Everyday philosophy

We still don’t know why the convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was released to Libya this August. Perhaps we never will. There has been, however, plenty of speculation over motives in the press and political class. Was this, as al-Megrahi himself claimed, an act of compassion towards a man about to die? Was it, as others more cynically supposed, a sweetener for an oil deal in the quid pro quo of realpolitik? Or both? In any case, the British government’s 1998 promise to America that al-Megrahi would see out his sentence in Britain was broken.

The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard used the phrase “the teleological suspension of the ethical” to describe situations in which conventional morality is put on hold for some supposed greater good or benefit, as it may have been in the case of this release. Kierkegaard himself used a biblical example to explain it: at God’s bidding, Abraham was ready to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, hoping against hope for a good outcome. By a miracle, he got it. Outside of the Old Testament, this strategy would, rightly, get short shrift.

Can politicians make a better case for themselves than Abraham? In the early 1970s, the American political philosopher Michael Walzer wrote about the problem he called “dirty hands”—a phrase he borrowed from Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1948 play of the same name. In extreme situations, Walzer asked, might not leaders shelve conventional morality for the sake of the greater good?

For Niccolò Machiavelli, in the precarious world of Renaissance Florence, there was no contest: leaders should always put the state’s survival before the purity of their souls. Trade deals with Libya, however, are unlikely to make or break Britain (we hope). So to invoke a dirty hands argument would be self-serving rationalisation.

Was al-Megrahi’s release, then, wrong? I’m with President Obama in counting it a mistake. But the whole business is clouded by doubts about the rightness of al-Megrahi’s conviction. Perhaps the only certainty is that, as Walzer put it, “the moral world is much less tidy than most moral philosophers are prepared to admit.”