In moral theory as well as in law, attribution is supremely crucial. Who did it? And “who” demands a proper name, a demonstrative pronoun, a definite description—and more than all that, an “individual” in the sense that a person is an individual. We emerge as individuals in the measure that we are able to attribute actions to ourselves, a competence that also allows us to attribute actions also to others. It is common for toddlers to refer to themselves in the third person. It takes some degree of maturity to meaningfully say “I”, ako.
That is the problem I have with the attribution of the gore and the mayhem of Paris and, possibly, Mali to ISIS (or ISIL, if you prefer an exotic Arabic term). ISIS is not a person. It may be a close-knit, highly cohesive, centrally directed association, very much like the Nazis were, but it will not do to attribute to it the atrocities that have revived the question of what it is to be “civilized”! I am by no means exonerating ISIS. Membership in a criminal organization is criminal, but that does not excuse us from going after the criminal who commits the crime and to whom must ultimately be attributed the act of terror and arrant cruelty!
It is the same thing with other crises that have wracked the world. We blame China for acts of aggression in the South China Sea (what we call the West Philippine Sea). But it is a Chinese leader who makes decisions. It is a Chinese military officer who directs acts of provocation. Always an individual. I am by no means denying fundamental postulates of sociology. But I am not ready to allow the culpable individual the convenience of disappearing behind the anonymity of the collective. Hitler was clearly the geni maligne of the everlasting horror that the Holocaust is. True, the Nazis were a deranged lot, but Hitler is rightly blamed because he gave the orders and approved the dastardly plans.
I can understand why Vladimir Putin and Francois Hollande are hot on the heels of ISIS, but when will they be able to claim victory? When that dreadful and hated symbol of the acme of irrationality—the ISIS flag—no longer flutters in the breeze anywhere in the world? Most certainly not! It is only when whoever it was who gave the order to behead, to bomb, to enslave, and whoever it was who beheaded, bombed and enslaved is made to answer for his acts in the manner the laws see fit!
The reason for the importance of attribution and the pursuit of the agent, the actor, the culpable subject is that the threat that hangs over us all (no part of the world seems safe anymore) can so easily lead us into endless squabbling about ideology and about the impossibility of vanquishing ideas. We can—and have been—lured into the cul de sac of historical gripes and continuing wrongs, real or imagined, and forget that persons can make decisions and do make them. The entire dimension of moral responsibility should not be lost to us as we debate with each other —often at futile length—over what we take to be the sociological and ideological roots of what really is ultimately the decision of an individual—of individuals—to be cruel, thoughtless and stupid!
Once more, the senseless attack on an audience armed with nothing more than eagerness for a concert and the bloodied bodies the murderers left in their wake painfully but forcefully demolishes the relativist thesis. There is no way you can relativize the moral evil of these murders. To even attempt to do so is to assault what characterizes human persons: the ability to distinguish right from wrong. There are some things that are absolutely, unqualifiedly wrong. The Paris nightmare is one of them!
Let us, by all means, go on with discourse on ideology, on the phenomenology of religion and the kinks of history—discussions that I have myself indulged in. But there are culpable persons out there who must be looked for and held to account for their criminal acts. More importantly, there are young consciences to form, persons who, in the future, will have sufficient influence and power for bane or boon, to whom we must pass on the convictions by which we are human. Moral maturity is the ability to pass upon my acts as good or evil, and so to commend myself as good or reprove myself as evil because of what I do. It is this eminently human capacity that can be taught only to individuals by individuals!