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What possibly could an international treaty and the magician of Science Fiction have in common, besides a birthday on August 22?
The First Geneva Convention
Today in 1864, representatives of twelve states and governments signed the first of a series of Geneva Conventions, the Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field. The original treaty had only 10 very short articles. It dealt only with the humane treatment of wounded soldiers in the field and the status of neutral medical personnel, particularly of the Red Cross, who attended to them.
Since then, the ten articles have slowly expanded to 64, and the twelve countries who signed the Geneva Convention(s) have grown to 196.
They are a curious set of rules: a self-imposed obligation to harm one’s enemy as much as is necessary and useful to one’s ends, but not more than that. And an obligation to treat someone you want to kill and annihilate with the civility and respect that you would grant your friends. In that, the Geneva Conventions carry echoes of both Christian sentiment (love your enemies) and medieval ideals of chivalry, which included never to strike a defenceless opponent in battle. They are, in this sense, uniquely rooted in Western history and traditions, and it would be an interesting project to see whether other cultures (Islamic? Chinese-Confucian? Buddhist?) provide similar cultural archetypes. Perhaps we will go after this question in a future post.
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What Is a Stoic Person?
A Stoic is an adherent of Stoicism, an ancient Greek and Roman philosophy of life. Stoics thought that, in order to be happy, we must learn to distinguish between what we can control and what we cannot.
But even earlier than the Middle Ages, we find similar thoughts. Stoic philosophy teaches that all human beings are of equal value, and that one can never be justified in placing one’s own interests over another’s. This, much later, became the central idea of Kant’s ethics: the principle that we are all infinitely valuable as persons, and that therefore no human being can ever be used by another “as means only.” Instead, we must all treat each other as ends, as human beings who have an infinite worth, just by virtue of being human.
Photo by Elijah O’Donell on Unsplash
That’s the high-minded part of the Geneva Conventions. But that’s not …
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
