The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror

by Michael Ignatieff

Overview

Must we fight terrorism with terror, match assassination with assassination, and torture with torture? Must we sacrifice civil liberty to protect public safety?


In the age of terrorism, the temptations of ruthlessness can be overwhelming. But we are pulled in the other direction too by the anxiety that a violent response to violence makes us morally indistinguishable from our enemies. There is perhaps no greater political challenge today than trying to win the war against terror without losing our democratic souls. Michael Ignatieff confronts this challenge head-on, with the combination of hard-headed idealism, historical sensitivity, and political judgment that has made him one of the most influential voices in international affairs today.


Ignatieff argues that we must not shrink from the use of violence—that far from undermining liberal democracy, force can be necessary for its survival. But its use must be measured, not a program of torture and revenge. And we must not fool ourselves that whatever we do in the name of freedom and democracy is good. We may need to kill to fight the greater evil of terrorism, but we must never pretend that doing so is anything better than a lesser evil.


In making this case, Ignatieff traces the modern history of terrorism and counter-terrorism, from the nihilists of Czarist Russia and the militias of Weimar Germany to the IRA and the unprecedented menace of Al Qaeda, with its suicidal agents bent on mass destruction. He shows how the most potent response to terror has been force, decisive and direct, but—just as important—restrained. The public scrutiny and political ethics that motivate restraint also give democracy its strongest weapon: the moral power to endure when the furies of vengeance and hatred are spent.


The book is based on the Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 2003.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691123936
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	09/04/2005
Series:	Gifford Lectures
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Michael Ignatieff, a writer, historian, and broadcaster, is Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. His books include Isaiah Berlin: A Life, Blood and Belonging, The Warrior's Honor, and The Needs of Strangers. His novel Scar Tissue was nominated for the Booker Prize, and his book The Russian Album, A Family Memoir won Canada's Governor General's Award and the Heinemann Prize of Britain's Royal Society of Literature.

Read an Excerpt

The Lesser Evil

Political Ethics in an Age of Terror

Chapter One

DEMOCRACY AND THE LESSER EVIL

On the appointed day the unarmed crowd of the Gothic youth was carefully collected in the square or forum; the streets and avenues were occupied by the Roman troops, and the roofs of the houses were covered with archers and slingers. At the same hour, in all the cities of the East, the signal was given of indiscriminate slaughter; and the provinces of Asia were delivered, by the cruel prudence of Julius, from a domestic enemy, who in a few months might have carried fire and sword from the Hellespont to the Euphrates. The urgent consideration of the public safety may undoubtedly authorize the violation of every positive law. How far that or any other consideration may operate to dissolve the natural obligations of humanity and justice is a doctrine of which I still desire to remain ignorant.
- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), 2.36

I

What lesser evils may a society commit when it believes it faces the greater evil of its own destruction? This is one of the oldest questions in politics and one of the hardest to answer. The old Roman adage-the safety of the people is the first law-set few limits to the claims of security over liberty. In the name of the people's safety, the Roman republic was prepared to sacrifice all other laws. For what laws would survive if Rome itself perished? The suspension of civil liberties, the detention of aliens, the secret assassination of enemies: all this might be allowed, as a last resort, if the life of the state were in danger. But if law must sometimes compromise with necessity, must ethics surrender too? Is there no moral limit to what a republic can do when its existence is threatened? As Edward Gibbon retold the story of how the Romans slaughtered defenseless aliens in their eastern cities in 395 C.E. as a preemptive warning to the barbarians massing at the gates of their empire, he declined to consider whether actions that political necessity might require could still remain anathema to moral principle. But the question must not only be asked. It must be answered.

If the society attacked on September 11, 2001, had been a tyranny, these ancient questions might not be relevant. For a tyranny will allow itself anything. But the nation attacked on that bright morning was a liberal democracy, a constitutional order that sets limits to any government's use of force. Democratic constitutions do allow some suspension of rights in states of emergency. Thus rights are not always trumps. But neither is necessity. Even in times of real danger, political authorities have to prove the case that abridgments of rights are justified. Justifying them requires a government to submit them to the test of adversarial review by the legislature, the courts, and a free media. A government seeking to respond to an attack or an expected danger is required to present the case for extraordinary measures to a legislature, to argue for them with reasons that might convince a reasonable person, and to alter the measures in the face of criticism. Even after extraordinary measures receive legislative approval, they will still come under review by the courts.

The first challenge that a terrorist emergency poses to democracy is to this system of adversarial justification. The machinery of legislative deliberation and judicial review grinds slowly. Emergencies demand rapid action. Hence they require the exercise of prerogative. Presidents and prime ministers have to take action first and submit to questions later. But too much prerogative can be bad for democracy itself.

In emergencies, we have no alternative but to trust our leaders to act quickly, when our lives may be in danger, but it would be wrong to trust them to decide the larger question of how to balance liberty and security over the long term. For these larger questions, we ought to trust to democratic deliberation through our institutions. Adversarial justification is an institutional response, developed over centuries, to the inherent difficulty of making appropriate public judgments about just these types of conflicts of values.¹ Citizens are bound to disagree about how far the government is entitled to go in any given emergency. Because we disagree deeply about these matters, democracy's institutions provide a resolution, through a system of checks and balances, to ensure that no government's answer has the power to lead us either straight to anarchy or to tyranny.

In a terrorist emergency, we disagree, first of all, about the facts: chiefly, what type and degree of risk the threat of terrorism actually presents. It would make life easy if these facts were clear, but they rarely are. Public safety requires extrapolations about future threats on the basis of disputable facts about present ones. Worse, the facts are never presented to the public simply as neutral propositions available for dispassionate review. They come to us packaged with evaluation. They are usually stretched to justify whatever case for action is being made. Those who want coercive measures construe the risk to be great; those who oppose them usually minimize the threat. The disagreements don't end there. Even when we agree about the facts, we may still disagree whether the risks justify abridgments of liberty.

These disagreements extend to the very meaning of democracy itself. For most Americans, democracy simply means what Abraham Lincoln said it was: government of the people, by the people, for the people. In this account, democracy is a synonym for majority rule. Popular sovereignty, through elected representatives, has to be the final arbiter of what the government can be allowed to get away with when it is trying to defend our freedoms and our lives. Democracies do have bills of rights but these exist to serve vital majority interests. When the executive branch of government suspends rights, for example, it does so in the interest of the majority of citizens. The public interests that these rights defend are defined by the elected representatives of the people, and courts must interpret what these rights mean in obedience to what legislatures and the people say the rights mean.² Defending a right of an individual, for example, to freedom of association in times of safety protects the liberty of all. But protecting that same individual in a time of emergency may do harm to all. A terrorist emergency is precisely a case where allowing individual liberty-to plan, to plot, to evade detection-may threaten a vital majority interest. A democracy has no more important purpose than the protection of its members, and rights exist to safeguard that purpose. Civil liberty, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court has written, means the liberty of a citizen, not the abstract liberty of an individual in a state of nature.³ Such freedom, therefore, must depend on the survival of government and must be subordinate to its preservation.

What prevents such a system from falling prey to the tyranny of the majority is the system of checks and balances and, more broadly, the democratic process of adversarial justification itself. While injustice can always be justified if you have to justify it only to yourself, it is less easy when you have to justify it to other democratic institutions, like courts and legislatures or a free press. Thus presidents or prime ministers may not see anything wrong in a stringent measure, but if they know that this measure will have to get by the courts and the legislature, they may think twice.

Besides these constitutional checks and balances, there would also be the democratic check of competing social, religious, and political interests in the nation at large. One of the most lucid versions of this argument is to be found in Federalist No. 51, where in discussing the federal system's balance of federal and state power, the authors go on to say that while all authority in the United States will be derived from the power of the majority,

the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and the number comprehended under the same government.⁴

Against this pragmatic view there is a moral view of democracy which maintains that it is something more than majority rule disciplined by checks and balances. It is also an order of rights that puts limits to the power of the community over individuals. These limits are not there just for prudential reasons, to prevent governments from riding roughshod over individuals. The rights are also there to express the idea that individuals matter intrinsically. Democracies don't just serve majority interests, they accord individuals intrinsic respect. This respect is expressed in the form of rights that guarantee certain freedoms. Freedom matters, in turn, because it is a precondition for living in dignity. Dignity here means simply the right to shape your life as best you can, within the limits of the law, and to have a voice, however small, in the shaping of public affairs. Government for the people, in other words, is something more than government for the happiness and security of the greatest number. The essential constraint of democratic government is that it must serve majority interests without sacrificing the freedom and dignity of the individuals who comprise the political community to begin with and who on occasion may oppose how it is governed. Rights certainly owe their origin to the sovereignty of the people, but the people-and their representatives-must steer majority interests through the constraints of rights.

Aharon Barak, president of Israel's Supreme Court, describes these two conceptions of democracy as "formal" and "substantive."⁵ Other scholars have contrasted a "pragmatic" reading of the U.S. Constitution with a "moral" reading.⁶ In normal times, these two meanings of democracy-one stressing popular sovereignty, the other stressing rights; one privileging collective interests, the other privileging individual dignity-are interdependent. You can't have a democracy without rights, and rights cannot be secure unless you have democracy. But in terrorist emergencies, their relation breaks apart. What makes security appear to trump liberty in terrorist emergencies is the idea-certainly true-that the liberty of the majority is utterly dependent upon their security. A people living in fear are not free. Hence the safety of the majority makes an imperative claim. On this view, rights are political conveniences a majority institutes for its defense and is therefore at liberty to abridge when necessity demands it. Those who defend a rights-based definition of democracy will then argue that rights lose all effect, not just for the individuals at risk, but for the majority as well if they are revocable in situations of necessity.

Both sides then appeal to history and seek vindication of their claims. Those who think of democracy primarily in terms of majority interest point to the frequent abridgments of liberty in national emergencies past-from Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War to the detention of illegal aliens after 9/11-and argue that democracies survive in part because they do not let rights stand in the way of robust measures. Moreover, robust measures do not prevent rights' returning in times of safety. Temporary measures are just that and they need not do permanent damage to a democracy's constitutional fabric. Those who put rights first will reply that yes, democracy survives, but rights infringements needlessly compromise the democracy's commitment to dignity and freedom. The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias.⁷ One side in the debate worries that caring overmuch about rights will tie the hands of a democracy, while the other insists that if rights are abridged, even for a few individuals, then democracy betrays its own identity.

Civil libertarians think civil liberties define what a democracy is. But the recurrently weak and shallow public support for civil liberties positions suggests that many Americans disagree. They believe that the majority interest should trump the civil liberties of terrorist suspects.⁸ For these democrats, rights are prudential limits on government action, revocable in times of danger; for civil libertarians, they are foundational commitments to individual dignity that ought to limit government action in times of safety and danger alike. For one side, what matters fundamentally is that democracies prevail. For the other, what matters more is that democracies prevail without betraying what they stand for.

A further disagreement arises over the question of whether a country facing a terrorist emergency should base its public policy exclusively on its own constitution and its own laws, or whether it has any duty to pay attention to what other states have to say and what international agreements and conventions require. Some maintain that a democracy's commitments to dignity are confined to its own citizens, not its enemies. Others point out that a democracy is not a moral island, sufficient unto itself. Thus, as many scholars have pointed out, the U.S. Constitution extends its protections to "persons" and not just to citizens.⁹ Hence aliens have rights under U.S. law-as well as, of course, under international conventions to which the United States is a signatory. Enemy combatants have rights under the Geneva Conventions, and even terrorists retain their human rights, since these are inherent in being human and hence irrevocable. Others think this approach values consistency more than justice. Justice-to the victims of terrorist outrages-requires that terrorists be treated as "enemies of the human race" and hunted down without any regard to their human rights.¹⁰

When citizens of a democracy insist that what matters most in a terrorist emergency is the safety of the majority, they are usually saying that rights are at best a side constraint, at worst a pesky impediment to robust and decisive action. Those who think this are also likely to believe that international agreements, like the Geneva Conventions or the Torture Convention, should not limit what the United States can do in a war on terror. Since the threat is primarily directed at the United States, it must respond according to its own system of law, not according to anyone else's standards.

Continues...

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Table of Contents

	Preface	vii
Chapter 1	Democracy and the Lesser Evil	1
Chapter 2	The Ethics of Emergency	25
Chapter 3	The Weakness of the Strong	54
Chapter 4	The Strength of the Weak	82
Chapter 5	The Temptations of Nihilism	112
Chapter 6	Liberty and Armageddon	145
	Notes	171
	Index	205

What People are Saying About This

Justice Richard Goldstone

Michael Ignatieff has written a sober yet chilling account of the issues facing liberal democracies in the face of modern international terrorism. In a surgical analysis he describes the challenges facing their leaders and citizens. His warning of the critical dangers of under- and over-reaction in combating terrorism could not be more timely.
— Justice Richard Goldstone, Constitutional Court of South Africa

Michael Doyle

Michael Ignatieff's The Lesser Evil is a strikingly readable rumination on the ethical challenge of our time: How can a liberal democracy survive the long struggle against terror and do so in ways that preserve its institutions and dignity intact? His answer is a profound moral analysis, drawing on insights from philosophy, law, and literature, of how to surmount the strength of the terrorists, who are weak, and avoid the weakness of the democracies, who can be both strong and just.
— Michael Doyle, Harold Brown Professor of Law and International Affairs, Columbia University

From the Publisher

"Michael Ignatieff has written a sober yet chilling account of the issues facing liberal democracies in the face of modern international terrorism. In a surgical analysis he describes the challenges facing their leaders and citizens. His warning of the critical dangers of under- and over-reaction in combating terrorism could not be more timely."—Justice Richard Goldstone, Constitutional Court of South Africa

"Michael Ignatieff's The Lesser Evil is a strikingly readable rumination on the ethical challenge of our time: How can a liberal democracy survive the long struggle against terror and do so in ways that preserve its institutions and dignity intact? His answer is a profound moral analysis, drawing on insights from philosophy, law, and literature, of how to surmount the strength of the terrorists, who are weak, and avoid the weakness of the democracies, who can be both strong and just."—Michael Doyle, Harold Brown Professor of Law and International Affairs, Columbia University

Recipe

"Michael Ignatieff has written a sober yet chilling account of the issues facing liberal democracies in the face of modern international terrorism. In a surgical analysis he describes the challenges facing their leaders and citizens. His warning of the critical dangers of under- and over-reaction in combating terrorism could not be more timely."—Justice Richard Goldstone, Constitutional Court of South Africa

"Michael Ignatieff's The Lesser Evil is a strikingly readable rumination on the ethical challenge of our time: How can a liberal democracy survive the long struggle against terror and do so in ways that preserve its institutions and dignity intact? His answer is a profound moral analysis, drawing on insights from philosophy, law, and literature, of how to surmount the strength of the terrorists, who are weak, and avoid the weakness of the democracies, who can be both strong and just."—Michael Doyle, Harold Brown Professor of Law and International Affairs, Columbia University

Editorial Reviews

"Ignatieff understands that democracies around the world were fighting terrorism long before 9/11. In this exceptionally sophisticated commentary, he provides much-needed global and historical context for America's war against al-Qaeda, illuminating the promise and peril of a range of possible strategies for combating terrorist threats. . . . The sheer diversity of his case studies enables Ignatieff to discredit any simple-minded approach to terrorism. . . . [His] impressive scholarship also underscores his warning that unless democracies subject all of their extraordinary tactics to legislative oversight and judicial scrutiny, they may subvert the very political traditions they set out to defend. The turbulence of recent history guarantees keen interest for this sobering inquiry."

Booklist

"Michael Ignatieff assesses America's war on terror and tries to determine what security measures a society can tolerate and still consider itself virtuous."

New York Times Book Review

"[A] thoughtful essay by a leading public intellectual. . . . [Ignatieff] eloquently argu[es] that a liberal democracy can survive the age of terror only if it takes seriously the political context within which terrorism thrives—that is, by engaging, persuading, and championing social justice."

Foreign Affairs

Michael Ignatieff has written a book in defense of liberty, in praise of democracy. . . . [I]t is too rare that the task is conducted with Ignatieff's learning and subtlety.

Michigan Law Review - Jedediah Purdy

Ignatieff presents a convincing argument as to how terrorist threats should be handled at the political level: with a combination of determination and caution.

Ethics

Ignatieff's analysis is nuanced, balancing ideals, necessities, and practicalities, and his literary inspirations are a welcome addition to doleful history.

San Francisco Chronicle - William S. Kowinski

We need calm, reasoned advice on how to balance the interests of security and liberty. We have it now in a remarkable book. Michael Ignatieff brings history, philosophy, law, and democratic morality to bear on the problem. That may sound daunting, but Ignatieff is such a forceful writer that it is a fascinating book. . . . Reading him is a bit like having a conversation with an eminently reasonable but convinced and powerfully convincing man.

New York Review of Books - Anthony Lewis

In The Lesser Evil, Michael Ignatieff addresses the ethical problems faced by liberal democracies. . . . [H]e soberly deals with permanent problems of American foreign policy, not only those specifically provoked by the Bush administration's war on terror: the problems of attempting to rule without demonstrated legitimacy, the prudential problem of choosing the lesser evil, the expedient choice of deliberative abuse or suspension of rights considered defining qualities of democracy, the limits of acceptable violence and coercion, and the problems of arbitrary detention, torture, assassinationand disregard of the rule of law—all the subject of policy choices made in Washington since September 2001.

Los Angeles Times - William Pfaff

Ignatieff presents a convincing argument as to how terrorist threats should be handled at the political level: with a combination of determination and caution.

"Ethics em Segev

Michael Ignatieff has written a book in defense of liberty, in praise of democracy. . . . [I]t is too rare that the task is conducted with Ignatieff's learning and subtlety.
— Jedediah Purdy

Michigan Law Review

Ignatieff's analysis is nuanced, balancing ideals, necessities, and practicalities, and his literary inspirations are a welcome addition to doleful history.
— William S. Kowinski

San Francisco Chronicle

We need calm, reasoned advice on how to balance the interests of security and liberty. We have it now in a remarkable book. Michael Ignatieff brings history, philosophy, law, and democratic morality to bear on the problem. That may sound daunting, but Ignatieff is such a forceful writer that it is a fascinating book. . . . Reading him is a bit like having a conversation with an eminently reasonable but convinced and powerfully convincing man.
— Anthony Lewis

New York Review of Books

In The Lesser Evil, Michael Ignatieff addresses the ethical problems faced by liberal democracies. . . . [H]e soberly deals with permanent problems of American foreign policy, not only those specifically provoked by the Bush administration's war on terror: the problems of attempting to rule without demonstrated legitimacy, the prudential problem of choosing the lesser evil, the expedient choice of deliberative abuse or suspension of rights considered defining qualities of democracy, the limits of acceptable violence and coercion, and the problems of arbitrary detention, torture, assassinationand disregard of the rule of law—all the subject of policy choices made in Washington since September 2001.
— William Pfaff

Los Angeles Times

Ignatieff understands that democracies around the world were fighting terrorism long before 9/11. In this exceptionally sophisticated commentary, he provides much-needed global and historical context for America's war against al-Qaeda, illuminating the promise and peril of a range of possible strategies for combating terrorist threats. . . . The sheer diversity of his case studies enables Ignatieff to discredit any simple-minded approach to terrorism. . . . [His] impressive scholarship also underscores his warning that unless democracies subject all of their extraordinary tactics to legislative oversight and judicial scrutiny, they may subvert the very political traditions they set out to defend. The turbulence of recent history guarantees keen interest for this sobering inquiry.

Booklist

Ignatieff, a leading liberal thinker on human rights issues, offers an impeccably (if often redundantly) argued case for how to balance security and liberty in the face of the new kind of threat posed by today's terrorists. His basic principle is that neither security nor liberty trumps the other a middle-of-the-road position but the more security-minded will no doubt find the author leans more to the civil libertarian side as he insists that, while the president may have prerogatives in terms of, say, limiting civil liberties, these actions must always be subject to legislative and judicial review. In the course of his discussion, Ignatieff, director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights, touches on key and troubling issues, such as how a democracy fighting nihilistic terrorists can avoid falling into the nihilistic trap itself, and why (according to Ignatieff) there is no moral equivalence between the violence perpetrated by a Palestinian suicide bomber and that of Israel's military retaliations. On the question of torture, Ignatieff argues, against Alan Dershowitz, that even in "ticking-bomb" cases torture must be abjured. Equally controversial but forcefully argued is his contention that a liberal democracy must respect the human rights of its enemies, however inhumane their own actions have been. The bottom line for Ignatieff is, in the end, commonsensical: a moral response to terrorism, while advancing security, must respect the equality and dignity of all and "make the fewest possible changes to our tried and tested standards of due process." This is an essential starting point for liberals and civil libertarians in grappling with the difficult moral and political challenges posed by the war on terror. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In this wise and reflective book, Ignatieff (director, Carr Ctr. for Human Rights Policy, Harvard) draws upon his training as a historian and journalist to look behind the popular knee-jerk reactions to terrorism. Ignatieff is more a realist than an ideologue, and he presents an overview of how democracies have dealt with terrorist movements in the past and how they might best approach the terrorist threat today. Central to his book are several questions: Is there no moral limit to what a republic can do when its existence is threatened? Are human rights to be sacrificed for the safety of the population? Finally, when is extreme violence justified? Ignatieff argues that when violence by the state is justified, it should be tempered and limited; likewise, when emergency measures are enacted (such as the suspension of civil liberties), they need to be temporary. With examples from history (the Roman Empire, tsarist Russia, the IRA, and Britain), he explores the tension between democracy and survival and concludes that "liberal democracies consistently overreact to terrorist threats." This book is much more than a philosophical exercise. Ignatieff addresses real concerns, such as the acquisition of nuclear or chemical weapons by terrorist organizations. This should be required reading for all informed citizens as we face an uncertain future.-Thomas A. Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib, Lancaster, PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Finalist for the 2004 Lionel Gelber Prize

From the Publisher