When do governments deserve our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? This course explores the main answers that have been given to this question in the modern West. We start with a survey of the major political theories of the Enlightenment: Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract tradition. In each case, we begin with a look at classical formulations, locating them in historical context, but then shift to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today. Next, we turn to the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking, again exploring both classical and contemporary formulations. The last part of the course deals with the nature of, and justifications for, democratic politics, and their relations to Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment political thinking. In addition to exploring theoretical differences among the various authors discussed, considerable attention is devoted to the practical implications of their competing arguments. To this end, we discuss a variety of concrete problems, including debates about economic inequality, affirmative action and the distribution of health care, the limits of state power in the regulation of speech and religion, and difficulties raised by the emerging threat of global environmental decay.
The Eichmann Case and Problem of Illegal but Legitimate Acts
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From the course by Yale University
Moral Foundations of Politics
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From the lesson
Enlightenment Political Theory
This module explores what makes a government legitimate. More specifically, was the Third Reich illegitimate and was Eichmann breaking some kind of higher law here?
Meet the Instructors
Ian ShapiroSterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
Today, we're gonna begin by talking about the Eichmann Problem.
And we're gonna start at the end.
You'll recall from last time that I told you that in 1961,
the Israeli Secret Service, the Mossad,
discovered that Eichmann was living under an assumed name in Buenos Aires.
They went there and kidnapped him, brought him back to Israel, charged
him with crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and tried him.
This is how it ended.
>> [FOREIGN]
>> [FOREIGN]
>> So there it is,
Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death in Jerusalem, and he was then executed.
But that doesn't really get us much of a sense of who this man was.
So who was he?
How would you characterize Eichmann?
>> He was a concentration camp or
transportation logistics manager.
>> Okay.
Do you think he designed the final solution?
Was he one of the people who came up with the idea for
what was gonna be done with the Jews?
>> I don't believe so.
>> Yeah, he was an implementer rather than a designer of the so
called final solution, but what kind of a person was he?
What struck you in thinking about him, really?
What kind of a human being was he?
>> Well, first, he looked like anyone we know, so
this is the first that comes up about him.
But then what is really uncomfortable about him is
that you ask how didn't he question his actions?
Why he didn't question.
>> Okay, let's put that off to one side for a minute and
start with the first thing you said.
He looked like he could be anyone.
He could your uncle.
He could be the man next door.
He didn't look like an evil genius or a monster, right?
He was just like everybody else, trying to get along in life.
You guys are students, you wanna get an A.
He wanted to get an A, he wanted to please his superiors.
He wanted them to think that he was doing well.
This is a very important notion, and in Ahrendt's book on the Eichmann trial,
she came up with the phrase, the banality of evil.
Part of what, I think, unnerves people about Eichmann
is that he doesn't seem that different from any of us, right?
So that brings me to the question,
what is it that made you most uncomfortable about his actions?
What would you, you had already started to say that he didn't question authority.
You want to elaborate a little about that?
>> Well, I think it was important, at least from where I stand, to question
what kind of action my act is producing?
Is it producing harm or not?
So it seems he didn't ask this question at all.
And I feel that he had this obligation to do so.
>> So notice that one of the most often quoted sentences attributed to him
was that he had absolutely no interest in the purpose in what he was doing.
He said it wouldn't have made any difference to him if he was transporting
mental patients or indeed armaments, or a military parts.
He wanted to do as good a job as possible without any reference to the purpose.
He wanted to be a good manager, without reference to what he was managing.
And that's another important theme we're gonna explore in the course,
this idea that you can separate means from ends, that it makes sense to talk
about being a good manager without reference to what you are managing.
Anything make you uncomfortable about this man?
>> I mean, I think that's exactly what you said.
Just to reiterate, I mean, he completely separated, during the trial,
what he did from what it meant.
And he didn't feel the slightest responsibility
to considering that even after the fact.
>> So another way of putting would be to say he didn't make any moral judgement
of his own.
He seemed to have no moral compass which drove his own actions and
so he did, it didn't even occur to him that he should perhaps
question the authority that he was being asked to obey and
to help and to help in pursue its own goals.
He didn't ask any moral questions about the rightness of what he was doing.
Now let's think a little bit about what the Israeli government did.
As I indicated to you, they found out where he was living.
They went and grabbed him, brought him back to Israel, passed laws to try him by,
including a death penalty, and then tried him and executed him.
What, if anything, makes you uncomfortable about what they did?
>> Well, the whole procedure, and it seems that the Israeli government was
making up the rules, as they go, and this is what makes me feel uncomfortable.
>> They made up the rules as they went.
There's some truth to that.
After all,
the state of Israel had not even existed in the 1940s when he committed his crimes.
So he was being tried by a country that didn't exist, in a legal system that
didn't exist, and even within the existing Israeli legal system, they made changes.
They brought back the death penalty.
They defined crimes that had not previously deemed defined in the Israeli
legal code.
That is they didn't give him what Americans think of
as due process in his criminal trial.
Anything else?
Anything make you uncomfortable about them and what they did?
>> Not only did the judicial system really exceeds its authority,
but they went to a South American country and
basically kidnapped him, and didn't go through any appropriate channels,
any of the appropriate channels that would be there at the time.
>> Now why do you think they did that?
>> Well, they probably thought that they wouldn't be able
to get him in any other way.
>> Why wouldn't they be able to get him in any other way?
>> Argentina probably wouldn't have extradited him.
>> That's right.
Not only would Argentina probably not have extradited him,
the moment he became alerted to the fact that Israel knew that he was living there,
he would've disappeared.
He would've gone underground, at that time in the 1950s and
'60s, there were literally dozens, maybe even scores of Nazis or
former Nazis all over Latin America living under assumed names, so
he would've simply disappeared.
So they made the judgement that unless they acted, he was gonna get away.
And so it wasn't a question in their minds of going
through the appropriate legal channels,
it was doing this or seeing a massive injustice,
seeing this man who they were convinced was responsible for
horrendous atrocities during the second World War,
escape justice, and so they simply acted.
Let's think about another couple of more recent instances
during which governments have acted in order to
enforce justice, as they saw it.
In June of 1999, NATO decided to bomb Kosovo
to protect the Kosovar Albanians from imminent ethnic cleansing,
but what was notable about this exercise was that they didn't have
UN Security Council authorization for doing it.
It would have been opposed by the Russians, and
probably the Chinese as well, who have veto power in the Security Council.
And not only that, they had actually violated the UN Charter,
because the UN Charter only activates NATO if a member country is threatened
with imminent attack, and nobody was threatening to attack a NATO country.
What they saw was that this was about to happen and NATO just did it.
They just went in there and acted.
And they
did it because they thought it was the right thing to do in the same way, or
in a certainly comparable way, as Israel thought it was the right thing to do,
to violate International law, to violate Argentinian law and
simply go after Eichmann and give him his comeuppance.
And interestingly, after the Kosovo affair,
an international tribunal was established in August of 1999 on the initiative
of the Swedish Prime Minister, and it reported,
very interestingly, from our point of view here in this course,
they concluded that the NATO military intervention in
bombing Kosovo was indeed illegal, but they said it was illegal but legitimate.
Illegal, but legitimate.
Think about that, how could something be illegal and legitimate at the same time?
>> Well, it's an interesting question.
I mean, laws can be put in place by any given country,
but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're recognized internationally.
>> I think that's right, but even if they were recognized internationally,
would that make it legitimate?
>> Perhaps not theoretically,
I guess it all boils down to some sort of moral, overarching moral code.
>> Whose overarching moral code is the question.
I think you put it very well.
Another example we could talk about is, in 1994, when there
was the slaughter going on in Rwanda, the Clinton
administration in the US was largely wringing its hands but not doing anything.
As a result of the failure to intervene, somewhere between 800,000 and
a million people were slaughtered in Rwanda during that genocide.
And this is the kind of situation where, as somebody once said, what you have to do
is recognize that you're gonna have to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.
Because if you ask for permission, by the time you get permission,
if you ever get it, the disaster will already have occurred.
And so this is this idea that when moral considerations are sufficiently
compelling, it becomes unavoidable that you make
the decision to act, and you recognize that what you're doing is illegal.
But there it is.
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