Letters to the Editor
cabdriver
Published Letters: 312 Editor's Choice: 6
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Considered strictly on the merits of the argument...
[Read the article: "We'll make you see death"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]the rejoinder "well, there are other guys who are worse" is the excuse of a guilty criminal.
You might as well sign a confession, as use that one.
Unfortunately, it's one I've heard time and again from Bush followers in recent years, offered up as a justification for the slide of official policies of the US government into the unconscionable.
More than any ranking of where the USA might stand in the world at the moment as compared to other nations in regard to indices of liberty and the well-being of its citizens, what ultimately matters is which direction it is heading- whether it's improving or degrading.
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Regarding another comment about this story...
[Read the article: "We'll make you see death"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think that the poster "Tagore" made some valid points in his comment on page 3.
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"Yes, we should be morally superior to our enemies. We are."
[Read the article: "We'll make you see death"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I've encountered that spiel before.
What next, Elephantman? Are you going to exhort the U.S. Army quartermaster corps to lay in a stock of belt buckles engraved "God with us"?
(click on my signature for a link to some really morally questionable material)
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moral relativism vs. moral abandonment
[Read the article: Responsibility for the last seven years]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm with Rob Mac on this one:
"...there should be no official policy or sanction of torture by the government. If, in a given circumstance, some Jack Bauer wannabe decides he's going to save New York City from a nuclear device by cutting some suspects finger, well, he'd sure as hell better be right. If he saves NYC then no one is going to call for his prosecution. If he's wrong then he'll be treated like any other criminal who violated the law. Such a "system" (if you could call it that) is only common sense..."
I would call that a stance of sensible moral relativism- reserved for a hypothetical situation that is extremely unlikely to occur except in a contrived fictional scenario- not least since there are so many ways for a competent terror conspiracy utilizing a "cell structure" to implement measures to prevent such a vulnerability, particularly in a time-sensitive scenario such as the final stage of a "ticking time bomb" plot. The "ticking time-bomb" type of terror plot is a rarity in itself- in the real world, terrorist activity rarely plays out in a manner even remotely similar to an episode of "Batman versus the Penguin."
Nonetheless, it's important to consider even highly improbable situations in the counter-terrorism business- and weighing moral coasts, in terms of personal responsibility. The person weighing the options in that situation maintains the awareness of the inevitability of review and judgement, in the aftermath of their decisions. That awareness in turn ensures that the resort to extreme and coercive measures of interrogation is considered ONLY as a desperate last resort, under situations of the most serious emergency.
This is entirely different from the moves by the Bush administration to grant a de jure status of impunity to deputized operatives of the American government, in order to bypass the possibility of any such review and judgement.
That difference divides between the sometimes awful dilemmas of admitting to the practical reality of relativism as a factor in moral decision-making, and the abandonment of morality all together.