Recently in France there has been a debate regarding a new law. Said law would make repeated visits of sites with content that advocates terrorism punishable. Similar laws regarding sites containing child pornography already exist in several countries. Now, there is many ways to assess whether such a law would be a good law or not. One could consider its practical implications. One could evaluate it in relation to existing judicial principles and procedures. Or one could focus on its philosophical underpinnings. I will attempt to do the latter, using an unconventional approach.
Any person who at least has had some contact with geek culture in his life will know what Warhammer 40k is. For those that don’t: it is a dystopian sci-fi fantasy universe in which the human Empire battles the forces of Chaos (among other foes) in a seemingly never-ending war. One unit that the Empire especially relies on in this war is the inquisition. The motto of said inquisition is “innocence proves nothing” (which explains the title). I always found that this motto was, in literary terms, extremely well chosen. The idea that “innocence proves nothing” after all flies in the face of pretty much our entire modern understanding of ethics. For us, innocence proves everything. If someone is innocent, he cannot be justly punished. This simple principle, however, does not and cannot hold in the world of Warhammer. The problem is that chaos, the evil force, can corrupt almost anything and only the strongest can resist it. So for the inquisition innocence is not a valid criterion. Bent on stopping chaos’s spread, they must judge whether someone is corruptible or not. If he is corruptible he must be eradicated, whether or not he has done something wrong. Innocence may imply resistance to corruption, but it may also imply that the person in question up until now had no chance to be corrupted. So: “innocence proves nothing”. They thus seek not to achieve justice. They want more. They want purity.
Now, any sane resident of our world would immediately reject such idea. It is anti-democratic. It is totalitarian. It is right-out insane. But… in a sense this is what is happening. The mere fact of looking at a website, even if it contains materials that advocates terrorism, is not a guilty act. One could go on these websites without ever intending to commit a terrorist act. One might, for example, be a sociologist researching the origins of terrorism. In this case one would unquestionably be innocent. There is no act and there is no intent so there can be no crime. But, if the law detailed above is enacted, one could still be persecuted. One could say that… innocence proves nothing. Such would be a strong case to oppose this law. We neither need nor want an inquisition to replace our legal system. In a democracy innocence should guarantee the right to be free and the law should protect this freedom. The only people whose freedom can be constrained are those who are guilty of conspiring against societies laws. And every single person must be regarded as innocent until they are proven guilty. To sum it up: we cannot accept the moral foundations of the Warhammer world because we simply don’t live in the Warhammer world.
Or do we? The thing is that terrorism seems to us as a crime that is distinctly different from others. It is not something comprehensible to a sane and reasonable individual. It is not like the murder done out of affection, or the theft done out of greed, which, even if wrong, still appear understandable. It is a fundamentally irrational act, a systematic destruction of life for the sole purpose of instilling fear and thus fulfilling an absurd ideology. One could imagine that an otherwise good person could commit a murder in drunken rage. But, to me at least, it seems impossible that a good person would ever commit the indiscriminate killings that exemplify terrorism. Terrorists cannot be reasoned with. Terrorists do not understand the immorality of their actions. Far worse, terrorists deem their actions to be ethical, legitimate, and sometimes even sacred. They are in a sense like Warhammer’s chaos: a force truly evil. Terrorism is a concept that seems so foreign to our values that it simply should not exist. It should be eradicated and banished from our world. Seen through this lens the law would make sense. No one should even read ideas so decidedly evil. One might come to them innocent, but they can corrupt, and every single corrupted puts society as a whole at risk. To prevent the possibility of corruption, everyone who puts himself into a position where he could be corrupted must be punished. The threat must be removed and purity must be achieved.
Now here one could immediately raise a valid objection. Benjamin Franklin once wrote that “they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”. And even in the Warhammer world this to an extent is true. The Empire is a brutal dictatorship and its methods are often hard to distinguish from those of the chaos. But if we need to erode democracy and our values in order to fight terrorism, don’t the terrorists somehow win? Unquestionably the answer is yes. And the law arguably does exactly that. It limits the freedom of information and it gives huge power to those with the authority to specify what terrorism, a fuzzy tem, exactly is. What if a future government decides to declare the Front National website terrorist? Or the website of the Front de Gauche? The opportunities for abuse are virtually endless. And how does one prevent seeing it? What if someone posts terrorist material on Facebook? Will all his friends have to go to jail? It all becomes very akin to the Orwellian concept of “thought crime”. This is not something desirable.
So, is the case closed? Not quite. The problem with the quotation written above is that, as good and powerful as it is, it represents somewhat of a false dichotomy. Without a minimum level of security to guarantee it, no essential liberty can exist. In both of the world wars, Britain, a mature democracy, decided to strongly limit the freedom of the press. This represented the curtailing of an essential liberty. But it did not result in a slide towards totalitarianism. Quite on the contrary, totalitarianism was decisively defeated in those wars. Now, arguably, we are in a war on terror. In the face of terror, essential liberty cannot exist. Freedom cannot be sustained if confronted with a minority that categorically denies the most fundamental of all human rights: the right to live. The state exists precisely to defend society from such ideologies and actions. The Empire arguably is bad. But Chaos is far worse. The risks are simply too high. What if such a website corrupts a biologist who then develops a biological weapon which turns into a pandemic? What if it corrupts an engineer at a nuclear plant? The law is thus part of a war effort. A war we cannot afford to lose.
As you might have noticed by now, I’m torn. There is compelling arguments on either side of the debate. Terrorism is a threat which is hard to compare to any other crime. It is a threat which must be adequately addressed. But we must also be careful to not exaggerate. Personally, I still believe that we have better options than this law. Instead of trying to banish ideas, however evil they are, we must find ways to convince people who might visit these sites of the superiority of our values. We must be able to prevent the spread of fanatic ideologies not by law but rather by reaching a consensus that they are wrong and unacceptable. In essence: instead of eradicating the forces of corruption we must increase our resistance to said corruption. It needs education, not inquisition. If we do not fight for our values, we lose them. If we do not believe them to be superior, we are lost. But I might be wrong. And the price of being wrong could be huge. Because it might just be that… innocence proves nothing.
– AK
The Dualblogarchy 