A reader writes, apropos the hostages for headscarves question:
I have not been following this matter, and have no firm opinion on how the French should respond. But you seem rather blithely to overlook the fate of the hostages. Surely their lives are more important than the head-scarf law, whether one approves of that law or not. Maybe the French government, rather than the French Muslims, should have changed positions. When a robber says, “your money or someone else’s life,” you give him your money.
1. I am certainly quite interested in the fate of hostages — but that’s a much broader question than the fate of the hostages. Once you have paid him the Dane-geld you never get rid of the Dane. If you give in to terrorists to save the lives of these hostages, this substantially increases the likelihood that other terrorists will capture other hostages, to ask for more and more. To quote another truism, “Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated.”
2. Also, even independently of this the question, isn’t whether the two hostages’ lives are more important than the head-scarf law (which I do not approve of, incidentally). Rather, it’s whether they are more important than the ability of Frenchmen to democratically govern themselves, rather than being governed by murderous thugs. Democratic self-government is not the most important thing in the world — but it’s hardly chopped liver, either. Many more Frenchmen than two have died to protect it.
(I don’t think the analogy to private payments is terribly helpful, for a variety of reasons. Among other things, I think governments do owe a different kind of duty to help their citizens who are victimized by criminals than we have to help strangers who are victimized by criminals, the latter being a matter of charity, rather than any other moral obligation. Moreover, I think the harmful long-term effects of paying off terrorists swamp whatever present benefits there might be.)
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