WHY SHOULD WE RESPECT OUR ENEMIES?

Freeman Dyson, who is a famous physicist and Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University, argues in the current issue of  The New York Review of Books that the 9/11 Moslem terrorists are deserving of "respect" :

"Yes, I wrote that we should respect our enemies as human beings in order to understand them. I do not tract or apologize for this statement. I would like only to add a more general statement, that our lack of respect for our enemies made it harder for us to deal with them effectively." 

Yet it needs to asked:  Why should one respect someone as a human being? Does the mere fact of membership in the human species amount to some worthwhile achievement? No.

Why then respect one merely for being human?  Hitler was human, Ted Bundy was human, slaveholders were human, child molesters are human and it is pretty preposterous to consider all of them worthy of any sort of respect – no matter if they kept a clean house, treated their pets well, or did other things inconsequentially nice.

So, that part of Professor Dyson's claim is arguably false, unless, at least, it is seriously modified or amended. Let's take the other part. Why would lack of respect imply lack of understanding?

Much of the world around us deserves no respect at all, yet we can understand it pretty well. As a physicist, while he understands them, does Professor Dyson respect the electron or the quark?

Do these inanimate, non-conscious beings go about earning our respect? Just how would that be, since they make no decisions, good or bad, worthwhile or not? Or are we to just respect anything, in which case the concept loses all of its distinctive meaning.

It looks like, then, that we could well come to understand our enemies, too, without respecting them. Even more:  often to understand our enemies it is imperative that we have no respect for them whatever.

Respecting them could well prejudice our understanding of them. We may be tempted to ascribe to them good qualities they do not have and by such means be tempted to misunderstand them quite seriously.

Now I am not familiar with Professor Dyson's complete philosophy and do not know whether, as a physicist, he believes in ethics, in the idea that some people are more deserving than others because of how they choose to act.

It is often the case with natural scientists that they view the world as morally neutral, through and through, to the point that ethics is precluded even from an understanding of human existence.

It is all just que sera, sera for them, with no personal responsibility, no freedom of will possible. Yet if that is the case, any talk of "respect" is meaningless.  At most it means being awed by the world, by all of it, by what are deemed vicious and virtuous deeds equally.  
Which means the idea of an enemy goes by the wayside, too. At most some things may have adverse impact on some other things but there can be no enemy since all sides are simply playing out the ways of impersonal nature. Sure, the lion may be the "enemy" of the zebra and the zebra of the grass, but all such talk is myth, without any possibility of truth to it.

I am not sure if that is how Professor Dyson looks at things, o let us just stick to what he believed is worth presenting to the readers of The New York Review of Books.

For it is not worth much that's useful or true. The implicit doctrine of tolerance he advocates – let's respect everyone, enemy and friend alike – is, in fact, quite dangerous.

To "tolerate the intolerable," as that famous neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse argued many moons ago with his doctrine of repressive tolerance, is not a virtue but a vice.   For to do so is to obliterate moral distinctions and thus morality itself. 

If nothing else, Professor Dyson might acknowledge this fact as he considers the worthiness of those who disagree with him that respecting terrorists has any sort of value. .

Tibor Machan holds the R.C. Hoiles Professorship in business ethics and free enterprise at Chapman University in Orange, California.