Peter Singer, Palestine, and the Professional Perils of Philosophy (UNLOCKED)

His Gaza commentary shows just how wrong things can go when philosophers approach current events with nothing but their moral intuitions and whatever they gleaned from this morning's New York Times.

Perhaps the most prominent living representative of “continental” philosophy, Slavoj Žižek, was at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week. The organizers had just made the grotesque decision to deplatform a Palestinian novelist, Adania Shibli, who they’d previously planned to award a prize at the Fair. Officially they were “postponing” the prize but they also canceled a panel with Shibli and her German translator and announced that, in the light of Hamas’s attacks two weeks ago, they were going to “give Israeli and Jewish voices additional time on our stages.”

The fact that what Israeli officials themselves described as Israel’s Dresden-style bombing of the Gaza Strip had killed rather dramatically more Palestinian civilians by the time the Book Fair than the number of Israeli civilians killed in the Hamas attacks, and indeed that Israel was well on its way to achieving that result within a day of the Hamas incursions, doesn’t seem to have given the organizers much pause about their decision to give Palestinian voices less time on those stages than was initially planned.

Žižek took the opportunity of his own speech at the Fair to forcefully assert the basic humanity of the Palestinians, to call the decision to deplatform Shibli “scandalous,” and to confess that it made him a “little bit ashamed” to be there at all. He also expressed some fairly mainstream opinions on Israel/Palestine, some of which I’d take issue with, but this didn’t stop him from being repeatedly heckled by a “local politician” (apparently “the antisemitism commissioner of the German state of Hesse”) who seemed deeply offended by any hint of Žižek “comparing” the killing of large numbers of Palestinian civilians to the killing of large numbers of Israeli civilians.

The commissioner called any exploration of what these two things might have in common “relativism”—which is a pretty good sign that he’s either never set foot in a classroom where moral philosophy was being discussed or managed to avoid soaking up even the most mind-numbingly basic distinctions while he was there. Applying the same moral standards to the deeds of actors on different sides of a conflict is precisely the opposite of relativism.

I might write more about the whole sordid incident elsewhere soon and I’ll save the rest of what I have to say about it for that article if and when it comes together. For now, though, here’s the point:

By the time you get to the end of the video, when one of the principal organizers of the Book Fair gets on stage for a couple minutes of impromptu remarks praising the heckler, if you don’t feel some level of admiration for the moral courage Slavoj is showing in saying what he said in that particular room, you and I probably have fundamentally incompatible value systems. I thought he was fantastic.

So, if that’s the track record during these last two weeks of the most prominent living representative of “continental philosophy,” what about the other team—the one in which I and most of my friends in the discipline got our training?

Surely any short list of the world’s most prominent living representatives of “analytic” philosophy would include Peter Singer. He’s certainly the most prominent living representative of utilitarianism. And like Žižek, he both engages in obscure disputes with other academics and sounds off about political and quasi-political subjects for a much bigger audience.

Back in 2004, for example, he came out with a book called The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush. I remember liking it. I read back through some early chapters this week and it still strikes me as a useful example of how philosophical training in taking arguments apart and putting them back together again can be usefully combined with an accessible style for public political purposes—i.e. the very thing I’ve spent the last several years trying to do.

So how did Peter Singer rise to the moment in the last two weeks—as the Israeli military killed thousands of children in Gaza and ordered well over a million Palestinians to leave their homes? As Israel’s President explicitly argued that the civilians in Gaza are responsible for Hamas’s crimes because they didn’t stage an uprising to overthrow the Hamas leadership, as Israel’s Defense Minister announced a “complete siege” of the territory—”no electricity, no food, no fuel” to any of the millions of innocent people trapped there—and the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Singer’s own homeland proclaimed that “Australia stands with Israel and always will”?

He tweeted this:

Afterwards, he wrote an article for Project Syndicate saying essentially the same thing but using more words. And then, as far as I can tell, he’s decided that he’d said everything Mr. Utilitarian Ethics needed to say and he’s shrugged off the whole subject.

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There’s a moment in the article where he seems to be briefly troubled by Israel’s explicitly announced intention of denying electricity, food, and clean water to millions of human beings.

He writes:

Whether Israel can eliminate Hamas as a military force remains to be seen, but it is clear that in the battle to achieve that objective, Israel will have to be prepared to lose many lives, probably of both soldiers and hostages.

How far Israel will go with its declared intention to deny electricity, fuel, food, and water to the two million citizens of Gaza, many of them children, is hard to know. What is certain is that Hamas’s brutal crimes do not entitle Israel to starve children.

Having gotten this Solomonic ruling out of his system—I’ve decided you shouldn’t do the child-starving part—he immediately goes back to declaring his overall approval of Israel’s actions. But…plot twist! He’s come up with an explanation of why supporting Israel laying siege to the defenseless population of what’s essentially a 25-mile-long prison camp is good for the Palestinians.

In the eyes of many outside observers, the cause of Palestinian autonomy and statehood has long held the moral high ground. Now that cause has been stained by the gruesome murders and abductions – many of them captured on video – carried out in its name. Paradoxically, if Palestinians are ever to regain the moral high ground, they must hope for the destruction of Hamas. As long as Hamas can claim to represent them, the evil it has perpetrated will taint their cause.

Singer is getting his wires crossed in attributing support for the two-state solution to Hamas but I suppose what he really means is that they tainted “the cause of Palestinians not being oppressed.” What really strikes me about this paragraph, though, is that Singer seems to think there’s a big button on Benjamin Netanyahu’s desk that says “Press Here to Destroy Hamas” and the Important Moral Question to be adjudicated is to-press-or-not-to-press.

When this article appeared, Israel had already been quite busy, day after day, turning entire apartment blocks in Gaza into dust and rubble. There were already dozens of cases since the weekend started where every single generation of the same family had been killed by the IDF. The only hint of the existence of any of these facts anywhere in Singer’s piece comes in this paragraph:

When Hamas attacks Israeli civilians, it knows that this will lead to Israeli counterattacks in Gaza that are bound to kill and injure many civilians. Hamas locates its military sites in residential areas, hoping that this tactic will restrain Israeli attacks, or at least lessen international support for Israel.

Singer’s regurgitation of the “human shields” talking point is stomach-churningly stupid. Israel and the United States do plenty of “locat[ing] military sites in residential areas” too. So does everyone.

Visit a military base that’s not in the middle of the desert and you’ll see residential houses lining the street up to the base’s gates. Go to a shopping center and you’ll find an Army recruitment office. Any foreign air force bombing the United States would have an easy time running the “human shields” defense. And that’s the United States—a sprawling and spacious country that you could drive around for years without seeing the half of it. 25 miles long and 6 wide, Gaza is one of the most densely populated strips of land on the planet.

What really strikes me here, though, isn’t even the “human shields” garbage so much as that Hamas gets agency in this story while the Israeli response is reduced to something like a law of nature—of course, Hamas’s decision to attack will “lead to” Israel massacring Palestinian civilians. Did the months of settler pogroms on the West Bank prior to the incursions “lead to” Hamas’s attack?

Maybe, as with his quibble about the mass starvation of children, Singer wants Israel to “destroy Hamas” without blowing up civilians. There’s plenty of criticism of Bush not being careful enough about civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan in The President of Good and Evil. It would make sense for Singer to have the same concerns here. But if so, why doesn’t he say so here? And what would his Support for Israel Destroying Hamas even amount to at that point?

He’s certainly writing as if he supports something Israel is actually doing to try to Destroy Hamas. But if all he means is that he would hypothetically support a version of Israel’s operation that didn’t mostly kill civilians, that strikes me as exactly as pointless, and for exactly the same reason, as saying, Well, I support Hamas’s incursions into Israel except that they killed civilians.

Given, well, everything about Hamas’s ideology, leadership, and history, it was clear they wouldn’t strictly limit themselves to going after military targets. And given everything about the ideology, leadership, and history of the Israeli state—really ever since that state was born in an orgy of ethnic cleansing in 1948, and even more so since Netanyahu formed the most rabidly right-wing government in the country’s history—there was exactly as much chance of Israel attacking Gaza in ways that didn’t involve mass murder and mass expulsion of civilians. Saying you’d support a force that was never going to do it any way but this doing it—but only if they did a different way!—is just wasting everyone’s time with IDF fanfic.

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It’s worth taking a long step back. Why is Singer writing this way? Is it because he’s a stupid person? A malicious person?

Honestly, no and no. As I’ve discussed here before, I’m no utilitarian, but Singer is in many ways a worthy representative of that tradition. Some of the places his utilitarianism has led him over the decades are admirable—for example, his concern with inhumane conditions in factory farms.

While the connection between utilitarian worldview and his preferred normative conclusions tends to be straightforward, he’s good at formulating arguments for those conclusions that don’t rely on narrowly utilitarian premises. He knows that most of us care about moral principles that aren’t obviously reducible to balancing good and bad consequences, and he’s generally pretty happy to grant us our non-utilitarian values for the sake of argument. The results are sometimes genuinely compelling.

For example, The President of Good and Evil includes a point-by-point demolition of the “it’s your money” rhetoric Bush used to justify his tax cuts. Given the degree of state involvement in propping up the conditions for a thriving economy, Singer argues, the idea that there’s an amount of money you hypothetically would have in an otherwise identical world without taxation is “deeply incoherent.” As to the Lockean argument that you gain an intrinsic right to unowned resources by mixing your labor with them, the idea that mixing something you own with something you don’t own makes the whole thing yours seems awfully arbitrary. (“If I own some salt, and put it in the lake, I do not make all the water in the lake mine.”) And even if it’s “your money” and even if returning it to you is more important than providing social services, it hardly follows that Bush-style tax cuts for the rich are justified.

If we were to take the “It’s your money” line seriously, we might think of fairness in taxation as something akin to the distribution of a stash that has been recovered from a thief. Suppose the thief stole $10,000, in varying sums, from many people, but before being caught he spent most of it, and the stash contains only $1,000. We might then think the fair thing to do is to give each of the thief's victims 10 percent of the money he or she lost… Suppose, however, that we know that the $200 the theif stole from Angela means that she is facing eviction and homelessness because, through no fault of her own, she is $100 short with her rent. On the other hand, the $1,000 that was taken from Barbara is less than she spends each week shopping for stylish clothes at expensive botiques. Bush's idea that we should return the money to everyone from whom it was taken, in some way proportional to what was taken from them, would mean that we should return $100 to Barbara and only $20 to Angela.

That’s very good. So are Singer’s demolitions of Bush’s moral condemnation of stem cell research, his enthusiasm for the death penalty, and the odd fit between the two. (If the death penalty is justified because it deters crime and mistakenly executing an innocent or two is an acceptable risk, what exactly is the case against destroying some frozen embryos that would likely never have become living fetuses to save countless lives?)

So what explains his vapid defense of the IDF’s campaign of ethnic cleansing?

One hint might emerge from Singer’s comments on another subject—capitalism. If you read his work on effective altruism, for example, you can all but see him rolling his eyes and making jack-off motions at the very idea that poverty might be less effectively combatted by individual charity than with collective attempts at remaking the economic system. If you read his book on Marx, he asserts that no one’s been able to come up with anything better than regulated capitalism plus a welfare state—without engaging at all with the work of thinkers who’ve proposed detailed models of how a “feasible socialism” that steers clear of the problems with the Soviet model might work. He just can’t be bothered to take seriously any ideas about how the world works that don’t gel with the default assumptions of a New York Times-reading liberal college professor who wishes the U.S. were a bit more like Europe but certainly doesn’t want to sound unreasonable.

The Project Syndicate article starts with a summary of Israel/Palestine starting not in 1948 or even 1967 but with the “peace process” of the 1990s. The idea of an independent Palestinian state sounds fair to Singer and the extremism of Netanyahu’s right-wing government disturbs him. It never seems to occur to him that there might be anything about the basic project of building an exclusionary ethnostate that might lend itself toward the systematic mistreatment of those residents who can’t simultaneously (a) have equal rights and (b) make up too big a share of the population without wrecking the whole premise of the state. And he seems to take it for granted that “destroying Hamas” is even on the table as an option. It never seems to occur to him that most counterinsurgency campaigns in most places that have the stated aim of “destroying” some guerrilla force don’t actually lead to that force’s permanent non-existence.

He knows that pressing the Destroy Hamas button will lead to a lot of deaths, but he seems awfully optimistic that after that comes a reset of the conflict that will allow westerners to once again sympathize with Palestinians and that this will mean the Palestinians will get their own state and all will be well. As opposed to, say, a massive campaign of killing and dispalcement of civilians allegedly aimed at “destroying Hamas,” creating a hell of a lot of Palestinians sufficiently scarred by the experience of watching all their brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, aunts and uncles be maimed and killed that they’ll be ready to sign up for either Hamas itself or some even worse successor organization.

Marx said that philosophers have “merely” interpreted the world when “the point is to change it” but the problem with Peter Singer is a level more basic than that. It’s about the disconnect between the skills that make for rigorous philosophical reflection on ideas and what you need even to accurately interpret external reality.

If you accept Singer’s utilitarian premise that maximizing good consequences and minimizing bad ones is all that matters morally, this should lead you to spend even more time than you might otherwise thinking about history, about existing power structures, and what all that tells you about the likely consequences—not just the consequences tomorrow, but the generational consequences—of different possible courses of action. The problem is that training in philosophy by itself doesn’t equip you for that. And even Singer the Utilitarian is ultimately just better at making a priori arguments than he is at the empirical stuff.

To be clear, I’m not raising any of this as an objection to studying philosophy—something I’m pretty clearly all in favor of!—or even applying what you learn from doing so to political analysis. My point is that you need to supplement that training in analyzing abstract arguments with a robust understanding of the dynamics of power and violence in the real world.

Hamas’s tactics are horrifying and indefensible is a fine starting point. I’ve repeatedly criticized those (relatively few) western leftists who’ve obfuscated that point. But however reasonable your moral intuitions, trying to navigate this stuff without an understanding of material reality, just on the basis of a moral intuition or two and whatever you gleaned from this morning’s New York Times, is a recipe for a lot of deeply embarrassing bullshit.