Moral Illusions
The interesting thing about optical illusions is that one may be aware of the illusion, yet, it does not go away.
It seems that the lines on the picture have different lengths even though one positively knows that they are exactly the same.
Now consider this statement:
Until January 2016, all nine situations which the International Criminal Court (ICC) had been investigating were in African countries. None were in European or American countries. ICC is therefore biased against Africa.
It doesn’t take much thought to realize that a country with war criminals in jail is better off than a country with war criminals at large. So, if anything, the ICC is biased against Europe and America.
But knowing that doesn’t make the moral illusion go away. Read the quote again and it still feels like Africa is being wronged. Repeat as much as you want: Yep, still there. Africa is being wronged.
It’s pretty clear that the left ends of the horizontal lines are vertically aligned but the right ends are not. This is confirmed with a ruler. Measuring horizontally from white to white, on my screen the top horizontal line is 50mm and the bottom one is 52mm. If I measure between some estimate of the visual centres of the junctions, I get 48 and 51mm.
I find the moral example no more illusory. It would take a large amount of research to draw the connection expressed by the “therefore”. None is given. One can easily come up with hypothetical causes of the alleged statistic (alleged, because one would first have to ask “Is this true?”, as I did with the lines). There are references in the Wikipedia article from which this is quoted, and one might start there if one wished to form a real opinion, rather than blow with the winds of other people’s chatter. But the quote on its own is worthless to that end.
Picture fixed. Thanks for spotting that.
That’s the nature of illusion: If you research it there’s no illusion. If you just glance at it without much thinking, the illusion is there.
As far as I am aware, yes. At some point it was all about Africa. I recall complaints about that in the media back at the time.
I’m not sure that the Africa one is a good example—it depends on your definition of the term “biased”. if there are an equal number of criminals in Africa and Europe and the ICC is only investigating Africa, then that suggests that the ICC has some sort of bias towards only investigating in Africa. Perhaps the people in charge of the ICC only think that African people can be war criminals—then they’re certainly biased against Africa in one sense, even though their actions are helping Africa. On the other hand, if their actions are helping Africa when they could be helping Europe, they’re biased against Europe in the sense you meant.
A similar example is with police investigation in black communities in the USA. Suppose for the sake of the example that there are an equal number of criminals in black communities and in white communities, but the police investigate the black communities at a higher rate. If they do that because they think that black people are more likely to be criminals (even though this is not true), then they’re definitely biased in the former sense against black communities. And in fact, they might catch criminals more quickly there (good) but they might also shoot innocent people (bad), meaning that they could also be biased in the latter sense.
I suspect that when many people say “biased” they mean the former sense, where it’s about the perception, not about the outcomes.
However, I do agree with your general point. I hadn’t really considered before how moral statements could be illusions in such a similar way to optical illusions.
I agree. Why the ICC was only investigating Africa matters. One part is that the ICC doesn’t have enough perceived legitimacy or authority for stronger countries to submit to investigations; they rely on their own institutions instead, and the ICC doesn’t have the power to override that. I highly doubt anyone in 2002 honestly expected that, say, the US would support it investigating US military actions in the Middle East (and providing access to classified records for such an investigation), and letting them investigate and punish Bush and Rumsfeld for war crimes.
Five of the African countries actually (at least technically, IDK the details) invited the ICC to investigate, so it’s not clear whether there was foreign imposition there, or to what extent. And since 2016 the ICC has been expanding into investigating in other (still relatively weak) countries in other regions, and in the case of Iraq, (although it decided not to prosecute), it was actually British nationals being investigated.
So, yes, I also feel the moral illusion the OP points out, but once I know enough context, the illusion fades, and I start to see this as a piecemeal strategy of building up momentum and precedent to make it harder to countries that had previously supported the ICC in distant cases to oppose it closer to home. I don’t want to have to wait until 2050 or later for the world to fully get behind international institutions of this sort, but I don’t have a better idea for getting there faster given the world I actually currently live in.
It reminds me of the “mani pulite” judicial investigations that happened in Italy in the early 90s and led citizens to vote in a referendum to change their proportionally elected parliament for the voting system that allowed Berlusconi to take control and all the following political reforms that only made things worse in Italy (in my opinion).
The consensus today is that “judicial investigations revealed a lot of corruption therefore the political system pre-93 fostered corruption”.
The possibility that the judicial system was simply more effective then, and that this revealed corruption was a sign of this effectiveness, is too often brushed aside.
I think you’re typical-minding here. The original quote doesn’t suggest that Africa is being wronged to me at all; there are dozens of reasons why ICC investigations would be concentrated in Africa. I have read it several times, and whatever moral wrong you perceive doesn’t appear to me at all.