Ponnuru and Goldberg on Torture and Killing
THE BLACK BOX OF TORTURE [Jonah Goldberg]
Okay, I finally got my thoughts organized enough to write a short piece for the mag on what really bothers me about the torture debate, so maybe I can do it even more briefly here.
The anti-torture absolutists take it as self-evident that torture (variously defined) is self-evidently evil. Context doesn't matter. Context cannot justify it. Further, they argue that torture is what defines our enemies in an existential way. We cannot become "like our enemies." And no matter what the circumstances, employing torture would make us like them.
But nobody to my knowledge has demonstrated why torture holds this unique status.
For their argument to be true, torture must be worse than killing, indeed it must be worse than the killing of innocent people. Ask any educated person if war will result in killing innocent people and they will say yes. That’s the nature of war. If taking innocent lives was always and everywhere an unconscionable evil that could not ever be tolerated in American law, then war would have to be illegal. And yet, it is not illegal. We even speak openly about “collateral damage” and the need to “minimize” it, not eliminate it.
It seems to me that one could quite easily argue that killing many innocent people is worse than torturing one evil person, particularly if doing so will save many innocent lives. This may not be the case, but if so nobody has explained why it is so to my satisfaction.
Instead, torture has been made into a moral black box, a stand-in for “something existentially and self-evidently evil.” Thus, in effect, the torture issue has succeeded where all other efforts at moral equivalence have failed. During the Cold War, the left (and some segments of the Right) claimed moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union because we had many of the same tools. The Soviets had nukes, so did we. We put people in asylums, they put people in asylums. We went to war to defend our way of life, the Reds went to war to defend their way of life. And so on.
Morally serious people saw through this. We put crazy people in asylums and murderers in prison. They locked-up Solzenytsins and Sharanskys. We went to war to fight oppression and defend liberty, they fought to oppress liberty and defend oppression. These are, to put it mildly, significant differences. An ambulance driver and a hit-and-run killer both have driver's licenses, but a serious person doesn’t claim the two are therefore morally equivalent.
But torture seems to be the one thing that changes all that. Suddenly, no matter what the context, no matter what the reason, torture is a stand-alone context-killer. Whereas even many liberals accepted that in some cases dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations could be morally acceptable given the right circumstances, torture never, ever, can be. Again, I'm willing to be persuaded that this makes sense. But as of right now, I can't get my head around the idea that it might be morally acceptable to nuke untold thousands or millions, leaving many to endure vastly greater agony than involved in 2 to 3 minutes of waterboarding but it is absolutely morally unacceptable to humiliate and hurt a terrorist in order to gain information that might help us stop just such an attack on our own citizens.
TORTURE AND KILLING [Ramesh Ponnuru]
Jonah writes: "For [the anti-torture absolutists'] argument to be true, torture must be worse than killing, indeed it must be worse than the killing of innocent people" (emphasis his). It must be worse because none of these absolutists think that war should be outlawed even though it results in the death of innocents. I think Jonah's argument goes seriously awry at this point, because it neglects intention. It isn't absurd, and I think it is indeed right, to regard the deliberate torture of a person as worse than the unintended, though foreseen and accepted, killing of an innocent. Launching a just war might very well cause many noncombatants to lose their limbs or their eyes. That the war might still be justified, even given that cost, doesn't mean that you can pluck out someone's eye during an interrogation to get him to talk.
RE: TORTURE AND KILLING [Jonah Goldberg]
Maybe, Ramesh. (And again for the record, I'm horrified by the idea that we would pluck anyone's eyes out). And I agree with you that intent matters a great deal. There's a reason you've had to spend so much time dealing with the ticking time bomb scenario -- because a scenario involving torturing someone for the fun of it is unpersuasive on its face.
But again, what is it specifically about torture that is demonstrably more evil than all these other things no matter what the context? I understand that aesthetically torture shocks the conscience. But so do thousands of maimed children from, say, the Dresden bombing. We all have access to the moral arguments -- just war, etc -- that help us accomodate the gruesome realities of war. But nobody has put forward a similar argument about torture, at least not that I've seen.
I have one partial explanation. The rights explosion. We have come to accept that human beings -- all human beings -- have certain immutable rights. This isn't new or bad. But what is new is that for some these rights cannot be forfeited based upon the actions we take. I have a right to life and free movement. If I murder someone, I forfeit my claim to those rights. But more and more it seems the idea that you can forfeit rights is falling out of favor.
Some pro-lifers take this view toward the death penalty. They argue that it simply doesn't matter what a person has done, the state has no right to execute him. I disagree, obviously, but it's an honorable position. It seems that torture is a stowaway in this worldview. Again, I am open to the argument that torture (real torture) deserves to be off limits but I want to know why. Is it because of the essential dignity of all life? Is it because cruelty -- even when the intent is to prevent greater cruelty -- is always wrong? Is it because in the long run it will corrupt our natures?
There's a bit of an echo to the animal rights debate here, I think. Animal rights activists want to argue that animals have inviolable right to certain humane treatment. Many of us sympathetic to the plight of animals still reject the idea that they have rights. Instead we've argued that animals don't have rights but humans have obligations. A decent person is not needlessly cruel to animals because cruelty to animals is at odds with our conceptions of decency.
I don't know about others, but this is where I'm most persuadable on the issue of banning torture always and everywhere. I don't think Osama Bin Laden has any rights. There isn't an ounce of kindness the man deserves. He doesn't deserve fair treatment under the Geneva Convention or any other custom of law because he's rejected those customs willy-nilly. Our rules are set up to protect the innocent, not the guilty. If we had some sort of God-given super-computer which could tell us with 100% who was guilty of murder, there would be no need for trials.
But, what Bin Laden and other murderers deserve isn't the issue. It's what we owe to ourselves and the kind of civlization we want to have. That's why I favor all sorts of things which on a practical level might make war -- and law enforcement -- more difficult. That gets me pretty close to your position. But that still doesn't quite get me to thinking it'd be wrong to waterboard Bin Laden all day long if that was the only way to prevent the next 9/11 -- or worse.
Okay, I finally got my thoughts organized enough to write a short piece for the mag on what really bothers me about the torture debate, so maybe I can do it even more briefly here.
The anti-torture absolutists take it as self-evident that torture (variously defined) is self-evidently evil. Context doesn't matter. Context cannot justify it. Further, they argue that torture is what defines our enemies in an existential way. We cannot become "like our enemies." And no matter what the circumstances, employing torture would make us like them.
But nobody to my knowledge has demonstrated why torture holds this unique status.
For their argument to be true, torture must be worse than killing, indeed it must be worse than the killing of innocent people. Ask any educated person if war will result in killing innocent people and they will say yes. That’s the nature of war. If taking innocent lives was always and everywhere an unconscionable evil that could not ever be tolerated in American law, then war would have to be illegal. And yet, it is not illegal. We even speak openly about “collateral damage” and the need to “minimize” it, not eliminate it.
It seems to me that one could quite easily argue that killing many innocent people is worse than torturing one evil person, particularly if doing so will save many innocent lives. This may not be the case, but if so nobody has explained why it is so to my satisfaction.
Instead, torture has been made into a moral black box, a stand-in for “something existentially and self-evidently evil.” Thus, in effect, the torture issue has succeeded where all other efforts at moral equivalence have failed. During the Cold War, the left (and some segments of the Right) claimed moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union because we had many of the same tools. The Soviets had nukes, so did we. We put people in asylums, they put people in asylums. We went to war to defend our way of life, the Reds went to war to defend their way of life. And so on.
Morally serious people saw through this. We put crazy people in asylums and murderers in prison. They locked-up Solzenytsins and Sharanskys. We went to war to fight oppression and defend liberty, they fought to oppress liberty and defend oppression. These are, to put it mildly, significant differences. An ambulance driver and a hit-and-run killer both have driver's licenses, but a serious person doesn’t claim the two are therefore morally equivalent.
But torture seems to be the one thing that changes all that. Suddenly, no matter what the context, no matter what the reason, torture is a stand-alone context-killer. Whereas even many liberals accepted that in some cases dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations could be morally acceptable given the right circumstances, torture never, ever, can be. Again, I'm willing to be persuaded that this makes sense. But as of right now, I can't get my head around the idea that it might be morally acceptable to nuke untold thousands or millions, leaving many to endure vastly greater agony than involved in 2 to 3 minutes of waterboarding but it is absolutely morally unacceptable to humiliate and hurt a terrorist in order to gain information that might help us stop just such an attack on our own citizens.
TORTURE AND KILLING [Ramesh Ponnuru]
Jonah writes: "For [the anti-torture absolutists'] argument to be true, torture must be worse than killing, indeed it must be worse than the killing of innocent people" (emphasis his). It must be worse because none of these absolutists think that war should be outlawed even though it results in the death of innocents. I think Jonah's argument goes seriously awry at this point, because it neglects intention. It isn't absurd, and I think it is indeed right, to regard the deliberate torture of a person as worse than the unintended, though foreseen and accepted, killing of an innocent. Launching a just war might very well cause many noncombatants to lose their limbs or their eyes. That the war might still be justified, even given that cost, doesn't mean that you can pluck out someone's eye during an interrogation to get him to talk.
RE: TORTURE AND KILLING [Jonah Goldberg]
Maybe, Ramesh. (And again for the record, I'm horrified by the idea that we would pluck anyone's eyes out). And I agree with you that intent matters a great deal. There's a reason you've had to spend so much time dealing with the ticking time bomb scenario -- because a scenario involving torturing someone for the fun of it is unpersuasive on its face.
But again, what is it specifically about torture that is demonstrably more evil than all these other things no matter what the context? I understand that aesthetically torture shocks the conscience. But so do thousands of maimed children from, say, the Dresden bombing. We all have access to the moral arguments -- just war, etc -- that help us accomodate the gruesome realities of war. But nobody has put forward a similar argument about torture, at least not that I've seen.
I have one partial explanation. The rights explosion. We have come to accept that human beings -- all human beings -- have certain immutable rights. This isn't new or bad. But what is new is that for some these rights cannot be forfeited based upon the actions we take. I have a right to life and free movement. If I murder someone, I forfeit my claim to those rights. But more and more it seems the idea that you can forfeit rights is falling out of favor.
Some pro-lifers take this view toward the death penalty. They argue that it simply doesn't matter what a person has done, the state has no right to execute him. I disagree, obviously, but it's an honorable position. It seems that torture is a stowaway in this worldview. Again, I am open to the argument that torture (real torture) deserves to be off limits but I want to know why. Is it because of the essential dignity of all life? Is it because cruelty -- even when the intent is to prevent greater cruelty -- is always wrong? Is it because in the long run it will corrupt our natures?
There's a bit of an echo to the animal rights debate here, I think. Animal rights activists want to argue that animals have inviolable right to certain humane treatment. Many of us sympathetic to the plight of animals still reject the idea that they have rights. Instead we've argued that animals don't have rights but humans have obligations. A decent person is not needlessly cruel to animals because cruelty to animals is at odds with our conceptions of decency.
I don't know about others, but this is where I'm most persuadable on the issue of banning torture always and everywhere. I don't think Osama Bin Laden has any rights. There isn't an ounce of kindness the man deserves. He doesn't deserve fair treatment under the Geneva Convention or any other custom of law because he's rejected those customs willy-nilly. Our rules are set up to protect the innocent, not the guilty. If we had some sort of God-given super-computer which could tell us with 100% who was guilty of murder, there would be no need for trials.
But, what Bin Laden and other murderers deserve isn't the issue. It's what we owe to ourselves and the kind of civlization we want to have. That's why I favor all sorts of things which on a practical level might make war -- and law enforcement -- more difficult. That gets me pretty close to your position. But that still doesn't quite get me to thinking it'd be wrong to waterboard Bin Laden all day long if that was the only way to prevent the next 9/11 -- or worse.
posted by Quin Finnegan at 10:35 PM
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