In the Shadow of Democratic Violence

Shmuel Nili’s Beyond the Law’s Reach? is an inquiry into the moral duties of the world’s established democracies in a world rife with violent and undemocratic states. Nili argues that these “consolidated” democratic states are “entangled” with the leaders of such violent polities—and uses this entanglement to derive an elegant and plausible series of political duties. In response, this essay seeks to undermine the distinction between the established democracies and the violent states, by showing that some democratic states—including, most centrally, the United States—are as violent as those societies considered by Nili as the focus of international moral obligation. This fact, however, does not impugn the moral obligations identified by Nili; instead, it demonstrates that Nili’s duties might demand something like a necessary form of moral hypocrisy—in which a democratic state might be effectively able to undermine violence abroad, even while incapable of effectively eliminating that violence on its own territory.