Beijing Again

Norm directed me to this very elegant piece of reasoning, concerning a Beijing boycott, sent to him by Jonathan Quong. It goes much, much further into the mechanics of arguing for a boycott than I could have done, and does so in a spare, lucid, generous way. I'm speaking next Wednesday at the Historical Society in Trinity on this subject, and hope to employ some of these very arguments, and so I must declare an early note of gratitude to Mr Quong for setting them out in such a direct and convincing manner.

I would take issue, however, with one stage of the argument: the contention that we "are each under a duty of justice not to participate in, or benefit from, projects or activities that involve violations of other people's rights." Mr Quong assumes this statement, though "stringent", to be "uncontroversial". I'm not so sure.

It is, of course, preferable that people avoid involving themselves in projects that directly violate the rights of others. Torturing people in attempts to extract information is definitely not on. The example given by Mr Quong- declining a dinner party invitation on the grounds that slave labour is used- is pretty open and shut: no thanks. Another example, say, would be not investing your money in companies that, while offering a healthy return, are contributing to genocide.

But, beyond these flourescently obvious cases, their exists a vast, penumbral grey zone, in which any statement promulgating a strict "duty of justice" becomes very problematic: "projects and activities" seems to me a very spacious remit indeed. Without trying to bring in a specifically Christian element, I think its fairly safe to say that we live in a 'fallen' world - a hard, unfriendly place fully-laden with deeply intermeshed injustices, which, however diligently we try, we cannot rid ourselves of. The oranges we buy, the shoes that we wear, the cars we drive, the news we watch, the money we make - all of it, at some point, passes through some stage of production whereby, somehow or other, it is connected to a human rights violation, even if that violation is only minor. An "activity" such as injecting money into the American economy by buying the New Yorker every week might, through a succcession of financial mutations, go to pay the salary of a CIA worker skilled at waterboarding. The taxes I pay can be funnelled, via a "project" like Irish Aid, and a series of graft and theft, into the Treasury of a toxic African regime. And so on, ad infinitum.

In the face of this, any abstract "duty of justice" that is not more rigourously defined falls short of responding to the world as it is. This is not to refute Mr Quong's point; only to add a qualification.

But another, related, issue is when rights are in conflict. Any broadly conceived and "stringently" enforced "duty of justice" doesn't take account of the necessity of sometimes settling for the lesser evil. It's not very edifying to say so, but sometimes, human rights must be overlooked in favour of the greater good. This, obviously, will not always be the case, but a realistic worldview simply can't dispense with this abiding truth. In my own view, its in the tangle and tumult of experience, and not in generalised, postulated "duties", that we must locate the drive to protect human rights. But in doing so, we must also accept that we cannot always protect them, and that, in some way, we may inadvertently - and inescapably - be violating them. Thus a "duty of justice" will, to my mind, simply not always work.

All this does not, however, entirely absolve us of our moral responsibilities. A boycott of Beijing is, in my view, the realistic option for athletes who take seriously the promotion of human rights, and who do not wish to participate in the glorification of a horrid regime. And fair play to Mr Quong for tackling the issue in such a bracing manner.