Moral and Political Responsibility Are Not The Same Thing

I don't really have a stake in the situation in Ukraine, and have mostly avoided conversations about it, because I'm pretty clueless about the region. But the conversations about Ukraine - and the divisions in opinions about it - are sometimes frustrating for me. I wasn't sure why, but I think it might be because of the tendency to conflate moral responsibility with causal responsibility. It's not a problem that's limited to Ukraine, but it's certainly become inflamed by it.

What I mean by this is that the question of who is morally responsible for the situation in Ukraine (or for any political situation) is different from the question of what caused the situation in Ukraine. This might seem wrong, because we often conflate the two types of responsibility, attributing causality to those who are morally responsible, but I don't think it is wrong.

If you hit me and I hit back, I'm morally responsible for my actions, because who else would be? When it comes to moral responsibility, the buck typically stops with the individual who is making the decision to act (or not to act). I hit you, I'm morally responsible. Simple.

However, if we're looking to understand the historical cause of my action, the situation is murkier, because then, the fact that you hit me certainly plays a role in helping us understand what happened. It doesn't excuse my actions morally (although it might moderate them), but it does help explain them. After all, while I might bear moral responsibility for hitting you, the explanation for why I hit you lies in the fact that you hit me first. And if we're looking to understand the situation, rather than just ascribing blame, such historical causes are definitely relevant.

I don't mean to be obtuse, and to talk in metaphors rather than just talking about Ukraine, but I do mean it when I say that I'm pretty ignorant about the region. So I'm just not knowledgeable enough to offer much of a substantive opinion.

That said, what provoked this post was something I read that sought to ascribe all the blame for the situation to Putin. And from a moral point of view, I wouldn't argue with this position (maybe someone with more knowledge would, but I see no need - the last thing I want to do is to defend him). But this kind of judgment doesn't really do us any service, and I don't think it really offers much by way of an explanation.

Instead, it wants to moralize what is essentially a political situation. That might be morally satisfying, but it's not politically satisfying. In fact, I think these kinds of moral judgments about political events (and Russia/Ukraine isn't alone here) reflects a tendency to avoid thinking about politics in favor of moralizing about it. These moral judgments are easy to make, while the real political analysis is much harder, especially as it often requires us to look past this type of simple moralizing in favor of a more amoral analysis of power. And I think that for many people this is an uncomfortable space to occupy.

In the case of the Russia/Ukraine piece that got me started, I'd say that this type of moralizing has been pretty typical of people with more liberal politics. But it's not exclusively their domain. I think that there's a strand of leftists that take comfort here too, replacing a more careful analysis of power with a moral condemnation of big phenomenon like colonialism and imperialism.

Yes, those things are bad. And we should morally condemn them. But we should also be aware of the way that these easy moral condemnations might be getting in the way of the much harder work of actually trying to understand what's happening in the world and why. It's only this latter type of analysis that will help us build the power we need to transform the world into a moral one.