Why is it today's Americans, including leftist libertarians, seem to not grasp an argument which opposes torture due to its effects not just on victims and outer world, but on its effects to oneself?

Why, for example, would a person refuse to torture another, even if it were absolutely assured that no one would ever find out, the victim would never know who you are, you would never know who the torture victim was, and it was a very efficient way of finding information?

Given the ideal circumstances for torturing another human being -- complete anonymity and perfect efficiency -- is there no reason we can conceive of to refuse to torture?

One of the reasons that one does not torture is because one does not want to be a torturer.

One of the reasons a judge should strive toward a fair trial is not simply because of the possible repercussions for himself or the accused if the trial is not fair, but because a judge should wish to think of himself or herself as a judge who conducts fair trials.

One of the reasons I don't lie is that I don't want to be a liar -- I wish to have respect for myself, even before I consider the possible repercussions upon those around me should I lie to them.

These are simple, elementary postulations in moral logic. Common for centuries, if not thousands of years if you count the greeks.

Yet if I mention this with regard to current U.S. debates on torture, people react with incomprehension, and make irrelevant comments about the other and irrelevant moral wrongs of historical figures.

In their best arguments, those historical figures who helped guide the founding of this nation made not only arguments toward efficiency, but arguments toward morality. These arguments were not spun from the brain of those historical figures only -- there was a large extent to which the American war for Independence was simultaneously a popular rebellion by its peoples against injustice and illegitimate authority (though, yes, those same people apply the same logics to the indigenous population living around them, nor to the African-descended individuals brought as slaves).

Those moral arguments have been used throughout history to justify popular struggles against injustice and illegitimate authority. Freedom of speech, for example, have been largely illusory throughout most of US history, despite the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. Yet this did not stop popular struggles from using the moral arguments for the value of freedom of speech made during the constitutional founding of the nation to justify fighting for the right to speak freely.

(For example, the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley of the 1960s concentrated their rhetoric on making true the US values of Freedom of Speech which had been expressed in the moral ideas of the nation, albeit values which had been immediately repressed. For some strange reason, Mario Savio didn't launch the FSM by denouncing Jefferson as a serial rapist, and instead appealed to the nation to stand up for what it claimed to stand for.)

Am I missing something?

Has there not been a debate in the last 6 years over the very basic principles in this country of whether or not fair trials are to be valued, or whether or not torture is morally and legally permissible?

Has that not happened?

And have not many people opposed the use of torture, and endorsed the principle of fair trials for all detained, using a variety of moral and legal arguments? Is that so hard to postulate?

And have any of those arguments used by those who opposed torture and who insist upon fair trials for anyone detained actually been based on values asserted to be core to the Constitutionalist movement which founded this nation?

Have any of those arguments been centered on the perfect moral rectitude of Thomas Jefferson and whether he had sex with enslaved individuals?

I believe I was pointing out that among the arguments for why the US government should NOT torture, and why the US government SHOULD arrange for fair trials for any detained person, one finds missing the notion that the US government should represent the best values of our notions of government.

Some people oppose torture, for example, because of what it does to the victims of torture. And that is correct.

Some people oppose torture because it is inefficient, because it leads to no useful information. That is also correct.

Some people oppose torture because it is banned under various accords on human rights and the laws of war. This is correct, too.

But perhaps a forgotten reason to oppose torture by the US government because, as an immoral act, it would mean that the US government was an immoral actor.

Surely it is possible to recall that one of the philosophical principles under which many people popularly supported the founding of a new government and a new society was their desire that their own government represent the better characteristics of human nature and morality, rather than the worse ones.

There is a complex dialogue, of course, between the grimy realities of the actual world, and people cleverly using classical moral arguments to try to gain popular support for adherence to those principles.

You know, we're accumulating so many invididual instances of journalistic failures that the data could be used to establish some sort of quality rating system -- i.e., Mike Allen gets a "non-existent" rating on the quality of "following up to check sources", while getting a "moderate" rating on something else.

There are enough journalists out there producing enough products so that the job of qualitative evaluation and content analysis ought to move from being trapped in the dead ends of academia and be used for useful purposes.

And Big News would hate it, too. If all our various blogs etc. made this semi-organized, being able to pull up their editorial score or overall kiss-a** rating, instead of referring the hapless curious reader to 5,000 preceding posts -- god, they'd hate that.