Giving Evil Its Due Judith Shklar’s (Ambiguous) Cosmopolitan Realism and World Politics

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Shklar’s work can serve as a valuable source of inspiration to theorise the problem of humanitarian intervention. In contrast to some of her more sympathetic commentators, however, I will also problematise the tensions and ambiguities in Shklar’s work. As such, my aim in this article is twofold: to demonstrate that Shklar’s work can help us illuminate fundamental problems of world politics; and to demonstrate that the engagement with problems of world politics helps us to illuminate Shklar’s work. My argument is that although Shklar’s thought defies easy categorisation, her work can be understood as a ‘cosmopolitan realism’ as it combines realism’s attentiveness to the realities and constraints of political life with the cosmopolitan insight that there are certain phenomena and experiences that are of genuinely universal concern. This ‘cosmopolitan realism’, however, is compromised by the conceptual ambiguity of Shklar’s concept of cruelty and her undifferentiated use of the concept of evil. I argue that by ‘giving evil its due’, that is, by treating ‘evil’ as a distinctive phenomenon of life that must be distinguished from injustice, Shklar’s cosmopolitan realism can be rectified and, indeed, serve as a valuable source for the creative theorisation of humanitarian intervention.

KEYWORDS:

• Judith Shklar
• humanitarian intervention
• giving evil its due
• cosmopolitan realism
• moral-political judgement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I am enormously grateful to Samantha Ashenden and Giunia Gatta, who read a previous version of the paper and provided extremely helpful feedback.

2 Such divisions, are, of course, always vulnerable to criticism. However, I employ this division for analytical purposes as I find it useful to approach the literature on Shklar and world politics, to identify the lacuna in this burgeoning literature and, ultimately, to demonstrate my contribution to it.

3 Samantha Ashenden objected against this crucial point (in a personal exchange) that the liberalism of fear should be understood more as a ‘mood’ than as an ‘analytical category’. I do not necessarily disagree with this characterisation; but I, nonetheless, think it is worth working out the – admittedly – analytical ambiguities of the liberalism of fear in order to clarify and improve it.

4 See also Giunia Gatta’s statement in this special issue that ‘cruelty is not simply violence: it carries with it a negative emotional connotation that Shklar intends to emphasise’ (emphasis added).

5 I am well aware that this is a controversial claim, and some might argue that non-psychological accounts of cruelty are indeed possible. Nonetheless, a survey of the (sparse) contemporary literature on ‘cruelty’ supports my argument that most (if not all) authors explicitly link cruelty to the psyche of the perpetrator; see Taylor (2009), Baron-Cohen (2012), Baumeister (2015). See also the particularly illuminating interview with Paul Bloom (https://fivebooks.com/best-books/cruelty-and-evil-paul-bloom/).

6 This is also confirmed by the definition of cruelty in the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘a disposition to inflict suffering; delight or indifference to another’s pain; merciless, hard-heartedness … ’.

7 I wish to avoid a potential misunderstanding here. Shklar was not particularly interested in evil as a religious idea. But she was also not hesitant to use the language of evil due to its (alleged) religious connotations. In fact, she writes in one of her essays: ‘I began work on political obligation to getting away from my preoccupation with political evil, but I soon found out better’ (1998: 38). My argument is that despite her claim to be ‘preoccupied with political evil’, she fails to treat evil (especially political evil) as a distinctive phenomenon of moral-political life.

8 The classic definition of humanitarian intervention is ‘the threat or use of force across state borders by a state (or group of states) aimed at preventing or ending widespread and grave violations of the fundamental human rights of individuals other than its own citizens, without the permission of the state within whose territory force is applied’ (Holzgrefe 2010: 18).

9 I could refer to the literature on ‘global justice’ here but I think an even better example is the literature on ‘just war’, which almost exclusively relies on the language of justice and eschews the language of evil.