Matthew Rendall
My research is running along two main tracks. The first deals with justice between generations and the philosophical problems that it raises. I have been working out the theory through a series of articles, with the ultimate aim being a book mounting a consequentialist defence of Hans Jonas’s dictum that ‘we do not have the right to choose, or even risk, nonexistence for future generations on account of a better life for the present one’. While Jonas’s Imperative of Responsibility was a seminal influence on the Green movement in Germany, and has been widely discussed in France, it has never enjoyed the same influence in English-speaking countries. It relies on a metaphysical argument which is not accessible or intuitive for philosophers and political theorists brought up in the analytic tradition. My project is to build a defence of Jonas’s imperative on the basis of contemporary analytic moral philosophy, showing how to give appropriate weight to the distant future, without our duties becoming impossibly demanding, or degenerating into paranoid risk aversion.
The other project is a book on democracy, the security dilemma, and the 1853-54 outbreak of the Crimean War. The working hypothesis is that liberal democracies, because of their relatively transparent foreign policy processes, find it easier to signal peaceful intentions. While autocracies can convey co-operative intentions through costly signals, they may not recognize the need to do so. Moreover, while democratic publics will not back war against a peer competitor unless they consider it a clear and present danger, the opaque nature of autocracies’ policy making and the assumption that ‘despots’ are aggressors render them guilty in liberal eyes until proven innocent. Democratic leaders can thus sometimes trump up pretexts for aggression, as Saddam Hussein found out. Documents from the Russian archives clearly show that from the 1820s to the 1840s, St Petersburg sought to uphold the territorial status quo in the Near East. But whereas the British generally understood the intentions of France’s liberal Orléanist regime, the opacity of Russia’s authoritarian policy making led them to misperceive Russian intentions. When in the early 1850s a confrontation arose in the Near East, British Russophobes exploited these perceptions to start a war. A similar dynamic could be at work in Russia’s relations with the West today.
The other project is a book on democracy, the security dilemma, and the 1853-54 outbreak of the Crimean War. The working hypothesis is that liberal democracies, because of their relatively transparent foreign policy processes, find it easier to signal peaceful intentions. While autocracies can convey co-operative intentions through costly signals, they may not recognize the need to do so. Moreover, while democratic publics will not back war against a peer competitor unless they consider it a clear and present danger, the opaque nature of autocracies’ policy making and the assumption that ‘despots’ are aggressors render them guilty in liberal eyes until proven innocent. Democratic leaders can thus sometimes trump up pretexts for aggression, as Saddam Hussein found out. Documents from the Russian archives clearly show that from the 1820s to the 1840s, St Petersburg sought to uphold the territorial status quo in the Near East. But whereas the British generally understood the intentions of France’s liberal Orléanist regime, the opacity of Russia’s authoritarian policy making led them to misperceive Russian intentions. When in the early 1850s a confrontation arose in the Near East, British Russophobes exploited these perceptions to start a war. A similar dynamic could be at work in Russia’s relations with the West today.
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