the film's real interest is in Gabriel Byrne's Tom, a lieutenant to Leo, who half-stumbles, half-glides through the mess of the gang war, all bone-dry, jaded wit and variously conflicted loyalties. Except that loyalties isn't quite the right word for it: they're more fickle than that. For example, he explains his temporary switch over to the other side to Leo as an elaborate double-cross, but his reasons for breaking with Leo were genuine and he only attempts to give this explanation once it is clear that he has broken with Leo forever. Likewise, he is once offered the opportunity to do something when it would be very risky for him not to, and then, later, when doing it is really quite gratuitous and destructive, he carefully engineers the chance to complete a now pointless task. About the only constants are a kind of (an enormously appealing, at least in a character in a film) bitter self-satisfaction, drink, and gambling (debts). As he says, wonderfully, to a lover, getting the response that she'd never met anyone who made being a son of a bitch such a point of pride, "if I'd known we were going to cast our feelings into words, I'd've memorised the Song of Solomon".

Tom is effectively a kind of cipher, a hyper-stylised version of a noir staple. When the lover tells him he's come to see her for the oldest reason there is, he replies that there are friendlier places to drink, and then does more than that anyway, just like he's supposed to. He doesn't really have any hinterland of commitment, just a smart word, a proud manner, various addictions and a handsomely lived-in face, and for the purposes of the film, itself a gloriously hyper-stylised tribute, that works. And it's for that reason that he's able to somehow extricate himself from the betraying his boss, in several different ways, and risking his life for nothing he hasn't already sold: the politics of the gang war eddy around him, and he swims through them, without ever quite being dragged under, because he has no reason to favour one current over another, knows how to let them carry him without taking him down with them. As someone says to him at one point, he sees all the angles: it's just that that's all he does, a kind of cold assessment without any real involvement. In that sense, the anarchy of the gang war does him no harm: although he loses things, we never quite sure why or how much he cared about them, and he just keeps doing what he always was, seeing the angles and world-wearily playing them, forever at a kind of distance.

Of course, if he wasn't outside politics, above commitment, with no vested interests, then he wouldn't be able to see all the angles. The fact that he is all surface means that being "back in the jungle", as Caspar puts it, is just another version of the game, another, although in general less productive, set of rules to work out and manipulate. Other people still have their commitments, and you just have to play them right. In this, and in his lack of a hinterland, he is like Heath Ledger's Joker: both exploit the way the predictability of other people by having no interests in particular to bind them to anything in particular. Neither, for example, really have a fixed past: just as the Joker re-tells, differently each time, the story of his grotesquely extended smile, Tom Regan is constantly correcting people, showing them that they've not got him quite right.

Where they differ, contra what Michael Wood said about The Dark Knight in the most recent LRB, is that Tom is not political at all, whereas the Joker's distinctly political aim is the end of politics, to make any rules at all an impossibility. Anton Chigurh, of No Country For Old Men, whom Wood compares with the Joker, is much more like Tom Regan than the crazed maniac who burns a pile of money: Chigurh, like Regan, is unreadable, a kind of force of nature, although of course a quite different sort of force of nature, but similarly quite uninterested in anyone else other than for his own quite private, in both sense, ends. The Joker would never flip a coin to decide whether he kills you or not: he would have you flip it to see who else he kills. Chaos is not a self-regarding aim; other people need to be involved. That's why Wood is also wrong about the film's labelling of the Joker as a terrorist: the Joker is in fact the archetypal terrorist, since he seeks the destruction of the basic, ordering, elements, of a social order. Or at least, that's what I argue in my article on the topic (I'm allowed to be pleased with myself, alright). In that sense, then, we should not be so cruel to the second of Johnny Caspar's attempts to give his self-interested requests a moral appeal: the problem with it is not the good it appeals to, since we do have a deep interest in the maintenance of social order, but rather the causal connection between the good and what Caspar wants to do; one bookie selling out your fix does not unleash a Hobbesian Sate of Nature, although a gang war may well do.

The Man Who Is Sleeping, That's Your Murderer

A lot of play has been made of The Dark Knight being some kind of political morality tale, supposed to offer us thoughts on the limits of publicly accountable institutions, on how much we might need men - and they are always men, at least in drama - prepared to do awful things to keep us safe in our beds at night. A lot of the film's narrative tension depends on what sorts of answers to those questions the main characters will decide upon, how far Batman and Harvey Dent are prepared to bend the rules in order to save the meaningful existence of those self-same rules. The problem, apart from the length and the failure to give anyone the kind of backstory against which their character can develop and their dilemmas acquire significance, is that those questions are kind of unintelligible in a world in which a single criminal, apparently without organisation or much money, can poison officials, kidnap policemen, rig boats and hospitals to blow, infilitrate various mafias, and the like at will, more or less by sheer force of personality. The rules the precise structure of whose value we're supposed to be wondering about are obviously inappropriate when you're confronted with an apparently omnipotent madman. Aristotle observed that gods and monsters live outside the polis: monstrous gods make a mockery of the idea of it.