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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
You wrote: "Would you have permitted the torture of one person if it would have prevented the Holocaust?"
If per impossible such a thing would happen, I would argue that in the very moment your magical action prevented the Holocaust, you would have laid the inevitable root for a new one to spring up, by becoming what you thought you had destroyed.
If what you call a first principle admits of an exception, then it is not a first principle. You are saying you have no first principles. That you would degrade another human being in certain circumstances. I think that thought is the first step of a descent into moral madness.
What is needed in order to put an end to the Bush torture regime are absolute, unequivocal, and transparent legal prohibitions governing interrogations, ones that are devoid of ambiguity, flexibility and secrecy. -- GG
What good are more laws if people won't follow them and there are no repercussions for breaking them?
Alex, I'm going to take "it was a load of shit" for $200 -- Paul Daniel Ash
A load of shit huh? Yeah? You and yours won't address it because it's got you by the balls. Quit being such a crybaby.
I don't know. Maybe.
I would rather have the protection of the constitution properly followed than not have it. I would rather have a well informed, and knowledgeable public over what we have now.
While we have those protections, you have time and the rhetoric to persuade the populous that this government is not working --- and perhaps never did.
But adnoto, go to youtube and listen to the old Beatles tune "revolution" --- only a few will be persuaded by anger and violence. If it takes a revolution, I hope for one like in India a while back. But even if it will take guns and blood to free us --- you will not get sufficient numbers on your side unless you present a better picture.
Reading over the above words tells me I am rambling and need to contemplate a bit. But I am trying to say that damn few people will join your team after you repeatedly call them blind foolish idiots. It is a human nature thing.
Now I am not trying to build a consensus and hence will use "idiot" or worse on occasion. In fact, just today I told a good friend why an absolute monarchy beats the hell out of a democracy. But then, I am not trying to build a revolution. It is a "wu wei" thing.
A better scenario which really reveals your true feelings about torture is this:
Would you willingly present yourself to be tortured to death if you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would prevent the Holocaust from taking place?
You seem quite willing to throw others into the lake of fire, would you take the plunge yourself?
Those who advocate for torture based on hypotheticals are imagining themselves in situations where they would be extremely desperate, helpless and/or angry. They ignore any argument based on the ineffectiveness of torture, because they persist in imagining themselves in a situation where they would feel an overwhelming compulsion to do something.
What such people are trying to do, in presenting their hypothetical scenarios, is to conjure up a situation that will induce, in those with whom they are arguing, the same feelings of anger or helplessness.
As such, I believe that, if they examined their own feelings more closely, they would realize that the hypotheticals they describe are ones in which the impetus to torture derives, not from a need for information (or to accomplish a greater goal), but from feelings of desperation and helplessness.
Imagining a situation in which you would torture does nothing to rebut the arguments made against torture on grounds of morality, legality or efficacy, because you are imagining a situation where none of those constraints are relevant. You are explicitly imagining yourself unbound by such considerations.
You might as well be repeating, over and over again, "but what if you had to torture someone..."
To my mind, your doggedness here does not mark you a "troll." I think you mean your argument earnestly, and I think you make a legitimate, if somewhat misguided, point.
Your question is a slightly more realistic version of the classic moral dilemma of whether to take one innocent life to save hundreds or thousands of others. I understand it's all about hypotheticals, and that the theoretical demonstration cannot be sustained if we challenge the hypothetical predicates.
Perhaps you will regard this as another dodge of your question, but hear me out. Even if one were to believe that torturing the detainee to prevent an atrocity would be a morally defensible thing to do, this still does not get to the more important question of the dilemma's actual operation in legal and political reality. That is because the supposed moral legitimacy of the decision to torture in that instance depends upon the actual veracity of the predicates that the detainee provided truthful and fruitful information that did in fact prevent or mitigate the atrocity.
How can a person, or a system, possibly account for such contingencies without effectively condoning the use of torture in "unjustified" instances where the detainee does not provide truthful or useful information (perhaps even providing false and damaging information instead)? To create an "emergency" exception for situations that are inherently and inevitably always described as emergencies is to allow the exception to envelop the rule, which is essentially what has happened under the sophistic justifications offered by the Bush administration's lawyers.
The only possible way to avoid this is to create clear and unequivocal legal rules that would make torture a crime regardless of context, and then simply allow the potential failsafes of jury nullification, prosecutorial discretion, and perhaps even the doctrine of necessity to withhold punishment of a person who engaged in the illegal acts and did in fact procure intelligence that directly contributed to ameliorating or preventing an atrocity.
This does NOT mean creating a written exception or system of immunity in advance of the act, and due to the immense doubt attendant to any such situation, potential torturers would be heavily discouraged from doing so - as opposed to a scenario in which the potential torturers are told that they are free to do "what they need to do," in which case the opposite incentive exists.
Also, even in those cases where the illegal torture led directly to saved lives, perhaps society would nevertheless insist on criminal punishment - but this is the necessary potential consequence of having a system built on laws and considered procedure as opposed to expediency and vague notions of paternalistic protection and blind trust in authority.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
