One of the many pitfalls in
the doctrine of absolute sovereignty, whereby government officials acting as government
can literally get away with murder domestically given the lack of credible de
jure and de facto enforcement of international “law,” is the ability
to inflict collective punishment based on group-identity, including the ideologies
that hinge on identity politics. Going the actual culprits of a crime or even a
revolt, collective punishment inflicts harm and even mass murder on an entire
group, including individuals thereof who are not at all culpable. Unlike “collateral
damage,” the ideology of collective justice includes intentionally harming
such individuals. It is an ideology because it is based on beliefs about a
group rather than an ethic that would justify normatively the infliction of
pain and suffering on the innocent. Furthermore, collective justice is an
ideology because it includes the artificial elevation of a group (i.e., the
collective) over the individual even though members of a group are arguably
foremost individuals, who typically belong to more than one group or
organization. To put the collective abstraction first ontologically is thus tenuous
at best. A person may be a Texan, a Democrat, a Catholic, and a member of a
football team, for example, so the claim that that person is essentially
any one of these would be dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. In privileging a
part over a whole, thus being partisan, an ideology is in a sense arbitrary, even
in claiming that a state of affairs that is favored or desired is the
present state of affairs, as if the statement were a fact of reason rather than
a counter-factual statement.
The full essay is at "Pope Leo on the Fallacy of Collective Justice."
