"Violence is not to be undertaken by private persons. If a state or administration acts without due and visible attention to agreed international process, it acts in a way analogous to a private person. It purports to be judge of its own interest"
About this Quote
Williams is doing something sly here: he collapses the flattering moral category of “the state” into the far less dignified figure of “a private person” with a weapon and a grievance. The point isn’t pacifist piety. It’s a targeted rebuke of governments that want the privileges of sovereignty without the restraints that make sovereignty legitimate.
The rhetoric hinges on analogy. Private violence is outlawed not just because it’s harmful, but because it short-circuits the central civic bargain: no one gets to be prosecutor, jury, and executioner for their own cause. Williams argues that when an administration bypasses “due and visible” international process, it commits the same offense in a global register. “Visible” is the knife twist. He’s not only demanding legality; he’s demanding legibility. A state that acts in the shadows may satisfy its internal lawyers, yet still behave like a vigilante because it refuses the public accountability that distinguishes enforcement from revenge.
The subtext is post-Iraq, post-“coalition of the willing”: a world where leaders invoke security or humanitarian rescue while quietly treating multilateral rules as optional theater. Williams, a theologian with an Anglican instinct for institutions, is defending process as moral formation. International law isn’t bureaucracy; it’s a discipline meant to blunt self-deception.
“Purports to be judge of its own interest” lands as the real accusation: not merely that the state is wrong, but that it has embraced the oldest temptation of power - to baptize appetite as necessity and call it justice.
The rhetoric hinges on analogy. Private violence is outlawed not just because it’s harmful, but because it short-circuits the central civic bargain: no one gets to be prosecutor, jury, and executioner for their own cause. Williams argues that when an administration bypasses “due and visible” international process, it commits the same offense in a global register. “Visible” is the knife twist. He’s not only demanding legality; he’s demanding legibility. A state that acts in the shadows may satisfy its internal lawyers, yet still behave like a vigilante because it refuses the public accountability that distinguishes enforcement from revenge.
The subtext is post-Iraq, post-“coalition of the willing”: a world where leaders invoke security or humanitarian rescue while quietly treating multilateral rules as optional theater. Williams, a theologian with an Anglican instinct for institutions, is defending process as moral formation. International law isn’t bureaucracy; it’s a discipline meant to blunt self-deception.
“Purports to be judge of its own interest” lands as the real accusation: not merely that the state is wrong, but that it has embraced the oldest temptation of power - to baptize appetite as necessity and call it justice.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|
More Quotes by Rowan
Add to List
