Ethics, Intent And The Jones Koran Burning

By Steve Hynd

We've now seen the third day of protests in Afghanistan after US evangelist Terry Jones burned a Quran.

At least one person has been killed and 18 injured in a third day of protests in Afghanistan over the burning of a Koran in the US last month.

Hundreds of demonstrators marched in Kandahar, Jalalabad and other areas on Sunday.

On Friday, 14 people, including seven UN staff, were killed in Mazar-e Sharif after similar protests.

...Ten people in Kandahar died and dozens were injured following Saturday's protests.

These riots mark a sea-change in the West's involvement in Afghanistan, according to many analysts. Joushua Foust writes:

it�s not just that the UN was attacked, or that Afghans are increasingly more and more angry at not just the U.S. but the international community in general (ahem) , or that protests and riots can sometimes turn violent. It is that a crowd of Afghans, with no obvious ties to the insurgency, in an area otherwise so successful it was flagged for transition to Afghan control, could so quickly spiral into such madness and fury that they murdered seven foreigners who themselves had precisely zero connection to an outrageous event that happened in a third country.

Something has changed here, and it�s something bad.

 And Una Moore of the UN mission in Afghanistan writes:

This is not the beginning of the end for the international community in Afghanistan. This is the end. Terry Jones and others will continue to pull anti-Islam stunts and opportunistic extremists here will use those actions to incite attacks against foreigners. Unless we, the internationals, want our guards to fire on unarmed protesters from now on, the day has come for us to leave Afghanistan.

President Obama has issued a statement calling the killings "outrageous" and describing the Koran burning as "intolerance and bigotry". However, he stopped short of including Jones in any moral or legal culpability for the killings, which he said were "an affront to human decency and dignity".

Despite the "intolerance and bigotry" of extreme rightwing cheerleaders for Jones, most conservative pundits seem to agree with Obama that the Florida "pastor" shouldn't be in the frame for any of the blame. Their consensus is that apportioning any blame to Jones would allow " the actions of barbarians" to "limit our right to free speech", that "the fact that people murdered innocent third parties because they were angered by Jones� speech is not something for which we can hold Jones morally blameworthy" and that "we shouldn't cede veto power on speech to the most evil, crazy people on the planet".

Were Jones entirely ignorant of the violence his action stands as proximate cause to, I'd agree. However, before he set a light to a book he clearly stated that his actions were designed to show that Islam is a religion of violence, meaning he anticipated and hoped for a violent response. His statements since have continued in that vein and anticipate further inflammatory acts:

Terry Jones, the radical pastor who oversaw the burning of a Koran in his Florida church last month after a mock court hearing, may put the Islamic prophet Mohammed on trial in his next �day of judgement�, he told The Sunday Telegraph.

�It is definitely a consideration to stage a trial on the life of Mohammed in the future,� he said in interview on Saturday.

When we consider the apportionment of moral blame or culpability, the intent of actors is just as important as the actual actors. Those who actually killed are no doubt morally and legally culpable. But Jones, by his intent, has put himself in the moral frame too. Intent is important in moral considerations. Take attempted murder, for example--we could say that because in the end there was no harm (e.g. an officer of the law stopped you before you could spray the cyanide), there was also no foul, yet we do not. Intent should not be the only means of judging an individual's actions, but the action itself likewise cannot and should not be the only factor taken into consideration. Jones has amply proven that he intended that there be violence as a consequence of his actions and thus is morally culpable.

However, in the US at least, he's legally scot-free. His actions - even given his intent - are regarded as protected free speech under the First Amendment. Despite John Stuart Mill's assertion that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others", the US Constitution and the US Supreme Court have taken a more fundementalist utilitarian approach than even Mill envisioned. Despite Justice Stephen Breyer's misgivings, the law in the US hasn't moved beyond Oliver Wendel Holmes and the Schenk case.

In the UK and elsewhere, though, legally Jones would indeed have been shouting "fire" in a crowded theater and would most likely have been arrested. He was banned from the UK back in January "for the public good". My conservative friends and I will have to differ on whether European free speech laws are "scary" or not, although I'd point out that many who worry about their application such that Jones would go to jail are just fine with laws banning holocaust denial. It remains that Jones is morally culpable and if the US legal system wasn't an 18th century ass he would be legally culpable too.

( An aside - Conservatives talk about the difference between the US and Europe being the difference between "citizens and subjects". The difference, at least to me, is somewhat deeper. The US Constitution was written by people who were avid supporters of, imprinted upon, the works of David Hume, the Scottish empiricist philosopher and the most important precursor of the libertarian style of utilitarianism as ensconsed in that Constitution. Because the Founders and the Constitution are deified in US thought, it has prevented the US from fully assimilating later philosophical progress into its ethical/legal system. In particular, it has stymied the assimiliation of Wittgenstein's maxim that "no man is an island": the notion that all human thought is based on language, that language is always shared and that "the limits of my language are the limits of my world". In short, the difference is between "islanders" and "communities".)