I guess what I’m trying to tangle with is the gap between what is and what people think ought to be. I keep seeing many historical events where there is debate about the justness of regicide, the use if certain weapons, the killing of certain people, and so on.
There is a cynical sense in which violence is just part of what the world is and how it functions, not always a necessary in every situation but one that can’t be done away with. But that line and where it is drawn between deploring it and defending its need is intriguing. Even the framing in martial arts of self defense is the same framing in violent endeavors where one is the invader.
My countries. Australia and now the US have never been invaded and likely have little need to fear as much but their interests do not lay solely within national borders and waters. They cannot be so atomized, and so even while framing interests as a point of defense, there is also clear offense but of course in defending and maintaining a certain order of things. Just as a state may terrorize its population but is defended in ways no individual acting outside the states authority would be allowed.
It seems that there can be a line where things are framed as unnecessarily cruel, but at the same time brutality can be calculated as well. It does little to make things less horrific but do the asserted ideals play a significant if even imperfect role? Or are they to be viewed cynically as just another weapon to best over another's head just as the law may in the abstract apply equally but seems to disproportionately hurt the weaker parties and it is simply the state of what is, that the weak suffer the strong. It’s the anarchy or order of the yard in a prison.
https://acoup.blog/2019/12/05/collections-a-trip-through-thucydides-fear-honor-and-interest/ Again, to follow the argument, the Athenians are asserting first that there is a set of rules which govern the behavior of states (fear, honor, interest) which may be observed to exist and that second no state may thus be faulted for behaving in accordance with these rules. There is thus both an ‘positive’ (or objective/fact-based; ‘what is’) observation and a normative (or value-judgment; ‘what we ought to do’) based conclusion; the former serves as the foundation for the latter. It is important not to merge those two steps; the core of this argument is about what is, which is only then used to explain what ought to be.
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These three motivations form a set of postulates in a proof which the Athenian envoys bring to its inevitable conclusion in the next sentence: “it has always been set down that the weaker should be subject to the stronger.” This line is often translated as “it has always been the law” which is a fair translation – the verb here (καθίστημι) has the sense of ‘appointing’ or ‘setting down’ but in this context, it really has the sense of implying a law – not in the sense of a legal issue, but a law like the law of gravity or the laws of physics, a fundamental constraint of the universe we live in. The strong will dominate because of interest, they will hold their domination out of fear and honor, and the weak will submit out of fear themselves.
It is the inescapable conclusion of the initial supposition – hard to resist – that the actions of states are driven by those three greatest motives: fear, honor and interest. Interest will cause the stronger to seek resources and control at the expense of the weaker; fear will – as in the Athenian case – cause the state with empire to cling ever more tightly to it (the traditional modern metaphor is one riding a tiger – empire is dangerous to ride, but far, far more dangerous to get off); honor will ensure that no state feels it can back down from a threat or a promise once made.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By Unthinking Majority
- By Saeko
- By Tainari88
- By MistyTiger