What's wrong with capturing vile tyrants? (Eve Garrard)

The capture of Saddam Hussein hasn't been greeted with unalloyed delight in every corner of the blogosphere. For those of us who find this puzzling (what can be wrong with catching someone dripping with the blood of his countless victims?) Philosoraptor provides an unusually detailed and helpful explanation:

We didn't nobly decide to make sacrifices in order to do what is right and bring down the tyrant. Rather, we were tricked into doing it for craven reasons. Because we were stupid and uninformed, and because we were easily frightened and overly deferential to authority, we allowed ourselves to be talked into going to war. What we did will probably, on balance, have morally good consequences (unless the administration cuts and runs before the next election, that is). But we don't get credit for those consequences since we didn't go to war in order to achieve them. If I'm a tad dim and easily frightened and, as a result, I shoot someone who in fact posed no threat to me, then I don't get any moral credit for shooting him, even if I saved someone else by doing so. If my reasons for shooting were stupid and cowardly, then I'm a stupid coward - no matter what good is accomplished by my bullet. Actions are morally good or bad on the basis of intentions - on the basis of the goals for which they are undertaken - and we undertook this war not in order to bring justice to Iraq, but in order to eliminate a threat our leaders invented almost out of whole cloth.

OK, so what follows from this view? It looks as if we can't give any credit to the USSR for resisting the Nazis, since they didn't do it to bring about justice (but just for what Philosoraptor regards as the 'not-especially-noble goal of self-defense'); and no credit either to Churchill for resisting Hitler, since he didn't do it to bring about justice, not for Poland and not for Czechoslovakia, and certainly not for the Jews or the Roma, and what's more he also invented a German threat to the British Empire which never really existed, since Hitler would have liked to have had England as an ally. So really no one can get any credit at all for fighting the Second World War. And France can't get credit for opposing the Iraq war, since her motives were to protect her financial interests in maintaining the Saddam regime, and the UN certainly can't get any credit, since it was making money hand over fist from the oil-for-palaces programme, and wanted to protect its special interests too. And, as for the Stop-the-War protestors, and the ANSWER group in America, well, the hysterical anti-Americanism of their motives really does make their activities thoroughly bad. In fact, once we start assessing actions strictly in terms of the purity of their motives, we'll find that not a lot in politics turns out to be creditable!

Myself, I think it's unlikely that Blair's and Bush's motives were as bad as Philosoraptor and others assume - it seems much more likely that they were a mixed bunch, containing among other things some genuine commitment to regime change for the reasons they gave us. But let's go along with the assumption of bad motives for just now, since what I want to concentrate on is not the truth or falsity of this view, but its implicit commitment to the claim that people's motives are the most important thing, morally speaking, about their actions. This meme about the overwhelming significance of bad motives appears all over the place in anti-war discourse. But in the context of the war in Iraq, it involves a serious mislocation of moral importance. Perhaps motives do determine whether an agent is good or bad, but that's a different, and in this context a much less important, issue than the question of whether an action (e.g. the intervention in Iraq) is right or wrong. Leave aside the fact that the exclusive concern with the moral status of the agent often looks depressingly like a juvenile interest in the giving and withholding of brownie points and black marks. Even if that concern were itself driven by the purest of motives, nonetheless in the context of the rape rooms, the torture chambers, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths, the moral status of George Bush's character really isn't the most important thing. What's of far greater importance is the question of whether it was right to engage in a war to overthrow Saddam. And the question of the rightness of an act isn't settled exclusively by an appeal to motives - as we acknowledge every time we allow that a person can do the right thing for the wrong reasons. The rightness or otherwise of the war in Iraq is a separate question from the goodness or badness of its participants' motives or characters. You don't need to be an ethical consequentialist to think that the consequences here, such as the overthrow of a vile tyrant, are going to play a pretty important part in deciding whether it was right to go to war.

One possible reply to this is that if Bush's motives were bad, there's no guarantee that his next action won't be a wicked one. Very true. But if his motives were bad, then whether or not Saddam's regime gets attacked we've got no guarantee that America's next action won't be a wicked one. But in the meantime, a terrible tyrant has been overthrown. And if the next action is wrong, we can always oppose it. The possibility of the next action being wrong can't be a reason for refusing to support the current action if it's right.

Connected to this concern for motives is another major theme of Philosoraptor's post (and of many others): namely, We Were Lied To. For my part, I think we probably weren't, but maybe I'm wrong about this, so again suppose for the sake of the argument that we really were deliberately deceived. How important is this? Picture the scales of justice: in one pan, we have the (putative) fact that we were lied to - a wrongful act, therefore; in the other pan, we have the overthrow of a monster who tortures and kills his people. Which way do the scales tip? And what kind of narcissistic concern for our condition, rather than that of Saddam's victims and future prey, would lead one to see only the scale containing the lie?