Thankfully, I have never received correspondence from the US Department of State (DOS), that is, not until very recently. So, you can imagine my disquiet when, upon opening my Gmail a few days ago, I was greeted with not one but two emails from said department – there, in my inbox, glaring at me implacably, unblinkingly, triumphantly. My not-so-free association went straight into overdrive. Had the long arm of Trump retribution for all those unkind things I have said about him in the last year or so reached all the way to my home in Cambodia? They certainly weren’t invitations to playdates at Mar-a-Lago. More likely, I had been made a banned person. An honour I had had bestowed on me before, by the apartheid Government of South Africa. Or was it just a scam of some kind?
Anyway, with some trepidation, I opened them and, much to my relief, found that they were not sinister at all, at least not as far as I was concerned. The emails, which were from the disarmingly named ‘Adriana’ (was she related to Claude, I wondered?), referred to my time in one of the countries of the Middle East and thereabouts where I had worked as a consultant: Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, South Sudan, and the UAE.
It turned out that a person who had worked with me during my time in one of these countries had included among the papers submitted to the DOS (I presumed) to support his visa application for entry to the US two documents allegedly signed by me.
The DOS emails asked politely that I answer several questions that were designed to establish the authenticity or otherwise of the documents that bore my signature.
Before we unravel that mystery, let me say that the person in question – who we will call ‘Mohammed’ – was a very good man who had carried out his duties efficiently and, most importantly, safely for the full length of my assignment. I remember him fondly and would only want well for him and his family.
Returning now to the documents that bore my signature and the ethical dilemma that I was to discover therein.
The first email asked me to say whether an attached copy of a letter of recommendation for Mohammed bearing my signature had in fact been written and signed by me. My response was unambiguous and immediate. I had kept a copy of the document and was therefore able to confirm its authenticity without hesitation.
The second email was less straightforward. It too had a copy of a letter attached that bore my signature. The first part of the document repeated verbatim what I had said in my letter of recommendation, but the second part, though in my view accurate, had clearly been written by a different hand.
My natural inclination was simply to tell the truth. But I paused briefly. Very briefly. Would my telling the truth deny Mohammed something that was worth having? He clearly thought so. Could I presume to know better? Luckily, I could resolve my ethical dilemma and still feel I was doing the right thing for Mohammed and his family by telling the truth and helping Adriana to arrive at the logical conclusion of my replies to her emails.
However, it required two responses from me to convince Adriana and the institutional apparatus that she represented.
As with my first email, the ‘electric’ and almost cloyingly polite (and grammatically correct) response from Adriana to my second email awaited me the next morning, beaten to the post only narrowly by the automated acknowledgement. It stated as follows: “Thank you very much for your assistance during our verification process. This information has been added to the case. We require additional information to ensure accurate and complete processing of this application. Specifically, we are seeking clarification in the following areas: Can you please confirm if the attached letter is fraudulent?”
In her Claude-like way, Adriana appeared not to be able (or allowed?) to draw the obvious conclusion from my first email. I therefore restated in plain English what I had implied in my first email.
Now suitably convinced it seemed, Adriana replied immediately thanking me again for my help.
It is possible that Mohammed’s application will be denied at least partly because of this, so the stakes are high. But, as I have said, Mohammed is from a country in the Middle East or nearby. And he is a Muslim. If he were to be admitted to the USA, he would be reminded of this countless times a day, every day, for the rest of his life. His wife and children would experience the same. His children would be bullied at school. They would all live with the constant fear of an ICE agent breaking down their door bearing an order for their deportation based on some pretext or whim of the Trump regime, as is happening now for Afghan Muslims in the USA and has happened before for many other Muslims in the USA.
It doesn’t need me to recount the USA’s long track record and deserved reputation for sometimes genocidal meanness and nastiness towards Muslims in Mohammed’s part of the world, in the USA, and in many other places.
As suggested above, it seems likely that at the very least my responses could contribute to Mohammed’s being denied entry to the USA. It would be easy enough for me to rationalise those actions by supposing somewhat paternalistically that exclusion from the West is somehow a blessing in disguise because admission would entail all the bad things I have recounted here and elsewhere. But Mohammed chose to apply to enter that world. Whatever I might know about his home country, his desired destination or his personal circumstances, his hopes and fears, or his family’s wishes, ethically I have no right to make that judgement for him.
There is no obvious or neat solution to the universal dilemma posed by this case. How can we resolve the harm that can be done by telling the truth with the fact that those who will suffer sometimes greatly as a result are innocent people who have done nothing to deserve the consequences?
But my beliefs and convictions are not so readily dissuaded or set aside. Should we in the messy, dangerous world that we inhabit allow ourselves to be paralysed by the pedantry and niceties of ethical dilemmas? Is this just as much of a moral self-indulgence or abdication as acting according to one’s best judgment, knowing that you might be wrong, is an unwarranted presumption?
Like the UK, the glory days of the US – if they ever existed in the first place – are long gone and for ordinary people in both places hope for a better future is diminishing fast. For Muslims in those countries there is no beautiful land or shining city on the hill. There is only the harsh reality of the Islamophobic worlds they will have to contend with – where abstract ideals that are not seasoned with practical judgment can threaten well-being and survival.
Mohammed is my friend and a good man. If he had asked for my assessment of the risks of taking his family to the US, I would have said what I have here. I would not have said ‘well on the one hand this but on the other hand that, I don’t really have an opinion’. To do so would have meant violating my responsibility to him as a friend because it was less onerous on me emotionally and seemed like the ethical thing to do. He would have asked me because he valued my judgement, because he knew I had spent sufficient time in both places – his place of departure and the US – and because he could rely on my telling him what I thought was best for him and his family. It would have been a plea for help not easily denied, at least not by me.
I am in good company in this. Aristotle’s view was that a true friend is “a second self”, and that authentic virtue cannot survive in a state of comfortable, dispassionate neutrality or cool and supercilious detachment. For him, a vital form of wisdom was phronesis – practical wisdom or judgment exercised in an unstable and unforgiving world where the competing demands of honesty and loyalty cannot always be settled by neat moral or ethical rules. And while he placed great value on careful deliberation (although he also believed that this could be overdone), if used as an excuse for inaction, it seems more than likely that he would have regarded the “on the one hand, on the other hand” prevarication as a fundamental failure of character, loyalty, and good sense. That is, as an unwillingness to make a moral choice (or prohairesis) which, for Aristotle, defined a virtuous person.
In the end, therefore, I still cannot help but feel sneakily consoled by the thought that an ethical dilemma that I could have resolved differently, at best, had I done so, would have left Mohammed impaled on a Morton’s Fork.