The Lesser Evil Review: Secrecy, Violation of Rights (Essay Sample)

The lesser evil
Name
Institution
The Lesser Evil
When terrorism is being fought by democracies, they are usually defending the proposition that is founded on the perception that their political lives are supposed to be free of violence. However, violence is used to defeat terror. Secrecy, violation of rights, deception and coercion are also used. The question therefore stands in this matter as to how democracies settle for these means of fighting terror without breaching their values. The other ideology is with regards to how they may resort to lesser evils without succumbing to greater ones. Civil libertarians never want to debate about lesser evils. Security is perceived to be much of right just as liberty but civil libertarians avoid the question as to which freedoms are worthy of trade to ensure that security is upheld. Conservative thinkers, like those of the libertarian Cato Institute hold the same ideologies but their rationale is quite different. For them, the big government is the greater evil and they also oppose all the measures that grants more power to the executive branch. The Attorney General, John Ashcroft who is also a conservative refused to hold the belief that all measures instituted to defend America can be termed as evil in any way (Ignatieff, 2004).
The debate on the lesser evil is unavoidable because strict adherence to principles of the rule of law creates a lot of avenues for terrorists to exploit the freedoms owned by individuals. The abandonment of the rule of law would also betray the highly esteemed institutions. For evil to be defeated, they may have to be trafficked; preemptive war, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations and the indefinite detention of suspects. All these qualify to be evils because they stray from international and national law due to the fact that they result to the deprivation of people’s freedoms in the absence of due process and that they also kill people. Their only justifications would be the prevention of the greater evils. The resolution therefore is not as to whether lesser evils should be trafficked but if they can be kept under control by free institutions. If they cannot be controlled then the victories gained from war on terror would be rendered Pyrrhic (Ignatieff, 2004).
Michael Ignatieff seeks to answer whether liberal democracies are supposed to be free of violence or whether the ‘lesser evils’ are justified under the rationale that the values represented by democracies are being protected. He generally offers an insightful discussion based on the possible necessity of using violence when ideologies of democracy are under attack. He argues for an approach t that is measured when the values of democracy are under attack. He therefore encourages that moral power should be exercised so as to persuade others on the values pertaining to liberal democracy. He therefore offers principles that liberal democracies can navigate when moral imperatives that require the protection of communities and individual rights are competing. He therefore argues that governments are justified in violating rights when encountering terror emergencies but, they should be executed with a ‘conservative bias’. This entails execution with adversarial proceedings, due process and other relevant legal safeguards. He also agrees that societies can be able to make tradeoffs that are prudent when they have accurately assessed the threat’s magnitude. He also considers the long history of terrorism on democratic societies and argues that liberal states have repeatedly overreacted and have readily curtailed freedoms. He argues that citizens do not have more rights accruing to them as opposed to non-citizens. After the 9/11 attack he protested that illegal aliens mostly Arabs and those of Islamic origin were targeted for deportation and detention and this he states are unjust and were unnecessary. He concludes that liberal democracies can survive terror when they take the political contexts that enable terrorism to thrive seriously. This entails persuading, engaging and advocating for social justice (Ikenberry, 2004).
Ignatieff. Being a professional advocate for human rights, broke with a lot of organizations of human rights when he defended the actions of President’s Bush administration decision in going to war with Iraq based on the fear of what Saddam Hussein would do with his weapons of mass destruction. Rabkin (2005), disagrees with Ignatieff by arguing that the lesser evil is not good enough. His argument majorly center on Ignatieff’s contention that liberal democracies have to perpetuate evil so as to forestall or combat worse evils. Ignatieff (2002) seeks to correct the moralism attached to human rights so as to leave room for rationale political calculations to be executed by a statesman when confronting terrorism. At the same time he seeks to preserve the moral outlook of advocates of contemporary human rights without considering how fundamentally anti-political or unpolitical the issue really is. Ignatieff rejects the counsel that a suspension of the normal protection that is legal leads to a breach of constitutional ethics he endorses Robert Jackson’s admonition that the “constitution is not a suicide pact.” He also rejects the opinion that the protections offered by the constitution are to be entirely ignored during emergency periods or war. The constitutional protections to be suspended however, cannot be determined by pragmatic considerations. Constitutional provisions that enhance security may end up diminishing the respect for future rights and laws. This he deems are a cost that utilitarian calculations are apt to ignore. Rabkin therefore opines on this matter that Ignatieff encourages the courts and legislatures to play an active role in ensuring that rights do not end up being restricted to levels that are more than necessary or for periods that are longer than necessary. Even though Justice Jackson warned of too much restrictions on interpretations of the constitution, he also warned against coercing judges in the reviewing of emergency actions where detailed information, political support or overall perspective was negated and executive judgments were therefore acquiesced in the moment’s heat. Therefore, emergency actions that would be perceived as questionable exceptions would then be viewed as lawful precedents. This would lead to precautions as to allowing courts to constrain the conduct of executives. Rabkin further opines that another problem with Ignatieff’s argument is that he wants to drive the argument from the constit...