Happy Friday!
It’s been a bit of a quiet period for me over the last month, but this week I’ve been busy doing one of the types of client project that I enjoy the most: producing a review of the academic literature to answer a question that matters to them. It's always one of my favourites because (a) I get to learn new things and (b) I know the end result is definitely useful to someone. Today, however, I don’t expect to be particularly productive, because I’ve been up far longer than the sun! Never mind...
Some of the issues addressed in this newsletter are highly topical. Others reflect topics and ideas that have been rattling around in my head for a while, demanding an airing. Today’s newsletter definitely falls into the latter category, but I think it addresses an important yet infrequently discussed issue: At what age should we consider someone culpable for their actions? And it is, of course, the Kadyrov regime in Chechnya that brings the issue to the fore.
With that in mind, here’s what you can expect this week:
- The contours of the culpability question
- The analytical implications of the answers
- The illusion of free will and the irrelevance of moral guilt
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The contours of the culpability question
Let’s consider, first, why the question of culpability arises in the first place. Dictators have children. Often, they position at least one of them as a potential heir. Consequently, they may groom their children for their intended roles, gradually involving them in more and more of the regime’s activities until they are ready to fully take the reins. Yet this process may start when they are still children. On the one hand, we can ask at what age they become accountable for their actions, rather than victims themselves. On the other hand, we can ask what choice the children of rights-abusing dictators have in who they become.
These questions are particularly pertinent to Chechnya today. Adam Kadyrov has long been positioned as heir intended — if the regime can work out a way to get around the legal issues that prevent his appointment. Adam was born on 24 November 2007, making him a mere 17 years old. That places him in something of a grey zone between childhood and adulthood. The age of criminal responsibility in Russia is 16 (14 for the most serious crimes), making him an adult. But he is not yet old enough to be conscripted (18) and certainly not old enough to hold many of the state positions he has been gifted (which gets to the crux of the transition problem). The regime began efforts at building his image by rigging MMA fights when he was only eight — and thus indisputably a child. And his more agentic debut in the media came with a controversial video showing him beating a detainee in September 2023, at the age of 16.
The analytical implications of the answers
The issue of responsibility for abused children — and those MMA fights, even as rigged spectacles, likely constituted child abuse — who become criminals is a deeply moral one. Yet it is reasonable to ask whether it is the job of the analyst to pass moral judgements. Alex Schmid once argued with regard to terrorism studies that the analyst should be a student of combustion and not confuse their role with that of a firefighter.
My own position on this has evolved over time. I used to agree with Schmid. However, I’ve moved towards the view that this is itself morally questionable. What, after all is the point of studying combustion except to put out the fire? To help people start them? While I don’t think passing judgements on others is either necessary or useful, this needs to be balanced against the importance of allowing a moral framework to inform analysis. On occasion, failing to take a moral stance on a question is nevertheless taking a stance. And there’s a good chance that you still have a moral position informing your analysis, in which case you might be failing to be honest or transparent by refusing to openly state it.
Nevertheless, for reasons that will soon become clear, I no longer think of the issue of age and responsibility as being a moral question so much as an analytic one. At what point does someone like Adam Kadyrov become a legitimate focus of enquiry? When he was being used as a propaganda asset at the age of eight, the only legitimate reason for discussing him is as such an asset or as a victim, but not as a political actor in his own right. Today, it’s largely unproblematic to treat him as an agentic actor: he is over the age of criminal responsibility, occupies a command position in the security services, and has participated in crimes such as interrogating Ukrainian prisoners of war. But when, precisely, does that switch happen? 14? 16?
The same issue arises in other areas too. I map the relationships around lots of actors, but such mapping invariably includes people who are (a) not political actors and (b) not obvious beneficiaries of the regime. But it is far from clear where the lines should be drawn much of the time. The relatives of many Chechen officials may not directly participate in political life, but they certainly benefit from their ill-gotten gains, and some are used to conceal them. Within the wider socio-political system, the mere perception of association may be sufficient to produce tangible benefits.
The illusion of free will and the irrelevance of moral guilt
Having pondered these questions over an extended period, I encountered what I consider to be a reasonable answer in an unexpected place: Sam Harris’ discussion of free will.
For any who don’t know who Sam Harris is, he’s an American philosopher and neuroscientist. I first encountered him years ago as one of the ‘four horsemen’ of the new atheism movement, though I think this association unfairly pigeonholes him today. One of the questions he has debated a great deal is whether free will exists (he has a book on the subject, but I think his ideas come across a lot better in his lectures on the topic).
I will do my best to summarise a fairly complex viewpoint in just a few sentences. We have no control over which thoughts arise, just as we have no control over our genes, our parents, or the circumstances into which we are born. All of these shape the actions that we take. As he puts it, “I cannot take credit for the fact that I don’t have the soul of a psychopath.” In such circumstances, free will cannot exist.
In one of his lectures, Harris touches upon the political implications of this in a way that is directly relevant to the discussion here. He raises the question of the culpability of Uday Hussein, the son of late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Uday went on to assume various regime roles and became deeply implicated in the regime’s crimes. Yet Harris questions whether Uday really had a choice: He did not choose his genes and nature, which led him to enjoy torturing people, any more than he chose his father. Is it, he asks, any wonder that Uday turned out the way he did? For Uday Hussein, substitute Adam Kadyrov — or even Ramzan himself.
The consequences of acknowledging this are less dire than they may first appear. They do not excuse the crimes committed or demand hand-wringing sympathy for their perpetrator — which will always be difficult to muster for people like Uday Hussein or Adam Kadyrov. Instead, they remove the need to make moral judgements about those crimes.
Harris somewhere uses the example, if I remember correctly, of a bear that attacks people to illustrate the point. There is no need to assign moral guilt to the bear for his actions. Indeed, the idea sounds absurd. But it is perfectly reasonable to stop the bear attacking people, trap it, even kill it, because, as a society, we decide that bears attacking people is not acceptable and should be stopped. Once the decision has been made that bears should not attack people, moral judgements about bears that attack people become irrelevant.
The same logic arguably holds true for the Kadyrov children, of which there are many. Adam Kadyrov, at the end of the day, is both victim and perpetrator. But it doesn’t really matter, for the most part, to what degree the former role counterbalances the latter one. It just matters that you stop the bear. And so the decision as to what to include or exclude from the analysis is not ‘to what degree are they culpable?’ but ‘does including them contribute to stopping the bear?’