Is genocide really permissible if State A says that it is or if the society in State A holds it to be acceptable in certain situations? My ability to accept or reject this proposition neces- sarily engages my moral beliefs and cannot be decided exclusively from a naturalistic position external to morality.
As Thomas Nagel has recently argued, however much I may try to assume an external position, I am pro- pelled into a moral stance which it turns out is very difficult to occupy. External skepticism has a long and complex history as regards the question of the basis of obligation in international law.
For any legal thinker schooled in the post-enlightenment secular society of the West, the orgins of this story are usually traced back to the Peace of Wesphalia in and the rise of the idea of social contract. However we proceed then, we cannot avoid the deep and complex problems raised by the relationship of morality to law.
Even if we start from the premise that morality concerns only the internal perspective that the individual adopts regarding her relationship to others and thus concede that the emergence of and respect for law does not necessarily require the individual to internalize the interests of others i.
As long as she will have to compete with others, and as long as she cannot always be certain she will prevail, there are inherent incentives for her to subjugate her preference and redefine her self-interest for immediate satisfaction to her longer-term interest of self-preservation.
The critical point then is that denials of the existence of objective truth in a given domain cannot be established outside of that domain. Skeptical rationalism must therefore contend with the countervailing force of the judgments in the domain it is trying to de- value. How this argument will be resolved will thus be determined, at least in part, by the answer to internal questions.
Reflection upon these internal questions will show that solely instrumental rationalistic arguments which seek to abandon moral truth claims altogether are unreasonable. Such interests as these tend to put a state at odds with other states and peoples and to threaten their safety and secu- rity, whether they are expansionist or not.
The background conditions also threaten hegemonic war. This view is premised on a duty to recognize the autonomy of others and to adopt an attitude of mutual respect. Rational choice is understood to be limited and constrained by the notion of reasonableness in the sense of reciprocity and the offering of fair terms of cooperation to others. This is an inherently intersubjective and dialogic undertaking: the limits which reasonableness imposes on rational self-interest cannot be established uni- laterally or in a vacuum; they need to be worked out in conversation and dialogue with others.
As argued below, it is this basic philosophy which underlies the United Nations Charter and post-Second World War attempts to forge a liberal international legal order.
How the material content and scope of that law is to be worked out is, of course, es- sentially-contested. But the need and justification for an agreed system of rules and norms between differently-situated states and peoples rests on the cogency of this moral premise, whether this be in the communitarian and universalistic tradition of Rawls or the autonomy-oriented and positivistic tradition of Hobbes.
This formidable and arguably improbable task is facilitated by the technique of legal formalism. It is only because the regime comprises noninstrumental rules i. This remains the case even though States may differ greatly in their comprehensive views about the good and true way of life. In this respect, the animating virtues of the modern view are notions of peace, toleration and value pluralism.
For it is only if we do so, that we can appreciate both the causes and consequences of the current two extremes of power politics and imperial moralizing in U. First, as noted above, rational choice theory is premised as a descriptive matter on the unfettered freedom of choice of States in the conduct of their international relations. Even for a superpower, the normative logic of the Hobbesian argument needs to be addressed: i.
Second, however, rational choice theorists are not silent on the norma- tive dimensions of international law. Indeed, it was the intractable nature of claims of this very kind that eventually led Rawls to distinguish between a political conception of justice on the one hand and a comprehensive philosophical doctrine on the other.
The dramatic reduction and limitation on freedom resulting from such claims are less visible in societies, political traditions and academic cultures such as in the U. Nowhere is this more evident than in contemporary debates and struggles over the meaning and application of universal hu- man rights norms.
It is to this issue that we now turn. Instrumentalism and International Organization The idea of legal formalism as a means to promote and secure the ideals of peace, toleration and value pluralism is an attractive picture so far as it goes.
The difficulty, however, is that any argument for such a formal view is ambiguous. Formal legal norms are always suspended precariously between two other virtues which international law simultaneously seeks to incorpo- rate and mediate: the seemingly opposing ideas of justice and consent. On their own, these two further virtues appear to threaten the coherence of international law qua law: justice because it substitutes vague and subjective ideas about international morality for the rules actually obtaining between states;38 consent because it identifies international law primarily with State will thus making it only external municipal law.
In the one case, community is interpreted as negative collectivism and auton- omy independence, self-determination is presented as the normative goal.
In the other, autonomy is interpreted as negative egoism and community integration, solidarity as what the law should aim at. Neither community nor autonomy can be exclusive goals. To think of community as the ultimate goal seems utopian: as there is no agreement on the character of a desirable community, attempts to impose it seem like imperialism in disguise.
To think of autonomy as the normative aim seems apologist: it strengthens the absolutist claims of national power-elites and supports their pursuits at international dominance. The humanistic universalism of the communitarian argument is limited by implicit acknowledgment of the boundaries and finitude of deontologi- cal reasoning whether arrived at from notions of God or Natural Reason and thus by the unavoidability of pluralism and reasonable disagreement.
The moral notion of universal right is thus premised on the idea of a social ethics, i. In this way, community-oriented arguments contain within themselves the normative aims of self-determination and may be constructed without lapsing into totalitarianism. In this way, autonomy-oriented arguments contain within themselves the normative aims of communal integration and solidarity and may be constructed with- out degenerating into unlimited egoism.
The international legal project is driven by this dialectic which creates a dynamics of contradiction and constant oscillation between patterns of argument seeking to legitimate social order against individual freedom.
The result is that international law—and its actual application and practice in and by international organizations—provides a site of deliberation and contestation which opens a possible pathway by which to transcend the twin dangers of power politics and imperial moralizing discussed above. In the case of core human rights treaties such as the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Conventions against Genocide and Torture, the legal validity of the relevant norms is the consent of the member states themselves.
The act of state acceptance by ratification of the treaty unites the ideas of consent and justice: a material norm such as to free speech or freedom of religion is thereby transformed into a legal norm which in turn creates corresponding rights and duties both as between and within the states parties to the convention.
This is what I mean by the social ethics of formal positivism, the key point of which is the need to engage with others as equals in the pursuit of a normative consensus reflected in law. This does not eliminate power politics, but it does ensure that powerful states need to obtain the agreement of less-powerful states for any putative international regime or normative framework. Or, conversely, State B asserts that its sovereignty is subject to no external limit other than that to which it expressly consents and thus that it too rejects certain norms?
In each case, a gap is now evident between consent and justice with the result that both the integrity and universality of the law is threatened. How is this impasse to be resolved? The Example of International Human Rights Both of these dynamics have played out in spectacular terms in the field of human rights in recent years.
The techniques, among other things, include questioning and conversation. And like any other living practice, philosophy can go dead. It is an embarrassment that for Heidegger persists to this day. The techniques and practices and materials of philosophy can grip practitioners in such a way that manifests the divine. For Heidegger, much of philosophy since then has been an exercise of cov- ering up and managing this void at the center of core philosophical practices and materials.
The Philosophy of Culture as an Expression of Idol Anxiety For Heidegger, this trivialized scholastic philosophizing was in large measure trivial to the extent that it suppressed anxiety about the fact that philosophi- cal practice had lost its distinctive revelatory power.
Heidegger views the cul- tural discourse of his day, however, as an expression of deep anxiety about this philosophical idolatry, singling out the writings of Oswald Spengler, Ludwig Klages, Max Scheler, and Leopold Ziegler. In each case, the call for a reenergizing of philosophy through new cultural objects like books and paintings and a new mythology expresses a background worry that some measures be taken to resuscitate practices taken to have gone dead, to create new vibrant, resonating, captivating techniques for authentic engagement with matters of the deepest concern.
For Heidegger, these sorts of reports on the human condition are just as trivializing as school metaphysics. They express idol anxiety without enabling us to engage it and understand its significance as an occasion for authentic philosophizing.
The cries of the likes of Spengler and company register attempts to activate the mood again, to get turned on again by philosophizing, to recover its materi- als from the threat of idolatry. Moods do not arise by thinking or deciding or forcing them into existence, as the host of any good party knows. We can prepare for them, take steps to arrange the situation so that a mood may arise.
Still, captivation by a mood always involves some passive moment, something carrying us away. Moods in- dicate a dimension of human action beyond voluntary effort. Anxiety about how to get in the mood of philosophy does, however, sug- gest a background mood that gives the various programs for cultural renewal their vitality. That mood is boredom. Rather than participating in debates that seek to confront philosophi- cal idol anxiety by sterile means, Heidegger situates those very anxieties in the practical and emotional contexts in which they could matter to the agents involved.
They can matter if they covertly express another, captivating mood, in which those agents are already gripped. Awakening philosophizing proper, for Heidegger, can happen by allowing what is implicit in this mood to speak out more clearly and forcefully.
Awakening a Mood Heidegger, like many other writers of his and our generation, sees a pervasive sense of emptiness in the materials and practices of philosophical questioning, and with it, a loss of the distinctive way in which that questioning could bring people into a certain connection with the divine.
This sense that something has gone awry in that philosophy no longer connects us with the divine, I have argued, should be understood as a form of idol anxiety. But Heidegger, in contrast to most others in the tradition, suggests not managing and controlling that anxiety to assuage fears but awakening a fun- damental philosophizing mood of boredom.
What does this mean? What is at stake in this puzzling approach? First, let us reflect on the notion of awakening a mood. To induce bore- dom would be to create it actively in people who are not already subject to the mood. This is what Andy Warhol seems to have been up to in some of his film projects.
Smashing philosophical idols and creating new ones does not therefore constitute for Heidegger a successful response to philosophical idol anxiety. No re- newal or rearguard action is needed—just listening more attentively to what is already there, and releasing the philosophizing and reflective potential in that orientation.
The renewal has already happened, he is urging them to un- derstand, since we are the sorts of beings who always, even and in particular in our boredom, are manifesting a stance on the meaning of being, a stance on how things are to show up as significant.
His aim is to clear a space where judgments about what that response means can occur. Awakening Boredom The phenomenology of boredom is meant to accomplish this task. How is it supposed to work? To begin with, Heidegger discourages his students from thinking about boredom as an inner psychological quality to be ascertained and dissected.
To do so would disconnect the mood from the everyday world. Ascertaining a mood as a piece of psychology, however interesting or detailed, amounts to observing it from the outside, without allowing its dynamics to show up as constitutive of the shape of a world.
Boredom, by contrast, is a fundamental mood or attunement. And moods are more than fleeting inner states caused by or transferred to objects. When we fall in love with somebody, we are not experiencing a psychological state that we transfer to a blank object; rather, the beloved is in a certain way, a way that resonates in an erotic key, as it were, that we, as lovers, can tune into.
The book resonates, one might say, in a key of boredom; entering into the mood is to become tuned into that key. A boring movie gives our world a bor- ing configuration. If we are drawn into its spell, the world lights up to us in a way that is imbued with boredom, as a place without energy or excitement.
They draw us in and define the shared feeling of a common space. To awaken a philosophizing mood in a fundamental attunement of bore- dom, then, would mean articulating how that mood is implicitly manifest in the ways in which boredom is already resonating in certain everyday situ- ations. In so doing, they are to relate to them- selves as already having been drawn into philosophical questioning as a chal- lenge that has called them, even if they have not registered it as such.
Boredom Number 1: Boredom as Suspension of the Instrumental Heidegger starts this exercise in awakening by describing an everyday situa- tion full of boring objects. He begins with a carefully chosen example—being delayed in a train station— and describes the boredom of pacing around the station, going outside for a smoke, shuffling through schedules.
It might help if we update the example and think of an airport instead—the uncomfortable fake leather seats, the walks up and down the terminal, the endless magazines to be picked up and put down, and so on. It is one infused with meaning through a scientific-instrumental comportment.
In the airport, we encounter things and others as impediments to be overcome on our way to our given goals; they are means and conditions—in- strumentalities—of ends, according to which we seek to move on to where we need to go. When it runs smoothly, the airport allows us to achieve those ends with maximal efficiency. The various conditions—distance, time, weather, traffic, people, and so forth—that separate us from our ends are to be made as minimally relevant to action as possible.
Heidegger wants their authentic philosophizing to grow out of the demands implicit in, but masked by, this comportment. He asks them to attend to the odd type of temporality contained in being bored. The desk is also there to make time for work and writing; it is a proper desk at the time when work and writing are occurring.
A similarly shaped object that came into its own at the time when people sacrifice and worship would not be a desk, but an altar. Time is not a simple passing on from one moment to the next.
Things are timely; they show at the right or wrong time—beings and time are intimately linked. Nothing shows up in its time. Magazines, books, music, people, do not fully appear as copresent with us. Dragging time means that each thing is distanced, forced out of what it could be. More attention needs to be placed on the trying to understand ethnic identities as dynamic, contested and context dependent. It is imperative to move beyond from the hackneyed practice of 'ethicising' and 'tribalising' all that has to do with Africa.
There is a need for scholars, particularly Africanist scholars, to broaden the focus to other competing forms of social identities such as the emerging Christian Pentecostal identities in West Africa and the fluid town-centred identities in Southern Africa where people are beginning to see themselves more and more in relation and affiliation to big cities like Johannesburg, Soweto and Cape Town.
It is gratifying that some scholars are already thinking along these lines Hunt and Nicola Conclusion This essay has sought to make two main points. The first is that the traditional models and paradigms for explaining ethnicity no longer suffice.
March , I constructivism do not, in their classic forms, provide adequate or compelling explanations of the place of ethnicity in African societies, either in historical or contemporary contexts. Although each model offers some insights into the nature of ethnic identities, each model has its deficiencies that make it necessary for scholars to transcend them.
The second point is that ethnicity has been unnecessary privileged over other forms of identities in Africa. This has resulted in the relative neglect of the study of other forms of identities in the continent.
The more damaging effect of this is that it has helped to foster what Mahmood Mamdani has described as Afro-pessimism in Western scholarship and media -- a highly sceptical view that questions the ability of post-independence and indigenous regimes in sub-Saharan Africa to rejuvenate local conditions from within Mamdani The call here is not for the abandonment for studies in ethnic identities which continue to be relevant to understanding African politics and societies.
Rather, it is a call to broaden the field of identity scholarship to include other equally important forms of historical and emergent identities in Africa that may in fact help us better understand and contextualise ethnicity in Africa. Such a focal shift will not simply reflect the academic predi lections. It will also reflect trends across the continent that indicate the emergence and persistence of complex and multiple forms of self- identification arising from the changing landscape of political and social relations.
References Achebe, Chinua. The Trouble with Nigeria. London: Heinemann Educational Books. Ajayi, Ade Ranger ed. Emerging Themes of African History. London, Heinemann. Ajayi, Ade. New York, Praeger. Ake, Claude Anderson, Benedict. London: Verso. Bloom, Leonard. Cooper, Frederick. Berkeley, University of California Press. Crossette, Barbara.
Dodds, Martine and Meshack M. Khosa eds. Shifting African Identities. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council. Mamdani, Mahmood. March , I Moore, Sally Falk. Social facts and fabrications: 'Customary' law on Kilimanjaro Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Nnoli, Okwundiba Ethnic Politics in Nigeria. Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension. Osaghae, Eghosa. Himmelstrand et al eds. London: James Currey.
Peel, J. History and Ethnicity. New York: Routledge. Pittock, Murray G. London; Routledge. Ranger, Terence. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ranger eds. Hampshire: Macmillan. Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. New York: St. Spear, Thomas and Waller, Richard. London: J. Currey, Spear, Thomas. Stephen Hunt and Lightly Nicola, Trevor-Roper, Hugh. The invention of Scotland: Myth and History. New Haven: Yale University.
Udogu, E. The issue of political ethnicity in Africa. Aldershot: Ashgate. Vail, Leroy. March , I Yeros, Paris.
0コメント