Amitai Etzioni Notes

Throwing Pakistan into the Arms of China

The Obama administration just suspended the delivery of some 800 million dollars’ worth of aid to the Pakistani military. Such get-tough moves ignore that the United States and its allies are much more dependent on Pakistan than Pakistan is on them. The nuclear arms of Pakistan pose a very serious threat to Washington and its allies. The combination of terrorism and WMDs is the greatest danger facing the West—and Pakistan is the most likely place terrorists may gain such arms one way or the other. There is nothing in the West that poses a similar threat to Pakistan. And the last thing we should want is for the CIA agents and other U.S. military personnel to be kicked out (as many have been recently). They are needed to keep an eye on the nukes and, if all else fails, to grab them.

Closing the supply routes to Afghanistan (as Pakistan did once already) would deprive U.S. and allied forces of many of their essential supplies. Using other routes is much more costly, and they are not reliable. The United States is much better off having both a southern (via Pakistan) and a northern (via central Asia and Russia) supply pathway...

Read the rest at The National Interest.

 

The Political Use of Moral Language: An Exchange with Daniel Callahan

In Bioethics Forum, Daniel Callahan took issue with Amitai Etzioni's article in Dissent, "A Moral Assessment of the Attack on Social Safety Nets."

"Amitai Etzioni, a prominent social scientist and leader of a communitarian movement, published an article in Dissent in February arguing that it would be “immoral” to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits unless we first eliminate a range of pathologies in our health care system. “If we must make cuts,” he wrote, “we ought first to cut those budget items that in effect pay for harmful activities and then those without discernible social benefits.” He had in mind such long-time villains as excessive administrative overhead, waste and fraud, direct-to-consumer advertising, unnecessary treatments, and medical error.

"He was right to identify those failings, all of which reflect a bad health care system. And as a fellow communitarian, I welcome his support for a solid and equitable social safety net. But are those on the other side of the aisle “immoral”? At what point does a political issue or position pass from simply being unfair, wrong-headed, or dangerous in some way or other, to being immoral?"

Read the rest of Callahan's comments here.

Amitai Etzioni responded:

Daniel Callahan’s commentary about my article in Dissent shows that even a bioethics giant, and a fellow communitarian, can make a mistake, and not a trivial one. Sadly he is not alone in adopting a culturally relativistic definition of what is moral. (The co-editor of Dissent, Michael Walzer, also holds that the community is the ultimate arbiter of that which is right.) And hence, of course, when there is no consensus, there are no moral standards and we are told there is nothing on which to base our moral judgments.

As I see it, there is a limited set of universal moral truths—human rights, for instance. Life and health over death and illness in all but exceptional circumstances, for example. These truths are, as the founding fathers put it so well, self evident. (As a deontologist would put it, these are moral causes that speak to us directly.) In the subject at hand, I need no community to approve a standard that will inform me that if one has a choice between saving money by cutting reimbursement for beneficial procedures, say kidney dialysis, or cutting the funds that pay doctors who run two CTs on the same patient on the same day or blowing money because insurers refuse to use the same claim form—which is the moral direction to go. It may not be politically practical, but there is no question what is right. (And the fact that one may find some very limited conditions under which the suggested statement will not hold just shows that some philosophers are sharp, not that we lack foundations for moral judgments).

Callahan correctly points out that I use normative arguments for a political purpose. All political acts and decisions have a moral dimension and if we do not judge, it will not stop others from laying moral claims, just mute our side. Moreover, it is this bad? I am trying to shame and lose votes for those who pass immoral laws that provide obscene profits to health insurers and exorbitant salaries for their executives while cutting funds for health care for poor children and many more such policies. I stand content to be judged accordingly.

Callahan truly crosses a line when he jumps from my position that some people make immoral choices —to argue that they must be bad people (his non sequitur), and therefore accuses me of ad hominem attacks. As I see it there are some bad people, those who have no moral conscience, the psychopaths. Most people struggle between their debased and nobler sides, and I am out to give whatever support I can to their better angels.

For more discussion, see Amitai Etzioni, “On Communitarian and Global Sources of Legitimacy,” The Review of Politics, 73 (2011): 105-122.

My Students-- And the Arab Spring

These days, I am interviewing college graduates for research assistant jobs. I do not bother those who seem to believe that proofreading their application is a waste of time and whose term papers are written as if English was their fourth language. After a brief chitchat (“What do you see yourself doing ten years from now?”), I suggest we talk about some contemporary issue. Say, “What you think our position should be if the Muslim Brotherhood wins the elections in Egypt and bans the sale of alcohol, insists everyone stop for prayer on Fridays, and declares homosexuality illegal?”

Students at this point often ask: “Was the election fair and open?”  I suggest that they assume the election was so declared by a delegation headed by President Carter. Students typically double check: “Did they have a majority?” and then add “Well, we should tell them that the Sharia is open to much more liberal interpretations, that Muslim feminists have shown that the Prophet was very respectful of women.”

Okay, assume we do all this, and the new Egyptian (or some other Middle Eastern) government persists. Well, the students sigh and conclude: “This is democracy. We cannot expect their majority to favor what ours does.”

 

The students seem not to be the only ones who are unclear about the difference between democracy and our form of government, the regime we wish for others to adopt. The media is full of references to various groups of rebels, protestors, and demonstrators in the Middle East, in which these groups are labeled as either democratic or not, as if this was the litmus test for good government. It may be elementary, but it seems we need to remind one another that plain democratic regimes have long been rejected as a legitimate form of government precisely because they can impose the tyranny of a majority on the minorities and violate individual rights. Hence, ours is what political scientists call a liberal (I prefer constitutional) democracy; that is, the constitution (especially the Bill of Rights) limits the majority’s rule. However large the majority, it cannot limit the right of anyone to free speech, to vote, to assemble, to practice religion, and so on. Hence governments, such as those in Russia, may be democratically elected but ought not to be on list of the neocons’ victory parade (or anyone else’s) because they do not honor individual rights.

There is a follow-up question I do not ask the students because I fear the answer is far from clear: Can there be a truly liberal (constitutional) religious democracy? On the one hand, the United States used to ban the sale of alcohol, homosexual relations, divorce, and abortions, insisted on Sunday closings, and treated women as second-class citizens—and we still considered ourselves a constitutional democracy. On the other hand, can we today support a government that, say, considers it a crime for a Muslim to convert to another religion, disallows speech that disparages the Prophet or the Koran, and limits the education of girls? (Survey data show that while a majority of Egyptians favor human rights abstractly, they also support stoning adulterers, sentencing to death those who denounce their Islamic faith, and whipping or cutting off the hands of those who commit theft or robbery.)

We had better become more clear about how much illiberalism we can tolerate, because those who keep pointing out that this or that group of demonstrators are democratic and secular, and presumably liberal (e.g. the April 6 movement in Egypt), will soon find out that at least some of the new regimes that will arise in the Middle East over the next decade (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran included) may be democratic—but not secular, and very far from liberal.

Amitai Etzioni is a professor of international relations at The George Washington University and the author of Security First (Yale 2007).

Originally published on July 11 on the Huffington Post.