Matt responds to my post on whether or not torture works thusly:
Megan counterproses that "people take the hard stance and say 'Yeah, torture may still work, but we still shouldn't use it because it's wrong.'" I think Megan thinks that people from the "torture doesn't work" camp are arguing in bad faith, but I'm really not. I don't think it makes any sense at all to say that there's a categorical moral against smashing people's fingers with a hammer or whatever other depraved acts of torture you may care to imagine. After all, I believe (as most people believe) that it's sometimes morally praiseworthy for the state to have its agents kill people with bullets, bombs, mortar shells, etc. so there's surely some end such that torturing someone would, if effective, be a just method of achieving that end.The difference is that despite the horrors of war, there's a very strong argument to be made that if good people systematically disavowed war-making as a practice that bad guys would run roughshod over us. When Hitler's tanks start rolling across Europe, someone's got to shoot back. By contrast, I don't see any examples of societies using routinized legal torture to gain a decisive advantage over their foes or any evidence that the current era of torture has been a net positive in fighting al-Qaeda. To say that a method of investigation works "provided that you can verify the information" is, after all, merely to beg the question. Consulting a psychic works provided that you can verify the information, but spending person-hours chasing down the psychic's "leads" isn't going to make the country safer.
I don't think that Matt &c are arguing from bad faith. Indeed, I agree with them that torture in most cases isn't very effective. I don't agree with what we might call the "strong case" against the efficacy of torture, which is that it never works. If I have, say, a kidnapper from whom I want to get the location of his victim, and I can credibly promise to shoot out his kneecap if the victim isn't where he says she is, then I think I have a reasonable chance of finding out where the victim is by torturing him. If he knows, it is clearly in his best interest to tell me rather than a) playing dumb or b) giving me false information.
Now, those cases might be rare. Which is why many people, I assume Matt included, make what we could call the "weak case" against torture, which is that it generally isn't that effective. But I don't think that this is a very good argument to deploy if your goal is, as mine is, a legal ban on torture by the US government. The weak case doesn't prove we shouldn't use torture; it just proves that we should limit it to cases, such as the above hypothetical, where there is a reasonable likelihood that it will be effective. I doubt the rules for doing so would be as complicated as, say, the New York City building code.
The other problem with the weak case is that torture can theoretically be made more effective. Those brain scans are real; a workable machine might be less than a decade away. (It also might well not; the history of science journalism is littered with the corpses of "next big things" that turned out not to, y'know, actually work.) If you cannot make the case against legal torture without resorting to efficacy arguments, what the hell do you do if it becomes pretty damn effective?
My position is that even if it is 100% effective--in the sense of producing only true information--we should ban it. I don't trust anyone, not myself and certainly not the state, with the power implied by sanctioned torture. I don't want to live in a state that tortures people. And I don't think you need an efficacy argument to make that case.
There's another issue floating around. Making statements about "efficacy" requires an objective. The objective is assumed to be extraction of information. But I'm not sure Dick Cheney is in favour of torture because it delivers good information. I think he's in favour of it because of his "strong horse" obsession. That one intimidates the bad guys by leaving out there the possibility that you might play as rough as they do. Or at least somewhere on the same scale. And of course whispering in Cheney's ear is Bernard Lewis, who was recalling the halcyon days of the USSR having no trouble at all with their Islamic frontier because of the reputation that the response to any provocation would be so severe. So there's a definition of the national interest, in his mind, that requires making other people think that you might use torture. I assume that you'd disagree with such a definition of the national interest.
Megan,
For the most part, I agree with your position (which is your clue to reexamine your arguments). However, I do have two nits to pick with you:
First, we disagree with what constitutes torture. For an increasing portion of the US population, torture means anything that would violate someone's Miranda rights. For others, the term means anything that would make someone physically or emotionally uncomfortable. These new understandings of torture greatly expand what is covered by the term. If we could all agree to apply what was and was not considered torture in the not too recent past (say 1945 or even 1975), then I'd agree that torture should be simply forbidden by law. (But note, the historical understanding of torture did NOT include the "aggressive interrogation techniques", such as water boarding, that were authorized for use in the current war.) If we cannot agree on that definition, then I'll continue to oppose outlawing torture -- because I have no idea what is or what will be considered torture in the future.
The second of my nits is your position that, if torture is needed to prevent a bomb from destroying NYC, the CIA will simply use torture despite it's illegality. While I don't disagree that most agents would make that choice if put in that situation, I think it's unconscionable for us to put them in such a position. If we think it possible torture must be used (much more likely if your much expanded definition of the term is adopted) to save life, we should allow for that possibility in the law. A blanket prohibition combined with a winking affirmation that the prohibition should be ignored if necessary is mere moral posturing.
"don't agree with what we might call the "strong case" against the efficacy of torture, which is that it never works. If I have, say, a kidnapper from whom I want to get the location of his victim, and I can credibly promise to shoot out his kneecap if the victim isn't where he says she is, then I think I have a reasonable chance of finding out where the victim is by torturing him. If he knows, it is clearly in his best interest to tell me rather than a) playing dumb or b) giving me false information."
Yep, many hot hookers with hearts of gold too.
Spoken like the torture-loving schmibertarian Bushbot you are, Megan!
First, I think the "what constitutes torture" question is important. Secondly, though, I never cease to be amazed at reading that torture doesn't work. People who assume the dimness of everyone before them are simply wrong. Obviously, torture works to some extent, or people wouldn't do it so often. That's because not everyone who worked for assorted judicial and prison systems was a socio (or psycho)path. Some of them were evaluating evidence they got, not just making people suffer for thrills. I've read enough prison/gulag narratives to realize that even the resistent will tell their interrogators useful things under torture.
This is not to say that I approve of torture, but that I find the "it doesn't work" argument insufficient.
Dude,
Torture is already banned by the United States in various statutes and treaties. They just refuse to obey the law.
Megan: Well thought-out post, thank you. We're basically in agreement on this issue. However, I think the "efficacy" argument still has its uses - especially as a counterpoint to the ultrahawkish case for "alternative interrogation techniques", which tends to assume the efficacy of these techniques when that's clearly not established. Change someone's assumptions about the efficacy of these techniques, and you might change their mind on the issue. So in the battle for public opinion, the efficacy argument is useful. I'd agree that it's probably not the best rationale for anti-torture laws, but we're not writing Supreme Court decisions here. Are we?
David Walser: Concerning your point #1, I have several "nits" of my own. First, specifically which policy-oriented liberals actually think that "torture" should be defined as a violation of Miranda rights? Or merely something that makes people uncomfortable? I know those "beliefs" fit hand-in-glove with the standard right-wing caricature of treehuggin' libruls, but in years of blogging on all sorts of sites I don't think I've actually heard anyone say anything like that. Other than maybe "BuShizHitLeR666" at DailyKos, but c'mon, not even die-hard Kossacks take people like that seriously.
Remember the context of the "torture conversation" - Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, attack dogs, daylong stress positions, extreme cold and heat, over and over for endless periods against maybe thousands of subjects who have never been tried in court. You may not call that "torture", but in the lefty blogosphere that's what they're talking about, and it's obviously a much more serious exercise of power than neglecting to tell a shoplifter that they can refuse to answer questions. You shouldn't disrespect the argument like that.
Granted, that's a small "nit" - and probably overkill, since so many lefties in Megan's comments have been pretty shrill and disrespectful themselves - but I also think the primary argument you make in point #1 is misplaced. The torture question brings up the classic conflict of interests - guarantees of freedom from forcible governmental oppression on the one hand, and the ability of the government to forcefully coerce people for useful information on the other. You don't really say why you think it's sound policy to err on the side of increased government power to coerce - you just assert it and move on. You won't convince me (or Megan either, or anyone else with libertarian leanings) with that quality of argumentation.
And as for point #2, your assertion that a "blanket prohibition combined with a winking affirmation that the prohibition should be ignored if necessary is mere moral posturing" just isn't factually accurate. In our legal system we incorporate conditionals all the time. Shoot someone, and that's assault or maybe murder; shoot someone in self-defense, and you're exonerated. Shoot someone when you've been pushed to the edge of sanity, and we have sentencing guidelines to ensure that the punishment is reflective of the crime. Torture can be treated the same way. There's no reason that we can't write conditionals into the law to make sure that a heroic Jack-Bauer-type isn't treated the same as Lynndie England - in fact I'd be surprised if those conditionals weren't already in the law, in some form.
That's true, Brady - we have Bush, Cheney, and Gonzalez all openly supporting our "right" to torture at will, and then smirking while refusing to discuss whether particular methods are torture or not. Apologists for the three can say all they want about terrible actions taken on our behalf in the past, but these three have made torture the Official War Crime of the United States of America.
And they're basically boasting about it.
James Tanner writes: "There's no reason that we can't write conditionals into the law to make sure that a heroic Jack-Bauer-type isn't treated the same as Lynndie England - in fact I'd be surprised if those conditionals weren't already in the law, in some form."
They're already there in multiple forms. There's always the power of the president to pardon, of course, and in the never-happened event of a 24 scenario, that would certainly be a lot more popular than pardoning Scooty has been.
There are also traditional defenses of duress and necessity. But of course these would leave the "Jack Bauer type" open to a prosecution, and leave it to a judge or jury to decide if his actions were covered. This is troublesome to fascists of the Bush sort, who never want to answer to anyone.
And yes, I realize some will conclude I am not "Serious" because I refer to Bush as a fascist, but that's exactly what he is.
"My position is that even if it is 100% effective--in the sense of producing only true information--we should ban it. I don't trust anyone, not myself and certainly not the state, with the power implied by sanctioned torture."-Megan
This is really weak. Saying that you oppose torture, without offering a definition of torture, is mere posturing. Yes, you want to demonstrate what moral person you are. I'm just overwhelmed by your virtue.
But really, this sort of sanctimony ought not to get in the way of sober, rational, hard calculation. If indeed coercion (which I wish to distinguish from torture) is ineffective, then I oppose it. We pay a price for coercive treatment of detainees and that price is only worth paying if the benefits outweigh the costs.
Now, assuming we can indeed get good information these terrorists, then the rational thing to do is to apply some pressure to them. It is a strange sort of morality that would rather see thousands of innocent Americans dead than a little pain inflicted on a terrorist fanatic who wants to blow them up.
The question is not whether torture might produce accurate information in some cases. As Matt notes, using psychics sometimes produces accurate information, but this is not a good reason to think that it should ever be used as an interrogation tactic. The question is whether a policy of using torture in interrogation would get us better intelligence over all than any other policy. I think not. The cases whether torture might "work" are not only rare, but they are difficult to distinguish from other cases. We know from experience that it is virtually impossible to keep torture confined within narrowly drawn bounds. Once torture begins to be used, traditional methods of gaining information (which actually have a fairly good success rate) will be degraded. Etc. Whatever one thinks of the morality of torture in principle, then, the practical case against it is much stronger than Ms. McArdle makes out.
Postulate: The odds that torture is both effective and important is so low that it is not worth having people and systems to allow it. That is, there's a cost in having an SOA just because there might be a nuclear bomb and someone with a lack of commitment to the cause knows where it is, and that cost outweighs the expected benefit.
One point which has not been raised (and which is why, in my mind, torture ended up getting dropped out of medieval law): the difficulty raised by the large number of false positives.
Torture someone enough and he'll tell you anything you want to hear. He'll confess to being Bin Laden's right hand man if you want that. Heck, he'll confess to being Bin Laden himself if that's what's needed to get the pain to stop.
So let's say you pick up 100 suspected terrorists, only one out of which is a real terrorist. You torture them until they confess. You now have 100 different confessions, each seemingly as viable and trustworthy as the other, all contradicting each other. And you've now produced 100 people extremely ticked off at you and willing to do anything to get back at you.
That's a hell of a way to run a railroad.
I also don't want to live in a state where I must live in fear of NON state actors, either.
I live in western Houston, "Third Orleans" post 2005. I used to be able to walk two blocks to the local pub; now, when I drive there, I hear stories of people getting mugged for doing what I used to do. Two weeks ago some neighbor's teenage son was robbed at gunpoint, at 10:45 PM at an intersection, and shot at. I can't lie down in my own bed at night without hearing gunshots from the local miscreants. Our mayor doesn't care; he's sitting pretty on hundreds of thousands of extra Democratic voters with more on the way.
I have been to London, and so I know whither Houston is trending.
I invite anyone who gets the vapours over a few coercive techniques to try living in a diverse neighbourhood for a few months, where the "community youths" laugh when you try to talk to them of civic responsibility. They have no problem torturing us if we don't, say, show them where the valuables are hidden. I should prefer it if the thugs were the ones who must live in fear.
Obviously, torture works to some extent, or people wouldn't do it so often.That's because not everyone who worked for assorted judicial and prison systems was a socio (or psycho)path.
Not every judicial and prison system is based on torture. The systems that are are indeed based on socio- or psychopathology. Indeed, many of the systems that aren't also have their fair share of sadism. Human beings are just bad at enforcing order and justice amongst themselves, and current practice cannot be assumed to be optimal.
Of course, since most of the torture occurred in secret with the torturer in complete control of the environment and historical record, it's easy for the torturer to come up with some narrative to justify their torture. That the historical record, even when written by the victors, has vastly more examples of sadism, stupidity, or dishonesty than sincere and successful attempts at torture says that people would have tortured just as often as they have now if the null hypothesis of torture's ineffectiveness were true. Torturers are sadists, their defenders are fools.
And the "what is torture" debate is pathetic. The sort of stuff like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and temperature extremes that we condemn in other countries as torture is still torture when it's in this country.
Houstoner writes: "I invite anyone who gets the vapours over a few coercive techniques to try living in a diverse neighbourhood for a few months, where the "community youths" laugh when you try to talk to them of civic responsibility. They have no problem torturing us if we don't, say, show them where the valuables are hidden. I should prefer it if the thugs were the ones who must live in fear."
I guess Houstoner's sort of cowardice is where fascism comes from. Is there any doubt that he'd like to see his local police officers torturing the "community youths" at random in the peculiar hope that it would make him feel a little safer?
And if his own son or grandson got picked up and beaten half to death, he'd squawk a little but not too much. He would have already made that bargain with himself.
If his sort now runs "the land of the free and the home of the brave," stick a fork in America. It no longer deserves to be called either.
Megan's brain scan argument makes sense (though actually functional lie-detecting equipment would require us to change way more than some of our arguments against torture), but her "strong case" is just a straw man, and she misunderstands the "weak case".
The weak case doesn't prove we shouldn't use torture; it just proves that we should limit it to cases, such as the above hypothetical, where there is a reasonable likelihood that it will be effective.
The true "weak case" is that investigators will be completely unable to divide the cases in which it will be effective from the ones in which it will be counter-productive--in fact, most of the effective hypotheticals are completely unrealistic. What if the kidnapper says so-and-so has the victim? So-and-so claims he has no idea what the kidnapper's talking about. Shoot both their knee-caps? Shoot the kidnapper's, then shoot so-and-so? The weak case is not just that torture is generally ineffective, but that any general policy green-lighting any sort of torture at all won't be effective.
Let's be clear about some terms here. David Walser claims,
"(But note, the historical understanding of torture did NOT include the "aggressive interrogation techniques", such as water boarding, that were authorized for use in the current war.)"
Let's keep in mind that these were well recognized as torture techniques in the first half of the century. The attempt to claim that water boarding and related techniques were ok simply isn't true. If Mr. Walser's view that they aren't torture compared to the medieval rack well congratulations. They are certainly less likely to immediately kill a person. Various manuals for torture listed them as techniques (remarkably the Khymer Rouge, the KGB and the Nazis all agreed they are torture).
People are attempting to define the law some outlier case that currently has only resided on a television show. Why are considering the "Jack Bauer" exemption to torture? It's a TV show that has NO bearing on reality. It strikes me a wholly unnecessary since if there was a true ticking time bomb scenario and our hero averted the nuclear bomb threat that no prosecutor would prosecute and no jury would convict. No exemption is needed.
The second of my nits is your position that, if torture is needed to prevent a bomb from destroying NYC, the CIA will simply use torture despite it's illegality. While I don't disagree that most agents would make that choice if put in that situation, I think it's unconscionable for us to put them in such a position. If we think it possible torture must be used (much more likely if your much expanded definition of the term is adopted) to save life, we should allow for that possibility in the law. A blanket prohibition combined with a winking affirmation that the prohibition should be ignored if necessary is mere moral posturing.
But such a law with such a possibility allowed would with absolute certainty be misused, even if unintentionally, producing enough bogus data that we'd be distracted from discovering the ticking-bomb in the first place. The law you're talking about would never work. The only reasonable possibilities are the winking and nudging you complain about, or to prosecute all torturers without exception.
Brian Despain is right, Walser is very, very wrong. Stalin basically never tortured anyone using extreme immediate physical pain. I've never read an account by a Gulag inmate that talked about ripped out fingernails or even electric shocks. It was all extended standing, prolonged exposure to cold, failure to treat medical conditions, and above all sleep deprivation. The KGB were far too intelligent and efficient to waste time on medieval nonsense.
Of course, you could just decide Stalin was okay. That's what Putin's Russia is doing lately. But...why did we fight the Cold War again?
And the Stalin point brings up something related, about "verifiability" of information. In an environment where people are being tortured to produce information, it quickly becomes impossible to verify anything. Stalin's Russia was an impenetrable madhouse of paranoia and conspiracy theories, where the most insane fantasies (that Bukharin had spied for Japan, that the majority of pre-1917 Bolsheviks had actually been capitalist saboteurs) were treated as fact and widely believed. That happened in no small part because people were being tortured and spewing out garbage information, which produced more arrests, more torture, more garbage information.
We've seen the same thing in our War on Terror. We no longer know what to think about the majority of our detainees. It's entirely possible that the overwhelming majority of detainees at Guantanamo and at CIA black sites are completely innocent. Then again, maybe not. We have no way to know, and it's increasingly clear that the government mostly doesn't, either. They no longer know who they think killed Daniel Pearl; too many of the people they've captured have "confessed" to it. We are starting to live in a Stalinesque paranoiac world, and it's partly because we're torturing people and believing their desperate fantasies.
"The weak case doesn't prove we shouldn't use torture; it just proves that we should limit it to cases, such as the above hypothetical, where there is a reasonable likelihood that it will be effective. I doubt the rules for doing so would be as complicated as, say, the New York City building code."
I really do appreciate your opposition, but I wish you would stop making ludicrous statements like this one. The U.S.'s torture policy started for high level suspects at CIA prison, was supposedly restricted to "scientific" techniques carefully administered by trained professionals. It took about a year before we were beating innocent Afghan cabbies to death--and one of the soldiers involved has said that by the time of his death U.S. troops basically knew he was innocent. That cabbie, by the way, was turned in by a warlord who accused him of firing rockets at a U.S. base; a few months later we arrested the warlord for the attacks. He had apparently been turning in random suspects to avert suspicion.
That's the worst case I know of from the Afghan war, but it's far from isolated. There are a number of cases in Guantanamo which indicate not only that we sometimes got the wrong guys in Afghanistan, but that we had no earthly clue what we were doing. My favorite single example being the six prisoners sent to GTMO after being captured in a Taliban prison, one of whom had been personally accused by Osama Bin Laden of trying to assassinate him in 1998, another of whom seems to remain in GTMO partly on the strength of a confession he made on video tape in early 2001 after being tortured by high level Al Qaida members. On the tape he says he will become a martyr for jihad--but then, he also confesses to having spied for Israel.
The techniques weren't isolated either. It was pretty standard at Bagram airbase to chain people to the ceiling for extended periods to keep them awake; Kandahar airbase somehow acquired the nickname "Camp Slappy". At one of the CIA prisons, which one might expect to be more carefully controlled, a prisoner froze to death.
From Afghanistan it spread to Guantanamo. Then, from all those places and through a number of different pathways (CIA interrogations of "ghosts" in military prisons; joint CIA-special forces task forces that were authorized by the Pentagon not to follow Geneva; units that had been in Afghanistan & assumed that Geneva still didn't apply; training teams from Guantanamo) it flowed into Iraq.
Nor is this anything new. A lot of the CIA techniques are based partly on a document called the KUBARK manual, which has been called the CIA's "bible" of interrogation. The techniques outlined in KUBARK are based partly on research into North Korean psychological interrogation techniques used to obtain confessions from U.S. service members in the 1950s. One problem, which people sort of overlooked when studying these fascinating new techniques: the confessions were completely false.
I accept that you mean well, but you really don't even begin to know what you're talking about here. It's naive, it's not helpful, and it's extremely frustrating. I agree with the moral case, but that's exactly WHY it's not as easy to regulate as the NYC building code.
From a legal point of you: yeah, you could write regulations with fewer pages, but in order to write them, you have to rip up the U.S. statutes and withdraw from the treaties that prohibit torture. And once you do that, it's not easy to replace them with another set of clear rules, because it is politically problematic to explain that you are going to violate the torture statute and Geneva conventions because national security demands that you torture CIA prisoners, and publish detailed regulations of exact allowable time you can waterboard a prisoner, the minimum dimensions of the coffin sized box you can put them in, exactly what temperatures you can expose them to to induce hypothermia, exactly how long you can chain them to the ceiling to force them to stand.
From a practical point of view it's even worse. Even if you did issue those detailed rules, 20 year old kids in a war zone would have a tendency to go beyond them. And when you don't, well: you get the results we've gotten.
Oddly enough, the same sort of thing has happened virtually every time throughout human history a government has given itself the power to torture: a lot of broken bodies, false conessions, innocent lives ruined. It serves some purposes well, but legitimate intelligence gathering isn't one of them.
It's practically disastrous BECAUSE it's grossly immoral, and there is no better evidence of its immorality than a detailed examination of its practical effects. The unlimited power of one human being to destroy another human being is a harder thing to regulate than how many electrical outlets you have to put in a one bedroom apartment.
"One point which has not been raised (and which is why, in my mind, torture ended up getting dropped out of medieval law): the difficulty raised by the large number of false positives."
The false positives are the point of torture. Torture is not a method to get at the truth. It is a method to get anyone to admit they did something wrong when they didn't in fact do that specific wrong. Societies that torture people want large numbers of false confessions.
The reason to torture people is to elicit false confessions that serve to expand state power, be it over single individuals by then killing or imprisoning the "guilty", or over society at large to scare the population by the randomness of incarceration (see Foucault - ideal prison), or though the method of "protecting" with greater state power over that population to protect people from these admittedly "guilty" monsters.
A guilty society recognizes no innocents. This is the only real argument against torture. We need some avenue for every innocent person to show they are innocent. Torture doesn't allow for innocence. Torture is 100% effective already. It makes every torture subject admittedly guilty.
"It's practically disastrous BECAUSE it's grossly immoral, and there is no better evidence of its immorality than a detailed examination of its practical effects. The unlimited power of one human being to destroy another human being is a harder thing to regulate than how many electrical outlets you have to put in a one bedroom apartment."-Katherine
It's very funny to see Megan McArdle taking so much heat from people with whom she basically agrees. She says that she opposes torture, whether or not it is effective, so it seems strange that so many here are attacking her as an advocate of Gulags and Death Camps.
I have my own quarrel with Megan, since she refuses to say what she means by torture. Some people consider sleep deprivation and waterboarding torture; others do not. Until she addresses this question her comments on the subject are close to worthless--since it is this gray area concerning what is acceptable that is the gravamen of the dispute.
But much of this debate has been overwrought. Katherine thinks that anyone who doesn't want to coddle terrorists must want to tear out their fingernails and burn them at the stake. My own position (and, I believe, that of most Americans) is that making life difficult for the terrorists is well worth it if it saves American lives. Do not let it degenerate into mere sadism, but use coercive interrogation when doing so is likely to elicit vital information.
Some people consider sleep deprivation and waterboarding torture; others do not.
That's false. Everyone calls it torture when the Nazis or Gulag torturers did it. The difference is that some people change their standards when their boys and girls are doing it. I agree with you that people are being unfair to McArdle, but that's only because there's a gigantic gulf between her reasonable (though in my view incorrect) view and the complete logic-free insanity of the pro-torture crowd on display here.
That's from an op-ed by Charles C. Krulak, commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999, and Joseph P. Hoar, commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994.
okay, but:
do you believe the state should be able to kill people in certain circumstances? (war)
do you believe that killing (usually) is worse than torture?
if you believe both of the above, then doesn't it follow that the restricitons on killing should be tougher than the restrictions on torturing? in other words, since the state can sometimes kill people, it should be allowed to sometimes torture them too?
Yglesias's way out of this is to say that there are two criteria for whether a state should be allowed to do something. the first is morality, and under that criterion, torture is at least as acceptable as killing. the second is effectiveness, and under that criterion, torture isn't worth it because it usually provides bad results, but killing is worth it because if we refused to ever engage in warfare, the consequences would be severe.
I buy your argument that torture could sometimes be effective and may become more effective in the future. so now what am I left with? unless you can convince me that torturing is worse than killing, I see only two options: either I become a pacifist, or I become a torture advocate. is there a third way?
(and, of course, my argument is not that supporters of "enhanced interrogation" wanted it to descend into mere sadism, which I doubt. It's that it actually did descend to that. For example, the Afghan taxi driver case I keep referring to is described at length in this article.)
"if you believe both of the above, then doesn't it follow that the restricitons on killing should be tougher than the restrictions on torturing?"
Killing doesn't merely inflict pain on someone for the sake of inflicting pain. It also incapacitates him: he can no longer harm others. People are allowed to kill in self-defense or in defense of another person who's life is being imminently threatened. States are also allowed to start wars in self-defense or in defense of another nation. During those wars, soldiers are allowed to shoot the enemy on the battlefield; they are NOT allowed to shoot the enemy when he is already incapacitated--you are not allowed to summarily execute prisoners.
(We do sometimes allow the state to kill prisoners after trying them for particular crimes. The Supreme Court has concluded that this is not "cruel and unusual punishment" banned by the Eighth Amendment, whereas I hope you will concede that it is cruel and unusual punishment for the state to sentence prisoners to be raped*, tortured, & mutilated. I think that this is somewhat inconsistent & am a death penalty abolitionist, but that's not the same as pacifism. And plenty of people have no problem supporting execution and opposing state-run "rape rooms.")
do you believe the state should be able to kill people in certain circumstances? (war)
do you believe that killing (usually) is worse than torture?
Sasha: No, killing is not "worse" than torture (the use of the word "worse" here is weird), and in fact that position is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States as currently interpreted: the ban on "cruel and unusual punishment", which as currently interpreted does not necessarily mean a ban on the death penalty.
Second: someone you torture is someone who you are holding captive. The laws of war prohibit states from killing people they are holding captive, as well as torturing them. States can kill combatants in battle.
It should also be pointed out that the "weak" case against torture doesn't have to worry about disingenuous "define torture" Pontius Pilate crap that the more morally centric one gets--from the point of of the view of the "weak" case, anything that makes people start blabbing is tactically garbage.
do you believe the state should be able to kill people in certain circumstances? (war)
do you believe that killing (usually) is worse than torture?
Others point out rightly that lots of things can be morally worse than killing.
Even if you don't buy that, McArdle's argument doesn't assume it. "I don't trust anyone, not myself and certainly not the state, with the power implied by sanctioned torture." Actually, I have to rescind my last comment, because that seems like a good answer to the "Define Torture" crap--I don't trust the government with waterboarding and sleep deprivation.
"...but that's not the same as pacifism."-katherine
But the logical result of your position is pacifism. You just haven't thought it through. What some of us are relying on is the principle that, given a choice between two evils, one ought to choose the lesser evil.
Ideally one would never have to treat anyone harshly--there would be no wars and no terrorism and all people would get along. But that ideal world isn't the one we live in. We live in world in which a there are many cunning and dangerous men who would like to destroy us. Now, we can choose to protect ourselves using sometimes unpleasant means (like bombing an enemy camp or applying pressure to a detainee with important information), or we can refrain from treating anyone badly ever and hope for the best.
The enemies we fight don't share your squeamishness about coercion. They would not hesitate to torture you. So i think your sympathy with them is misplaced. Coercion, like all warfare, is an evil, but it is sometimes the lesser evil and, therefore, a necessary evil.
Some time ago a philosopher made the case against the same ennervating moral prudery manifest on this blog:
"How men actually live is so far removed from how they ought to live, that he who abandons what is for what ought to be brings about his own ruin rather than his preservation: because a man who might want to make a show of goodness in all things necessarily comes to ruin among so many who are not good."
This is not, as some will argue, a defense of immoralism. it is rather a plea for a rational, flexible and pragmatic ethical code that recognizes the harsh reality of the world. Those who are unwilling ever to harm anyone might make fine neghbors, but they would make terrible Secretaries of State or Defence--and they would bring their country to ruin.
But the logical result of your position is pacifism.
No, opposing either the torture or killing of people in your custody in no way logically compels you to oppose legitimate wartime acts of violence against people who aren't in your custody. Logic has absolutely nothing to do with your believes--you're just telling yourself a story after you've decided you're point of view.
And you're not even a particularly good story teller.
it is rather a plea for a rational, flexible and pragmatic ethical code that recognizes the harsh reality of the world.
The harsh, pragmatic reality of the world is that state-sanctioned torture policies would make us less safe. That's harsh because emotionally we'd like to torture them--we WISH that such a policy would make us safer. Reality says otherwise. Sorry.
Um no that’s not quite true. There are several different types of “water boarding” ranging from putting a cover over someone’s face and pouring water on it to simulate drowning (which is what the United States is allegedly doing) without putting the prisoner at risk of physical harm to actually pouring water down their throat until their stomach bladder is full and then stomping on their stomach bladder (which is what the Japanese did during WWII and for which they were charged with crimes for the Double Tenth incident).
It isn’t so much that the supporters of coercive interrogation techniques are holding the United States to a lower standard when they say they don’t consider water boarding to be torture – it’s that the people who think we’re doing the same thing the Axis and Soviets did just don’t know what they’re talking about.
Thorley Winston dissembles: "It isn’t so much that the supporters of coercive interrogation techniques are holding the United States to a lower standard when they say they don’t consider water boarding to be torture – it’s that the people who think we’re doing the same thing the Axis and Soviets did just don’t know what they’re talking about."
We're using sleep deprivation and hypothermia, chuckles. The Soviets used those. For some strange reason you avoided mentioning those - why is that?
Then there are the detainees who have died in American custody - some of whom were beaten to death. Are they somehow less dead than people who were beaten to death by other torturing regimes? You may rest your pride on the fact that we have fewer victims. I suggest that if people like you get their way, we'll start to catch up. The one certainty is that people like you sure won't complain if we do.
"No, opposing either the torture or killing of people in your custody in no way logically compels you to oppose legitimate wartime acts of violence against people who aren't in your custody. Logic has absolutely nothing to do with your believes..."-consumatopia
No, you haven't understood my argument. It relies upon the well known philosophical principle of the lesser evil.
1) Given a choice between two evils, we ought always to choose the lesser evil.
2) Twisting a terrorist's arm is a lesser evil than letting an American city be wiped out.
3) Therefore, given a choice between twisting a terrorist's arm and letting an American city be wiped out, we ought to twist the terrorist's arm.
This syllogism is logically valid. So you must either accept the conclusion or reject one of the premises--if you believe in logic, that is, rather than mere prejudice and emotion.
Katherine, it seems to me was implcitly rejecting premise number one, and that would logically lead to opposition to war for any reason, since the justification for war itself rests crucially on that premise (For example, when we allied with Stalin against Hitler it was because at the time he was the lesser threat and therfore the lesser evil.) The Quakers have essentially taken that position against all war, which is intellectually respectable; but, as I wrote above, I wouldn't want a Quaker running the defense department.
MLAJ is correct here--there's no evidence that any American thinks it's a-ok when other countries perform "correct" waterboarding and sleep deprivation techniques on either their own citizens or our POWs--international law certainly reflects nothing of the sort.
You're always going to add some new "safety" twist to any procedure and use that to distinguish that from the Nazis. Apparently, "never again" means only never again will there be someone who looks and acts exactly like a Nazi. Just part your hair the other way and you're good to go.
Isocrates sort of proves my point: defenders of the administration want to discuss abstractions, tv show plots, straw man versions of their opponents' arguments, or best of all a bizarre combination of the three--anything but the actual record of US policies, which is much harder to defend than "twisting a terrorist's arm" to save U.S. city from nuclear attack. That's why it's necessary to turn to the actual factual record to effectively debate this.
1) All men are Greek.
2) All Greeks are Europeans.
3) From 1) and 2) all men are europeans.
4) 3) is false. Therefore, no men are greeks.
3 is valid. 4 is obviously crap. Rejecting the syllogism does NOT require you to believe that "Given a choice between two evils, we ought NEVER to choose the lesser evil." Sometimes logic is harsh, my friend.
I mean, seriously, you wouldn't want a Quaker running the Defense Department (not even Nixon?), but would you be okay with a Catholic? If you want to claim that pacifism is the only nonconsequentialist moral doctrine, you're at odds not merely with logic and me, but probably most people in the world. (Take a poll on killing one person to get organs to save 5 other people. You may end up throwing out more resumes for the defense department than you realize).
This syllogism is logically valid. So you must either accept the conclusion or reject one of the premises--if you believe in logic, that is, rather than mere prejudice and emotion.
If you actually do care about logic, then I expect an apology.
To disbelieve principle 1, I don't have to believe "
The part of my post after the blank lines in the middle was meant to be deleted.
megan, your mediocrity is astounding.
Brooksfoe:
On your first point: I'm sorry if the use of the word "worse" is weird, but what I was trying to get at is that not all actions have equal moral weight. I believe that it is more wrong to kill someone than it is to say, smash his fingers with a hammer. You are right that the current interpretation of the US Constitution goes against my moral intuition because it allows the death penalty. Do you believe the current interpretation of the Constitution is correct? If, in 30 years, the Supreme Court reverses its stance and argues that the death penalty *is* cruel and unusual, will you then believe that torture and killing are equally wrong?
On your second point: I hadn't considered that in warfare neither killing nor torturing someone in captivity is allowed. However, I wonder if there is some guiding moral principle behind that rule? Maybe something like: hurting/killing someone is okay when that person directly poses a threat to you, but not okay once that person is no longer a direct threat (since once you're in captivity, you're no longer a direct threat), even if his organization still is. It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it holds up on a macro level when you're trying to defend the justifications for a country going to war.
Katherine, you say:
Killing doesn't merely inflict pain on someone for the sake of inflicting pain. It also incapacitates him: he can no longer harm others. People are allowed to kill in self-defense or in defense of another person who's life is being imminently threatened. States are also allowed to start wars in self-defense or in defense of another nation. During those wars, soldiers are allowed to shoot the enemy on the battlefield; they are NOT allowed to shoot the enemy when he is already incapacitated--you are not allowed to summarily execute prisoners.
Torturing (by the government) presumably also doesn't inflict pain just for the sake of inflicting pain. It's done for information. And severe enough torture could also incapacitate someone. I guess torture for reasons of self defense doesn't really apply, but what do you think of torture in cases where someone's life is being imminently threatened (aka, the ticking time bomb)? I don't think you've provided an adequate explanation of why torturing falls in a different class than killing.
That said, I do think you're right to turn to the factual record to debate this. For example, I do believe that most of the time, killing is more wrong than torture, but that's not always true. I think most people would rather be tortured than killed, but torture can also get so bad that people would rather die than be subjected to it. And if, in the real world, allowing any torture at all creates such a slippery slope that we'll quickly degenerate to horrible worse-than-death torture, maybe that's reason enough to outlaw all torture to begin with.
Far from being self-evident, the principle that "given a choice between two evils, we ought always to choose the lesser evil" is actually incoherent. If an action is evil, then you shouldn't do it. That's just part of what the word 'evil' means. Saying that we ought to choose the lesser evil, then, is equivalent to saying that we ought to do what we ought not do, which is self-contradictory.
I mean "incapacitate" in the sense of "make someone not a physical threat." An unarmed prisoner in custody is already not a physical threat to anyone, so you can't be acting in self-defense. It is possible to create a hypothetical where he possesses information needed to defend someone else from a real, imminent, physical threat, torture will make him reveal it, & nothing else will, but: (1) it's not actually possible to know this with certainty at the time--you often don't know you've got the right guy; you don't know exactly what he knows; you don't know that torture will work; you don't know that other methods will fail. (2) more fundamentally: The prisoner you're torturing or threatening to execute or what have you is not an imminent physical threat to anyone. I think there's a moral difference between physically incapacitating someone who can shoot you, and totally breaking down an unarmed, captive prisoner mentally by causing him such pain that he will be forced to say whatever you want him to say.
For that reason, you couldn't invoke "defense of another" at your trial if you were tried under U.S. criminal law. The defense would be: "necessity"--that your actions were necessary to prevent some greater evil--and that's a separate, far more restricted defense than "defense of another," if it's available at all (you can't use it for certain crimes, such as murder).
Megan, welcome to your new home. I hope you got a lot more money, etc. I prefer the blog format here over your old haunt.
I agree with your final assertion that we should not entrust government with the power to torture because we cannot trust them not to misuse it. I would approach the question from the other direction, however. What powers should we deny our government, because we cannot trust them not to abuse?
Unfortunately we can't carte-blanche because governments do have to fight wars. So we have to grant the government some lee-way to do the fighting. The most obvious way to do that is by classifying people, and then defining government powers with respect to each class.
I see five classes of people:
1. Citizens
2. Non-citizens
3. Human shields (non-combatants in a war zone)
4. Enemy combatants
5. Captured enemy combatants
I would allow for the government to have different sets of powers in relation to each class of people. I think we need to define the specific boundaries of government power in relation to each class. And I agree with many of the previous comments that we have to define those boundaries in very specific terms.
Modern guerrilla warfare is as much a PR fight as a fire-fight. We have to send a clear and consistent message that we will prevail over those foolish enough to choose to be our enemies, while at the same time we will treat everyone else as family. That's the only PR strategy that will win. That has to drive our list of specific allowed and disallowed behaviors.
For each class of people, I would describe the government's rights like this:
1. Citizens - Miranda rights
2. Non-citizens - also Miranda rights
3. Human shields - Take every reasonable measure to avoid hurting these people, including letting enemy combatants get away (if they will retreat) in order to reduce the danger to human shields.
4. Enemy combatants - Leave their dead bodies on the battlefield (don't capture them unless they actively surrender.)
5. Captured enemy combatants - Treat them like citizens who have been arrested by the police for suspicion of committing multiple homicides.
That doesn't just mean no torture for captured enemy combatants. It means that they get a speedy military trial, where the military has the burden of proof to show that the person really was armed and tried to harm our soldiers. Once proven guilty, hold them in prison with no option for release--at least for the duration of the war. I wouldn't even bother interrogating them.
This leaves only one moral gray area for soldiers to deal with: At what point is an enemy combatant "captured"? I would draw the line at the moment that the capturing soldier can safely turn his or her back to the prisoner. This will be self-policing, mostly, because the soldiers will be taking photos and videos of everyone they capture in order to prove their combatant status.
The only remaining issues are (a)getting information on enemy operations, and (b) performing offensive military operations. I think that you have to rely on signal intelligence; and prioritize known associates of known enemy combatants in your signal gathering. When you find an enemy factory or similar support-type facility/personnel/whatever, you have to go through a grand jury-type process to get approval to classify a set of citizens or non-citizens as suspected enemy combatants. And then you send in the soldiers. Not the police. No bombings. This would be the one exception where the goal is to capture, unless and until the suspected enemy combatants open fire. At that point you have real combatants and a regular battle.
When it happens that we attack a baby-food factory that really isn't an enemy bomb factory, then we have to go through a public apology and a vetting of our grand jury-type process failure.
Huh. I just re-read all of that and realized that I could have just written, "I don't support torturing anyone ever because the negative backlash is always greater than even the best-case possible positive gains, and I don't trust government to not abuse the power." Oops.
We live in world in which a there are many cunning and dangerous men who would like to destroy us. Now, we can choose to protect ourselves using sometimes unpleasant means (like bombing an enemy camp or applying pressure to a detainee with important information), or we can refrain from treating anyone badly ever and hope for the best.
The enemies we fight don't share your squeamishness about coercion. They would not hesitate to torture you. So i think your sympathy with them is misplaced. Coercion, like all warfare, is an evil, but it is sometimes the lesser evil and, therefore, a necessary evil.
Here's how isocrates would have dealt with Mahatma Gandhi, if he'd been Viceroy of India: a bullet between the eyes.
I mean, what else could he do? The man refused to quit protesting and fomenting rebellion. Throw him in jail, isolate him, do anything to him; he endured it, and went right on being a pain. Why take all this heartache from one puny little man? Just blow him away. The locals might get a little upset, and the folks back home might grumble a bit; but that would die down after a while. The empire would be preserved, and that's what's important.
Heck, the guy didn't even make it hard. He didn't even fight back. Just sat there.
You've learned nothing from history. Nothing. You use nice little euphemisms like "pressure" and "coercive interrogation" to try to wriggle out from under the bare, brazen fact that you advocate TORTURE. Pathetic.
1) All men are Greek.
2) All Greeks are Europeans.
3) From 1) and 2) all men are europeans.
4) 3) is false. Therefore, no men are greeks.
3 is valid. 4 is obviously crap. Rejecting the syllogism does NOT require you to believe that "Given a choice between two evils, we ought NEVER to choose the lesser evil." Sometimes logic is harsh, my friend.
Rejecting a logically valid syllogism does require that you reject a premise or accept the conclusion. The problem with your syllogism above is that it's not valid, because it contains an unstated false premise:
0. Either all men are Greeks, or no men are.
The syllogism you were criticizing has a similar problem. There's an implicit unstated premise, as follows:
0. In situations where American cities may be wiped out, we are limited to two possibilities: allowing the wipeout, or twisting a terrorist's arm.
Obviously, this is the weak point of Isocrates's syllogism.
The power of logic is indisputable; the catch is that few situations in real life can be spelled out as precisely as logic requires. Unstated premises abound.
If an action is evil, then you shouldn't do it. That's just part of what the word 'evil' means.
Part of the concept behind "the lesser evil" is the recognition that, often, we cannot avoid doing evil.
That's essentially the choice being presented. If we do nothing, a city gets wiped out. But the only way to prevent the disaster is by twisting the arm of the terrorist who planted the bomb. Either choice is evil, but which is less so?
I hope you'll pardon me for saying it, for I mean it in the best way, but if you haven't encountered such a situation in life yet, you are probably just lacking in experience.
The problem with your syllogism above is that it's not valid, because it contains an unstated false premise:
0. Either all men are Greeks, or no men are.
Correct. Thank you for being much clearer than I was.
This was the problem with Isocrates's argument--he was assuming that either it is always acceptable to choose the "lesser evil" or that it is never acceptable.
In other words, that you must be either a strict consequentialist (and not even a higher-order rule utilitarian or anything reasonable like that--if coercive organ harvesting saves lives, go to it) or a strict pacifist. There's no reason to assume this, and indeed the vast majority of people fall somewhere in between those--choosing the lesser evil is acceptable in some circumstances but not in others. Hence the Geneva convention.
The syllogism you were criticizing has a similar problem. There's an implicit unstated premise, as follows:
0. In situations where American cities may be wiped out, we are limited to two possibilities: allowing the wipeout, or twisting a terrorist's arm.
Obviously, this is the weak point of Isocrates's syllogism.
I think that's getting too specific--there is a continuous spectrum of viewpoints in between simplistic consequentialism and pacifism, and each of those viewpoints may differ from Isocrates's assumptions in different ways. I look at it in terms of rules--a rule in favor of torture in ticking time bomb situations is likely to cause more harm than good--the rule will be misused and situations will be misread in the panic of the moment.
Assuming that there really are circumstances where every course of action (including inaction) open to a person is evil, then the question of what to do in that situation would have no answer. If you say "you should twist the terrorist's arm to save the city," then you can't really believe that twisting the terrorist's arm is evil in those circumstances. If it were evil, then it couldn't be the right thing to do. But you do think it is the right thing to do, thus you must think that it is not really evil. This is a matter, not of experience, but of simple logic.
Personally, I think that if the only way a person could sotp a city from being destroyed was to torture someone ('twisting a terrorist's arm' being a mealy-mouthed phrase), then he still shouldn't do it. Do not do evil that good may result, and all that. But that's a separate issue.
Sigh. Yeah, yeah. But you can't know *in advance* which torture will be effective and which won't. You only know after you've smashed the guy's hand with a hammer, he's told you which well the kid is down, you've gone there, and there is no kid.