Chris Bertram has been taking issue with Christopher Hitchens' remarks about whether those who don't fight themselves, and don't have children fighting, have a right to a view on whether the Iraq war - or any other, presumably - is justified. He (Chris Bertram) raises the very interesting question of just what the moral relation is between recommending a dangerous, perhaps lethal, course of action, and being prepared to take on (some of) the risks in one's own person.
He agrees with Hitchens that the question of whether the war was actually justified isn't affected by the military involvement or otherwise of the person making the judgement. But he thinks that this involvement affects the moral status of the judgers themselves. He says:
It is perfectly reasonable to ask of someone who advocates a policy that involves people in significant personal sacrifice whether they would be willing to incur or risk that sacrifice themselves.And the point of asking the question, in his view, is that those who aren't so willing, who endorse the dangerous policy but wouldn't risk the sacrifice for themselves or their children, are 'despicable hypocrite[s] whose prattlings do not deserve the attention of reasonable people'.
Now it is right, I think, to suggest that there is something morally doubtful about being prepared to support sacrificial policies while carefully protecting oneself and those one loves from making any of the sacrifices involved, though whether it's actually hypocrisy, rather than some other vice, needs further consideration. But the trouble with this argument is that it's far too strong: if this is hypocrisy, then there's an awful lot of hypocrisy about the place, and an emphasis on its presence doesn't favour the doveish side of the debate about the Iraq war.
For we can equally ask of those who were and remain against the war whether they were themselves, in their own or their children's persons, prepared to incur the consequences attendant on that war not having been waged.
That too was a sacrificial policy. How many of those hostile to the US and UK intervention, without which Saddam would still be in power and his torture chambers still open for business, would be prepared to put their own child at risk of entering one of those chambers, to be hideously raped or tormented or murdered - or have been willing to offer up themselves? I don't believe that a single one of those who so vociferously complain about the hypocrisy of armchair warrior hawks would be prepared to risk their children or themselves at the hands of Saddam's torturers.
Are they also despicable hypocrites whose prattlings do not deserve the attention of reasonable people? Myself I don't think so: I'm prepared to listen to them and argue with them as serious antagonists in one of the most important political debates of our times. It's not to their discredit that they want their children to be protected from the horrors of the world; though what might be to their discredit is that they don't want other people's children to be protected in the same way. How ready, come to that, would your average comfortably-off critic of the war be to volunteer himself or herself for some of the more dangerous, or less healthy, non-wartime occupations which we all depend upon?
Much of the commentariat does get off lightly from life's troubles, and this is a serious moral issue; but it can't be hijacked for use by those opposed to the Iraq war to award themselves brownie points for open-eyed moral integrity. If it's hypocrisy to prefer, and indeed ensure, that others, rather than one's own loved children, take the risks of the policies one endorses, then there's going to be a lot of hypocrisy in the ranks of those who preferred Saddam to be left in power, torturing and murdering many many thousands, while the West, including its commentariat, remained safely at home. (Eve Garrard)
