Author: Patrick Stokes

This piece originally appeared on The Conversation’s Cogito blog.

One detail you might have missed in the recent uproar over the Australian Border Force’s involvement in “Operation Fortitude” was the ABF’s understanding of what a border is:

We consider the border not to be a purely physical barrier separating national states, but a complex continuum stretching offshore and onshore, including the overseas, maritime, physical border and domestic dimensions of the border.

That language set ABF up for obvious lines of parody (“the border is just a state of mind, maaan…”) and the inevitable “It’s the vibe of the thing” memes. It all sounded a bit too, well, philosophical for a government department, let alone a newly-uniformed and armed organisation.

It’s certainly an unfamiliar thing when governments start to sound like philosophers, though there is precedent. In the middle of last decade, for instance, the Israeli Defence Force experimented with strategies based on Critical Theory and twentieth century French philosophy, particularly the work of Deleuze. It wasn’t a success, reportedly because “Not every officer in the IDF had the time or the inclination to study postmodern French philosophy.”

Imaginary lines and real lives

But waxing philosophical about borders is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, for borders, in the literal sense, are inherently abstract. They are the legal and cartographic expression of historical, cultural, and political contingencies. Not surprisingly, imposing these abstractions on the physical world sometimes leads to absurdity.

For instance, as a result of a complex set of Medieval treaties and land purchases, the Dutch municipality of Baarle-Nassau contains a patchwork of Belgian enclaves (Baarle-Hertog), some of which themselves contain parcels of Dutch territory, nested like Russian dolls. There are cafes that straddle the border; at one time, when Dutch law imposed early closing time on restaurants, patrons sitting in the Netherlands would simply get up and move to a table on the Belgian side of the room.

Elsewhere, an interminable dispute between Egypt and Sudan over which of two century-old borders is the right one means that Bir Tawil, an uninhabited 2,060 km2 patch of desert, is unclaimed by any nation: Egypt insists it’s part of Sudan, and Sudan insists it’s part of Egypt.

And for every such piece of quaint geopolitical trivia, there are uncountable tragedies connected with or occasioned by borders: tragedies of separation, of deprivation, of conflict, of death. We should be thinking hard about borders. They may be abstractions but their impact is desperately real.

Sovereignty and control

In December of 2014, the newly appointed Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, Mike Pezzullo, gave a speech on “Sovereignty in an Age of Interdependency” in which he attempted to do just that sort of thinking. It’s a significant speech with far-reaching implications, one that both puts his department’s conceptualisation of borders into context, and unwittingly exposes the very conceptual problems at the heart of how we think about migration.

Pezzullo declared that while the mission of DIBP’s predecessor institutions going back to 1945 had been one of nation-building, now it was one of negotiating the tension between the openness required by globalization and the post-Westphalian state’s “ancient coding as a vehicle for territoriality and exclusion”:

I see them [borders] as mediating between the imperatives of the global order, with its bias towards the flow of people, goods, capital, data and knowledge, and the inherent territoriality and capacity for exclusion which comes with state sovereignty.

In the simplest of terms, modern states demand the right to determine how they will live within their own boundaries, but also seek the benefits of open movement of goods and people and of a rule-governed international order. The tension here is that we claim the right to make rules for ourselves while living in a broader environment that requires us to subject ourselves to external rules if we are gain certain benefits.

In that context, ABF’s “complex continuum” model of the border makes more sense. But it also draws our attention to what that border really amounts to.

Our gift (not) to give?

The language of ‘border protection’ is useful for governments, as it conjures
up images of patrolling a physical frontier, of keeping a walled populace safe from a hostile world without. That we’re now being told this wall is in fact a “continuum” that exists all the way to Flinders Street (even if Fortitude is what the ABF regards as a “behind the border” operation) gives the lie to this imagery. Entitlements to remain in a country aren’t created by borders, but the other way around: borders exist because of such entitlements. They are functions of a right that states claim for themselves, a right that Pezzullo sums up as being “able to determine who and what has the right, or gift, of entry or exit, and under what conditions.”

As I’ve argued here before, part of what makes the problem of asylum seekers so disturbing for us in the developed world is that these people’s very existence calls into question our assumed entitlement to live where we do, as we do. What moral rights does the mere accident of birth bestow upon us? Why should I be rich and safe and the other debased and imperilled? How do we derive rights of territorial exclusion from such sheer contingency?

The more fundamental question raised by this concept of the border is not how to balance sovereignty against the demands of global commerce; the question is what entitles us to make – or withhold – a gift of something we haven’t ourselves earned.

Community and contingency

You might reply that rights of abode derive from certain forms of connectedness to the community. The taunt of “I grew here, you flew here” is meant to convey that the speaker has the relevant kind of connections, and so an entitlement to be here, while the ‘newcomer’ does not. But simply being born here doesn’t automatically mean you’re connected to the community, while as the current case of Mojgan Shamsalipoor attests, connection to the community is no protection against the threat of deportation either.

Even if we could establish such a right on the basis of concrete connections, we’d still be left with the more fundamental challenge of whether we have a right to insist on ‘sovereignty’ ahead of our duty of concern for the other. In his speech, Pezzullo speaks of border protection as giving governments the “space” to be “compassionate” towards asylum seekers – phrasing that suggests compassion is somehow one policy option among others rather than a standing moral demand.

He points out that the sheer scale of the global refugee population means no one nation or even group of nations can take on the whole burden themselves. Yet nations already do take on that burden – asylum seekers physically have to be somewhere, after all – so what this really means is that developed nations cannot comfortably take on such burdens. But why simply assume we have a right to be comfortable? What grounds such a right? And just what flows from it?

Confronting our assumptions

If our current policy settings are to be believed, almost anything is licensed by our ‘right’ of exclusion, up to and including offshore detention in conditions so horrific it is clearly meant to be a cruel deterrent to anyone who would dare challenge us, not a bureaucratic mechanism for the orderly flow of people across borders.

The spectre of uniformed quasi-police checking papers in the middle of Melbourne rightly disturbed enough of us that it caused an immediate backlash. And while Australia continues to pull its hair out over relatively tiny numbers of “irregular” arrivals, Europe continues to experience appalling tragedies as it struggles to deal with incoming refugees and migrants.

Both these events confront us with what – if anything – underpins our claimed right of exclusion, even in the face of suffering and death. We should indeed be thinking about borders. We just might not like where that thinking takes us.

Patrick Stokes, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Deakin University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

This piece originally appeared on The Conversation’s Cogito blog.

Whatever you think of his views, or of how he came to sit in the Senate, it’s hard to deny that David Leyonhjelm is the real deal: a conviction politician whose positions are governed by principle, not populism.

The problem for his supporters is that Leyonhjelm is exposing the disturbing moral thinness of the libertarian principles he espouses.

In the wake of a parliamentary committee recommending a referendum on constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians, Leyonhjelm repeated the claim that there’s doubt in anthropological circles that the Aboriginal nations were the first inhabitants of the Australian continent.

That claim struck many as decidedly odd. However, this empirical claim is just one component of a larger position that Leyonhjelm outlined in a speech in March. Appeals to anthropological data and a curious concern not to exclude those who don’t respect Aboriginal culture are just ornaments to his main objection. That comes near the end of his speech, and is both perfectly consistent with his ideological commitments, and perfectly emblematic of what’s wrong with libertarianism:

Every human being in Australia is a person, equal before the law. Giving legal recognition to characteristics held by certain persons – particularly when those characteristics are inherent, like ancestry – represents a perverse sort of racism. Although it appears positive, it still singles some people out on the basis of race.

This is a familiar argument: if we’re all equal, and if it’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of race, then it’s just as wrong to discriminate positively as negatively.

The problem with talking about equality at this level of abstraction is that it makes the reality of material privilege invisible. And the bigger problem is that for libertarians, and a great many classical liberals, that’s not actually a problem at all.

The skinless enlightenment man

Treasurer Joe Hockey insists the state promises “equality of opportunity” but not “equality of outcome”. But “equality of opportunity” here is understood as mostly formal. It’s the equality Anatole France spoke of:

The majestic equality of the law, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.

But if you can strip human beings back to a self so abstract that purely formal equality seems compelling, you can convince yourself that practical disadvantage doesn’t matter. Leyonhjelm’s speech name-checked the Enlightenment, and this is fitting. What emerges from the Enlightenment and its early modern antecedents is, as the philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, a “buffered” self, an autonomous agent impervious to external forces.

The men of the Enlightenment – figures like Locke, Hume, Kant, Jefferson and Rousseau – laid out the value of liberty and the essential dignity of humans spectacularly well, but the humans they were describing looked an awful lot like themselves. Being white, male, heterosexual, well-educated and materially comfortable – qualifications which allow you to pass through the world without the kinds of friction that others encounter – makes it much easier to conceive of yourself as an objective centre of disembodied reason and freedom.

Abstract reason doesn’t go hungry. Abstract reason has no skin; it is not born into a body situated into a world of meanings it cannot control.

Nor does it have a history. In speaking of everyone “celebrating ancestry”, Leyonhjelm quite explicitly collapses the experiences of an Indigenous Australian, an asylum seeker, and an Anglo-Celt into one very big but very shallow bucket. Racial identity is reduced to “ancestry” and shunted back into a past that’s available for voluntary “celebration” but exerts no real force on the present.

The “buffered self” isn’t buffeted, let alone constrained or determined, by the winds of history. It stands above history just as it stands above embodiment.

And to suggest otherwise? To suggest that history and its sequelae must be acknowledged? Why, that would be singling people out on the basis of their race. That’s racist.

Saving us from ourselves

In some ways this is all in keeping with libertarianism’s refusal to see anything but individual liberty as having decisive moral weight. Freedom, just so we’re clear, is desperately important. It’s one of the main features of the moral landscape that politics must be responsive to. But a myopic focus on individual liberty, linked to a thin conception of persons that sees human dignity simply as the free exercise of autonomy, obscures other vital features of that landscape.

Leyonhjelm has apparently won support for a parliamentary inquiry into the “Nanny State”. Once again, there is commendable philosophical clarity and consistency in his position:

The issue here is, to what extent is the government entitled to legislate – and we’re not talking about just giving advice – but to legislate, to protect you from your own bad choices. Bicycle helmets are a very good example of that: nobody is hurt if you fall off. If you don’t wear a bicycle helmet, your head’s not going to crack into somebody else and damage them.

This is the classic Liberal Harm Principle: no-one is entitled to interfere with your personal behaviour so long as it doesn’t impact on anyone else. Hence if you want to smoke, or ride a bike without a helmet, this is an essentially “personal” matter that no-one else should interfere with.

Leyonhjelm hit back against criticism for apparently being more concerned about the imaginary health effects of wind turbines than the very real health effects of tobacco. Such criticism misses the point: libertarians don’t care what you do to yourself, just to other people. Smoke ‘em if you got ’em.

I’ve noted before that even classical liberals like Mill drew the line at suicide – as this destroys the very freedom that the Harm Principle is meant to respect – though some libertarians such as the late Robert Nozick were prepared to countenance a wider right of self-disposal.

But consider whether you have a right to wrestle a would-be suicide down from a window ledge or bridge. To conclude that this would be an unfair interference in their personal autonomy involves a certain blindness, a whittling of the person down to the point where their only remaining value is rational autonomy. The independent, buffered Enlightenment subject: a pure atomistic locus of self-directed freedom, including the freedom to jump.

What is bled out of that picture is the essential interconnection of persons, grounded in our intersubjective constitution. When John Donne famously declared “no man is an island entire of itself”, he knew exactly what that implied:

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

No-one “merely” harms themselves, but inevitably harms those around them in doing so. My life is not entirely my own – nor is its value reducible to my autonomy.

Thick value and power-blindness

People – real, concrete, loving, feeling, people – matter in deep, distinctive ways, ways that strain the resources of our moral language. And, accordingly, their deaths – which rob the world of something inherently precious – also matter, at least enough for us to sometimes try and save people from their own objectively bad choices. But that sort of thick moral value is lost in the remorseless thinning-down of libertarian calculation.

Even Leyonhjelm’s support of same-sex marriage, for instance, doesn’t seem to be grounded in a view that long-term same-sex relationships are intrinsically good things that deserve access to the same sort of recognition as heterosexual ones, so much as a pervasive dislike of governments saying “no” to people.

Also, when you denude the world of moral pith by abstracting people down into their Enlightenment ghosts in this way, you end up peeling away the level on which real power operates. That makes it easier to pretend we’re now living in some sort of post-racial utopia in which any attempt to redress ongoing power imbalances becomes “reverse racism”.

Equality, it seems, is achieved simply by refusing to acknowledge that inequality remains to be overcome, and by refusing to see the privilege of one’s own position.

Think of Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson complaining that that the law – and not just social sanction – prohibits racially loaded terms being used by some people but not others. This misses the point that the words in question aren’t just words used to denigrate minorities: they’re words used by white people to denigrate others.

Wilson doesn’t magically stop being white when he speaks, and he doesn’t get to sidestep the historical meanings of a white man using those words. None of us gets to be the pure monad of ahistorical, acultural reason the Enlightenment imagined us to be.

But this charge of “reverse racism” is deeply attractive from a certain perspective. It’s a way of pretending you can talk about racism, or sexism, or homophobia, without talking about power. That’s comforting for those who sense true equality would mean that they – we – might have to give up some of that power.

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Patrick will be on hand for an author Q&A between 3PM and 4PM AEST on Tuesday, June 30. Post your questions in the comments section below.

Editor’s note: This piece was updated after publication to clarify Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson’s comments.

Patrick Stokes, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Deakin University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

This piece originally appeared as the first post in The Conversation’s new Cogito blog

Earlier this year, the ethicist Walter-Sinnot Armstrong asked whether philosophers were out of touch with, even contemptuous, of ordinary people and everyday life. The picture he paints isn’t flattering:

Philosophers love to complain about bad reasoning. How can those other people commit such silly fallacies? Don’t they see how arbitrary and inconsistent their positions are? Aren’t the counter examples obvious? After complaining, philosophers often turn to humor. Can you believe what they said! Ha, ha, ha. Let’s make fun of those stupid people […] It puts us out of touch partly because they cannot touch us: we cannot learn from others if we see them as unworthy of careful attention and charitable interpretation. This tendency also puts us out of touch with society because we cannot touch them: they will not listen to us if we openly show contempt for them.

Those words left me tugging uncomfortably at my collar. A day before I’d taken a swing at commentors on the New York Times’ The Stone blog, where Justin McBrayer had tried to answer the question: why don’t our children think there are moral facts?

You can disagree with the specifics of McBrayer’s causal claim that the way ethics is discussed in schools contributes to universal moral antirealism (roughly, the view that the universe contains no moral facts), but he’s right that antirealism seems to be a great many people’s default view, even if their choices and actions suggest otherwise.

As I’ve said before before, this is a bugbear of mine. Moral antirealism might turn out to be true, but it’s not just obviously true. There are only so many essays and online comments where people don’t even understand the suggestion that ethics might be more than subjective before it starts to get to you.

So page after page of comments on McBrayer’s piece insisting that of course there are no moral facts and it’s ridiculous that a so-called philosopher could think otherwise got me snarky. This, I sneered, is why we can’t have nice things. Here’s a professional moral philosopher trying to explain a matter within his expertise and being dismissed, even belittled, by people who clearly don’t even understand what he’s saying. Why would people simply ignore what he’s saying like this? Would they do this to a scientist, or a surgeon, or a lawyer?

Well, yes, of course they would. We live in an age in which everyone, labouring under the delusion that they are always and everywhere entitled to their own opinion, feels fully equipped to tell experts they are flatly wrong about their area of expertise. So this is in many ways a problem of degree rather than kind.

But science denialists of various stripes – anti-vaccinationists, climate denialists, 9/11 Truthers, Wind Turbine Syndrome proponents – usually at least pay lip service to playing the game. They make (bad) arguments, cite (dodgy) sources, and generally at least try to give the impression they are doing better science than actual scientists.

Philosophy denial, it seems to me, is a somewhat different beast. Philosophy denialists – including a disheartening number of high-profile physicists – deny the value of philosophy itself rather than simply taking issue with specific philosophical claims.

And as Sinnot-Armstrong points out, a large part of that is philosophers’ own fault. He notes that while scientists frequently make an effort to explain what they do to the general public, philosophers don’t do so nearly as often:

As a result, the general public often sees philosophy as an obscure game that is no fun to play. If philosophers do not find some way to communicate the importance of philosophy, we should not be surprised when nobody else understands why philosophy is important.

Fortunately, more and more philosophers are taking up this challenge. This new group blog you’re reading now hopes to be a contribution in that direction. It will feature writing from a team of Australian philosophers committed to the idea that philosophy can’t solely be a purely abstract pursuit, but must also connect with how we live and what we care about.

I say ‘must’ quite deliberately. Put simply, philosophy is too good, and too important, to keep locked up in the academy. Philosophy may appear ‘an obscure game,’ but it’s also uniquely powerful in its ability to illuminate, complicate, and break wide open things we consider settled and clear.

Just as importantly, at its best, philosophy’s probing of the physical, conceptual, logical, aesthetic, and moral universes turns back upon the questioner themselves. It encourages the mental activity we might now call metacognition and the corresponding virtue of metarationality. To use an older language, it teaches us to know ourselves and to know our own limits, how to reason and how to map the limits of our ability to do so. At the core of philosophy lies the Delphic saying that motivates so many of Plato’s dialogues, γνῶθι σεαυτόν: ‘know yourself.’

But here be dragons.

Across twenty-five canonical dialogues (and another ten of dubious authorship) Plato depicts his mentor Socrates down in the market place, asking questions of passers-by. Socrates speaks from a position of professed ignorance. He knows nothing, but he at least knows he knows nothing, which already puts him ahead of his neighbours – who mistakenly think they know a great deal. And so Socrates asks his fellow Athenians about the most fundamental, seemingly obvious matters. Then through careful, incisive, and frequently prolonged questioning, he turns their preconceived understandings on their heads, sometimes reducing his interlocutors to bewildered, humiliated wrecks.

That ended about as well as you’d expect. Socrates saw himself as a “gadfly,” fated “to sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth.” Gadflies are rarely welcomed. In the Apology, Plato’s account of the trial of 399 BCE in which Socrates was sentenced to death for impiety and corrupting the youth, Socrates describes the general reaction to his method:

… young men of the richer classes, who have not much to do, come about me of their own accord; they like to hear the pretenders examined, and they often imitate me, and examine others themselves; there are plenty of persons, as they soon enough discover, who think that they know something, but really know little or nothing: and then those who are examined by them instead of being angry with themselves are angry with me (Apology 23c-d)

Socrates, it must be said, does himself no favours in the Apology. Given the chance to plead for his life, he simply doubles-down on the things that made the Athenians want to kill him in the first place, and then literally demands a reward for doing so. I once polled a philosophy class at the start of a lecture on the Apology on whether or not the Athenians were right to execute Socrates. Then I polled them on the same question when the lecture finished. Slightly more voted in favour of death the second time around. Socrates, it’s fair to conclude, was just really annoying.

But the deeper point here is that what makes philosophy so powerful is also precisely what makes it so uncomfortable: it dissolves obviousness. It takes things that seem so unimpeachably self-evident we don’t even notice them and throws them into doubt. It shakes the unshakeable and corriges the incorrigible.

That is thrilling, liberating, even intoxicating; but it is also unsettling and even infuriating. Finding out you might have been wrong about things that seem obvious – such as that there are no moral facts, for instance – is rather inconvenient. The snide comments on McBrayer’s article are of a piece with the impatience of Neil Degrasse Tyson and Lawrence Krauss’ impatience with philosophical questions. Philosophy just spins its wheels, gets in the way and slows us down.

My philosophical first love, Søren Kierkegaard, writes his unwieldy masterwork Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments from the persona of a certain Johannes Climacus, a thirty year old idler and Socratic gadfly. In an age of increasing reflection, sophistication, and haste, Climacus is on a mission, as Paul Muench points out, to slow his reader down. Oh, so you think you’ve understood the basics, know what’s what, and are impatient to move on to more challenging questions? Really? Linger a while, friend. Have you really understood what the good is, or how you should live, or what it means that you’ll die? Really? You sure?

Welcome to the blog. We hope it gets in your way and slows you down.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Barring some sort of last-minute miracle, two relatively young Australian men, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, are going to be killed by the Indonesian state. They will not be the first to die this way in 2015. Six other drug criminals have already been executed in Indonesia this year, and more are scheduled.

The Brazilians and Dutch recalled their ambassadors in response to the last executions, which involved two of their citizens. Australia is reportedly doing what it can to save Chan and Sukumaran, but apparently to no avail, and it remains to be seen if we would follow the Brazilian and Dutch examples. ACU Vice-Chancellor Greg Craven has claimed that:

The attitude of Australia and Australians will become part of the reason why these men are executed if we are not sending the right signals to Indonesia.

Meanwhile, Roy Morgan polling finds that 62% of Australians think their government should not do more to stop the execution. A slim majority, 52%, favour such executions going ahead. Yet as recently as 2009 Roy Morgan also found a clear majority not in favour of capital punishment in Australia – not even for murder.

That re-introducing the death penalty doesn’t have majority support isn’t surprising. The consequentialist arguments against the death penalty aren’t hard to find. The irreversibility of execution means sickening and unfixable miscarriages of justice are more or less inevitable.

The imperative to avoid those injustices makes the process extremely slow – almost 15 years on average in the US, as of 2010 – and accordingly more expensive than life imprisonment. As a deterrent it simply doesn’t seem to work, perhaps because, oddly enough, it turns out humans aren’t rational, cool-headed calculators who deliberate carefully and act accordingly.

We know all this, or at least we should.

So, it seems a large proportion of us are against the death penalty, but say we are for executions abroad and don’t want us to try harder to stop them. How do we reconcile these apparently incompatible beliefs?

I suspect we’re doing it with “arguments” that at bottom have nothing to do with the death penalty as such, but are really just excuses for not caring about it in particular cases. We don’t like the death penalty, we just don’t want the discomfort of having to care about the people it’s applied to. And so we trot out a series of trite, clichéd slogans.

‘Do the crime, do the time’

The obvious rejoinder to this is that execution isn’t “doing time” – even if the years spent on death row is.

Philosophers continue to grapple with the surprisingly difficult question of why death is a harm and why, by extension, killing is wrong. The closest thing to a standard answer is that death deprives us of good years we would otherwise have enjoyed.

But as the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus insisted, not existing for what would have been the rest of your life is not the same as suffering for that many years.

You might rephrase this as: “Do the crime, pay the penalty”. But just how far do we follow that principle? Penalties can be excessive, or unjust. So surely for such a principle to have force, the penalty has to be proportional to the crime.

If you say Chan and Sukumaran should accept their punishment, you’re thereby committed to saying that execution is a fitting punishment for drug trafficking – a claim that needs to be argued for.

‘They knew the risk they were running’

Radio host Garry Linnell offered a version of this argument in response to artist Ben Quilty’s candlelight vigil for the pair. He wrote:

Sukumaran and Chan knew the penalty if they were caught. You cannot arrive anywhere in Indonesia without signs explicitly stating the consequences of importing and exporting drugs on Indonesian soil. It is Indonesian law.

But this confuses moral responsibility with prudential responsibility. If you leave your car unlocked with the window down and your laptop on the front seat, someone might say that you “deserve” to have your laptop stolen. But being imprudent in such a case isn’t the same thing as moral culpability: that rests with the thief. We wouldn’t refuse to stop the thief, or let him off the hook, simply because you’d been careless.

You can agree that Chan and Sukumaran were stupid to take the risk they did, and even that what they did morally deserves punishment, given the misery and death heroin brings with it. But the argument that “they knew the risks” doesn’t, on its own, make their execution appropriate. Those who assert this still owe us an argument.

‘Different countries have different laws and we should respect that’

Linnell, like many others, also insisted that:

… the Bali Nine controversy is equally about sovereign rights and the penalties imposed on those who decide to flout them.

Sovereignty has moral weight, and it’s not hard to imagine cases where it might be ethically right to abide by local laws or norms you nonetheless disagree with.

But, again, this only goes so far. It would be obscene to subordinate the profound wrongness of killing – the very thing many death penalty proponents appeal to – to the need to respect sovereignty or avoid giving offence. To say that the laws of other countries must always be respected – no matter what they demand – is not so much a statement of principle as a moral abdication.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with making arguments like this. It’s not so much ethical reasoning as ritual hand-washing.

If you honestly think that killing two young men, who are so effectively rehabilitated that even their jailers want them to live, and destroying the lives of their families, all for no deterrent effect, is somehow going to achieve something – well, you have to argue for it.

If there’s some knock-down argument that makes premeditated killing on the part of the government appropriate, or shows how more death and misery is somehow going to put the world to right, let’s hear it. Those who think we shouldn’t care about this owe us better than rhetorical fig leaves for indifference.

Bali Governor Made Mangku Pastika has said that the executions should take place – just not in Bali. It seems it’s OK for things like this to happen, so long as they don’t happen here, where we have to confront the full reality of what is done when the state ends a life, of what it is to shoot a man tied to a stake.

Sadly, many Australians seem to agree.

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Read the original article.