Torture is a Moral Issue

[pecunium]

I know I spend most of my time arguing about the practical lack of utility for torture; because that's the way the torture-mongers, and apologists, frame it.

But that's only part of the issue. The whole point of the ticking bomb is to redeem the torture as a morally valid act. "If you just talk to him, people will die. Isn't it better to hurt him a little and save lives?"

It's a forced choice, of course, with a poisoned pill. At it's heart it the sort of thing one argues about in late night bull sessions: "Would you kill Hitler to avert WW2 and save millions of people?" There is only one answer acceptable to the people who pose such things... "Yes, of course torturing someone to save a lives is the lesser evil."

At which point we are one has made the choice to join them in condoning torture. It may be posed as saving hundreds, but once you cross the line, the only thing one is haggling over is the price. They have already decided they accept torture. They want affirmation they have done the right thing.

If is interested in discussions of the actual moral question, there's a conference in June (26/27)

Torture Is A Moral Issue: Panel & Conference for People of Faith.

I'll be speaking on both days.


(if there is a recording/transcript, I'll see how one gets a copy)

Comments

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

Are you familiar with the various Appiah's researches on "the Trolley problem?" (wikipedia.)

Edited to correct misattribution.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Do you know if there will be a transcript, recording, or video of your talk?

[kestrels-nest.livejournal.com]

Would I could get there, but travel to CA is outside my budget. Will you post the text of your presentation somewhere?

Thank you for pointing out how the question has been framed. It never occurred to me that some might not consider torture a moral issue.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. The thing that is seldom noted about being the lesser evil is that it's still evil. Nobody wants to embrace the fact that certain actions can never be good, in the sense of virtuous. There no war is ever virtuous. No torture is ever virtuous. These are evil acts, and the people who commit them will be tainted and corrupted by their actions for the rest of their lives. Lady Macbeth's hands will never be clean again.

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

I would also be interested in a transcript of your presentation, if you're planning on posting it.

[soul-diaspora.livejournal.com]

That's great news. I'm glad you'll have that forum for your words.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I'm a pretty simplistic pragmatist. In making my decisions on matters of morality, I generally turn to "what kind of world do I want?" and I make sure I consider it in terms of actual possibilities. Living in a world in which torturing a guaranteed bad guy (no chance of catching up an innocent in the process) would produce information guaranteed to save lives of innocent bystanders, yes, I'd support torture. But in this world, there's no guarantee of any of those factors. So, the question becomes, do I want a world in which authorities can with impunity torture people they think can and will produce useful information--even information that will save lives? No, I don't.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

If people who engaged in slave trading and enslavement, thought the death penalty appropriate for petty theft, transported criminals to malarial settlements, and thought harsh corporal punishments were perfectly normal believed torture to be wrong why the hell can't we?

[rawbery79.livejournal.com]

I kept meaning to tell you--once a week they publish the best blog comments in the paper, and that one you submitted was in there! It gave me a chuckel.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Have you got a link?

[rawbery79.livejournal.com]

No, because it was in the print edition, but I can try to find it for you.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Isn't it better to hurt him a little and save lives?"

"Would you kill Hitler to avert WW2 and save millions of people?"

See, this is another of those questions that illustrates why I don't really accept the idea that you can have a 'moral' answer and a 'pragmatic' answer to a question and have them be separate.

Because, as you've pointed out, the moral question wrt torture hinges on the pragmatic one. The only sane answer is "no, and I wouldn't kill the king to save the harvest either, because it would be a completely bloody pointless thing to do."

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

If you could, I would be ever so grateful.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

That's the reason (I think) the apolgists try so hard (and with so many special pleadings); they need you to agree with them, because they know what they are arguing for is wrong.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Not just wrong, even but bag-of-hammers-dumb wrong. Palming a card is one thing, but keeping one up your arse is another.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

If they asked to give my position on torture, I'd also respond with the moral argument - and with the pragmatic one by quoting the exchange between Thomas More and his son-in-law in A Man for all Seasons.

[(Anonymous)]

Of course torture is a moral issue -- and I'm so glad churches are getting behind a truth they should have upheld all along!

Is there any chance someone with a video recorder could tape the conference for those of us who can't attend? And post it on Youtube?

If I recall my Christian history correctly, the reason the faith spread like (relative) wildfire is that opponents of the naissant religion tried to use torture publicly. Whether or not the target broke under torture became irrelevant; the brutality on the faces of the torturers turned public opinion against them and towards the martyrs.

My theory about the reason there's such a fight being put up against closing Guantanamo Bay is that none of the "dangerous captives" held there were nearly as dangerous when they were caught (in which case, a military tribunal could have legally sent them to a place whence they would never have emerged) as they are now. Now they're enraged and brutalized and their families are equally enraged and brutalized -- and friends of their families see them as martyrs.

To me, creating martyrs out of your enemies is a zero (or worse) sum game.

[(Anonymous)]

cakmpls has the crux of that argument, I think. The fantasy "If you could have killed Hitler..." assumes sure & certain knowledge of what he did. The uses we have made of torture are based on a mere guess about what might be prevented. The analogy between the two is simply not valid. I don't know if the people who use it are being willfully dishonest, or are simply ignorant/blind to that fact (which even intelligent people can be). I have no objection to statements starting with "If...", and frequently engage in such speculation, but have learned to be cautious about using them as a basis for action.

As akirlu points out, the lesser of two evils is still evil, though sometimes it may be the best choice we can make. And sometimes it's not a good one.

I think inadequate consideration is given to such things as "If a bombing raid kills five members of the Taliban (never mind that this group is _not_ Al Quaeda) and ten innocent civilians, thus causing thirty otherwise-uncommited Moslems to support the Taliban, should it be done?". That may be, in essence, what we've been doing (and are continuing to do) in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, resulting in the U.S. being considered, by many people, to be the lesser of two evils. I can't help thinking that there must be a better way of doing things.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Oops! A recent post from me, citing cakmpls & akirlu, was "anonymous" (& is being held for screening) because I didn't noticed that I'd been logged-out somehow. *sigh* As a matter of Policy I never (well... hardly ever) do anything anonymously.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Churches have been against it for the whole of the "debate" in the present. It's just they've not had quite so much practice being against it at home.

The understanding of the early church is flawed. The use of torture didn't turn public opinion against the gov't, and to the churches. Tortures for sport were a big draw. Christians were a target because they were suversive of the government, which made them enemies of the state (a large part of the emperor's power was from his cult status as a living god. The idea was kept, if mutated, in the "divine right of kings")

There is no, legal, military tribunal which could have deep-sixed any of those captives. The legal situation surrounding the wars is such that almost all of them are either combatants, or detained persons being denied their rights (and probably subject to war crimes; as a result of their proper status, but I digress).

There is no justification for using Geneva to enforce US Laws. There is no good legal justification for enforcing those laws we have tried to assert (the best seems to be the "Noriega Doctrine" of Bush I).

Looking at the details, it's possible both Afghanistan and Iraq are illegal wars (though it may be decades before we can finally make a decision on Afghanistan. It depends on what the Taliban said in response to our demand they turn bin Laden over), in which case the entire edifice on which the arrest, and detention, of the captives is a house of cards.

[(Anonymous)]

The reason I used the term "relative" isn't that public opinion was turned all at once. It was an individual-by-individual experience (at least as Paul related his Damascus Road conversion) -- and it will probably have to be fought one person at a time again in this country.

The good news is that people like you are fighting it.

"There is no, legal, military tribunal which could have deep-sixed any of those captives. The legal situation surrounding the wars is such that almost all of them are either combatants, or detained persons being denied their rights (and probably subject to war crimes; as a result of their proper status, but I digress)."

I don't think this is a digression at all. In fact, I think it plays into the reasons the captives were held incommunicado and tortured long past the point where they would have had anything useful to say. I've noticed that people who do bad things often like to blame their victims so that they can continue to do bad things.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

If by relative, you mean that the state which followed the Romans dropped some common tortures (crucifixion) in favor of others (the rack, the Auto de Fe, the stake), and in the course of some 1,500 years they were phased out, I'd agree.

But that's not really the way your argument read.

It was a digression, because the one question (torture) isn't related to the other (illegal dentention; failure of the capturing power to properly treat the people in their care [and rendition is specifically covered. The capturing power is repsonsible for the treatment of prisoners it has taken, no matter who has actual physical custody], etc.).

The legality of the prisoners situation is immaterial to the question, "are they being tortured."

They are two very different crimes, and would have two very different resoltions.

[(Anonymous)]

Not to argue the point too much, I was using relative to refer to the spread of Christianity -- and to refer to the fact that the conversions often occurred one-by-one as people began to see the people the Romans tortured as martyrs instead of as dangerous radicals.

I intended this as an analogy to what I fear may be happening in previously pacific Muslim communities, as they see Americans as the new torturers and Muslim radicals as martyrs.

I saw what you saw as a digression as simply a response to my claim that people who are guilty of a crime (under whichever jurisdiction applies) can be properly prosecuted and locked up. I agree that torture is always a crime in itself -- and draw a parallel between the fact that jurisdictional law was not used to lock up the Guantanamo detainees following due process and the fact that torture was also used.

Or, to murder a metaphor, once you've thrown out the baby, there's no sense in keeping any of the bath water.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I don't think there is any way to analyse why people converted. We no longer live in a land of plural cults of relatively equal weight.

The dynamic is different. The real (structural) difference for Christianity was it's aggressive proslytisation (which Judaism had foregone; though the need for circumsion slowed it's actual adoption), and it's subsequent exclusion of participation in other cultic practices.

That meant it was going to either wither and die, end up marginal (as with Judaism), or have an exponential growth, with the snowball, eventually, destroying all the other cults.

The question of "crime" brings up questions of jurisdiction (local or universal), apprehension, trial; and subsequent sentence, and a whole lot of contingent factors.

That Adghanistan was a war, removes the question of "crime" from the equation. Belligerents are constrained. Protected persons (all people in the zone of conflict who do not fall into a more favorable category) are to be governed under the laws of the invaded country (which laws are to be in effect until the conflict is resolved). The occupying forces are allowed to promulgate such regulations as are needed to keep peace/protect their forces.

They are not allowed to replace the code/impose their own laws.

So there can't be a "due process" question. The prisoners at Gitmo, etc. are either POWs, or Detained Persons. If they are Detained Persons the reason for them being so; as opposed to Protected Persons, or Refugees, has to be explained.

If they are POWs, they don't get a release date (POWs are held by the controlling power [i.e the people who captured, them, not always the the custodial power which is keeping them; one of the difficulties with that is the Northern Alliance/Afghan Forces are actually responsible for what we are doing to most of those prisoners: they aren't actually ours] until the cessation of hostilities, or exchange).

It's an interesting thing. We waged a war with the Taliban, and a new gov't, which we recognise, now exists. Does that mean the hostilities have ceased, and the POWs ought to be released?

Or is the Taliban a government in exile, and Karzai a puppet of an invading power? To avoid that, the previous administration declared the prisoners to be, "unlawful combatants": creating a new category not in the Geneva Conventions.

All of that really is a digression.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I dislike this joke as a joke, but it's a perfect analogy to what you're saying here.

A man asks a woman, "Would you have sex with me for a million dollars?"
She thinks about it for a minute and says, "Yes, I would."
Then he asks, "Would you have sex with me for ten dollars?"
She snaps back, "Of course not! What kind of woman do you think I am?"
He says, "We've already established that. Now we're just haggling."

That's what the ticking-time-bomb argument is.