Jeremy Bentham statue. Flickr/Ben Harper. Some rights reserved.The dust has settled. And what has emerged from the attack on Charlie Hebdo has been a public relations boon for the French satirists. Violence and death sells. But what we can also see emerge from the wreckage is a deeply troubled understanding of moral rights, freedoms and, in some circles, the double standards that straddle these ideas. Mehdi Hasan, perhaps most forcefully, illustrated some of the fictions and hypocrisies of the conveniently-timed champions of free expression; extolling its virtues whilst criminalising political dissent.
If we believe in these rights as sacrosanct, how are we to make sense of the internal contradictions of rights-based rhetoric which is used to deny the freedoms of some but not others? When a Russian punk band of white women was imprisoned for expressing anti-Putin sentiments, even the White House expressed “serious concerns”. But few, if any, know about Seckin Aydogan, a member of the Turkish band Grup Yorum, who was arrested by the government in Turkey months earlier. To dissect and understand such moral paradoxes, one explanation, familiar to many students of the humanities, starts with the seemingly intractable moral theories of the Enlightenment: utilitarianism and deontology.
Universalism was enlightenment’s imperialism
Attempting to put it succinctly, utilitarianism – the brainchild of those such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill – holds that the determination of what is morally right is governed by what will maximise happiness (of which variations exist). The London Metropolitan Police's fatal public shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005, in a tube carriage, when they mistook de Menezes for a suspected terrorist, is one example of the workings and consequences of the rhetoric of utilitarian ethics. Effectively, its ‘felicific calculus’ is a numbers game.
