Senate The US Politics discussion

Here's the problem Wocky, you do that and you undermine all of international law in the process. When you have a peace treaty, you have a winning party and a losing party. International stability is created by people fulfilling their agreements, even if there's a later change of position. Allowing for unilateral repudiation without consequence is simply not an option.

I mean, the conflicts were entered into for very dubious purposes -- but that's not how we evaluate treaties.

Finally:

I think the world would be better if we got away from the notion that undoing one's own wrongs is somehow a favor to others.

This is a completely inapposite point to the rest of the discussion. As I've said a couple times now, it's a different matter if both parties agree to change the treaty or one party agrees to give up its rights. It is a different matter for a party to say the other party doesn't have its rights any longer because of reasons in the past. I would thank you not to muddle the two.

 

But I think there would something seriously wrong if we re-evaluated our opinion about the morality of an act because of simple convenience. That a war that was waged in "revenge" for a ship that was failing to fly its expired British colors while selling contraband is stupid and outrageous, especially when this was nakedly a pretext for the fact that the UK was still tending to run a negative balance of trade relative to China in spite of already waging one unjustifiable war to rework the whole relationship between the two countries is awful. That there were "concessions" from it to the clear aggressor is worse. Those two points should be acknowledged as true, regardless of how well honoring those concessions makes the international system work.

The moral interpretation of the war has little to nothing to do with the fact that the U.S. and Cuba have a permanent lease agreement on Guantanamo Bay. These are completely separate issues. We could give up the base without ever admitting fault. We could admit fault without giving up the base.

You know full well we're not talking about the morality of the act. Please either: make this a separate point, or acknowledge it's a strawman and a red herring.

This is actually the sentence I was commenting. The whole phrasing of "give up its rights" suggests some sort of magnanimity on the part of the country that took the losses. It isn't. No polity, entity, or organization should be praised for doing what's decent.

It does nothing of the sort and it has nothing to do with praise. It has to do with rights -- the U.S. has a permanent leasehold on the land. Who cares about praise? What are you talking about?

These are negotiating positions. Cuba knows the U.S. has the rights to the land, that's why it's part of Cuba's conditions for the talks.

Also, I think you somewhat undermine your point with the "racist and colonialist" regimes note. Our current system doesn't leave a lot of room for system people to renege. That doesn't mean an alternative could not.

...Wocky, what are you talking about? What alternative? Yes, we could invent an entirely new system of international law right now. Do you even have a point?

The UN Charter is a multilateral treaty. All the colonial powers were and are parties to the treaty. Nobody went by and said "I am the God Emperor of the Earth and I am changing the rules bwahahah give me your land to hand to the people in my beneficence."

edit: Wocky how can you on one hand talk about how forcing concessions is bad and then on the other talk about forcing an entirely new seat of rules and stealing land from people? We've already said that the U.S. could at any time give up the land, so the discussion is whether the U.S. should be forced to.

 

OK, who's the moral arbiter? State A? State B? The UN? God? You? Please sketch a brand new paradigm.

You and I trade. You sell me Wockies. I decide you are grossly overcharging for Wockies, which my people need to survive. I decide not to pay you for Wockies, because you are being immoral. I have broken our trade agreement, but I can unilaterally rescind on the grounds of your immorality. Is this how your system works?

And why doesn't this work on a personal level? Why don't we change all state and domestic laws to operate on a system of morality? Why should the gas station charge more in times of scarcity? Why should the bank charge interest, which is immoral usury?

 

To be clear, morals are great. We can have a discussion -- as Ender mentioned -- whether states have an obligation to be moral in their conduct. That's great and interesting, and I'd be very interested in that.

But that is different than saying that morals decide the rights and privileges of states, which are big scary dangerous entities composed of many people of many cultures of many belief systems. That requires an objective system, and that system has been determined to be consent (coupled by other factors such as fair dealing, various norms of behavior, etc. -- some of these norms have moral underpinnings, but they function because states agreed on these not because morality demands it).

 

Something I learned through long immersion in the international human rights crowd is that you have to go for the practical, workable solutions. You probably think that I'm going for the "might makes right" version of international politics, but I'm not.