See why not

This post inaugurates a short series in which I respond to points raised against other posts of mine by Chris Young at See Why? - and my title is just a handy play on the name of his blog, and meant in friendly, not insulting, spirit. I begin with one of Chris's points that is relatively quick to deal with.

Chris has responded to my post 'I vote for the majority' by the slightly unusual move of linking to a piece of his posted five days earlier. In principle, there's nothing wrong with his doing this, if his earlier post already meets the point made by my later one. But it doesn't.

Chris seems to have taken me to be saying something like that the argument against the war from the putative illegality of it under international law could not by itself suffice. For in the earlier post of his that he links back to he says (rightly)...

that a reason doesn't need to be an absolute reason (i.e., one that always defeats other reasons) to be a good reason for something.

But Chris will know - from another of my posts with which he has taken issue - that I do not discount the arguments from international law, and by implication national sovereignty, since I there talk about having to give these considerations real weight, and in saying that I use the same analogy (with domestic law) as Chris himself does.

My argument in the 'I vote for the majority' post was that to oppose the war before it began on the grounds that it would be illegal under international law (a point, incidentally, which is moot, and which I go along with here merely for the sake of a clear argument) was to contribute to making it illegal under international law; since if that huge body of global opinion which opposed the war had instead supported it and pressurised their governments to support it at the UN, the war could have had UN authorization. So my point wasn't that international law doesn't count for anything - which I do not think; I look forward to a day when it might count for more than it now does. My point was that this was the wrong kind of reason for opposing the war, before the war, for those - everybody - who had a part in determining the war's legality. It was about the oddness of invoking a procedural reason when you yourself are, directly or indirectly, a participant in the relevant and ongoing procedure. It's a bit like arguing against a proposal in some assembly to which you belong that the proposal is going to lose. As I put it in the post Chris was replying to:

Those who opposed the war before the war will want a better reason for having opposed it than the then-going hypothesis about whether international support for it could be obtained. They will want a substantive, and not just procedural, reason as to why the Saddam Hussein regime should have been left in place.

In responding to another of Chris's criticisms I will be addressing differences between us over such substantive reasons.

(Update at 1.45 PM: slightly amended.)