Christopher Hitchens’ views on war in the Middle East often infuriate me, even while I greatly enjoyed his views on religion. My respect for him goes up, though, because he has done something I wouldn’t: to determine whether it really was torture, he had himself waterboarded by the US military (and if you relish the thought of watching Hitchens actually being tortured, it was recorded on video).
You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning–or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and–as you might expect–inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.
The answer is clear.
I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
It is a dreadful act to perform on the subject, and it degrades those who do it. I’m ashamed to admit that I would like to see all of the proponents of torture in this awful war subjected to this treatment; it is by an act of conscience that we have to say it must not be allowed to happen to anyone.
(via Cycle Ninja)
Now that you have changed your opinion on this point
Apparently you think that “a stopped watch does not keep time” and “a stopped watch is right twice a day” indicates a change of opinion. Your error is to misinterpret the implicit logical quantifier.
bizarre mischaracterisation of my argument
I haven’t followed the details of your debate with neg, but it’s fairly accurate characterization of Sam Harris’s argument. Which brings us to your absurd (and self-serving) claims about Harris way back in your first post, plainly rebutted by #356. Regardless of whether you are engaged in a purely intellectual and rational exploration of ethical systems, Harris is certainly not.
The bit you left out? “for dealing with problems in which human rights are infringed on BOTH sides (such as -but not limited to- the TBS)”
Oh yeah, right, other’s peoples’ rights are infringed by NOT torturing people. As has been pointed out, this is a monstrous sort of intellectual and ethical bankruptcy. Doctors are not infringing on the rights of patients needing transplants by failing to run out and kill someone to harvest their organs.
this appears to be a foreign concept to both you and TM
Nice ad hominem, you whiny hypocritical asshole.
who have quickly assigned all manner of evil motives to both me and Sam Harris (in whose defense I was drawn into this discussion initially)
I have ascribed no evil motives to you, just stupidity and a fair amount of intellectual dishonesty, and it wasn’t “quick”, it was an inference from what you wrote. The evil isn’t in your motives, it’s in the arguments you make and their consequences. Monsters don’t need to have evil motives; they don’t need to have motives at all.
As for Harris, see my crosspost above. Your defense of him is in conflict with clear facts about him. And I didn’t say anything about evil motive — I’m sure that he’s quite sincere in his belief that we must stop the Islamist horde. But the arguments he uses are intellectually dishonest and have evil consequences. These are the sorts of distinctions you seem quite unable or unwilling to make.
The main problem with torture (or any similar procedure) is that it limits our ability to condemn other nations for similar practices. Even if torture could be ensured not to harm innocent (it doesn’t), even if it is reliable at obtaining information (it isn’t), even if it’s morally permissible to treat another human being like that (it isn’t), even if all those were true it’s still outlawed because it means we have no high ground on which to criticise other nations for doing similar.
Regarding your overinflated opinion of your post @356,
I can’t process why google rankings or arguments about islam has the slightest bearing on whether torture and warfare have enough overlap in consequences to be treated similarly.
Sam Harris’s argument -and mine at 311, which is essentially the same- was never competently addressed by you: your post @268 woefully mischaracterises what both Harris and I have been saying by omitting the essential part about exceptions which justify the worse evil, and therefore, presumably, the lesser evil as well. This was already in Harris’s argument in the end of faith, and in his defense which I linked to. (My equivalent part detailing this ‘exception permitting the worse evil’ is premise p1 in post 311.)
BTW, despite my having raised
Doctors are not infringing on the rights of patients needing transplants by failing to run out and kill someone to harvest their organs.
several times, and SC pointing to it as critical, I haven’t seen you address it — rather, you keep repeating the same nonsense about failing to deprive someone of their rights as being an “infringement” of someone else’s rights. Regardless of your motive for continually ignoring the nub of the counterargument against you, the effect is the same.
TM:
Actually ‘ad hominem’ is only a fallacy if the insult or praise is given instead of addressing the arguments on their merits. This is why I haven’t accused you of it, despite the wealth of insults and petty names you have directed at me. I’m pretty sure what you’ve done to Harris (attacking his intentions rather than dealing with his argument) qualifies though.
Regarding your overinflated opinion of your post @356
You’re an impenetrably dishonest git. #356 rebuts your claims about Harris’s dispassion and rationality, non sequiturs about “whether torture and warfare have enough overlap” notwithstanding.
the essential part about exceptions which justify the worse evil, and therefore, presumably, the lesser evil as well.
I have addressed this repeatedly, you lying git. Greater evils are irrelevant to the justification of lesser evils; such arguments as yours and Harris’s are simply fallacious, and tendentious. If anything, observing that we condone a greater evil but not a lesser one is grounds for reconsidering our view of the greater evil, not the lesser one.
TM @505
Look harder. Specifically, see post 446.
I don’t know why I’m bothering to try to attempt to explain this again. This is an absurd contrast. These principles are the basis of the UDHR, as well as all other human rights documents and conventions. These are not derived not from abstract axioms, but from a recognition of our equality and inherent right to dignity and bodily inviolability, as well as an appreciation of where subsuming these to utility, even when people believe their intentions are good, has always led. (I should add that it would be impossible to derive these through purely intellectual exercises, since they would not then be based on real human characteristics, such as the capacity for compassion on the one hand and the capacity to dehumanize on the other; this would also be most unscientific.) I tried to explain this to you in the specific case of medical ethics and human rights, and it went right over your head. I also gave you a reading list. I’m not going to discuss it further. Read the fucking books.
Do you think this helps your case? First, you haven’t referred to “suffering, privacy, autonomy, dignity and justice” in your torture apologetics, except to suggest that you are the one “privileging” them. You don’t have the slightest appreciation for the specific suffering of torture victims, much less how being tortured is an affront to their dignity. Not the slightest. If you did, you would not be so cavalier in using a fake hypothetical to justify what they have been through.
Second, the TBS is not a “problem” to be dealt with anywhere but in the fevered imagination of would-be torturers. It has nothing to do with the reality of torture as it exists in the world, or has ever existed in the world. If you wish to try to justify torture in a real historical case based upon the application of these principles, be my guest. You have a large number to choose from.
Actually ‘ad hominem’ is only a fallacy if the insult or praise is given instead of addressing the arguments on their merits.
Which is exactly what you have done, most notably in your idiotic whine #481 about neg not having any any points, where you repeatedly clipped them, you dishonest ass.
I’m pretty sure what you’ve done to Harris (attacking his intentions rather than dealing with his argument) qualifies though.
You’re full of dishonest shit, and a waste of my time. It was you who made an ad hominem argument about Harris vs. those who disagree with him, painting him as all rational and dispassionate and the others as engaging in “hysterics”. You made Harris’s personality and intentions a topic of discussion; it isn’t ad hominem to then address it. In addition, I have addressed his arguments, here, in previous threads, and talking to him in person, so fuck off, jackass.
I going to go deal with some weighty real world matters and leave you to your perpetual wankery.
Look harder. Specifically, see post 446.
That doesn’t address the point at all, the point that failing to kill someone to harvest their organs is not an infringement of someone else’s rights. Period. So it doesn’t matter how you form your utilitarian equation, you simply cannot plug in that comparison of “rights on both sides” and call it moral.
I’ll add that, given this, your fixation on it and use of it in developing your own ethical stance on torture is totally unscientific.
Greater evils are irrelevant to the justification of lesser evils; such arguments as yours and Harris’s are simply fallacious, and tendentious.
What do you mean ‘simply fallacious’? Point out the kind of fallacy and where it is. Do you mean the fallacy is the next part:
“If anything, observing that we condone a greater evil but not a lesser one is grounds for reconsidering our view of the greater evil, not the lesser one.”
If you think neither I nor Harris have considered this, you’re utterly blind. We are both entirely attuned to the fact that the argument relies on the idea of a ‘just’ war, and could be used as an argument against the existence of a ‘just’ war. Additionally, both Harris and I would be much happier if there were no such things as ‘just’ wars, thus relieving both war and torture from this uncomfortable equation.
If you have forgotten, that was where Rwanda entered the discussion.
regarding my references to “suffering, privacy, autonomy, dignity and justice”, what do you think the effects are on each of these aspects for your 5 and a half billion victims, killed (or perhaps maimed) subordinate to the rights of the single individual in the entire world you seem to acknowledge; the torture victim.
You have managed to argue for more than 2 days now without really even mentioning the effects on these people. By contrast, I have been more than willing to consider and examine the negative consequences for torture victims, both innocent and guilty, and both hypothetical and historical, reading their accounts and being as shaken by them as anyone else.
You have managed to argue for more than 2 days now without really even mentioning the effects on these people.
Ahem …
failing to kill someone to harvest their organs is not an infringement of someone else’s rights. Period. So it doesn’t matter how you form your utilitarian equation, you simply cannot plug in that comparison of “rights on both sides” and call it moral.
Asshole.
your 5 and a half billion victims, killed (or perhaps maimed)
Imagined victims who do not exist in any possible world.
the negative consequences for torture victims
Real victims in this world.
Asshole.
You’re an insufferable moron. There are no effects on these people. They do not exist. You made them up. The scenario you describe is impossible. It has never existed, does not exist, and could not exist, and yet you present is as a difficult real-world moral dilemma, abstracting away from real torture and its victims and apologizing for real torture and the immense real suffering it causes in its name.
What part of tm’s “Oh yeah, right, other’s peoples’ rights are infringed by NOT torturing people” do you not understand?
Again – point to such a problem with regard to torture in the real world, contemporary or historical.
Point out the kind of fallacy
Fallacies of red herring, special pleading, and is/ought. Not that there’s ever any need to categorize the fallacy; the burden is on the one who offers an argument to show that it has logical force, asswipe.
“?What part of tm’s “Oh yeah, right, other’s peoples’ rights are infringed by NOT torturing people” do you not understand?”
The part where it conflicts with article 3 of the UDHR, in which the “life”, and “security” of the 5 and a half billion victims is infringed.
I submit that in certain unlikely scenarios, article 3 and article 5 are in opposition. Therefore, *sigh* we have to go back to the principles on which human rights are based, suffering, autonomy, dignity, justice, privacy.. and determine where to go from there, OR introduce an entirely new system which allows us to choose between article 3 and article 5.
I could characterise many of your argument as “article 5 wins LOL!”, but that might sound too close to an axiom for you.
SC:
Just because it would be convenient for you if I regarded some historical or contemporary torture as justified, doesn’t mean I believe there ever was such an instance. I do not, in fact, exist to antagonise you. Actually, I have repeatedly acknowledged that I don’t think there ever was such an instance. Ever since my second post, in fact. Repeatedly asserting points that everybody agrees on is very noble of you, but it doesn’t help you make your case.
The part where it conflicts with article 3 of the UDHR, in which the “life”, and “security” of the 5 and a half billion victims is infringed.
That doesn’t address the point, moron, it again ignores it. Failing to abide by article 5 is never an instance of violating article 3 — the actors are different! Those who violate section 3 are the perpetrators of violence, not those who fail to perpetrate violence in order to stop them. Your absurd skin-crawling sophistry is straight out of 1984.
Gah! These are NOT victims. They are IMAGINARY. The UDHR concerns real people in real situations.
There are real moral dilemmas in the world. Torture isn’t one of them.
hmm, where do we get poorer logic being exhibited…
In torture threads, or libertarian threads?
I do see the exact same fictional logic (the non-existent victim argument, presented by “jamie(?)” in the first torture thread, and essentially repeated here by SS.
I see the same fictional economic arguments presented by “libertarians” in those threads.
I can’t decide which becomes more annoying to wade through.
more power to those who have the energy to smack rocks with hammers.
*tips hat to SC and TM*
I don’t think there ever was such an instance.
And yet you’re complaining about us not showing concern about these non-existent victims!
it doesn’t help you make your case
It’s your case, asshole, which stands rebutted. You are justifying real crimes by appealing to the right of billions of fictitious people to have someone tortured on their behalf, and then you dare to suggest that we lack concern for these non existent people that you invented for your sick purpose.
These are NOT victims. They are IMAGINARY.
Even if they were real, article 3 of the UDHR does not warrant torturing anyone on their behalf.
It is my case, you perfect jackass. Whatever your reason(s) for finding torture unjustified in every existing case in all of history, that is your fucking categorical argument.
You still haven’t responded to this.
Failing to abide by article 5 is never an instance of violating article 3
I got my negatives wrong here. Abiding by article 5 — that is, not torturing someone – is never an instance of violating article 3 — that is depriving them of their right to life etc. That was deprived by those who set the bomb — different actors.
Hey, Ichthyic! And thanks for the h/t.
And there’s no such thing as negligence, and rights do not ever entail positive duties (??) and so the UN had no obligation to try and stop the Rwandan Genocide, or any future genocide, and doctors don’t have to be competent, and there is no such thing as an ethical issue that arises for a third party when a first party infringes the rights of a second.
Sounds lovely. Whereabouts is this wonderland located, and is it large enough for the whole human race?
You still haven’t responded to this.
In #418 he wrote
“Caveat: Like torture, I am quite convinced all forms of slavery both historic and contemporary are completely unethical.”
but then
“Suppose we decide slavery is forced incarceration of one or more humans who are coerced (by force) into providing their services…In this case, would it be ethical for that state to incarcerate the scientist and coerce him, by force, into providing his services…Again, given the huge number of lives hang in the balance, and I don’t feel that it would be ethical to stand idly by.”
Maybe I’m misreading it, but that kinda looks like a contradiction.
Abiding by article 5 — that is, not torturing someone – is never an instance of violating article 3 — that is depriving them of their right to life etc. That was deprived by those who set the bomb — different actors.
Quite so. It was getting hard for me to see beyond his “Cry for your poor imaginary victims!” rhetoric.
That would be because it’s a non-sequitur.
Since when does not having a categorical argument mean we don’t have a strong argument against many, or even most cases?
And there’s no such thing as negligence, and rights do not ever entail positive duties (??) and so the UN had no obligation to try and stop the Rwandan Genocide, or any future genocide, and doctors don’t have to be competent, and there is no such thing as an ethical issue that arises for a third party when a first party infringes the rights of a second.
If you could manage to identify the actors and properly ascribe the rights and responsibilities to each instead of rashly conflating them, you could answer these questions. Certainly no one’s right to life entails an obligation on a second party to torture a third party — especially when torture is well known to be unreliable to that end. But then, that point has been covered over and over but you simply ignore its implications.
Sounds lovely. Whereabouts is this wonderland located, and is it large enough for the whole human race?
You’re quite the ass, but that doesn’t make torture any more defensible.
“be I’m misreading it, but that kinda looks like a contradiction.”
That’s because firstly you cut out the part about the epidemic that the scientist could save, and also because you can’t distinguish between (historical/contemporary) and hypothetical. I find this amusing, because you and SC have been pretty vocal about the difference when it comes to the TBS.
That would be because it’s a non-sequitur.
Not in context, it isn’t. You’ve been saying all along that since you can’t find a categorical argument against torture in the abstract you don’t feel entirely comfortable rejecting concrete torture. This was the cause of much handwringing for you. If you can’t find such an argument against slavery then you must have the same qualms about categorically rejecting it in the present. It follows that you allow for the possibility that it is justified to enslave people in the present, and this would include you.
Do your speculations about hypotheticals affect your views on real torture or slavery in the present – making it impossible for you to categorically reject them – or don’t they?
Since when does not having a categorical argument mean we don’t have a strong argument against many, or even most cases?
Many, most, or all? Are you categorically rejecting torture in the past and present or aren’t you?
That’s because firstly you cut out the part about the epidemic that the scientist could save
Because the details are irrelevant … it’s sufficient that you think they warrant enslavement. Certainly that omission would not be a cause of my misreading, since I read the part I omitted. You’re simply engaging in cheap sophistry.
and also because you can’t distinguish between (historical/contemporary) and hypothetical
Hardly; where’s your Principle of Charity? You wrote “all” … “forms” … “of slavery both historic and contemporary are completely unethical.” You offered no explanation of why your scenario is exempted.
I find this amusing, because you and SC have been pretty vocal about the difference when it comes to the TBS.
First, I for one have stated that the difference isn’t relevant, remember? You are the one justifying torture in that scenario, just as you do in the slavery scenario. Second, SC and others have presented extensive documentation indicating that a TBS not only implausible, but that torture isn’t reliable in that circumstance. You are offering no such thing in your slavery scenario.
Once again you are demonstrating that you’re a stupid and dishonest wanker. And once again I am demonstrating that I am a fool for wasting my time on you.
TM
so people do have positive duties? If so, I may have a positive duty to save your life, possibly even to the extent of shooting the man who is eradicating your entire ethnic group, if I can’t apprehend him instead.
This leads us to the ‘just war’ scenario which you still haven’t addressed, at 311. I insist you identify the fallacies you claim and locate them.
The basis of Harris’ argument is that the two activities are fundamentally similar and should be treated similarly- this is the precise opposite of ‘special pleading’. Your is-ought complaint makes no sense as Harris and I have both represented the argument as conditional on the concept of a just war, which provides our ought. If you wish to dispute the concept of a “just war”, or submit that it is not well established (to which I agree) you are welcome to do so, but you haven’t made any real arguments of that nature.
First, I for one have stated that the difference isn’t relevant, remember?
For the record, so have I (though I’m too lazy to find it).
Also for the record, @ #402 I wrote:
Frankly, I don’t care about this comparison, but that chapter does provide some insights.
“First, I for one have stated that the difference isn’t relevant, remember?”
You have my sincere apology on this one. I became mistaken about which of you and SC held which views.
“You wrote “all” … “forms” … “of slavery both historic and contemporary”
You are correct at objecting when it is phrased this way. What I had meant to communicate is ‘instances’ not ‘forms’, to make it align with my stance on contemporary and historic instances of torture, which -in the context- was the point.
As such, there is no longer a contradiction.
Thankyou for pointing this out.
you can’t distinguish between (historical/contemporary) and hypothetical
Perhaps I just understand what “contemporary” means and you don’t — you apparently mean “in current practice”. So, your statement about “all forms” refers only to those forms actually in use, provided that no one anywhere has enslaved someone for the greater good, or so great as in your scenario, and your statement would be false had your scenario actually occurred. And because of this case, you cannot produce the categorical argument argument against slavery that windy asked for, and you have reached the tentative conclusion that there are no categorical arguments about anything in ethics. Well, I certainly agree with the latter, for reasons I’ve stated, but in this case you could easily avoid the conclusion by doing the sensible thing, namely denying that it’s ethical to enslave someone in order to force them to teach something that they wish not to teach on religious grounds, even if that would mean saving many people. After all, such a thing is almost universally held not to be ethical, and there has been a great deal of literature, fictional and non, in which such enslavement is held to be unethical.
Was it one if these?
No, those were simple statements of fact. It was back @ #332, when I stated:
(While this was unclear as to whether I was talking about ss’s own argument, whatever that may be, and the case against torture more generally, I meant the latter.)
so people do have positive duties?
This is your dishonest style — ignore the arguments someone actually makes in which they delineate distinctions, and blithely move on to blur them. As I said, one must accurately assign rights and obligations to the right parties.
I insist you identify the fallacies you claim and locate them.
You can insist all you want, but the burden is still on you to show that your argument has logical force.
‘special pleading’
I already stated this clearly: “If anything, observing that we condone a greater evil but not a lesser one is grounds for reconsidering our view of the greater evil, not the lesser one.”
The argument is symmetric and thus nothing can be concluded from it.
Your is-ought complaint makes no sense as Harris and I have both represented the argument as conditional on the concept of a just war, which provides our ought.
You’re talking gibberish. “We ought to torture X in order to save many people because we’re willing to cause innocent people to die in just wars” is not convincing, in part because the fact that lives will be saved cannot in and of itself justify that we ought to torture people, and in part because the argument could just as well be used to conclude that we shouldn’t be so willing to cause innocent people to die in just wars … if there were any sort of valid inference here, which is highly dubious; intentional and unintentional acts are not morally comparable.
Was it one if these?
Asshole.
so people do have positive duties? If so, I may have a positive duty to save your life, possibly even to the extent of shooting the man who is eradicating your entire ethnic group, if I can’t apprehend him instead.
In this case, “the man” is positively performing a harmful act, and it is morally permissible to stop him, although I don’t believe people ever have an moral obligation to be violent unless they have voluntarily committed to same by, say, joining the military or the police.
But, if there were a button you could push to torture another person, thereby coercing them to shoot the man, it would be immoral to push that button, even if that were the only way spare an entire ethnic group. I don’t find just war arguments, utilitarian arguments, or any other sort of argument to be sufficient reason to do so.
Of course it isn’t, because you’ve mischaracterised the argument again and demonstrated that you have no understanding of the is-ought problem.
The is-ought problem is that you cannot derive an ought conclusion from ‘is’ premises.
If your premise includes an ought, such as:
“a just war is a war that we ought to fight because of some set of circumstances”
you can then (potentially) chain this ought premise to arrive at an ought conclusion.
Whatever the problems may be in this argument from Harris, the is-ought fallacy is not one of them.
I’m curious about Harris’s views on the ethics of terrorism. It would seem to have more features in common with torture than does “collateral damage” in war. Has he produced a categorical argument against it? If not, would he allow that it’s sometimes justified, including, potentially, contemporary instances? When is it justified and when not?
(I’m genuinely curious. I don’t know of anything he’s said on the subject.)
because you’ve mischaracterised the argument again
I think not. In any case, there’s no cogent recharacterization, no matter how much you or Harris bleat.
demonstrated that you have no understanding of the is-ought problem.
That you say such things shows that that you are stupid, dishonest, and hypocritical about your (Quine’s) Principle of Charity.
The is-ought problem is that you cannot derive an ought conclusion from ‘is’ premises.
And I was specific about the invalid inference: “the fact that lives will be saved cannot in and of itself justify that we ought to torture people”. That’s part of the argument (the utilitarian part), a part that doesn’t go through.
If your premise includes an ought, such as:
“a just war is a war that we ought to fight because of some set of circumstances”
you can then (potentially) chain this ought premise to arrive at an ought conclusion.
I never said otherwise, but I noted that that part of the logic is broken — because of special pleading, among other things. There in fact no “chain”, no sequence of application of inference rules. Rather, there’s simply an invalid comparison and a claim that we ought to do one thing because we’re willing to do another, rather different, thing. (And in any case I know too much about other thing to be willing to do it, either.)
Whatever the problems may be in this argument from Harris, the is-ought fallacy is not one of them.
An erroneous inference; the argument employs more than one fallacy, and the mere fact that there’s a claim that one ought follows from another does not establish that no oughts are being inferred solely from ises.
SC: I think the title of his book — “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason” — tells us quite a bit about how he views the subject, but it would be interesting to know how he would react to your question.
Searching for “terror” in Harris’s response to criticisms cited in #176 yields
and
and
While he refers to the ethics of torture, waterboarding, bombing, collateral damage … he never touches on the ethics of terrorism. I think he would — at least at first — consider it to be an oxymoron. Whether one could penetrate his “completely honest, sincere and earnest” veneer to seriously consider the subject is an interesting question.
SC @547
You make a very interesting and insightful comparison. I am unaware of anything Harris has written from that angle, but you are absolutely correct in that such a similarity really demands a response.
I am just writing a signoff post at the moment(!) but I wanted to take a moment to that I think your point here is very compelling and valuable.
And no, I’m not going to make some snarky ‘at last’ jibe about this being the first time, because it isn’t, not by a long shot- You have given me plenty to think about, (though I feel many of the “attacks upon my honor and reputation” (Article 12) were uncalled for.
I think this is retarded. I’m unable to fence with 3 (well, 2.5) of you at once, even if I’m not left-handed. However I have been largely unsatisfied with the analysis of my arguments, which is strange as most of them are things I am strongly decided on, and therefore I’m not emotionally invested in either outcome. Also, I’m a little tired of being constantly vilified for ‘justifying’ real crimes when I have done no such thing.
“dishonest piece of torture-justifying shit”
“you are justifying real crimes”
I saw a gaping chasm between what I (and many others, including many professional ethical theorists) still believe is the well-supported ethical response to the TBS, and the horrific contemporary and historical practice of torture. I wanted help to flesh out that hole, and understand it better. Some of your links were insightful, but the later commentary has largely into petty bickering (some excellent points here and there aside).
Additionally, I do not want this discussion to intrude on my work (I stayed up too late last night reading material and composing responses, and wasn’t as effective at work today as I should like.
Before I quit this discussion entirely, I want to thank windy and amk especially for tolerating my incendiary scenarios with thoughtful counterpoints and without resorting to insult. And actually, yes, I do honestly want to thank TM and SC and negentropyeater for your contributions; you might not believe me, but (though buried in much vitriol) you did give me interesting things to think about, and I am far from done thinking about them.
I wanted to offer you something (which you may balk at as you seem convinced I am a troll), and here is what I have:
If you could recommend one book on the subject that you feel I should read, please do so and I will add it to my reading list. I cannot realistically be expected to tackle 6 volumes (SC @395) for the sake of this internet discussion, but I might be able to manage 2.
This is not for the purpose of continuing this discussion, but rather for my personal ethical development, which you have been so adamant I need.
If I do not receive other specific recommendations from you, I will use Greenberg, as recommended by SC, and Amery, whom I have encountered several times before but not in book form.
minor correction, should read
You’re such a pathetic whiner, SS. I lost track of how many arguments you failed to respond to, as for “unsatisfied with the analysis” you’ve engaged in … oh my.
I love you too, TM.
I thought that I’d reproduce an entire chapter from “Intervention, Terrorism, And Torture: Contemporary Challenges to Just War Theory (AMINTAPHIL : THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF LAW AND JUSTICE)”.
LIBERALISM, TORTURE, AND THE TICKING BOMB by David Luban
Torture used to be incompatible with American values. Our Bill of Rights forbids cruel and unusual punishment, and that has come to include all forms of corporal punishment except prison and death by methods purported to be painless. Americans and our government condemn states that torture; we grant asylum or refuge to those who fear it. The Senate ratified the Convention Against Torture, Congress enacted antitorture legislation, and judicial opinions spoke of “the dastardly and totally inhuman act of torture.”1
Then came September 11. Less than a week later, a feature story reported that a quiz in a university ethics class “gave four choices for the proper U.S. response to the terrorist attacks: A.) execute the perpetrators on sight; B.) bring them back for trial in the U.S.; C.) subject the perpetrators to an international tribunal; or D.) torture and interrogate those involved.” Most students chose A and D – execute them on sight and torture them.2 Six weeks after September 11, the New York Times reported that torture had become a topic of conversation “in bars, on commuter trains, and at dinner tables.”3 By mid-November 2001, the Christian Science Monitor found that one in three surveyed Americans favored torturing terror suspects.4 American abhorrence to torture now appears to have extraordinarily shallow roots.
To an important extent, one’s stance on torture runs independent of progressive or conservative ideology. Alan Dershowitz would permit torture, provided it is regulated by a judicial warrant requirement;5 and liberal senator Charles Schumer has publicly poo-poo-ed the idea “that torture should never, ever be used.”6 He argues that every US senator would back torture to find out where a ticking time bomb is planted. On the other hand, William Safire, a self-described “conservative and cardcarrying hard-liner,” expresses revulsion at “phony-tough” protorture arguments, and forthrightly labels torture “barbarism.”7 Examples like these illustrate how vital it is to avoid a simple left-right reductionism. For the most part, American conservatives belong no less than progressives to liberal culture, broadly understood. Here, when I speak of “liberalism,” I mean it in the broad sense used by political philosophers from John Stuart Mill on – a sense that includes conservatives as well as progressives, so long as they believe in limited government and the importance of human dignity and individual rights.
It is an important fact about us – us modern liberals, that is – that we find scenes such as the Abu Ghraib photographs, to say nothing of worse forms of abuse and torture, almost viscerally revolting (and I am convinced
that this is just as true for those who believe that torture may be acceptable as for those who do not). That is unusual, because through most of human history there was no taboo on torture in military and juridical contexts. On the contrary, torture was an accepted practice asa means for terrorizing civilian populations, as a form of criminal punishment, as a method of extracting confessions in legal systems that put a premium on confession as the form proof should take in criminal cases, and – above all – as the prerogative of military victors over their vanquished enemies.
Indeed, Judith Shklar notes a remarkable fact, namely that cruelty did not seem to figure in classical moral thought as an important vice:
It is only in relatively modern times, Shklar thinks, that we have come to “put cruelty first,” that is, to regard it as the most vicious of all vices. She thinks that Montaigne and Montesquieu, both of them protoliberals,
were the first political philosophers to think this way; and, more generally, she holds that “hating cruelty, and putting it first [among vices], remain a powerful part of the liberal consciousness.”9
What makes torture, the deliberate infliction of suffering and pain, specially abhorrent to liberals? This may seem like a bizarre question, because the answer seems self-evident: making people suffer is a horrible thing. Pain hurts, and bad pain hurts badly. But let me pose the question in different terms. Realistically, the abuses of detainees at Abu Ghraib, the Afghan Salt Pit, and Guantanamo pale by comparison with the death, maiming, and suffering in collateral damage during the Afghan and Iraq wars. Bombs crush limbs and burn people’s faces off; nothing even remotely as horrifying has been reported in American prisoner abuse. Yet, much as we may regret or in some cases denounce the wartime suffering of innocents, we do not seem to regard it with the special abhorrence that we do torture. This seems hypocritical and irrational, almost fetishistic, and it raises the question of what makes torture more illiberal than bombing and killing.
The answer lies in the relationship between torturer and victim. Torture self-consciously aims to turn its victim into someone who is isolated, overwhelmed, terrorized, and humiliated. In other words, torture aims to strip away from its victim all the qualities of human dignity that liberalism prizes. It does this by the deliberate actions of a torturer, who inflicts pain one-on-one, up close and personal, in order to break the spirit of the victim – in other words, to tyrannize and dominate the victim.
Torture, in short, is a microcosm, raised to the highest level of intensity, of the tyrannical political relationships that liberalism hates the most. Liberalism incorporates a vision of engaged, active human beings possessing an inherent dignity regardless of their social station. The victim of torture is in every respect the opposite of this vision. The torture victim is isolated and reduced instead of engaged and enlarged, terrified instead of active, humiliated instead of dignified. And, in the paradigm case of torture, the victor’s torment of defeated captives, liberals perceive the living embodiment of their nightmare – tyrannical rulers who take their pleasure from the degradation of those unfortunate enough to be subject to their will.
In other words, liberals rank cruelty first among vices not because liberals are more compassionate than anyone else, but because of the close connection between cruelty and tyranny. The history of torture reinforces this horror, because torture has always been bound up with military conquest, royal revenge, dictatorial terror, forced confessions, and the repression of dissident belief – a veritable catalogue of the evils of absolutist government that liberalism abhors. It should hardly surprise us that liberals wish to ban torture absolutely, a wish that became legislative reality in the Torture Convention’s insistence that nothing can justify torture.10
But there remains one reason for torture that I have not mentioned, and which alone bears no essential connection with tyranny. This is torture as intelligence gathering, torture to forestall greater evils. The liberal rationale for the state, namely to secure the safety and liberty of its citizens, may make it particularly important to obtain time-sensitive security information by whatever means are necessary. For that reason, it will dawn on reluctant liberals that the interrogator’s goal of forestalling greater evils, by torture if that is the only way, is one that liberals share. It seems like a rational motivation, far removed from cruelty and power-lust.
Thus, even though absolute prohibition remains liberalism’s primary teaching about torture, and the basic liberal stance is empathy for the torture victim, a more permissive stance remains as an unspoken possibility, the
Achilles heel of absolute prohibitions. As long as the intelligence needs of a liberal society are slight, this possibility within liberalism remains dormant, perhaps even unnoticed. But when a catastrophe like 9/11 happens, liberals may cautiously conclude that, in the words of a well-known Newsweek article, it is “Time to Think About Torture.”11
But the pressure of liberalism will compel them to think about it in a highly stylized and artificial way, what I will call the “liberal ideology of torture.” The liberal ideology insists that the sole purpose of torture must be intelligence gathering to prevent a catastrophe; that torture is necessary to prevent the catastrophe; that torturing is the exception, not the rule, so that it has nothing to do with state tyranny; that those who inflict the torture are motivated solely by the looming catastrophe, with no tincture of cruelty; and that torture in such circumstances is, in fact, little more than self-defense.
And the liberal ideology will crystalize all of these ideas in a single, mesmerizing example: the ticking time bomb.
Suppose the bomb is planted somewhere in the crowded heart of an American city, and you have custody of the man who planted it. He won’t talk. Surely, the hypothetical suggests, we should not be too squeamish to torture the information out of him and save hundreds of lives. Consequences count, and abstract moral prohibitions must yield to the calculus of consequences.
It is a remarkable fact that everyone argues the pros and cons of torture through the ticking time bomb. Senator Schumer and Professor Dershowitz, the Israeli Supreme Court, indeed every journalist devoting a think-piece to the unpleasant question of torture, begins with the ticking time bomb and ends there as well. The Schlesinger Report on Abu Ghraib notes that “[f]or the U.S., most cases for permitting harsh treatment of detainees on moral grounds begin with variants of the ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario.”12 In the remainder of this chapter, I mean to disarm the ticking time bomb and argue that it is the wrong thing to think about. And, if so, the liberal ideology of torture begins to unravel.
But before beginning these arguments, I want to pause and ask why this jejune example has become the alpha and omega of our thinking about torture. I believe the answer is this. The ticking time bomb is an argumentative move against liberals who support an absolute prohibition of torture. The idea is to force the liberal prohibitionist to admit that yes, even he or she would agree to torture in at least this one situation. Once the prohibitionist admits that, then he or she has conceded that his or her opposition to torture is not based on principle. Now that the prohibitionist has admitted that his or her moral principles can be breached, all that is left is haggling about the price. No longer can the prohibitionist claim the moral high ground; no longer can he or she put the burden of proof on his or her opponent. He or she is down in the mud with them, and the only question left is how much further down he or she will go. Dialectically, getting the prohibitionist to address the ticking time bomb is like getting the vegetarian to eat just one little oyster because it has no nervous system. Once he or she does that – gotcha!
The ticking time bomb scenario serves a second rhetorical goal, one that is equally important to the proponent of torture. It makes us see the torturer in a different light, one of the essential points in the liberal ideology of torture because it is the way that liberals can reconcile themselves to torture even while continuing to “put cruelty first.” Now, the torturer is not a cruel man or a sadistic man or a coarse, insensitive brutish man. Now, the torturer is a conscientious public servant, heroic the way that New York firefighters were heroic, willing to do desperate things only because the plight is desperate and so many innocent lives are weighing on the suffering servant’s conscience. The time bomb clinches the great divorce between torture and cruelty; it placates liberals, who put cruelty first. But, I wish to argue, it placates them with fiction.
I do not mean by this that the time bomb is completely unreal. To take a real-life counterpart: in 1995, an al-Qaeda plot to bomb eleven US airliners was thwarted by information tortured out of a Pakistani suspect by
the Philippine police. According to two journalists, “For weeks, agents hit him with a chair and a long piece of wood, forced water into his mouth, and crushed lighted cigarettes into his private parts. His ribs were almost
totally broken and his captors were surprised he survived.”13 Grisly, to be sure – but if they had not done it, thousands of innocent travelers might have died horrible deaths.
But look at the example one more time. The Philippine agents were surprised he survived – in other words, they came close to torturing him to death before he talked. And they tortured him for weeks, during which time they presumably didn’t know about the al-Qaeda plot. What if he too didn’t know? Or what if there had been no al-Qaeda plot? Then they would have tortured him for weeks, possibly tortured him to death, for nothing. For all they knew at the time, that is exactly what they were doing. You cannot use the argument that preventing the al-Qaeda attack justified the decision to torture, because at the moment the decision was made no one knew about the al-Qaeda attack.
The ticking bomb scenario cheats its way around these difficulties by stipulating that the bomb is there, ticking away, and that officials know it and know they have the man who planted it. Those conditions will seldom be met.14 Let us try some more honest hypotheticals and the
questions they raise:
1. The authorities know there may be a bomb plot in the offing, and they have captured a man who may know something about it, but may not. Torture him? How much? For weeks? For months? The chances are considerable that you are torturing a man with nothing to tell you. If he does not talk, does that mean it is time to stop, or time to ramp up the level of torture? How likely does it have to be that he knows something important? 50:50? 30:70? Will one out of a hundred suffice to land him on the water board?
2. Do you really want to make the torture decision by running the numbers? A 1% chance of saving a thousand lives yields ten statistical lives. Does that mean that you can torture up to nine people on a 1% chance of finding crucial information?
3. The authorities think that one out of a group of 50 captives in Guantanamo might know where Osama bin Laden is hiding – but they do not know which captive. Torture them all? That is: torture 49 captives with nothing to tell you on the uncertain chance of capturing Osama?
4. For that matter, would capturing Osama bin Laden demonstrably save a single human life? The Bush administration has downplayed the importance of capturing Osama because US strategy has succeeded in marginalizing him. Maybe capturing him would save lives – but how certain do you have to be? Or doesn’t it matter whether torture is intended to save human lives from a specific threat, as long as it furthers some goal in the War on Terror?
This question is especially important once we realize that the interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects will almost never be to find out where the ticking bomb is hidden. We do not know in advance when al-Qaeda has launched an operation. Instead, interrogation is a more general fishing expedition for any intelligence that might be used to help “unwind” the terrorist organization. Now one might reply that al-Qaeda is itself the ticking time bomb, so that unwinding the organization meets the formal conditions of the ticking bomb hypothetical. This is equivalent to asserting that any intelligence which promotes victory in the War on Terror justifies torture, precisely because we understand that the enemy in the War on Terror aims to kill American civilians. Presumably, on this argument Japan would have been justified in torturing American captives in World War II on the chance of finding intelligence that would help them shoot down the Enola Gay; and I assume that a ticking bomb hard-liner will not flinch from this conclusion. But at this point, we verge on declaring all military threats and adversaries that menace American civilians to be ticking bombs, whose defeat justifies torture. The limitation of torture to emergency exceptions, implicit in the ticking bomb story, now threatens to unravel, making torture a legitimate instrument of military policy. And then the question becomes inevitable: Why not torture in pursuit of any worthwhile goal?
The point of these examples is that in a world of uncertainty and imperfect knowledge, the ticking bomb scenario should not form the point of reference. The ticking bomb is a picture that bewitches us. The real debate is not between one guilty man’s pain and hundreds of innocent lives. It is the debate between the certainty of anguish and the mere possibility of learning something vital and saving lives. And, above all, it is the question about whether a responsible citizen must unblinkingly think the unthinkable, and accept that the morality of torture should be decided purely by toting up expected costs and benefits.15 Once you accept that only the numbers count, then anything, no matter how gruesome, becomes possible.
I am inclined to think that the path of wisdom instead lies in Holocaust survivor David Rousset’s famous caution that normal human beings do not know that everything is possible.16 As Bernard Williams says, “there are certain situations so monstrous that the idea that the processes of moral rationality could yield an answer in them is insane,” and “to spend time thinking what one would decide if one were in such a situation is also insane, if not merely frivolous.”17
There is a second, even more important, error built into the ticking bomb hypothetical. It assumes a single, ad hoc decision about whether to torture, by officials who ordinarily would do no such thing except in a desperate emergency. But in the real world of interrogations, decisions are not made one-off. The real world is a world of policies, guidelines, and directives. It is a world of practices, not of ad hoc emergency measures. Any responsible discussion of torture therefore needs to address the practice of torture, not the ticking bomb hypothetical. Somehow, we always manage to talk about the ticking bomb instead of about torture as an organized social practice.
Treating torture as a practice rather than as a desperate improvisation in an emergency means changing the subject from the ticking bomb to other issues – issues like these:
Should we create a professional cadre of trained torturers? For instance, should universities offer undergraduate instruction in torture, as the Georgia-based School of the Americas did in the 1980s? Do we want federal grants for research to devise new and better torture techniques? Patents issued on high-tech torture devices? Companies competing to manufacture them? How about trade conventions in Las Vegas? Should there be a medical subspecialty of torture doctors, who ensure that captives do not die before they talk? Consider the chilling words of Sgt. Ivan Fredericks, one of the Abu Ghraib perpetrators, who recalled a death by interrogation that he witnessed: “They stressed the man out so bad that he passed away.”18 Real pros would not let that happen.Who should teach torture-doctoring in medical school?19
The questions amount to this: Do we really want to create a torture culture and the kind of people who inhabit it? The ticking time bomb distracts us from the real issue, which is not about emergencies, but about the normalization of torture.
Perhaps the solution is to keep the practice of torture secret in order to avoid the moral corruption that comes from creating a public culture of torture. But this so-called “solution” does not reject the normalization of torture. It accepts it, but layers on top of it the normalization of state secrecy. The result would be a shadow culture of torturers and those who train and support them, operating outside the public eye and accountable only to other insiders of the torture culture.
Just as importantly: who guarantees that case-hardened torturers, inured to levels of violence and pain that would make ordinary people vomit at the sight, will know where to draw the line on when torture should be used? They never have in the past. They did not in Algeria.20 They did not in Israel, where in 1999 the Supreme Court backpedaled from an earlier permission to engage in “torture lite” in emergencies because the interrogators were torturing two-thirds of their Palestinian captives.21 In the Argentinian Dirty War, the tortures began because terrorist cells had a policy of fleeing when one of their members had disappeared for 48 hours.22 Authorities who captured a militant had just two days to wring the information out of the captive. One scholar who has studied the Dirty War reports that at first many of the officers carrying it out had qualms about what they were doing, until their priests reassured them that they were fighting God’s fight. By the end of the Dirty War, the qualms were gone, and hardened young officers were placing bets on who could kidnap the prettiest girl to rape and torture.23 Escalation is the rule, not the aberration.24
Interrogators do not inhabit a world of loving kindness, or of equal concern and respect for all human beings. Interrogating resistant prisoners, even nonviolently and nonabusively, still requires a relationship that in any other context would be morally abhorrent. It requires tricking information out of the subject, and the interrogator does this by setting up elaborate scenarios to disorient the subject and propel him into an alternative reality. The subject must be gotten to believe that his highvalue intelligence has already been discovered from someone else, so that there’s no point in keeping it secret any longer. He must be fooled into thinking that his friends have betrayed him, or that the interrogator is really his friend. The interrogator disrupts his sense of time and place, disorients him with sessions that never occur at predictable times or intervals, and manipulates his emotions. The very names of interrogation techniques show this: “Emotional Love,” “Emotional Hate,” “Fear Up Harsh,” “Fear Up Mild,” “Reduced Fear,” “Pride and Ego Up,” “Pride and Ego Down,” “Futility.”25 The interrogator may set up a scenario to make the subject think he is in the clutches of a much-feared secret police organization from a different country. Every bit of the subject’s environment is fair game for manipulation and deception, as the interrogator aims to create the total lie that gets the subject talking.26
Let me be clear that I am not objecting to these deceptions. None of them rises to the level of abuse or torture lite, let alone torture heavy, and surely tricking the subject into talking is legitimate if the goals of the interrogation are legitimate. But what I have described is a relationship of totalitarian mind-control more profound than the world of Orwell’s 1984. The interrogator is like Descartes’s Evil Deceiver, and the subject lives in a false reality as profound as The Matrix. The liberal fiction that interrogation can be done by people who are neither cruel nor tyrannical runs aground on the fact that regardless of the interrogator’s character off the job, on the job every fiber of his concentration is devoted to dominating the mind of the subject.27
Only one thing prevents mind-control games from crossing the line into abuse and torture, and that is a clear set of bright-line rules, drummed into the interrogator with the intensity of a religious indoctrination. American interrogator Chris Mackey reports that warnings about the dire consequences of violating the Geneva Convention “were repeated so often that by the end of our time at [training school] the three syllables ‘Lea-ven-worth’ were ringing in our ears.”28
But what happens when the line is breached? When, as in Afghanistan, the interrogator gets mixed messages about whether Geneva applies, or hears rumors of ghost detainees, or of high-value captives held for years of interrogation in the top-secret facility known as “Hotel California,” located in some nation somewhere? What happens when the interrogator observes around him the move from deception to abuse, from abuse to torture lite, from torture lite to beatings and waterboarding? With the clear lines smudged fuzzy, the tyranny innate in the interrogator’s job has nothing to hold it in check.29 Perhaps someone, somewhere in the chain of command, is a morally pure soul, wringing hands over whether this interrogation qualifies as a ticking bomb case. But the interrogator knows only that the rules of the road have changed and the posted speed limits no longer apply. The liberal myth of the conscience-stricken interrogator overlooks a division of moral labor in which the person with the fastidious conscience and the person doing the interrogation are not the same.
The myth must presume, therefore, that the interrogator operates only under the strictest supervision, in a chain of command where his every move gets vetted and controlled by the superiors who are actually doing the deliberating. The trouble is that this assumption flies in the face of everything that we know about how organizations work. The basic rule in every bureaucratic organization is that operational details and the guilty knowledge that goes with them gets pushed down the chain of command as far as possible.
We saw this phenomenon at Abu Ghraib, where militar intelligence officers gave MPs vague directives “‘Loosen this guy up for us.’ ‘Make sure he has a bad night.’ ‘Make sure he gets the treatment.'”30 Strictly speaking, that is not an order to abuse. But what is it? Suppose that the 18-year-old guard interprets “Make sure he has a bad night” to mean, simply, “keep him awake all night.” How do you do that without physical abuse?31 Personnel at Abu Ghraib witnessed far harsher treatment of prisoners by “other governmental agencies” – OGA, a euphemism for the Central Intelligence Agency.32 They saw OGA spirit away the dead body of an interrogation subject, and allegedly witnessed contract employees and Iraqi police raping prisoners.33 When that is what you see, abuses like those in the Abu Ghraib photos will not look outrageous. Outrageous compared with what?
This brings me to a point of social psychology. Simply stated, it is this: we judge right and wrong against the baseline of whatever we have come to consider “normal” behavior, and if the norm shifts in the direction of violence, we will come to tolerate and accept violence as a normal response. The psychological mechanisms for this renormalization have been studied for more than half a century, and by now they are well understood. Rather than detour into psychological theory, however, I will illustrate the point with the most salient example – one that seems so obviously applicable to Abu Ghraib that the Schlesinger Commission discussed it at length in an appendix to their report. This is the Stanford Prison Experiment. Male volunteers were divided randomly into two groups, who would simulate the guards and inmates in a mock prison. Within a matter of days, the inmates began acting like actual prison inmates – depressed, enraged, and anxious. And the guards began to abuse the inmates to such an alarming degree that the researchers had to halt the two-week experiment after just seven days. In the words of the experimenters:
It took only five days before a guard who prior to the experiment described himself as a pacifist was forcing greasy sausages down the throat of a prisoner who refused to eat; and in less than a week, the guards were placing bags over prisoners’ heads, making them strip, and sexually humiliating them in ways reminiscent of Abu Ghraib.35
My conclusion is very simple. Abu Ghraib is the fully predictable image of what a torture culture looks like. Abu Ghraib is not a few bad apples. It is the apple tree. And you cannot reasonably expect that interrogators in a torture culture will be the fastidious and well-meaning torturers that the liberal ideology fantasizes.
That is why Alan Dershowitz has argued that judges, not torturers, should oversee the permission to torture, which must be regulated by warrants. The irony is that Jay S. Bybee, who signed the Justice Department’s highly permissive torture memo, is now a federal judge. Politicians pick judges, and if the politicians accept torture the judges will as well. Once we create a torture culture, only the naive would suppose that judges will provide a safeguard. Judges do not fight their culture. They reflect it.
For all these reasons, the ticking bomb scenario is an intellectual fraud. In its place, we must address the real questions about torture – questions about uncertainty, questions about the morality of consequences, questions about what it does to a culture to introduce the practice of torture, questions about what torturers are like and whether we really want them walking proudly among us. Once we do so, I suspect that few Americans will be willing to conclude that everything is possible.36
NOTES
1. Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, 630 F.2d 876, 883 (2nd Cir. 1980)..
2. Amy Argetsinger, “At Colleges, Students are Facing a Big Test,” Washington Post, September 17, 2001, p. B1.
3. Jim Rutenberg, “Torture Seeps into Discussion by News Media,” New York Times (November 5, 2001), p. C1.
4. Andrew McLaughlin, “How far Americans would go to fight terror,” Christian Science Monitor, November 14, 2001, p. 1.
5. Alan M. Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 158-161.
6. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, “U.S. Senator Orrin G. Hatch (R-UT) Holds a Hearing on the Federal Government’s Counterterrorism Efforts,” FDCH Political Transcripts, June 8, 2004.
7. William Safire, “Seizing Dictatorial Power,” New York Times, November 15, 2001, p. A31.
8. Judith Shklar, “Putting Cruelty First,” in Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 7.
9. Shklar, “Putting Cruelty First,” p. 43.
10. “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment, Article 2 Sect. 2.
11. Jonathan Alter, “Time to Think About Torture,” Newsweek (November 5, 2001).
12. The Schlesinger Report, reprinted in Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 974.
13. Marites Danguilan Vitug and Glenda M. Gloria, Under the Crescent Moon: Rebellion in Mindanao (Manila: Institute for Popular Democracy, 2000), p. 223, quoted in Doug Struck et al., “Borderless Network Of Terror; Bin Laden Followers Reach Across Globe,”Washington Post, September 23, 2001, p. A1.
14. See Oren Gross, “Are Torture Warrants Warranted? Pragmatic Absolutism and Official Disobedience,” Minnesota Law Review 88 (2004): 1501-1503. Gross reminds us, however, that the catastrophic case can actually occur. Ibid., pp. 1503-1504. The ticking bomb case might occur if a government has extremely good intelligence about a terrorist group – good enough to know that it has dispatched operatives to carry out an operation, and good enough to identify and capture someone in the group that knows the details – but not good enough to know the details without getting them from the captive. Israel seems like a setting in which cases like this might arise; and indeed, Mark Bowden reports on just such a case. Mark Bowden, “The Dark Art of Interrogation,” The Atlantic Monthly (October, 2003), pp. 65-68. Importantly, however, the Israeli interrogator got the information through trickery, not torture. (For that matter, the Philippine police who tortured the al-Qaeda bomber eventually got their information not from the torture but from the threat to turn him over to Israel.)
15. For a powerful version of the consequentialist argument, which acknowledges these consequences and accepts them (at least for dialectical purposes), see Michael Seidman, “Torture’s Truth,” forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review.
16. David Rousset, The Other Kingdom, trans. Ramon Guthrie (New York: Howard Fertig, Inc., 1982) (1947), p. 168.
17. Bernard Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” in J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 93. Williams suggests “that the unthinkable was itself a moral category. . . .” Ibid., p. 92.
18. Quoted in Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 45. The man was later identified as Manadel Al-Jamadi. According to various news accounts, Navy SEALS beat him with rifle muzzles and broke his ribs; he was then turned over to the CIA, who placed him in a stress position known as “Palestinian hanging” or the “Palestinian necklace” – suspended by the arms from a grate, a position that places great stress on internal organs. Al-Jamadi died that night, after which CIA operatives packed his body in ice in a shower stall before smuggling it out. One of the Abu Ghraib scandal perpetrators, Army Specialist Sabrina Harman, was photographed leaning over Al-Jamadi’s corpse, grinning and flipping a hearty thumbs-up. The SEAL commander was tried and acquitted. According to Associated Press reports, after his acquittal he said, “I think that what makes this country great is that there is a system in place and it works.” Seth Hettena, Associated Press, May 28, 2005, http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?file/news/archive/2005/05/27/stat/n171730D65.DTL.
19. This is hardly far-fetched. Summarizing extensive studies by researchers, Jean Maria Arrigo notes medical participation in 20-40% of torture cases. One study, a random survey of 4,000 members of the Indian Medical Association (of whom 743 responded), revealed that “58% believed torture interrogation permissible; 71% had come across a case of probable torture; 18% knew of health professionals who had participated in torture; 16% had witnessed torture themselves; and 10% agreed that false medical and autopsy reports were sometimes justified.” Jean Maria Arrigo, “A Utilitarian Argument Against Torture Interrogation of Terrorists,” Science and Engineering Ethics 10 (3) (2004), p. 6. at http://www.atlas.usafa.af.mil/jscope/JSCOPE0/Arrigo03.html.
Evidence has emerged of participation of medical personnel in abusive U.S. interrogations. M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks, “When Doctors Go To War,” New England Journal of Medicine 354 (January 6, 2005), pp. 3-6.
20. This is the conclusion Michael Ignatieff draws from the memoirs of French torturer Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria, 1955-1957 (New York: Enigma Books, 2002), who remains completely unapologetic for torturing and killing numerous Algerian terrorists. Michael Ignatieff, “The Torture Wars,” The New Republic, April 22, 2002, p. 42.
21. Bowden, “The Dark Art of Interrogation,” pp. 74-76.
22. Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Ordinary Evil, and Hannah Arendt: Criminal Consciousness in Argentina’s Dirty War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 40.
23. Osiel, Mass Atrocity, p. 120.
24. This is a principal theme in Ignatieff.
25. These are tabulated in the Schlesinger Report, The Torture Papers, pp. 965-67. See also Chris Mackey and Greg Miller, The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against Al Qaeda (Boston: Little, Brown, 2004), pp. 479-83; see also US Army Field Manual FM 34-52.
26. See the discussion in Bowden, “The Dark Art of Interrogation.”
27. Given my earlier argument that liberal revulsion at torture is grounded in its similarity to tyranny, the question arises why I am willing to accept the forms of tyranny involved in tricking information out of detainees. The answer, though theoretically untidy, is straightforward: pain matters, and the pain of torture makes it a more devastating assault on the dignity and personhood of the victim. I thank Steven Lee for calling this question to my attention.
28. Mackey and Miller, The Interrogators, p. 31.
29. This point is forcefully made in the Jones/Fay Report on Abu Ghraib, reprinted in The Torture Papers. After noting that conflicting directives about stripping prisoners and using dogs were floating around simultaneously, the Report adds, “Furthermore, some military intelligence personnel executing their interrogation duties at Abu Ghraib had previously served as interrogators in other theaters of operation, primarily Afghanistan and GTMO. These prior interrogation experiences complicated understanding at the interrogator level. The extent of ‘word of mouth’ techniques that were passed to the interrogators in Abu Ghraib by assistance teams from Guantanamo, Fort Huachuca, or amongst themselves due to prior assignments is unclear and likely impossible to definitively determine. The clear thread in the CJTF-7 policy memos and published doctrine is the humane treatment of detainees and the applicability of the Geneva Conventions. Experienced interrogators will confirm that interrogation is an art, not a science, and knowing the limits of authority is crucial. Therefore, the existence of confusing and inconsistent interrogation technique policies contributed to the belief that additional interrogation techniques were condoned in order to gain intelligence.” LTG Anthony R. Jones and MG George R. Fay, “Investigation of Intelligence Activities at Abu Ghraib,” in The Torture Papers, p. 1004.
30. Hersh, Chain of Command, p. 30.
31. As a military police captain told Hersh, “when you ask an eighteen-year-old kid to keep someone awake, and he doesn’t know how to do it, he’s going to get creative.” Hersh, Chain of Command, p. 34.
32. “Working alongside non-DOD organizations/agencies in detention facilities proved complex and demanding. The perception that non-DOD agencies had different rules regarding interrogation and detention operations was evident. . . . The appointing authority and investigating officers made a specific finding regarding the issue of ‘ghost detainees’ within Abu Ghraib. It is clear that the interrogation practices of other government agencies led to a loss of accountability at Abu Ghraib.” Jones/Fay Report, The Torture Papers, p. 990.
33. Hersh, Chain of Command, pp. 44-45.
34. Craig Haney et al., “Interpersonal Dynamics of a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973), p. 94, quoted in the Schlesinger Report, The Torture Papers, p. 971. See also Philip Zimbardo et al., “The Mind is a Formidable Jailer: A Pirandellian Prison,”New York Times, April 8, 1973, §6 (Magazine), p. 41; and the remarkable internet slide-show of the experiment, Zimbardo, Stanford Prison Experiment: A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment Conducted at Stanford University (1999), at
35. See John Schwartz, “Simulated Prison in’ 71 Showed a Fine Line Between ‘Normal’ and ‘Monster’,” New York Times, May 6, 2004, p. A20.
36. This chapter is based on a longer essay with the same title appearing in the Virginia Law Review 91 (6) (October 2005), pp. 1425-1461, and it appears here with the
permission of that journal.
By the way, if anyone wants a copy of this book in pdf format, let me know.
Damian @ #555 – Thanks! That also happens to be the chapter that I’ve been recommending to ss! Funny – I remembered some minor aspects of it, but forgot about other major ones. (As an aside: I’m an anarchist, and don’t see states as having any legitimate “security” functions, so I don’t have the liberals’ problem of distinguishing between these and torture. But of course it wasn’t written for me.)
Alas, I fear ss won’t get it at a fundamental level. He writes:
Again, there is no well-supported (and when has he ever supported his own – well or otherwise?) ethical response to the TBS along his lines, because it is impossible – it could never exist. The reasons for this are not only technical, but sociological. This brings me to my larger point, also made in that chapter: Ethics is not theory. Ethics is grounded in real human experience. (The only ethical philosophy worthy of consideration – I mentioned Camus and Arendt earlier – is that which grows out of concrete experience and the observation and analysis of real historical and contemporary actions.) You do not strengthen your system of ethics by abstracting away from real life; you poison it. And you lose sight of how your speculations interfere with your ability to understand real-world issues in ethical terms, and of how you are contributing to real horrors. Real people are really being tortured by real governments in real institutions.
Regarding the ethics of terrorism, I raised the issue for a few reasons, and challenging the consistency of Harris’s ethical system wasn’t chief among them. Beyond simple curiosity and a general suspicion of his hypocrisy, I wanted to shift the viewpoint away from that of the state. Harris’s comparisons and hypotheticals encourage people, as I’ve noted above, to “see like a state,” dangerously dehumanizing those who become the objects of its/their actions – “terrorists,” “suspects,” “innocents.” Considering even would-be terrorists as ethical and political agents can hopefully help people to move toward including these “objects” as people in their moral universe in some meaningful way.
No, but you can realistically be expected to keep silent about matters you don’t understand, so that you don’t make an ass out of yourself by comparing the allocation of donated organs to torture or forced organ harvesting and suggesting that I would have to consider the doctors involved as monsters. You can be expected to acknowledge that your speculations concerning utilitarianism in medicine were nonsense based in pure ignorance.
For the record, I concur (but then, how surprising is that?).
neg responding to SS:
Well put.
(I have to give silentsanta credit for following through on the slavery thought exercise, but I agree with others that he is doing a very bad job with the rest of the discussion)
I recognised the Luban text as it was linked to from Harris’ webpage that I posted in @167.
Here is the PDF – a good read, thanks Damian.
http://www.samharris.org/images/uploads/Luban_VLR_Torture_2005.pdf
Thanks Damian. (And SC and negentropyeater and windy and Nick Gotts and other sane contributers.)
Note:
Not only that, but it wasn’t torture that elicited the revelations. From http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E3DC1E3FF93AA35750C0A9659C8B63&pagewanted=all :
Also, in response to silentsanta’s
which is wrong in almost every possible way, I offer this from #555:
And certainly frivolous is silentsanta’s
as if writing that one would willingly allow oneself to be tortured has any relationship to actually doing so and actually being tortured. It’s especially frivolous when the scenario is such that either he couldn’t save any lives because he has no information or, if he did have the information, he could simply give it up and avoid being tortured. This was one of the many killer refutations that silentsanta failed to address. If it is true that he has thought about this many times in his life, he clearly hasn’t thought about it very critically. And yet he’s “largely unsatisfied with the analysis” of his arguments! His non sequitur parting shot is very revealing; my comment wasn’t about my personal opinion of him, which is irrelevant (and not well defined), it was about the weakness of his arguments and the hypocrisy of trying to turn that on its head and playing victim, poor suffering thing.
poor suffering thing.
so..
much…
blood!
“cleanup on aisle 3!”
as usual, another torture thread, another person tortured into a greasy spot on the floor, still apparently with a smile on their face and love in their heart.
*shudder*
a smile on their face and love in their heart
Consider what silentsanta is so bravely willing to do … he claims. From #160:
So, he would willingly — he claims — put himself in a situation where he has information that can save millions, but if he reveals it his family will be killed, so he’ll allow himself to be tortured to the point where his resistance is totally broken down, he reveals the information … and his family is killed. How noble. But of course this scenario is impossible. In the scenario I proposed, the person being tortured values his family so much that he will do everything possible to keep them from being killed, and thus must be tortured to get the information out of them; they aren’t volunteering to be tortured to the point where they will give up the information that will cost their family’s life. But the bloodless silentsanta would — he claims — simply do his moral calculation, judge his family less of a loss than millions of strangers, and willingly give up the information (and lose his family) without any need to torture him. Or so he says, facilely.
Or so he says, facilely.
sounds like an interesting experiment on altruism in want of funding to me.
OTOH, in the spirit of “nothing new under the sun”, I’d bet it’s already been done.
TM, I make no claim to have addressed all of your points, nor all of SC’s. In my parting post, I tried to express was unable to cope with the volume of discussion (where I talked about fencing against 3, and the impact on my work) but perhaps I could have been more clear.
The torturing innocents variation of the TBS would have a terrorist only willing to stop a bomb if he sees a loved one suffering. John Yoo infamously said the President could order the testes of a suspect’s son crushed in front of a suspect. That leaves the question of why it wouldn’t be more effective to torture the bomber, and why he would have enough compassion to care about one person’s suffering but not enough not to kill millions. (Insert snide comment about anyone loving silentsanta here ;)
For a pithy response to Harris’s war-“collateral damage” comparison, I suggest “It is our moral obligation to minimise casualties, especially amongst innocents.”.
Do we have a pithy response to the TBS yet? I doubt “torture is always immoral” would convince anyone who didn’t already agree.
SC,
The relevant question is how effective at eliciting information is torture compared to other techniques. Torture falls down much harder when compared to rapport based techniques than when compared to nothing.
Henry Kolm was assigned to play chess with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolph Hess. He reports, “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture.” source
Good point. This was discussed a bit in the quotation I provided @ #93.
It’s interesting (maybe only to me, but anyway) in this context to note how wrong Hannah Arendt was about the social conditions of terror in “totalitarian” systems. People in these systems weren’t the anomic “lonely mass” she theorized. And indeed state terror wouldn’t have worked had this been the case. Instead, the systems functioned precisely because people were in family and social networks. Even people willing to suffer themselves and to sacrifice their own lives can be terrorized into submission by threatening harm to their families, especially their children, and close friends. Insofar as the real goal is not intelligence-gathering but to create a climate of terror so as to squelch resistance, it’s disgustingly effective. Corey Robin’s Fear: The History of a Political Idea is excellent on this subject.
In response to Gen Finnegan’s concern over TBS plotlines in 24, is anyone a skilled enough writer to deconstruct the trope?
TM, I make no claim to have addressed all of your points, nor all of SC’s.
As I said, you steadfastly failed to address killer refutations; you ignored the strongest arguments against your position. You acted in bad faith.
I tried to express was unable to cope with the volume of discussion (where I talked about fencing against 3, and the impact on my work) but perhaps I could have been more clear.
You could have been more honest. You used “I cannot realistically be expected to tackle 6 volumes (SC @395) for the sake of this internet discussion” as a ridiculous strawman excuse, at the same time whining about the quality of our analysis. In the end, you’re just another dishonest ass.
And, as SC already stated,
But, being the dishonest bad faith ass you are, you ignored that rebuttal, stupidly pretending that you were misunderstood.
And I go back you your
What an utter ass. No it is not “in the same way”; doctors are never (ethically) coercive (leaving out the ethical complexities of abortion). Choosing how to allocate scarce resources is nothing like torturing, except in the minds of the sickest utilitarians. Contrary to your lie (“Look harder. Specifically, see post 446”), you never addressed this. In 446 you wrote “The same think that makes it immoral to harvest the organs of a single individual to save 5 others”, but you never said what that thing is, and how it contradicts your “in the same way” bullshit. Rather than any sort of acknowledgment that the Hippocratic oath is non-utilitarian, #446 is imbued with utilitarianism. For you, it’s simply a matter of assigning the proper weights to “privacy, autonomy, dignity, justice” in order to plug them into your utilitarian formula. See SC’s #395, which you totally ignored, for an in depth discussion of medical ethics: “medical professionals do not make decisions based upon utilitarian considerations”.
In searching for that post, I found this punny comment of hers:
You might want to consider a career in fencing, since you have a knack for missing the point.
From your own comment, it seems that the fact that what you did here was fencing is something we can agree on.
I hadn’t planned to post more on this subject because the torture argument was stagnating; however a number of recent posts have attacked my character, and I feel compelled to offer some defense.
Failure to address “killer refutations”. There are plenty of points I failed to address in this discussion. I found it difficult to see which points to spend my limited time addressing.
Your first labelled “killer refutation” @559 is baseless speculation about my personal conduct, which has no bearing on whether my argument is correct.
My willingness to trade places was introduced as a defense when you claimed that I had never considered torture fully -either torture of innocents (@424), or torture from the standpoint of the victim. Which you later (correctly) retracted.
Your second “killer refutation” about me “comparing the allocation of donated organs to torture” is absurd because:
1. not only have I shown an appreciation for the distinction between rampant utilitarianism and that practised in medicine (446), but
2. my introduction of medical utilitarianism was only to show that it is (successfully?) used to deal with otherwise intractable problems where human rights are infringed on both sides. Searching for ‘kidney’, I see I indroduced it to show that the UDHR does not provide suitable guidelines for dealing with situations when human rights are infringed on both sides. You could argue that the untreated patient’s right to ‘life’ (article 3) is not infringed by a human agent, but don’t see how this entails that we should dismiss the problem entirely.
SC’s response “Second, medical professionals do not make decisions based upon utilitarian considerations.” is utterly false (432 section VII), though SC’s line could be reworded as “Second, medical professionals do not make decisions based upon ONLY utilitarian considerations”, in which case I entirely agree. I happen to have some amount of inside knowledge into how these allocations work in my country – using utilitarian QALYs as I mentioned, although I am not quite so certain about yours.
How best to fuse utilitarian thought -which has flaws I have never denied- with other forms of ethics was the subject of 446 and 432 section VIII, and thus direct, unconsidered application of only utilitarian methods to torture was NOT part of my argument.
I don’t know why you insist on posting more concerning my arguments (or more often, my character) (568, 567, 561, 559..) when you are confident you have already engaged with all my points. If you have already engaged with all my points, what is your purpose (other than perhaps character assassination)?
(other than perhaps character assassination)?
.. I note such a goal would be pretty futile, given that no one here could hold me in much lower regard anyway.
Your first labelled “killer refutation” @559 is baseless speculation about my personal conduct
It has nothing to do with that, you pathetic whining moron.
no one here could hold me in much lower regard anyway
Gee, and whose fault is that? But of course people could hold you in far lower regard, although such pathetic victim hyperbole does tend to be self-fulfilling.
intractable problems where human rights are infringed on both sides
Look how this stupid fucking asshole continues to claim that NOT killing people to harvest their organs INFRINGES the human rights of others.
I repeat what I wrote in #502:
and #520
Only a complete and utter ass would continue to use this intellectually bankrupt and utterly dishonest formulation of “infringed rights”.
My willingness to trade places was introduced as a defense
This “willingness” is no defense because, as I have explained, your argument is utterly retarded. You cannot trade places with that such a person because they, ex hypothesi, are not acting on your utilitarian principles. They would rather be tortured than trade their family for strangers; you would not. Thus, they must be coerced by torture in order to save those strangers, whereas you do not need to be coerced. Willingness to be tortured only makes sense if you’re against yielding the relevant information, but you’re for it. That you’re too fucking stupid to understand this is no one’s fault but your own.
I found it difficult to see which points to spend my limited time addressing.
That’s easy: the ones that make your position untenable. For instance, the point that failing to torture people or harvest their organs is not an infringement on anyone else’s rights. Your response to that, “And there’s no such thing as negligence, and rights do not ever entail positive duties (??)” is a ridiculous strawman. Neglecting to assure someone’s rights is not the same as infringing on their rights, certainly not when there’s no “neglect” at all, but rather a refusal to actively do something against one’s conscience.
And about that conscience and my refusal to abandon it, there’s this from #555:
I will never yield on my absolute stance against torture, because I recognize the consequences of doing so.
That formulation is used often by politicians – “There is no greater civil liberty than the right to life” they say as they strip away our ancient liberties. Presumably they think people should be kidnapped and have their blood drained because that blood could save lives, and the right to life outweighs all other rights. Very common from Nulab, as is the apparent assumption that “safety” and “civil liberties” compete in a zero sum game.
Q: “What would you do in a nuclear TBS?”
A: “Would you like to hear my plan to repel an alien invasion too?”
baseless speculation about my personal conduct
This from the bozo who complains about others confusing hypotheticals with actuality. It’s not about SS’s “personal conduct”, it’s about his own counterfactual speculation about his hypothetical conduct. He justifies torturing an innocent person on the basis of his absurd claim that he would be willing to be tortured if the tables would be reversed. But from my #455:
Either SS would not in fact be willing to take the place of such an innocent person, or he is completely and utterly insane.
That formulation is used often by politicians – “There is no greater civil liberty than the right to life” they say as they strip away our ancient liberties.
And as they invade other countries, slaughtering millions of innocents and making refugees of millions of others. This is a common — and oh so dishonest — argument employed by proponents of the invasion (including Christopher Hitchens): that it was the truly liberal response.