The West's attitude towards Syria and Moral Values

As Congress is sitting tonight deciding whether or not to intervene in Syria in the wake of last weeks chemical attacks and the British parliament decision not to back intervention, many questions have been asked, such as, what does this mean for Britain? Did Mr Cameron make the right call? Or, what is the impact of the Iraq war on this decision? One question that hasn’t been asked and in some ways must merit serious consideration is, given that there has been outrage at President Assad’s regime, where does this leave the argument for moral relativism which is meant to occupy a central tenant of western liberal thought? In this article, I want to explore the dilemma of western thought that taking a stand against the Syrian regime may, in fact, pose a serious problem for those who argue that morality is relative and any distinction between good and evil no longer makes sense. In the period that followed the Second World War, the old powers (Britain and France) came under intense pressure (from the U.S., amongst others) to decolonise and relinquish ideas of imperial grandeur. This coupled with the social revolution of the 1960’s whereby the discussions around morality were permeated by ideas of relativism and the idea of the primacy of individual agency, led to the questioning of the traditional distinction between good and evil. The idea of moral relativism is associated with the Social Revolution of the 1960’s, where for a variety of reasons it was asserted by liberal intellectuals that absolute morality could not exist and with the decline of religious values, any reference to good and evil made little sense. This process is of fundamental importance to the present topic at hand. Bcause if the west is serious about taking action against Assad, (which by in large I think is correct, although I don’t personally support military intervention) then it must admit that moral relativism is not only the incoherent(as recently pointed out by Julien Beillard (Beillard, 2013, 23-24)) but also a problematic given the actions of the Syrian government. In order to fully comprehend the position of world politics today, it is necessary to consider that the duplicity of western morality has fundamentally eroded its own moral position. Whether one supports action or not, the rhetoric coming out of Downing Street and the White House camouflages the insecurity of the supposed moral righteousness of the message.