By Abiye Tekelemariam

Philosopher Messay Kebede has a unique take on the release of CUD leaders (Ethiopian Review, July 21). As a consequence of the demand for forgiveness, he argues, its goal can’t be none other than the need to humiliate the leaders. The popular, if not the conventional, perspective about their release is that despite the moral puzzles of last week’s deal, the outcome is better than them staying in prison.

Suppose Messay is right, and that the government’s commitment throughout the mediation process had in fact been to humiliate its opponents, and that because it has obtained the demand for forgiveness, it has humiliated them as needed. I would then say that it is reasonable to consider the deal as a massive cataclysm that changes a lot of what we know about CUD politics.

There is a philosophical matter of great importance here. To be humiliated doesn’t simply mean to be wronged, or to be a victim of injustice even though it falls in those general categories. Humiliation is a special wrong, or injustice as it is a violation of human dignity; an attack on the absolute and inherent worth of human beings. The distinction here isn’t just semantic. For example, laws give differential remedies to subjects of humiliation and victims of other kinds of injustice. The Christian doctrine of turning the other cheek doesn’t go as far as urging the toleration of humiliation. We sometimes reasonably expect persons who are victims of some sorts of injustice not to be morally outraged, and rather to forgive and forget. But forgiving a humiliator is so difficult a task that putting it as a moral, legal or any other form of obligation is unreasonable, or at least too demanding. If we violate such obligation, our nature would serve as a morally mitigating factor, if not an excusing condition entirely. It is thus reasonable to expect a humiliated person to make revenge the predominant part of his life’s project.

We may argue that politicians are rear human beings, and that because their projects have implications beyond themselves, they have an obligation to behave in a different way to ordinary individuals. Despite the general validity of the statement, it serves as a weak argument as a justification to the toleration of humiliation. If anything, politicians think of themselves as representatives of people, and as Messay himself acknowledges, an affront to the dignity of a politician is, by extension, an affront to dignity of each of the people he represents. That is especially true where the humiliation is inflicted in connection to the politician’s representation of a constituency. Physicists speak of the larger distortions of physical space when the gravitational masses are greater. Humiliation is a distortion to personal space. The larger the number of the humiliated, the greater the distortion to personal spaces, and hence, the more reasonable to expect the commitment to payback.

Of course, it doesn’t follow that, if Messay is right, the CUD leaders will act in the way I mentioned above. They may be a collection of holy people, and may in this case, as some of them have been before, be shining personal examples of forgiveness and toleration. I am not also assigning an ontological status to them as a group of vengeance seeking politicians. There may be differences among them in how they react to the humiliation. My aim here is to show that Messay’s thesis of humiliation can bear upon us the reasonable expectation that the CUD’s politics of reconciliation and love, famously captured by Teddy Afro’s song Ja Yasteserial, will change.

But I do not think that Messay’s argument is well-taken. I trust that his conception of humiliation is suspect, and contrary to his interpretation of the document they purportedly signed, it is doubtful whether the document extracts guilt from the leaders.

Messay starts his essay with references to moral psychology to explicate his theory of humiliation. He claims that one cannot humiliate what “one has not already recognized as a superior.” So in the matrix of relationships, the commitment or the need to humiliation enters as a relational value when one feels inferior to another. Messay’s argument can be reformulated as follows:

(i)(x, y) (x is inferior to y)

Humiliation is an act of the inferior
Therefore, only x is capable of humiliating y

Or;

(ii)(x, y) (x humiliates y)

Humiliation is an act of the inferior
Therefore, x is inferior to y

It seems that the truth of both conclusions depends on the truth of proposition that humiliation is an act of the inferior. Messay doesn’t say what he means by “inferior”. Thus, here I take the liberty to assume that because his argument relates to political competition, it avoids the complex, but comprehensively rejected, notion of moral inferiority even though humiliating treatment in itself is a moral one. Instead, it may mean an inferiority in talent, education, popular appeal and support, vote, etc…

If humiliation is the violation of human dignity, the proposition seems to be false. Let’s assume that y is a person who believes in the race-based eugenics, and thinks and feels that the race x belongs to(r2) is intellectually inferior to his race(r1). He thinks people in r2 are so inferior intellectually that they are like SMR(Severely Mentally Retarded). Let’s further assume that because y has, to use concepts from moral psychology, neither Transferal Respect nor Counter-Factual Interpersonal Identification, to and with x, he isn’t ready to treat him as a moral equal. Y, say, chooses to make x his slave. There is no better example of an assault to human dignity than that. But the humiliation isn’t a result of feeling of inferiority in y. In fact, the reverse is true.

Even if the conclusions of (i) and (ii) are false, Messay’s further argument remains unscathed. His argument that the purpose of the extraction of confession of guilt is the perpetrator’s mask to hide his own meanness from himself , and construe humiliation as a punishment can stand whether the humiliator is inferior or superior. So surely the argument needs examination independently of the truth of his previous proposition. Let me ask if there is an extraction of guilt.

Legal philosophers distinguish between mistake and guilt. Mistake is a false belief in the existentiality of that the knowledge corresponds to. There is a lack of volitional intent in it. Guilt, however, is for acts and consequences intended by the doer. In modern criminal law, some negligent acts can make the doer guilty of crimes, but even then, negligence is different from mistake. The text of the document the leaders of the CUD signed states in clear terms that the responsibility that they have taken is to the acts and consequences arising from their mistake.

Beyond the text, there is an important aspect of the agreement to consider- circumstances of the agreement. In general law of contracts, we have the concept of duress. If a person enters into an agreement by violence or a threat to violence, the law supposes that there is a defect in consent, and thus, the contract is voidable.The scope of concept has, in recent years, been significantly expanded in different legal systems in both form and content. Economic pressure is now routinely considered by courts and laws as a form of duress. violence can be a positive act or inaction. It is not my intention in this essay to explore whether the document is signed under duress. But in the legal world where inaction may amount to violence, there is a sufficient reason to doubt whether there is a consent free of defect in a deal made between a jailer and the jailed.

I acknowledge that answering the question of the existence of a guilt confession, not by elucidating the meaning of some of the concepts in ordinary speech, or how the agreement is perceived , but by using conventional doctrinal methods may render my project irrelevant in view of the fact that the agreement is not entirely legalistic, but that it involves political aspects as well. An argument skeptical to my doctrinal method may advance the thesis that as an agreement which is le politique, what matters is how, as a matter of habit or conviction, the text of the agreement is interpreted,and/ or how the community sees the circumstances of the agreement. This is an empirical question, and a matter for the social scientists to deal with. On the basis of some of the opinions in the media here and abroad -which can’t be taken as a scientific research- , however, there is a remarkable degree of conformity that the paper doesn’t constitute the confession of guilty.

Perhaps the reason for the commitment of the government to obtain the demand of forgiveness from the CUD leaders has more to do with realpolitik than the infliction of any form of moral damage. If Messay’s theory of humiliation is debunked, it is reasonable to expect CUD politics, here in Ethiopia, to continue with its traditional message, but with a modified strategy.

The writer can be reached at [email protected]