Sunday morning at the AAR (okay, maybe I am live-blogging) I went not to church (unless you count the moment of prayer at the panel on Zizek by the Christian Theological Research Fellowship) but to a comparative ethics panel about John Kelsay’s recent book, Arguing the Just War in Islam. The panelists discussed the book as a contribution both to comparative ethics across traditions in general and as an effort to understand the mechanics of justification at work among Muslim militants today.
There was an interesting tension running through the discussion, one not uncommon among moral philosophers eager to work in a world of reasons—of “higher” human faculties, rather than lower ones like emotions, dreams, delusions, and what-have-you. The well-known scholar of modern militancy Mark Juergensmeyer alluded to a world beyond reasons, to a sense that some actors commit violence not in terms of just war but “cosmic war.” Another panelist, Scott Davis, began the open discussion by reprimanding Juergensmeyer for his talk of violence. Talking about war that way, Davis suggested, restrains the debate about reasons.
Yet, today as much as ever, the insufficiency of reasons thrown about to justify conflict is arresting. In the present Iraq War, for instance, the reasons given for war turned out to be entirely absurd, while the violence of it is undeniable. At the end of the talk, Kelsay gave a list of forces beyond reasons that he admitted to being “not quite sure how” to address—scriptural imagery, fetish violence, moral outrage, “the zeal of Phineas,” and so forth. But how can you talk about war without speaking of these things, which so often seem to drive the reasons later used to justify it? Philosophy needs a way.
A slight about-face. I’ve lately been reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (see this excerpt at The New York Times). Though far from perfect and far from rigorous in itself (it was written for a general audience), the book enacts a kind of philosophy, an ethics, perhaps capable of entering the territory into which Kelsay feared to tread. Appiah’s sources come from far and wide. In addition to the classics of moral philosophy, he is deeply rooted in the experience of growing up in Ghana, the son of an African father and an English mother. He quotes literature from far and wide. And more recently, he has become involved in the “experimental philosophy” movement, an effort to generate empirical data that can accompany discussion of philosophical questions.
Appiah’s plea for a new ethic of cosmopolitanism in this globalizing world speaks of reasons, but he doesn’t put all his faith in them. The very need for cosmopolitanism, as he frames it, is not one grounded in abstract ideals or categorical imperatives. It comes rather, as a way of living in the circumstance of globalization. Appiah doesn’t so much call for a totally new theoretical construction as welcome us to embrace what is already occurring.
The place of reasons for him isn’t easy to wrap one’s head around. On the one hand, he is a philosopher, and wields reasons for his claims like one. Reasons make up the intellectual worlds we inhabit, and we can’t escape the need for them—nor should we want to. On the other, though, “theories,” he writes, “are underdetermined by the evidence” (p. 40). What this means is that a variety of intellectual and cultural constructs can be adequate descriptions of the world.
This sounds a lot like crass relativism—where every theory is basically equivalent to every other—but in fact Appiah claims from the outset to be after something quite different. “There are some values,” he writes, “that are, and should be, universal, just as there are lots of values that are, and must be, local” (xxi).
The truth Appiah is after, ultimately, is a pragmatic one, a truth in practice. What matters to him is not when people from different backgrounds can agree on the same reasons, but when they can agree to coexist and cooperate for different reasons. For instance, the well-meaning urbanite might advocate creating a nature preserve in order to enjoy the place on vacations, while someone living near the site might support the preserve in order to keep a water source from being contaminated by the mining operations that want to move into the area.
That such practical and practicable agreement actually equals truth is not an innovation with Appiah. It goes at least back to William James’s writings about the meaning of truth, and is at work in the operational wisdom of the American pluralist tradition.
Inscribed in this approach is the recognition that there is more at work in human reasons than pure reasoning itself. We build our reasons among webs of emotion, history, imagery, and politics. We use them, but we cannot expect everyone else to embrace ours. Taking this to be the case, I would add, reasons for war are impoverished in the absence of an account of its violence in practice.