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The Danish cartoons: Considering the consequences

Mikel Burley

Think / Volume 5 / Issue 15 / September 2007, pp 77 ­ 82DOI: 10.1017/S1477175600002293, Published online: 22 July 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1477175600002293

How to cite this article:Mikel Burley (2007). The Danish cartoons: Considering the consequences. Think, 5, pp 77­82 doi:10.1017/S1477175600002293

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THE DANISH CARTOONS:CONSIDERING THE CONSEQUENCES

Mikel Burley

Should publishing decisions be influenced by thepotential for violent reactions?

In his article 'Storm in a Turban' (Think issue 13) David Be- —inatar canvasses six reasons why the publication, by a Danish 5*newspaper, of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed *"might be deemed morally wrong. In each case Benatar con- ^eludes that the reason is inadequate. I wish to respond to the £"argument that he gives for rejecting the sixth of these reasons, 3namely: 'that given the Muslim response, inappropriate though -̂it may be, publishing cartoons that result in violence, the de- ostruction of property and the loss of life is wrong.' (p. 21) ^

Benatar characterizes the above claim as a 'consequentialist •argument'. His response to it is twofold. First he highlights the ,^jparadox that would be generated were the violent protestersthemselves to use the argument. The paradox is this: A groupof people protest violently against the publication of somecartoons. We ask those people why they are protesting. Theyreply: because the publication of the cartoons is wrong. Weask them why it is wrong. They say: because it provokes usto protest violently. It therefore appears that the wrongnessof the cartoons and the protest against their wrongness aremutually dependent, and hence the protesters'justification fortheir protest is circular. This seems right to me, and I do notwish to question Benatar's conclusion.

In the second component of Benatar's response, he consid-ers whether 'the consequentialist argument [could] be invokedby people other than those who orchestrated, encouragedand perpetrated the violence.' Of course, Benatar is not re-ally disputing whether the argument could be invoked. Thereis no question whether it could. Indeed, it probably has beeninvoked, although I cannot cite any particular instance. WhatBenatar is questioning is whether it could be invoked in away that is warranted. His response is that it could not be so

invoked, for its invocation is liable to generate an outcome thatwould, in the long run, be more deleterious on consequentialistgrounds than the violent protests themselves. Benatar's con-cern is that, by refraining from publishing material in order toavoid an angry response, one is, in effect, appeasing a groupof people which really ought not to be appeased; by capitulat-ing to the implicit, and sometimes explicit, threat of violence,

co one is (to use that phrase which has now become a cliche)^ giving in to terrorism. Such capitulation will, Benatar asserts,^ 'encourage the very intolerance it seeks to mollify.'^ The view I wish to defend, against Benatar, is not that 'pub-O lishing cartoons that result in violence [etc.]' is necessarily^ wrong, i.e. wrong in all cases. Rather, the argument that I wishU to present has the following two elements. I maintain, firstly,-C that arguments in favour or against the cartoons' publication' c cannot, insofar as they are worthwhile arguments at all, avoidS taking the likely consequences of their publication into consid-0 eration. Secondly, I maintain that, among the consequences£ which ought to be considered, is the reaction that the cartoons>. are likely to provoke. My purpose is not to reach a verdict on.Sj whether, in the particular case at issue, the cartoons should or^ should not have been published. It is instead to show that we

need to be more careful in our assessment of consequentialistarguments than Benatar appears to have been.

Let us begin by each of us imagining that he or she is thenewspaper editor, trying to decide whether to publish thecartoons of Mohammed. (For our present purposes we canleave aside the question of whether it was right to commis-sion the cartoons in the first place.) What are the sorts ofmorally-relevant considerations that ought to enter into ourdecision-making process? One consideration, which appar-ently did play a crucial role in persuading the editors to publishthe cartoons, was the moral and political requirement, as theysaw it, to oppose self-censorship that occurs as a result of ageneral climate of fear. The object of fear is, of course, violentreprisals by offended parties, specifically militant Muslims.Whether or not we take opposing the threat of violence in thisway to be a worthy motive, I would suggest that the motive

itself is thoroughly bound up with consequentialist reasoning.Even if the expected consequences are very inchoately formu-lated, it remains implicit within the view in question — namely,that which holds us to be morally obliged to openly confrontthe factors contributing to a climate of fear — that the con-sequences of confronting those factors will be preferable tothose of refraining from doing so.

Although the editors could not have foreseen the ferocity - iand widespread nature of the reaction to the cartoons, it would 5*be naive to think that they did not anticipate a high degree *"of anger and protest on the part of some Muslims. The view ^taken by the editors was that the belligerence stirred up by £"the cartoons would be an acceptable by-product of fulfilling 3the overriding requirement to resist the climate of fear. As I - 'have noted already, Benatar concurs with this verdict, since ohe regards a society in which intolerant attitudes are complied ^with to be a worse society than one in which those attitudes are •challenged, even when the challenging of them incites a short- ^Jterm violent response. It therefore seems clear that Benataris not calling for consequentialist arguments to be rejectedwholesale. Rather, he is opposing one consequentialist argu-ment — that the cartoons should not be published becausethey will provoke a violent reaction — with a second conse-quentialist argument — that the cartoons should be publishedbecause they will serve to help dissipate the climate of fear.It seems to me that these are indeed the right considerationsto take into account. The problem with Benatar's argumentis that it tries to tie the particular case under examination inwith a general principle that, in his opinion, should guide ourdecision-making; and I am doubtful that the general principleis as general as Benatar suggests.

The general principle that is strongly implied, though notexplicitly stated, in Benatar's discussion of the consequential-ist argument is that potentially violent, or otherwise noxious,responses to one's actions on the part of intolerant peopleought never to feature in one's deliberations in such a wayas to deter one from going ahead with an action that is inother respects beneficial. This principle is implied in Benatar's

remark that invoking the consequentialist argument againstpublishing the cartoons 'grants to the most violently intolerantpeople the capacity to turn any of our actions into wrongdo-ings.' If one were to grant this, Benatar adds, then 'Any actionone takes, no matter how benign or beneficial, can be madewrong by a sufficiently noxious response.' Now, my gripe withBenatar's principle is not that it is altogether misguided. In

o some respects I take it to be on the right lines. My objectionis that the principle is too sweeping and uncompromising.

In my view, it is not the case that we ought to be deterredc from performing otherwise beneficial actions by the potentialityO for noxious responses. And so, to this extent, I agree with Be-^ natar. What I disagree with is his implied view that such poten-U tiality should never result in our abandoning or modifying the-£ action that we were otherwise intending to perform. It seemsc to me that there are many conceivable circumstances in whichS it would be, not merely wrong to go ahead with an otherwiseQJ beneficial action, but downright reckless and irresponsible to£ do so. In order to illustrate this point, let us adapt the case>. at issue. Imagine again that you are the editor of the Danish^ newspaper considering whether to publish the cartoons. You3 receive a message from a secret intelligence agency inform-

ing you that the agency has partially uncovered a conspiracyby militant Islamists to blow up Western Europe with nuclearweapons. The message adds that the conspirators have foundout about the newspaper's plans to publish cartoons depictingMohammed, and have vowed to use this as the excuse forsetting off the nuclear explosions. Furthermore, it is claimedin the message that, provided the secret intelligence agencyis given a few more weeks, it is almost guaranteed to be ableto track down and capture all of the conspirators, therebypreventing the murderous plot from coming to fruition. Whatare you to do in this situation? If you were to be guided bythe principle that we should never let the threatened violenceof intolerant people scupper our attempts to penetrate theatmosphere of intimidation, then you should, I presume, goahead and publish the cartoons. But this hardly seems to bethe sensible option.

An advocate of Benatar's position might complain that thescenario I have painted is preposterously exaggerated; andperhaps it is, given the currently limited weaponry availableto most Islamic militants. It is not, however, inconceivable thatthis sort of situation might arise at some point in the future. Ifone persists in regarding it as unduly exaggerated, then wecan simply dilute it a bit. The conspirators need not be planningto blow up western Europe; perhaps they are only planning to —iblow up Copenhagen, or the Danish parliament building, or 5*an airliner, or a bus. They might be planning to kill only one *"person; but my principal point remains unaltered, which is that ^it would be morally impermissible to adopt a blanket policy, ac- £"cording to which the threat of a violent response should never 3compromise one's decision to publish certain material, even -3

when in other respects one anticipates that the publication of othe material will have a beneficial effect. ^

It seems obvious to me that decisions of the sort made by •those who have chosen to publish the offending cartoons are 52invariably made in the light of consequentialist considerations,some of which will be in conflict with one another. Deliberationsabout the appropriate way to act in such situations ought totake account of all the available facts concerning likely out-comes. It would be stupid and morally negligent to ignore awhole category of outcomes, namely that of potential violentreactions, on the grounds that, as a matter of principle, onemust never capitulate to threats of violence.

Let me repeat that I am not proposing that the editors ofJyllands-Posten, or those of any other newspaper which haspublished the Mohammed cartoons, were wrong to do so. I amproposing merely that potentially violent outcomes ought tobe treated seriously — and not simply dogmatically overruled— when the consequences of our actions are considered.

Mikel Burley teaches Ethics and Philosophy of Religion atthe University of Leeds.

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