*Jennifer D. Kibbe. “The rise of the shadow warriors.” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 2 (March/April 2004): 105.

I would like to add, as a sidenote, that some “left” objections to blaming systemic effects on individuals, on persons, are objections against the blaming of “elites” for systemic effects. There is left critiques of the moral indictment of “elites” (instead of a clear understanding of the system’s workings), notably among the “wertkritik” marxists.

A parallel question, one with which I am personnally struggling is: in what circumstances, in what systemic configuration do people morally blame individuals for systemic effects, and why, in such and such circumstances, such and such people are mainly blamed for such and such effects. I try to look for a beginning of answers in european Middle Ages patterns of violence against lepers and jews, “modern” anti-semitism and xenophobia, and sorcery crisis and trials. One great source of inspiration is: Wilson, Monica Hunter. 1951. “Witch Beliefs and Social Structure. ” The American Journal of Sociology 56 (4) : 307-31.

To go back to the main question of the post, would it be fair to rephrase it like this: “Can there be a moral applied to systems, and what could it look like?” ?

One thing is, I feel, quite obvious: it makes no sense to try and punish a system. Well, it could also be argued that it doesn’t make any more sense to punish people, and it has been argued, but that’s another story I guess.

I think we are leaving out the most important actor though, Osama Bin Laden himself. Is he not the most responsible factor in his own death? This may seem like another billiards example, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And when someone acts as he did than it should come as no surprise his life ended the way it did. Opinions on this war notwithstanding, he was being hunted by a lot of motivated people for a number of years. So on a micro level I would argue bin Laden is more responsible than anyone in all this. On a macro level, the individual is no different in that he/she is always in charge of the decisions they make. Whether or not those decisions will have a fatal repercussion is a different story.

Anyways, I’m an anthro major and stumbled across this article and the site. I’ll definitely be back.

I’m not sure ethical questions should be part of anthropological enquiry – at least, not answering them. It’s interesting to see where different people place the blame or credit for particular actions, or whether they accept things like collective punishment as valid – and that truly is a realm in which people vary, because there really is no right answer (in a sense). There’s an apocryphal story (maybe it’s true; I’ve never checked) from China about a dagger that was convicted of a murder and drowned in a river. Maybe the bullets that killed Osama should be considered responsible (“If it’s a miracle, Colour Sergeant, it’s a short chamber Boxer-Henry .45 caliber miracle”), or the manufacturer of the guns.

Well, most people don’t come to that conclusion because they know that people act on the basis of the stuff going through their heads. That’s a widespread idea because it’s true, and also because the ascription of intention/intentionality to people (and objects) is a human universal. Godfrey Lienhardt has a good article somewhere on this limit on the variability of the concept of “the person”.

Sargon of Akkad didn’t really conquer Mesopotamia, and the Qianlong emperor didn’t really conquer Tibet, in the same way that Barack Obama didn’t really kill Osama bin Laden. Here, the supposedly “individualistic” ascription of blame/credit to these people is based on a collective acceptance of their power – what Searle calls “collective intentionality”. That doesn’t contradict individualist explanations (it rests on the concept of common knowledge from game theory, essentially). But it’s a collective thing, not an individual thing, in some sense.

The problem is that all actions exhibit the accordion effect. The SEAL pulling the trigger was part of a huge network of causes involved in the man named Osama bin Laden ending up dead in Pakistan, and we can expand or contract our description like an accordion. What is interesting is when different groups of people focus on different expansions or contractions of the accordion, but I don’t think saying that Barack Obama killed bin Laden is particularly revealing of American individualism, anymore than saying that Mao Zedong defeated Jiang Jieshi is revealing of Chinese individualism.

Try and teach race and you’ll get from your students anecdotes about racial situations between individual actors, but getting them to understand structural inequality or white privilege is difficult.

Try and teach popular culture and the mass media and you’ll hear them say, “Well if you don’t like what’s on TV you can just turn it off, right?” Getting them to understand how discourses frame what are permissible channels of communication is difficult.

I think this comes from an American tendency to imagine the self as a discreet, bounded entity. I am a non-porous, autonomous actor – cogito ergo sum. Like a billiard ball I respond in a rational, sensible way to the Newtonian forces around me.

Again, I’m not sure it is that simple. The agency question surfaces here in relation to the structures which allowed this to happen – and the ways in which they limit some while providing space for others to bring these financial issues to the fore.. I think it is a thought provoking question, but there are structural imbalances which render it very difficult to approach with these broad strokes.

Then, step back from this America-first stance and look at famous cases documented by anthropologists. Feuds, for example, in which if one of us (however “us” is defined”) is killed, killing any of them (the crowd to which the killer belongs) is right and proper vengeance. What about curious customs like that of imperial China where, if a son passed the examinations and became a mandarin, his parents immediately received superior rank of their own (wouldn’t do, you see, to have a son outrank his dad)?

Where all this leads me is the question, what are individuals held responsible and given blame or credit for in what situations? Lots of variation there, both inside and outside the US of A. Shouldn’t that be where the anthropological gaze is focused?