The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror

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The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
ISBN
9780748622245

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror is a lecture and book written by Michael Ignatieff as part of the Gifford Lectures. In it, Ignatieff considers the question of how, in a liberal democracy, it is possible to balance the legitimate rights of innocent citizens against the state's need to combat terrorism.

Historical context

This book was written in 2003 to address questions of human rights and humanitarian policy which arose as a result of the issues surrounding the

Kennedy School of Government
.

Publication history

The book is based on a series of six lectures that Ignatieff gave at the University of Edinburgh in 2003 as part of the Gifford Lectures. The book was initially published in hardcover form in 2004,[3] then in 2005 in paperback by Edinburgh University Press.[4] Then, later in 2005, a new paperback edition was published by the Princeton University Press including a new preface by the author.[5]

Structure and arguments

In this book Ignatieff argues that the war against terrorism requires acts which go beyond those permitted by our constitutional restraints and protections of the recognition of individual legal rights. To balance this necessary erosion of liberal freedoms and rights, Ignatieff presents a framework of judicial review, executive and Congressional oversight, free debate and limits on interrogation.[6] He writes that "...defeating terror requires violence. It may also require coercion, secrecy, deception, even violation of rights...To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war."

Reception

The Lesser Evil was reviewed in

Ethics & International Affairs in 2005,[7] and in the Michigan Law Review in 2006.[8] Ronald Steel wrote in The New York Times that "in concocting a formula for a little evil lite to combat the true evildoers, Michael Ignatieff has not provided, as his subtitle states, a code of 'political ethics in an age of terror' but rather an elegantly packaged manual of national self-justification."[6]

Jedediah Purdy highlights what he sees as two of the principal sources of Ignatieff's approach - the jurisprudence of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith and the work of Isaiah Berlin. These give Ignatieff's work a sense of the moral life as a product of the passions rather than a strict Platonic/Kantian idea of moral reasoning, and also from Berlin what can be described as "value pluralism" - in guiding our actions there is no clear unique moral right answer, we must trade off each freedom against the other, and particularly liberties and securities. Purdy describes The Lesser Evil as Ignatieff's attempt to respond to criticisms that his theory fails to provide a principled basis to guide our decisions on future actions. Purdy goes on to highlight what he sees as problems with Ignatieff's five tests for coercive measures, in that some of the individual tests are too indeterminate, and that he provides no detail as to how each of competing considerations expressed in the tests is to be weighed against each other.

Sources

See also

  • Lesser evil

References

  1. ISBN 9780691123936
    . Retrieved 18 February 2013.
  2. ^ a b "Liberty's travails on the road to Armageddon". Times Higher Education. 17 December 2004. Retrieved 23 July 2013.
  3. ISBN 9780748618729
    .
  4. ISBN 9780748622245
    .
  5. ISBN 9780691123936
    .
  6. ^ a b c Steel, Ronald (25 July 2004). "Fight Fire With Fire". New York Times. Retrieved 23 July 2013.
  7. ^ "The Lesser Evil". Ethics & International Affairs. 19 (2). September 2005. Retrieved 23 July 2013.
  8. ^ Purdy, Jedediah (May 2006). "The Limits of Courage and Principle". Michigan Law Review. 104 (6). Retrieved 23 July 2013.

External links

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