The American Scene

An ongoing review of politics and culture

• Politics
• Economics
• The Media
• Culture

• Home
• About
• Archive
• Search

Leave a Reply

1. Well, torture of prisoners merely to inflict pain is wrong because it serves no military purpose, unlike, say, confining people for the duration of hostilities, or killing those who are retreating rather than making effectual surrenders. Obviously the question of whether or why torture to obtain actionable intelligence is wrong is more difficult.

   — y81 · Apr 27, 04:41 PM · #

2. y81:

   Yes, I was trying to address the harder case of torture for (epxected and precieved) potential military benefit (and hence, logically, the more universal proposition).

   — Jim Manzi · Apr 27, 05:13 PM · #

3. You can’t collapse the distinction between an enemy soldier who is fighting against you and a prisoner in chains in a cell. The question you ask answers itself.

   — vimothy · Apr 27, 05:14 PM · #

4. Generally speaking, laws of war tend to evolve to restrict behavior that has some combination of ineffectiveness and moral repugnance. This is why there are restrictions on chemical weapons and not nuclear ones for example. Chemical weapons tend to have a fair amount of literal blow back in addition to their nasty effects on the enemy, so it can be mutually advantageous for both sides to stay away from them.

   How can something be mutually advantageous in war, a classic zero sum game? I think there’s a human tendency to meet your opponent measure for measure, even if such measures are not particularly wise. Also in some cases, like treatment of captured officers, the individuals involved have different incentives than the country as a whole.

   On the larger international law point, there actually are restrictions on weapons designed to wound. This is part of why laser weapons are controversial, they tend to blind. There is a convention against land mines, but the U.S. leadership has often gone with the position that they’re sufficiently useful on the Korean peninsula that we’ve opposed the ban while choosing not to use them elsewhere (although dud cluster munitions can be defacto land mines).

   I think the larger answer is that the restrictions are not so much an internally consistent guide to morality, as a guide to where views on immorality and practicality align. Thus, law of war restrictions are rather good as a sufficient but not necessary guide to judging something immoral.

   — Greg Sanders · Apr 27, 05:32 PM · #

5. Discussions about morality without something to back them up often get you to the same type of argument that you are in. If I could start from a Christian viewpoint I think I could argue that based on “Imageo Dei” (being created in the image of God). That torture of someone under your power is morally wrong. But if you start from an idea of morality without a religious view point then you are probably right that it is very hard.

   Personally I think the best non-religious argument is the fact that it doesn’t work and you don’t want your own soldiers tortured.

   — Adam S · Apr 27, 05:40 PM · #

6. I think that the argument starts in the wrong place. For non-religious dialogue about the morality of torture you need to start with law. Is it legal? After is it legal then you can move to “should it be legal?” Or “how did it become illegal?”

   Here is a good summary of the laws that make torture illegal in the US. (All torture, not just of US citizens.)

   http://phronesisaical.blogspot.com/2009/04/quick-review-of-torture-law.html

   — Adam S · Apr 27, 05:48 PM · #

7. Most Just War theory is predicated on the right of individuals and nations to defend themselves against aggression. A prisoner of war, disarmed and imprisoned is not (generally speaking) a clear and present danger to the continued existence of soldiers on the battlefield or the nation. As they are not a threat, they are to be treated humanely.

   The reasons why a society goes to war, as well as the way they behave while at war matter. Being the good guys means that we shoot second, not first and that we don’t shoot (torture etc) unarmed men. If we as a nation are not doing these things, then maybe we’re not the good guys. And I would submit that being the good guys offers us a long term strategic advantage as a nation at the price of an occasional loss of short term advantage gained through actionable intelligence.

   — Johnny A · Apr 27, 05:48 PM · #

8. lkasjehrpajlshfa;skf asdflhjkas;dfk

   — Freddie · Apr 27, 05:55 PM · #

9. “As they are not a threat, they are to be treated humanely.”

   Exactly. A captured or surrendered soldier is not a functional soldier at all.

   This might also explain why, although at times there are qualitative similarities between being tortured and being a soldier, we have a volunteer military, but few volunteers for torture.

   BTW, y81:

   Torture must have a purpose, according to customary law, to qualify as torture; otherwise, it is cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

   — vimothy · Apr 27, 06:00 PM · #

10. I think part of it is that when we are bombing from 30,000 feet we don’t need to think in detail about the specific suffering. Whereas, if you’re torturing the cost side of the cost-benefit calculus is much starker.

    The greater aversion to torture, relative to other necessary evils of warfare, is in this sense a bit like Bastiat’s essay on What is Seen and What is Unseen. You can’t so easily tell yourself no-one in particular is getting hurt when you do it.

    — steve · Apr 27, 06:01 PM · #

11. vimothy:

    You can’t collapse the distinction between an enemy soldier who is fighting against you and a prisoner in chains in a cell. The question you ask answers itself.

    It doesn’t answer itself to me. And I think the point of moral reasoning (as opposed to moral intuition, as per my last paragraph) is the atempt to convince someone for whom a moral conclusion is not obvious.

    First, what does “fighting against you” mean? Consider a simple scenario. An enemy soldier is limping (with a leg injured by a landime I planted) down a road 200 yeards from me. I am in a concealed sniping postion. I shoot him in the back and kill him. Was that wrong? He was not actually “fighting against me” at that moment. But I can still kill him under my understanding of the basic laws of war.

    If I capture him and detain him in a prison, he has the right (under the Geneva Conventions) to attempt to escape and return to combat. Under my understanding of current U.S. military doctrine, a captured U.S. soldier is obligated to atempt to escape to return to combat. Why is it morally acceptable to shoot the injured soldier in the road to prevent him from (maybe) fighting me in the future, but not to shoot prisoners to prevent them from (maybe) fighting me in the future.

    Further, suppose the cost of imprisioning people is very high in terms of loss of fighting manpower and mobility (as it sometimes is in tactical combat situations) and by executing prisoners I can be more effective? What if I consider saying the words “I imprison you” to be a tactical faint designed to fool enemies into making it easier for me kill them (much as soldiers will often hide explosives behind doors to apparent hiding places)? It just doesn’t seem so obvious that in a situation in which I can do pretty much anything to a combatant to attempt to maim or kill him that there is some inherent immorality associated with this one action.

    Second, and more simply, why? Obviously, one can specify (roughly, but well enough for it to be practical) what it means to be imprisoned. But why should the action called “put him in forced confinement” prevent me, morally, from taking the next action called “torture him to death”. After all, I take lots of other actions prior to killing people in war all the time.

    — Jim Manzi · Apr 27, 06:05 PM · #

12. I think that even for most people who argue against torture categorically, there is a more prudential aspect to their position that often goes unnoticed (sometimes even by themselves). I mean, I’m staunchly anti-torture, but I wouldn’t argue that there are literally no conceivable circumstances in which torturing someone could be the right thing to do. You can make up circumstances that could justify just about anything, from child rape on up.

    If aliens came down and bizarrely ordered me to rape and mutilate a child, or they would destroy the whole human species, and I believed them, and thought I would save the human race by doing so, then, as awful as it is even to write it, I would absolutely do it, and I think that would be by far the less wrong thing to do. I do not think this precludes me from believing, and pronouncing, that “child rape is wrong.” I say this only to observe that no one discusses the morality of child rape in anything like these bizarre terms, nor should they. Yet torture is routinely defended precisely on this kind of simultaneously hyperbolic and myopic basis. History and human psychology tell us that state-sponsored torture is rarely, if ever, going to stay confined to some extremely narrow set of circumstances; its use does not systematically increase our understanding of the world; and even more obviously, the practice of torture harms our national interest vastly more than it could ever help it.

    What I find odd about this post is that you seem to see the question of the “morality” of torture as utterly separate from the “prudential” issues surrounding it, as if morality were a matter of following a list of abstract rules without concern for the consequences. Torture is wrong because it inflicts awful suffering on the person tortured (as a side point, often far in excess of anything they could reasonably be said to “deserve”), harms the torturer’s psyche, systematically leads to coverups, self-deception, and outright lying on the part of the tortures and the government who authorizes them — and because there is nothing close to a weighty enough benefit that we should put these concerns aside and do it anyway. The kind of brutal violence that goes on in war is really, really awful, too, and one doesn’t have to be a “pacifist” to think that the cavalier way in which societies engage in war, and valorize it, is a very bad thing. One doesn’t have to be a pacifist to think that, because there are circumstances in which inflicting brutal suffering on vast numbers of people is the lesser of two evils — though war obviously tends to be a negative-sum game, and such situations thus virtually always mark a real failure to reach a possible outcome other than war.

    — Christopher M · Apr 27, 06:05 PM · #

13. “Torture must have a purpose, according to customary law, to qualify as torture; otherwise, it is cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

    That may be true in certain legal usages, but not in popular usage, where we wouldn’t hesitate to refer to Al Qaeda captives or sex crime victims as having been “tortured” before being murdered. It doesn’t seem to me that Mr. Manzi is using the word in a legal context. A good bit of the unclarity in discussions of these issues comes from the failure (sometimes willful) to distinguish situations where a word is being used as a term of art versus situations where it is being used in a vernacular sense.

    — y81 · Apr 27, 06:10 PM · #

14. I’d echo Johnny, but add that in prison, soldiers are no longer tools of the state. They’re human beings, disconnected from combat. If they’re no longer a soldier, you’re left with pretty basic moral questions to answer. Do unto others, etc.

    You see this morality skit play out often across military history, where stories about of combatants putting aside their fight in the trenches for a mini-cease fire, where they treat eachother as men and not tools of the state. During holidays, or to care for the wounded.

    Of course, this would be the argument in a war where you were dealing with hostiles who were doing the bidding of a state that ordered them to go into combat. In a battle where you’re dealing with someone who philosophically wants you dead, and could care less what his orders are, then maybe the rules are different?

    — Geoff · Apr 27, 06:11 PM · #

15. Christopher M:

    I see the situation in a very similar light. The point of this post was a narrow one: that it is easy to make categorical moral statements about torture of enemy combatants, but that as long as you are not a pacifist, it is almost impossible to consider this issue other than as bound-up in the prudential questions. To your point, in the extreme, this is true for any statement. However, I think there is near-universal agreement that the omnipotent aliens scenario is a hypothetical so unlikely as to be ignorable in normal speech. Many people do not believe this to be the case for torture of enemy combatants. The argument is much more bound up with prudential considerations, in practice.

    — Jim Manzi · Apr 27, 06:21 PM · #

16. This discussion is so confused that it is difficult to know where to start. There is, for one, an entire tradition of thought spanning more than a millenium devoted to articulating precisely why the “options” put forward by Manzi—pacifism versus total war—are equally reductive and false: this is called Just War Theory, and if Manzi can’t see how its most basic claims provide reasons that answer his absurd question, I am not going to waste my time providing them for him.

    There is secondly Manzi’s pernicious use of “prudence”—as in “prudential questions” “prudential considerations,” etc.—which presents in the language of classical virtue what in fact is the crudest of consequentialisms. The virtue of prudence requires that some things be left off the table EVEN IF refusing to entertain them would cause the death of a nation or of the species. This is because there are some acts—such as the raping and torturing of a child, listed above in the comments—for which no reason can serve as a justification. It were better—more prudent even—that a political community cease to exist than that, in order to ensure its existence, it would so compromise itself by the undertaking of certain odious actions. But Manzi is really a consequentialist, which is why he thinks that the word “prudence” means something like a cost-benefit analysis.

    But, seriously, are we really debating the morality of torture? Is this what we’ve come to? Really?

    — wj · Apr 27, 06:57 PM · #

17. Jim, I think we mostly agree. My real point is that people routinely make moral statements in quite categorical terms, even what you are calling “prudential” considerations are very much bound up in those very same people’s moral calculus. For a lot of reasons — the history of moral thinking in Western culture, the ways people are brought up and taught “morality,” etc. — a lot of people just think and speak about moral issues (at least, ones that seem especially vital) in those terms. I think it’s pretty rare that people who talk this way are actually putting considerations of consequences entirely to the side.

    Thus, to me, calling those people out on the ground that the truly categorical version of their position is problematic seems like a very oblique point at best, because it has very little to do with anything specific to the torture debate. Our collective system of moral norms is very situational and nothing like a fully rational and self-consistent set of propositions. So it’s almost always very easy to call some norm into question by pointing out that either the norm, or the prospect of abandoning the norm, is in tension with some other aspect of our standard moral beliefs. This can be useful as a way of sort of shaking people up so that they’re open to revising their beliefs in one way or another — but ultimately to move the debate forward in any way, we need a positive case for one norm or another.

    On torture, I think that there’s a vastly bigger problem, empirically, with people assuming that it probably has good consequences in reasonably plausible circumstances — and thus that the only question is whether it’s “moral” or not in the abstract — than there is with people rejecting it on moral grounds without simultaneously reworking their entire set of moral beliefs about violence in general to be self-consistent. Maybe I’m just criticizing you for not writing the blog post that I would have written — but the tone of the post does strike me as carrying a rhetorical force broader than the narrow analytic point — on which we agree — that the consequences of torture matter to whether it’s right or wrong.

    — Christopher M · Apr 27, 07:02 PM · #

18. wj:

    Are we really debating the morality of launching flaming petroleum jelly onto an unarmed an enemy combatant as he runs away from us? Is this what we’ve come to? Really?

    You’re reading this post as a defense of the morality of torture, rather than an attack on rationalistic ethics divorced from tradition and intuition. Take a nother look at the last sentence of the post.

    — Jim Manzi · Apr 27, 07:18 PM · #

19. Christopher M:

    Fair enough. My motivation for writing the post is that saying “torture is obviously just wrong“ impedes progress in the debate. Unlike child rape, lots of well-intentioned, non-crazy people can develop scenarios that don’t involve space aliens in which they say to themsleves “Well, I’d probably torture that guy”. I think that good evidence that this is a non-trivial issue is that the topic is so controversial (inlike child rape on one side or, say, brushing your teeth, on the other).

    You say that:

    Our collective system of moral norms is very situational and nothing like a fully rational and self-consistent set of propositions.

    Check. As with all such evolved systems, strict rationaization can cause more harm than good. Tradition represents evolved opinion about how to make such judgments, as per the last paragraph of my post (as well as the other things I’ve written about the topic).

    — Jim Manzi · Apr 27, 07:29 PM · #

20. “Are we really debating the morality of launching flaming petroleum jelly onto an unarmed an enemy combatant as he runs away from us?”

    I find this comment very puzzling. Is there some universal agreement, unknown to me, that it’s okay to use machine guns on retreating enemies but not flamethrowers?

    I also don’t see where intuition or tradition get us. Most people have sort of an instinctive reaction against shooting at retreating enemies, but advanced Western nations have mostly abandoned this scruple. Orthodox military doctrine requires a victorious general to follow up and press a retreating enemy, not permit him to retreat and regroup. In contrast, as any history of early Amerindian peoples will show, many primitive peoples do engage in ritual torture of military captives. In fact, the early colonists and the Indians each regarded each other as monsters, for shooting at fleeing enemies in one case, and for torturing captives in the other. So I guess it depends on whose tradition and whose intuition you follow.

    — y81 · Apr 27, 07:53 PM · #

21. I assume you’re asking why torture is wrong from a non-utilitarian point of view? If you’re a utilitarian, there’s no real moral distinction between what’s prudentially justified and what’s morally right (or even obligatory). If you’re not a utilitarian, you don’t have to be religious to think it’s always and everywhere wrong, contra Adam S.

    There are several different moral principles at play here, including conduct in war, but the absolute moral prohibition on torturing people during interrogation isn’t related to warfare as such. The reason you can’t torture people to get them to do what you want is that by torturing them you are overriding their moral agency.

    I go into a bit more detail here, if anyone’s interested.

    — David Schaengold · Apr 27, 07:56 PM · #

22. Your argument applies to murder just as well as it does to torture. So you are telling us that you see no moral objection to killing prisoners of war.

    — Bloix · Apr 27, 08:01 PM · #

23. You think it is not adequate to just say “Torture is obviously just wrong.” You imply that it is adequate to say, “Child rape is obviously just wrong.” Why? Everyone agrees that ordinarily torture is immoral (in the same way that lying is ordinarily immoral). The question you are raising is whether torture, which we ordinarily condemn is justified in some situations. Generally, torture apologists claim it is either when (a) the person deserves it or b) the good that will result outweighs the harm to person.

    Generally, (a) has been clearly rejected as morally acceptable. This is enshrined in the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. If you accept (b) as the justification, then you can use the exact same reasoning to justify child rape. I.e., I can imagine fanciful situations where the only way to prevent some great harm is to rape a child—much like some Republicans have done for torture.

    Now, I want to say that even so, child rape is still clearly immoral. If you wish to have a debate about whether in some fanciful situations we are faced with tragic choices, then fine, whatever. But this is a situation where the crass utilitarianism that seems to underly your question really does conflict with modern moral sensibilities.

    The problem is that torture apologists wish to have it both ways. On the one hand, they claim it isn’t really torture, that what they are doing is not so bad, and on the other they want to say that the benefit justifies the cost.

    Now, I don’t see much point in arguing with someone about whether or not the good that might come from torturing someone outweighs the cost of doing so if they aren’t willing to admit the harm or immorality of torturing someone in the first place. Instead, in these debates, they usually revert back to the view that torture is okay because the people they are torturing deserve to be tortured (which has nothing to do with the prudential calculation). In other words, instead of having Jack Bauer torture some evil, evil terrorist, have him torture a young child in order to find the hidden bomb. Tell me why that’s okay. Then I’ll listen to the debate.

    — sabina's hat · Apr 27, 08:05 PM · #

24. “So apparently it’s OK to inflict (the most extreme imaginable) violence when the guy is totally helpless in combat…”

    Actually, this is not quite accurate: You may not shoot enemies wounded to the point of presenting no current threat, and you may not shoot medical personnel aiding the wounded. You are not supposed to shoot unarmed individuals mixed in with combatants (but may inadvertently do so, likely without official punishment).

    “The whole point of maneuver in warfare is often to put yourself in a position where you can cause massive causalities from a protected position.”

    This is a poor rhetorical conflation of “position.” In the latter scenario, whether you are firing from a position of advantage or not, the enemy still poses a threat — he is armed and equipped to kill you if he can see you. The same cannot be said of a person in custody. That extremely necessary component of mutual physical danger is gone.

    But then, actions in war are not “morally acceptable.” War is simply a situation in which we, as a society, have agreed that the enforcement of our standards is relaxed out of necessity. A lot of the trauma and psychological fallout to veterans occurs precisely because they’ve had to do something that society has spent the majority of their lives telling them is not acceptable. War, like torture, can never be moral or just. One can only argue for its necessity.

    Given that conduct in war towards the enemy, if repeated in other circumstances, becomes fractious and endangering to the cohesion of society, we draw arbitrary lines where such actions are and are not acceptable, where necessity ends and personal volition begins. A non-pacifist can, completely reasonably, decide that this line is where the immediate threat ends. I happen to agree with that line: An officer who, while his unit is under fire and taking casualties, shoots a prisoner in the leg and terrorizes him into giving up his allies’ position, is acting in a morally reprehensible but situationally necessary manner, and is thus, I would argue, able to proffer a reasonable necessity defense for his actions. The interrogator who has that same man in custody back in a secure position, safe from enemy fire, is under no such necessity dictated by situation.

    (And yes, while this does open up the argument for “ticking time bomb” situations, I think torture opponents, like myself, too casually dismiss that argument with the true but lazy argument that such situations are unlikely to occur. I believe an argument for necessity, made under a system of accountability, can always be made without resorting to a system of condoning torture — vindication can only be granted in a case-by-case fashion.)

    — James F. Elliott · Apr 27, 08:06 PM · #

25. I think the presumptions you started the argument with are backwards, Jim.

    Your premise is essentially that our behavior towards enemy soldiers is the ‘norm’, and you are questioning the underpinning of the argument behind making exceptions to that ‘norm’ for prisoners.

    Whereas I would say the exceptions we construct in our behavior towards other human beings apply only during wartime, and the argument should be why we would extend those exceptions to prisoners.

    The onus of the argument should always be on why we would use extreme measures of any kind against another person, not on why we shouldn’t use them.

    In other words, in day to day life you don’t go out of your way to inflict pain and/or death on other people (presumably). You do it only during duress and exceptional circumstances (wartime, self-defense, etc.) So why would you do it to a prisoner?

    I don’t think that’s a pacifist position. The pacifist position would be assuming no such exceptions or justifications exist at all, at all.

    — Erik Siegrist · Apr 27, 08:07 PM · #

26. Bloix:

    To be as precise as possible I don’t see the persuaive absract moral principle that distinguishes between killing fleeing soldiers and prisioners. Please see the last paragraph and last sentence of the post. My argument is not that it is OK to torture (or kill) prisoners, my argument is that we can only rely on tradition and intuition to guide such judgements.

    — Jim Manzi · Apr 27, 08:08 PM · #

27. I have the same question about corporal punishment. Why is it fine to throw some 18-year old hoodlum in jail for a few months but its unconscionable to cane him and let him go?

    —

    Also, I genuinely had the same question as Manzi, so thanks for the responses.

    — Adam Greenwood · Apr 27, 08:12 PM · #

28. Somehow I feel like with this one, the answer’s in the question…but that’s just me…

    — E.D. Kain · Apr 27, 08:15 PM · #

29. Yes, you’re being morally obtuse.
    A prisoner could be planning to escape and fight you, true. Theoretically, the granny on the corner could be planning to kill you. Clearly, there is no non-pragmatic justification for not horribly burning her to death.

    Two non-snarky points:
    There is indeed no magic bullet separating “not a danger” and “a danger”, in a way that could be applied to fill the categories of “non-combatant” (or, perhaps, “prisoner”) and “combatant”, using the moral idea “It is morally wrong to inflict torture on non-combatants or prisoners”. This does not mean that the categories cannot be applied at all; moral judgments are made, like all things, in the knowledge that they will not be perfect. This has nothing to do with pragmatism, and pragmatic arguments are just as dependent on being able to accept their own imperfection.

    Second:
    You’re assuming that all non-pacifists support “total war”. This is silly. It’s acceptable to make a moral distinction between methods that primarily serve to kill or incapacitate and others that primarily serve to cause severe amounts of pain. So assertions that rely on the use of the latter methods in war to justify their use on prisoners don’t apply to quite a lot of people.

    — strech · Apr 27, 08:26 PM · #

30. James F. Elliot:

    I mostly agree with what you say here.

    I generally tried to be precise about maximum power imbalances without violating a layman’s take on doctrine (e..g, bombing form 30,000 feet with air supremacy vs. shooting poeple in hospital beds).

    It would have nee (far) more precise for me to have said something like “requiring a different approach to warfighting than the US has typically employed” than “some form of pacifism”.

    I agree, syringly, with what I take to be the core of your point:

    Given that conduct in war towards the enemy, if repeated in other circumstances, becomes fractious and endangering to the cohesion of society, we draw arbitrary lines where such actions are and are not acceptable, where necessity ends and personal volition begins.

    The point sof the post were that: (1) rational moral principles are not that useful in drawing these lines, and (2) that leaves us with a reliance on tradition.

    — Jim Manzi · Apr 27, 08:29 PM · #

31. Mr. Manzi,

    re: “flaming petroleum jelly onto an unarmed an enemy combatant as he runs away from us”

    Are you under the impression that any action taken in a just war is thereby moral? Isn’t that a self-evidently false assertion? Flame-throwing an unarmed enemy in retreat, like firebombing Dresden, can be immoral even if the war against the Nazis is just. Why would we need a craven moral system that justifies the worst extremes of any war just to permit ourselves to fight?

    I am thoroughly confused. I thought we all accept as axiomatic that even the most just wars include, by the very definition of war, conduct that is immoral. So finding some other moral failure common to our war-fighting practices as way to puncture the moral sanction against torture strikes me as, well, confused.

    — ASR1234 · Apr 27, 08:30 PM · #

32. strech:

    Please see my comment in reply to James F. Elliot.

    — Jim Manzi · Apr 27, 08:32 PM · #

33. in prison, soldiers are no longer tools of the state. They’re human beings, disconnected from combat

    No. Once you take the salt, getting captured can’t change your loyalties. You still have duties, like the duty to escape and the duty not to divulge secret information. Torture is meant to overcome the latter duty.

    — Adam Greenwood · Apr 27, 08:37 PM · #

34. 1) At some level, it’s an ethical question, so we might not torture because we find it instinctively repugnant, regardless of prudential concerns.

    1.1) If you are asking why we find it more instintively repugnant than killing a relatively helpless combatant on the battlefield, we’re in deep philosophy, but I would start by asserting that most of us do and work from there. After that, I would start by suggesting that a bunch of it is line-drawing. Killing helpless combatants is also ethically disturbing to most modern westerners, but it’s harder to separate out the helpless from the dangerous after the fact, and trying to do so would put our combatants in greater danger.

    By contrast, we have an ethical intuition that once we capture someone, we have a certain degree of responsibility for their well being that we do not have when they are at liberty.

    1.2) Second, once we grant the fact that modern citizens of liberal democracies generally find torture repugnant, some of the why follows. Our leaders don’t want to be viewed as leading a torturing state, either by citizens of other states or by our own citizens, etc.

    2) Even once you grant the ethical argument to whatever degree you want, the prudential concerns are there too, so I don’t think you can demand that torture opponents provide either a moral or a prudential argument – they necessarily interact. What do we gain by torture? What do we lose? If we gain enough, even people repulsed by torture might hold their nose and do it, while if our gains are small and uncertain, even a small ethical objection may be enough to block the practice.

    — J Mann · Apr 27, 08:50 PM · #

35. Most moral rules fall apart under close inspection. Why should one feel bad about adultery or stealing if you’re not caught?

    We have laws (or used to, in the case of adultery) against these things that probably come down to a judgement that, without them, society would fly apart. i.e. all the societies that didn’t punish stealing are no longer around.

    So we just say, a priori, that torture is wrong. We have law upon law that states this.

    By the way, this kind of conversation about first principles is interesting, but in the context of current events should not be construed as any sort of mitigating factor in favor of those who ordered torture. There was a time and place to have this debate in the open – to debate whether we ought to torture, and openly withdraw from Geneva and the Convention on Torture – these people chose to break the law instead, and almost every conservative chose to look away.

    I wonder if conservatives are now open to talking about why selling and buying and using illegal drugs is wrong?

    — Steve C · Apr 27, 09:08 PM · #

36. Jim:

    (1) What do you mean by “syringly”? Typo? (sparingly?)

    (2) I think I still disagree, to the extent that the failure of a rational moral principle to apply precisely to the line that has been drawn does not make that line arbitrary, and it doesn’t make that principle useless in drawing said line.

    e.g. “Conduct that involves inflicting horrible pain and suffering is immoral except when as a necessary byproduct of actions taken to protect life and liberty” as a principle is not rendered useless because its application in war (“Deadly force or force that inflicts pain and suffering is only justifiable among active combatants”) is not precise. The lack of precision here is that a fleeing combatant is no more an immediate threat than a surrendered combatant (and both are theoretical future threat), but the latter is more protected against retaliation.

    However, removing yourself from the combatant pool by surrender is an assertion that you are no longer a threat to life or liberty until a theoretical and defined future point, while merely fleeing is asserting that you are continuing to remain one.

    So I think both the reasoning to reach the principle and the principle itself can still be useful; and similarly tradition will not perfectly align with the line, but it is not rendered useless on that count either.

    — strech · Apr 27, 09:12 PM · #

37. I’d second sabina’s question to Jim about why he thinks child rape is wrong. Why? And let’s pick it apart the same way torture is in Jim’s post – in certain societies, what we call a child is, for them, an adult, and what do you really mean by rape after all – how do you determine what that is?

    — Steve C · Apr 27, 09:17 PM · #

38. James F. Elliot: There is nothing “lazy” about dismissing the ticking-time-bomb scenario as “unlikely to happen.” Notably, none of the U.S. government’s recent forays into torture involved a ticking time bomb or anything remotely like it. In fact, virtually no terrorist attacks involve “time bombs” — the idea that they should form the key hypothetical for testing our intuitions about the morality of torture is, frankly, ridiculous, and plays much more on people’s familiarity with Hollywood movies than on anything resembling reality. Remember, the idea here is not only that terrorists use a time bomb, but that in the interval between their planting the bomb and its detonation, one of the terrorists is caught, AND that we know a bomb exists so that we should ask for details about it, AND that we can torture the terrorist to the point of revealing the details in time to defuse the bomb, AND that the terrorist is going to tell us the truth, rather than say whatever will make the torture stop in the short run. That is not how terrorist bombings work, it isn’t how torture works, it isn’t how defusing bombs works, and it isn’t how people respond to torture. It is really utterly ridiculous that this scenario is taken to be a serious issue at all.

    Now, that alone doesn’t settle the question of either the morality or the efficacy of torture. But let’s not pretend that torture in the real world involves anything like a short-term attempt to get some crucial, easily-verified information from an unwilling subject who can make the pain stop by answering our questions. As the recent revelations show — and this is totally, completely apparent to anyone who looks at torture as a historical practice — what government-sponsored torture involves is a long-term process aimed at breaking down a person’s mind.

    If we’re going to debate the efficacy of torture, let’s at least try to start with a clear idea of what practice is actually under debate. I think a look at both historical and recent evidence will show that the practice does not systematically improve our intelligence about the world; that it tends to corrupt the people and institutions who do it (and then must cover it up, or justify it — for virtually no one will ever be prepared to concede that they did torture someone, but that it was to no useful purpose); and that it harms our national security. That is a debate that we must have, since many people are viscerally attracted to the idea that a systematic policy of torture is a good idea. But let’s have it honestly.

    — Christopher M · Apr 27, 09:19 PM · #

39. Jim –

    Your question is this: “why is the belief that the torture of captured combatants is wrong compatible with anything other than some form of pacifism?”

    My answer would be:

    1) Violence is only justified in defense against an act of aggression
    2) Prisoners of war, properly disarmed and imprisoned, are unable to conduct acts of aggression
    3) Therefore violence against prisoners of war is not justified

    Most “ticking time bomb” scenarios contain an implicit reference to the morality of point #1. Have I answered the question in a way that conforms to rational moral principles? I’m not discounting the need for respecting tradition – I’m just trying to answer the original question.

    — Johnny A · Apr 27, 09:44 PM · #

40. Johnny A:

    I responded to your first comment, but the editor ate it. I think the issue with your syllogism is point 2: Prisoners of war, properly disarmed and imprisoned, are unable to conduct acts of aggression.

    POWs actually do normally have continuing duties, including the duty to attempt to escape and return to their army. Somebody running away from me on a battelfield poses no immediate threat, but does pose a potential future threat. Just as the POW does, merely with lower odds.

    Further, one could easily argue that by using respurces for guards, food, etc. that could otherwise be deployed in battle, they are a threat. And so on. Just so its clear, I’m not adovcating thes epositions, I am trying to show how such reasoning from principles inevitably falls apart, or better, quickly gets down to axiomatic beliefs.

    — Jim Manzi · Apr 27, 09:52 PM · #

41. http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2009/04/27/torture-and-war/

    — Barry · Apr 27, 10:05 PM · #

42. I understand that this is a broader discussion utilizing the example of ordinary soldiers to make a point…but let’s not lose sight of the fact of the current situation raising the broader question: the detainees are unquestionably not honorable lawful combatants. They are, BY DEFINITION, war criminals…the equivalent, in fact, of pirates and spies and as such are subject to SUMMARY EXECUTION under the laws of war. So the question is not can we inflict different degrees of violence on them in the course of battle, some examples of which as given I would say do rise to the level of war crimes, but rather….HAVING captured them, and having in good faith determined that they are, in fact, war criminals, why is it that we can summarily execute them —- humanely, of course —- but cannot play “Stairway to Heaven” at them at 30 decibels? The anti-“torture” side inevitably comes down to treating war criminal/terrorists as honorable POW’s subject only to name rank and serial number questions and to conflating unpleasant treatment of them —- illegal if they are legitimate POW’s —- as exactly the same as pulling out their fingernails.

    — RFC · Apr 27, 10:30 PM · #

43. RFC: First, it is absurd to suggest that all “detainees” are automatically “war criminals.” Second, it is absurd to act as if playing loud music were emblematic of the torture practices currently under debate. If you want to defend waterboarding someone hundreds of times in a single month, slamming people’s heads into walls, forcing people to stand for days at a time, subjecting people to cold water for long periods of time, sexual humiliation, mock execution, long-term sensory deprivation, binding and tying prisoners’ arms behind their backs so that, when their strength gives out, they fall forward and cannot breathe, rough slaps to the face, rough slaps to the abdomen, and placing people in small boxes with insects, then please do so. Talking about “Stairway to Heaven” is a waste of everyone’s time and strongly suggests that you are not arguing in good faith.

    — Christopher M · Apr 27, 10:47 PM · #

44. I don’t see anything wrong with deriving moral rules from prudential considerations….in the first instance…indeed, isn’t that exactly what the Golden Rule and the Categorical Imperative are?…meta-rules that serve to protect oneself under the pain that failing to comply will lead to the Hobbesian nightmare.

    In that light, the rules of war make sense….the POINT of —- just —- war is not to kill as many of the enemy as possible but to get him to surrender or comply with your just political demands by getting to see that his military situation is hopeless. You do NOT want him to fight to the death…which is exactly what he’ll do if thinks that he’ll be tortured if he surrenders or if the is “total war” and “unconditional surrender”.

    There is an element of MAD here —- we don’t want our guys to be tortured and agree that we won’t torture theirs….it’s prudential at base but leads to “intuited” moral rules that make rational sense from self interest viewpoint.

    The same reasoning applies to unlawful combatants…we want to provide incentive AGAINST use of such and so they are not covered by the SAME moral rules….

    — RFC · Apr 27, 10:52 PM · #

45. Mr Manzi: Thanks for the response. Rather than

    “The point sof the post were that: (1) rational moral principles are not that useful in drawing these lines, and (2) that leaves us with a reliance on tradition.”

    I actually preferred your original conception of (2): both tradition AND intuition. After all, tradition is just the codification of accepted moral intuitions for a certain group. They’re just as subjective and preferential as any other standard, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

    I do disagree with (1): I would say that the application of reason is a luxury given to those with the time and distance from the fray — and that it is precisely that luxury that obligates us to use our reason and apply it to such situations, in order to better define and create rules around those acts that do offend our moral sensibilities and intuitions. You can view it as the moral version of a karate kata — instead of muscle memory, like all good traditional and ethical structures, we’re creating a moral memory. We use reason to modify the schema by which we evaluate our stimuli and responses. This need be no different.

    Christopher M: See, I think what you did there was the opposite of the “lazy” dismissal. It was, “Look at all these factors that have to come in to play! What are the odds of that? Slim to none!” For whence you can quite rightly point out that predicating a policy of irrevocable harm to others upon such a slim foundation is totally monstrous.

    — James F. Elliott · Apr 27, 10:55 PM · #

46. Christopher M;

    You’re wrong….I am willing to concede that there could be cases of mistaken identity or something similar…but there is no question that MOST of the detainees, and certainly those captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, are war criminals….BY DEFINITION. They are not wearing uniforms, they are not bearing arms openly, they do not have a legitimate chain of command, they target civilians and violate the laws and customs of war or do all of these. Any ONE factor listed makes them, ipso facto, war criminals, subject to summary execution. Period. End of discussion.
    Or are you claiming that they are NOT war criminals and are lawful combatants with the same rights as POW’s?…absurd.

    Second, waterboarding was done to three of the very worst of a bad lot…and then discontinued as a practice. Am I bothered by the other mistreatment as described of these war criminal/terrorists…who are subject to and deserving of summary execution?…not hardly…

    Those slobbering over the terrorist/war criminals are LITERALLY arguing that playing the Barney the Dinosaur song repeatedly is ITSELF torture!…even if that’s ALL that was done to these vipers to break them, you object!!…the implication is clear…you want to give terrorist/war criminals EXACTLY the same rights and privileges against ANY attempts at interrogation no matter what the circumstances, value of information or anything else as legitimate POW’s. You want to give them a sporting chance evidently…

    So who’s arguing in bad faith?

    — RFC · Apr 27, 11:10 PM · #

47. If we allow torture, we dishonor all those Americans who lie in Arlington, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Korea etc. that died fighting against governments who also liked to torture. I grew up without a Father because he died from wounds he received fighting the “SS” in the Hertkin Forest in Belgium in WW2. Americans are not a bunch of Pussies. We don’t need cowards like Cheney & Bush claiming they are protecting us by taking away our countrie’s HonoR

    — Jay Garbutt · Apr 27, 11:15 PM · #

48. Jim,

    First of all a general proposition: we feel easier about our soldiers killing other soldiers than killing civilians. I feel that this is almost certainly true, and that the reasons for this are obvious (soldiers are less vulnerable, are generally armed, are a military threat, have some kind of effective agency, etc), so I won’t spend any more time trying to establish this fact.

    After a soldier has surrendered or been captured, his characteristics are those of a civilian (that is, a civilian detainee). He is no longer a direct threat. He is no longer carrying a weapon. He is no longer furthering a military purpose. The future threat that you point to is merely a hypothetical future threat. It is assumed. Any cost is marginal and surely equivalent to a civilian detainee. So, a reductio ad absurdum of your argument (uh, not your argument, but the argument that you are making) would be that since it is acceptable to kill soldiers as they flee, and since it is acceptable to kill prisoners, it is also acceptable to kill civilians – because you can no longer make a meaningful distinction between the three groups. In fact, there is no reason for any kind of restraint.

    All words are in some sense metaphors, generalisations, approximate descriptions of dynamic relationships, gray areas… A soldier is also a civilian, after he takes off his uniform and returns to his home. A young male civilian or a civilian prisoner is a civilian who might be a soldier in the near future. War is inherently a violent event. To make it nonviolent is to stop it from happening. But in order to have a grammar of war, we need a lexicon. And we certainly need grammar, even if we are only interested at winning at all costs.

    Yet we are not only interested in winning at all costs. “From the social condition both of States in themselves and in their relations to each other… War arises, and by it War is… controlled and modified.” It is good that it is modified. Who wants to fight wars where all sides compete across the dimension of absolute brutality?

    — vimothy · Apr 27, 11:17 PM · #

49. ” Or are you claiming that they are NOT war criminals and are lawful combatants with the same rights as POW’s?…absurd.”

    This is actually a misreading of the GC (and a popular straw man). Lawful combatants (wearing uniforms, insignia, carrying weapons openly, etc) are afforded full POW status, but everyone else without exception (terrorists, saboteurs, criminals, innocent civilians – whatever) receives the protection of Common Article 3.

    — vimothy · Apr 27, 11:25 PM · #

50. I had this discussion already.
    Torturers are Machiavellian pragmatists.

    “How one lives and how one ought to live are so far apart that he who spurns what is actually done for what ought to be done will achieve ruin rather than his own preservation.”

    Non-torturers are Dostoyevskian idealists.

    “Neither man or nation can exist without a sublime idea.”

    You can be Ivan, you can be Alyosha.
    It might even be biologically deterministic, Dr. Manzi.
    ;)

    — matoko_chan · Apr 27, 11:57 PM · #

51. vimothy:

    You are overstating the matter of common article 3….and missing my main point…

    Common Article 3 refers to conflicts “not of an international character”, i.e., civil war…irrespective of the Hamdi decision which was a travesty…I reject it…

    My point is that they are war criminals…BY DEFINITION…Period. article 3 does NOT contradict that judgment…at MOST…it says that notwithstanding that fact, they cannot be tortured or mistreated….but they CAN be summarily executed for war crimes…they just cannot be executed by drawing and quartering…

    so you are reduced to arguing either that they canNOT be executed for war crimes, or, indeed, are not even guilty or war crimes, an absurdity on its face…or that, legalities aside, while we MAY execute them we can not even play “Stairway to Heaven” at 30 decibels at them…

    LOL!…which is it?

    If you take the position that article three or morality requires that these terrorist/war criminals cannot be subject to harsh interrogation, indeed, must be treated in conformity with the Army Field Manual…then you are explicitly arging that they have essentially ALL the protections of name, rank and serial number legitimate lawful combatant POWs. In that case….there is no distinction at all between legal POWs and these war criminal terrorists….so why should they obey the laws of war under your regime?

    BTW, IIRC there is an enabling protocol to article 3 that we did NOT ratify…

    — RFC · Apr 28, 12:01 AM · #

52. Common Article 3 is called “the convention in miniature”. It describes the baseline rights given to all under the GC. The rest of the GC convention deals with war between states. Common Article 3 is binding even for wars within states. What you are proposing is two categories, one of them new: POW and potential torture victim. I’ve got to say, I can’t find any mention of this over at the ICRC’s website. And look — an obscure Francophile court known as SCOTUS seems to disagree with you…

    The rights of a legal combatant are distinct from the rights of an ordinary prisoner. Nobody is arguing that terrorists should have POW status. It is a straw man.

    If you are not happy with the GC, there are also a raft of other laws outlawing torture, for instance, UNCAT, the War Crimes Act, federal law, etc.

    — vimothy · Apr 28, 12:32 AM · #

53. matoko_chan: Your distinction between Machiavellians and Dostoyevskyites might make sense if there were good evidence that torture systematically worked to the benefit of our national security. It is useful for the pro-torture crowd to frame the argument as if they were merely being pragmatic, while those opposed are unrealistic idealists. But I have yet to see any such evidence for torture’s pragmatic value; indeed the evidence seems quite to the contrary.

    — Christopher M · Apr 28, 12:35 AM · #

54. vimothy:

    you didn’t address my point…are they war criminals by definition or not? Are they, if war criminals subject to summary execution?

    “The rights of a legal combatant are distinct from the rights of an ordinary prisoner. Nobody is arguing that terrorists should have POW status. It is a straw man.”

    In what way are they distinct under your regime?…BTW they are NOT “ordinary prisoners”, i.e., common criminals…they are by definition WAR CRIMINALS..terrorists..brigands..pirates…if they can not be subject to repeated playing of Barry Manilow to “break” them…if, indeed, they cannot be subjected to any attempt at “breaking” them by any means whatever….if they are to be treated as honorable soldiers in accordance with the Army Field Manual…then there is in fact NO distinction between a lawful combatant and an al-Quaeda terrorist/war criminal…so you don’t have “argue” it….it’s a direct implication of your position…war criminals treated for all practical purposes as honorable POWS.

    so…again…are you saying they are NOT war criminals?….are you saying they are NOT subject to summary execution?…

    or are you saying that they are war criminals and we can execute them….but we can’t put a caterpiller in their cells if they’re afraid of bugs….WTF?

    Please explain how these terrorist war criminals would be treated ANY differently IN FACT than “full” lawful combatant POWs under your regime…..

    — RFC · Apr 28, 12:55 AM · #

55. The distinction between an AQ operative and a legal combatant is that of an ordinary detainee and a POW.

    But I fear you misunderstand me. It is not my regime. It is the law.

    — vimothy · Apr 28, 01:07 AM · #

56. “ But I have yet to see any such evidence for torture’s pragmatic value; indeed the evidence seems quite to the contrary.

    — Christopher M · Apr 27, 08:35 PM · #”

    The wrongness of torture shouldn’t depend on payoff.
    If it is wrong, it doesn’t matter if it works or not.
    Their argument is that they can’t ever be sure.
    Even if it didn’t work THIS time, they are planning for that jackbauer rainyday in the future.
    Pragmatic.

    — matoko_chan · Apr 28, 01:14 AM · #

57. My definition of torture is any treatment for which the prisoner would rather die than continue to be treated so. It is, therefore, worse than killing a prisoner, and worse than most acts of war, which tend to be performed on people who wish to survive.

    Plus, if we don’t intend to live in an authoritarian state for the entirety of the eternal Long War, we should be comparing torture to other penalties a state assigns to criminals, not to the things we do to enemy warriors, because that’s what the terrorists are—criminals, not warriors.

    If the original post were renamed “why is killing prisoners wrong?” then I would largely agree that the issue is fuzzy, but strech’s point (2) makes a lot of sense, enough sense that citing this as an example where “such reasoning from principles inevitably falls apart, or better, quickly gets down to axiomatic beliefs” is wrong.

    But on the original question, there are more differences between torture and other acts of violence.

    Most acts of destruction and injury in conflict are intended to disable the target, to prevent it from doing something. Once someone is in your custody, the only likely reason to torture is to force him to do something—give up intel, confessions, etc.

    That said, sure, the state has lots of ways of inducing people to do things—taxes, fines, imprisonment, execution. But these are all of the “do this or else!” variety. Lots of people, out of stubbornness or principle, accept “or else”. Torture seeks to remove “or else” as an option—it aims to be utterly impossible to resist, to reduce the victim to an automaton under the control of the torturer.

    Even under simple preference utilitarianism, this is way worse than simply killing someone. Killing someone erases their preferences. Torturing them negates their preferences, like we cut them off at some sort of cartesian pineal gland, dividing their body from their will.

    There are pragmatic and traditional reasons galore to oppose torture. There are also sufficient reasons based on a very parsimonious moral code—one that even seems designed to be sympathetic to “ticking bomb” or “trolley switch” problems in general.

    I know you aren’t cheering for torture and just want to make the case against moral reason divorced from pragmatics/tradition. But this is a terrible example—moral reasoning, pragmatics, and tradition all line up on the same side to speak with one voice in a way that usually never happens.

    — Consumatopia · Apr 28, 01:25 AM · #

58. Christopher M:

    Wholly disingenuous yet commonly made assertions from the slobberers over terrorist/war criminals….

    Are we to understand that you are OK with “torture” IF it could be shown to produce pragmatically useful results?…LOL!!…I don’t think so!!…you’re against it even IF it’s efficacious…

    ….oh, sure, sure, “you” haven’t “seen” “any” “evidence”…blah, blah…but in fact neither you nor any of the other terrorist sympathizers can possibly know..you’re reduced to arguing that there can NEVER be a situation where we’d want to or could get ANY useful information by playing Brittany Spears over and over at terrorist/war criminals…there’ll never be a black swan in other words…and you’re willing to RISK another 9/11 on that claim, too…

    if you back away from that position…then you’re left with your prudential judgment and to when and what to do in any particular exigent circumstances….as opposed to Bush’s…or Obama’s…a judgment call, that’s all…NOT a criminal act in any way…

    that’s why your side HAS to be so absolute about the claim that no value can ever be had by harsh interrogation…an obviously extreme view…because you don’t WANT to take the quasi-pacifist but at least honorable position that EVEN IF there is value and risk….we shouldn’t try to “break” a terrorist/war criminal to get information..not even with only loud music…

    good luck with that….I’ll be waiting for His Oneness to make that argument, too…waiting…waiting….

    — RFC · Apr 28, 01:27 AM · #

59. “But I fear you misunderstand me. It is not my regime. It is the law.”

    so say you…do you know what Dickens wrote?…“If the law presumes that, then the law is an ass.”

    I’m CHALLENGING the validity of the law…SHOULD that be the law?
    And you consistently avoid the issue…

    “The distinction between an AQ operative and a legal combatant is that of an ordinary detainee and a POW.”

    laughable…OK…so what’s THAT distinction…IN FACT….not in circular question-beggiing definitions….how, SPECIFICALLY, does treatment of an AQ “operative” —- an “ordinary detainee” —- differ from that of a POW?

    You haven’t answered my questions or points….ARE the “AQ operatives” war criminals? ARE they subject to summary execution as such? Article 3 IN NO WAY denies that…as I said…all it does is say you can’t draw and quarter them when you execute them…

    — RFC · Apr 28, 01:40 AM · #

60. Jim –

    Of course in these sorts of arguments, there is always a lot of litigation over definitions. And you are absolutely right about axiomatic beliefs. No pacifist would be convinced by this argument because they reject the notion that violence can ever be an appropriate response. Similarly, someone who believed that violence is always justified when done by ‘the right sort of people’ or ‘those in power’ would similarly be unconvinced. I certainly don’t think that you approve of torture – I just think that rational moral arguments should be the first resort in any response, rather than an appeal to tradition.

    My responses to your objections to 2) is that if they are easily able to escape then they are not properly imprisoned and that if they are not easily able to escape then the act of escape constitutes an act of aggression against which violence is justified. Additionally the act of escape results in a change of status from prisoner to combatant behind enemy lines.

    I think that any objection based on limited resources would have to either be ultimately framed as a rejection of 1) or by defining away an act of aggression as ‘anything our enemies do that inconvenience us in any way’ which has its own problems and opens the door for the question of defining a proportionate response to an act of aggression by an enemy.

    Anyway, all of this is to say that I believe that the rational moral principles provided by the Just War theory constitute a time-tested fortress that should not be lightly abandoned. Principles guarded by long tradition are well protected, but principles guarded by both tradition and reason are doubly protected.

    — Johnny A · Apr 28, 01:52 AM · #

61. Are we to understand that you are OK with “torture” IF it could be shown to produce pragmatically useful results?…LOL!!…I don’t think so!!…you’re against it even IF it’s efficacious…

    Maybe so, but that’s far more reasonable than being for it even if it’s not, which seems to be your position.

    Of course, it doesn’t have merely to produce effective results occasional, it has to outweigh the pragamatic costs. Those costs include:

    The cost of chasing down false leads. Note that if some reports are correct that information obtained by torture was used to connect Saddam and Al Qaeda, than we’ve spent thousands of lives and trillions of dollars chasing down false leads, more than the cost of 9/11.

    The cost of bad press. Being known as a torturer turns people against you. Given that our wars against terror tend to be “counter-insurgency” wars in which hearts and minds matter, then torture seems like a sure path to mission failure.

    The danger of institutionalized torture. Torture is historically used to extract false confessions, brutalize populations, silence opposition, and control information. These are tools I don’t particularly like to trust my government with. But how about you? How much do you love Big Government? Apparently a lot more than I do.

    Degradation of personnel. The kinds of people would be interested in a job as an interrogator if torture was the key component of said job are unlikely to be the most ethical, conscientious, or intelligent of all applicants. I should say, Mr. RFC, that if you really want to argue for torture, then maybe you should try to get a hold on your temper or whatever, because the last thing in the world I want is to trust crazos like you with interrogation. The military, intelligence and law enforcement personnel that have come forward to oppose these policies seem more responsible than you, while those who have come out in defense seem ready to shout down all opposition, Noun-Verb-9/11 style.

    So, that’s a lot of costs weighing down the scale on one side. Each of which has just as much “black swan” potential as the ticking nuke. Then there’s the moral case I made above as well. So I have about five independent, sufficient arguments against torture. I might be wrong once. I don’t think I’m wrong five times.

    — Consumatopia · Apr 28, 02:16 AM · #

62. So apparently it’s OK to inflict (the most extreme imaginable) violence when the guy is totally helpless in combat, but suddenly upon his saying the words “I surrender”, any serious violence beyond confinement becomes wrong.

    Whether violence towards him is prohibited turns not, I think, on whether he’s helpless in the sense of being no threat, but whether he’s helpless in the sense of being in your power. (I think vimothy is getting at this upthread.) Torturing someone, which involves hurting someone while they’re in your power necessarily involves a certain sort of humiliation of them that is absent when you’re hurting someone who is not under your close control, even if they’re no significant threat. This form of humiliation is always present even where the torture procedure is made deliberately clinical.

    The traditional conception of human dignity is that such humiliation is always evil and prohibited, even when inflicted on wrongdoers, while mere violence, without that sort of humiliation, as applied to the losing side in a battle, is not. There is nothing magical or irrational about this conception. For example, rape too is always evil and prohibited at least partly because it is intrinsically humiliating in this way. The idea that torturing prisoners for information is evil and should be prohibited seems to me no more a merely conventional taboo than the idea that it would be evil to rape captured female terrorists in order to coerce them into giving up supposedly vital information. Both are, so to speak, crimes against human dignity as such, even when inflicted on wrongdoers. Wrongdoers can justly be deprived of many of their rights, but the right to be treated in such a way as to respect their intrinsic dignity as human beings is inalienable. After decades of culture-war, people often forget this.

    — Amit · Apr 28, 02:18 AM · #

63. Or more precisely, why is the belief that the torture of captured combatants is wrong compatible with anything other than some form of pacifism? I mean this an actual question, not as a passive-aggressive assertion.

    ——————

    You’ve betrayed your moral bankruptcy, your lack of historical literacy, and your dullness.

    Let’s start with the latter. “Passive aggressive” has a specific meaning: to display aggression through non-compliance. You misused the term because you are ignorant of its actual meaning. Strike one.

    Moving on, you ask why opposition to torture is inconsistent with martial values. One answer is to look at how the U.S. Marine Corps treated Japanese P.O.W.s during the second world war. The USMC treated them humanely for two reasons: It was required by the Geneva Conventions, and it produced useful battlefield intelligence. Apparently, you didn’t feel any need to study the issue before you asked your question, or maybe you are one of those wingnuts who thinks that history began the day that Reagan was inaugurated in 1981. Strike two.

    Finally, there is morality. The right wing is forever prattling about morality, usually with respect to men who have sex with each other or white girls who get themselves knocked up. But ask them about truly difficult moral questions, such as what to do with a captured and harmless combatant, and they regard morality is an expedient. Strike three.

    Want to know why the American public has finally awakened to you and your games? Strike one, strike two, strike three. Right down the middle, no curve balls. You’re out!

    — Magic Dog · Apr 28, 02:34 AM · #

64. RFC: I’ve always enjoyed this blog’s civil comments section, in which people at least try to engage each other in good faith. I’m not going to get into a flame war with you. You’re clearly upset at people you consider “terrorist sympathizers” and I’m sure it feels good to vent that, but please do consider calming down and having a rational discussion.

    — Christopher M · Apr 28, 02:44 AM · #

65. Deontological theories of morality that rely upon respect for autonomy of the will as the necessary cornerstone of moral decisionmaking, question mark?

    — Kasten · Apr 28, 02:55 AM · #

66. Jim Manzi asks whether torturing a combatant is so bad, given that you might just kill him in battle instead, and then goes on from there.

    This kind of misleading rhetorical question was more fun to read in the original Russian in Pravda on my subway commute in Moscow back in 1977. But amazingly, it has now become SOP for American right wingnuts, a regular technique on NRO’s The Corner and Fox News.

    Here’s what we now know was really going on.

    Some of the 800 or so “worst of the the worst enemy combatants” we shipped to Gitmo in 2002-2003 are no doubt real villains, nabbed flagrante delicto on the battlefield or in the plotting room. It turns out that description applies to relatively few of the Gitmo inmates (or the thousands? of others we have held in Abu Ghraib and other places). Everybody talks about these bad guys, esp. the ones who were waterboarded.

    I hate them, too. I can think of no more fit punishment for them than a life term in the general population of Riker’s. “Life” in this case would be measured in weeks or months, a much quicker execution than years of appeals on death row.

    I’m thinking about the others. The ones on whom we ain’t got nothing, but abused anyway.

    The majority—you know, the over 400 from Gitmo we have already released plus some more we say we will release soon—-were miscellaneous unfortunate SUSPECTS sold to us by various Afghan and Pakistani groupings, who somehow endeared themselves to our neocons—-our T E Lawrences who backed Ahmed Chalabi (who was so grateful to the USA that he sold us out to the Iranians).

    A distinguishing feature of these SUSPECTS seems to be that they were foreigners passing thru. Like those Uighurs fleeing China, who were trying to get to Turkey by following (more or less) the Silk Road. No wonder they got sold.

    So we threw these SUSPECTS in diapers, goggles and earmuffs, chained them to the floor of unheated military planes, and flew them to Gitmo, where we chained them naked to the floor in their own filth, froze them, hung them from the ceiling, and interrogated them for up to 11 days at a time without sleep (a method favored by the KGB, and refined by the CIA with the support of Yoo and Bybee, who said it was fine as long as no organs failed and there were no lasting marks).

    And we spiced things up from time to time, it seems—-we recently learned that in the case of one British subject, now released and back home, one of our experts starting nicking his genitals with a knife, and threatened go further. I guess we thought this guy knew a helluva lot. But we were wrong, it turns out. And now he has a story to tell.

    And after 5+ years of incarceration and torture (if you don’t understand why what Bybee and Yoo outlined is torture, please see the UN Convention on Torture signed by Ronald Reagan, the proceedings of the Nuremberg trials, the book Gulag Archipelago, and the movie “the Battle of Algiers”), we have decided that 400+ of these SUSPECTS are not guilty of the crimes we tortured them to tell us about, and so we have sent them home.

    There are some problems, of course, if their home countries assume they are in fact terrorists (after all, that is what we told the world). That’s why the Uighurs are still in Gitmo. At least have had a room upgrade and are no longer chained to the floor.

    The US has so far managed to convict three detainess—-a seriously weird young American, who after being chained naked in a container for some days, was put on trial, and sentenced to long term in prison; an Australian sheep shearer, who was found guilty of being a clueless idiot, and served a year or so in Australia, and Hamdan, who was found guilty of being bin Laden’s driver and has a short sentence. (By way of comparison, Hitler’s driver, Kempka, was not considered a war criminal.)

    It further appears that the cases against against the more notorious Al Qaeda villains like KSM are now seriously compromised because they were tortured so much (KSM was waterboarded 183 times in a month) that they confessed to both real and imaginary crimes in profusion. We might even have to let these guys go.

    How do we know these things? Well, it’s all the fault of those well known left wing, anti American military lawyers—all of them career Marine, Army, Navy, and Air Force officers—-who have been speaking out. Including, incredibly, a prosecutor (Davis) who resigned because the cases stank so much, and then VOLUNTEERED to testify for the defense.

    You know, we could have avoided this mess by simply sticking to the values, traditions, and laws that we are famous for, practices which our own military considers essential since the command of George Washington in the Revolution (which predates the Constitution by more than a decade). It’s all pretty simple:

    1. In a war situation, people who surrender or are captured get to be POWs. The captors get to hold them until the end of hostilities, and get to ask name, rank, date of birth, and serial number. The Red Cross gets to visit, and the captors really need to act on the Red Cross reports. No torture, no “enhanced interrogations.” If you find that detainees were not in fact fighting against you, they go home as soon as you figure this out.

    2. If you arest people as criminals—-and this includes war criminals—-the rules change. You get to interrogate them, forcefully even, but not torture them. But you must charge them with a concrete crime within a reasonable period, and then give them a fair trial. (note that “fair” does not mean “perfect”). And if you cannot charge them, you have to let them go.

    These are now the accepted rules of conduct for the civilized world. Japanese and German militarists—and their collaborators in captive countries like France and Norway—- who water boarded, suspended, battered,and otherwise tortured prisoners—- were tried and executed.

    And there is no statute of limitations. More than 50 yrs after the fact, the US is sending alleged Nazi prison camp guard Demjanjuk back to Germany for trial.

    The recent administration did not follow these precedents, but rather chose the methods previously used by the Nazis, the KGB, the Khmer Rouge, and the Red Chinese. Which is a lot nastier than the euphemism “the Dark Side.” These techniques didn’t work out so well for those regimes, and they won’t work out so well for us, either.

    It does look to me like, one way or another, all the nasty details are going to leak out, drip drip drip. Kinda like Watergate.

    The GOP and its apologists might want to think real hard about which side of history they want to be on.

    As it is, the GOP is headed toward extinction now that it is more or less synonymous with the Old Confederacy plus the Socialist State of Alaska (where every resident gets a handout from oil taxes from the rest of us). A poll out today showed that only 21% of Americans are willing to say they are Republicans.

    — vh · Apr 28, 03:21 AM · #

67. <i>Maybe I’m morally obtuse about this</i>

    Yes, you are. A combatant is a threat; if he is running away, he’ll be a threat when he turns around and fights again. A prisoner is not a threat, and abusing him is morally repugnant.

    — Matt Steinglass · Apr 28, 03:27 AM · #

68. “Many (not all) reasonable people can imagine plausible situations in which they would torture enemy combatants.”

    What the average American can imagine doing is a piss-poor test of what should be legal, particularly given the difficulty some people have of separating the TV and film world from objective reality. (“Natural Born Killers” copycats, to take one extreme example. Arguments over whether Chuck Norris or Bruce Lee was the better fighter, for another.)

    Just 200 years ago owning slaves, or having complete legal dominion over one’s wife, or sending one’s 8-yr-old child to work 12 hr shifts, was within the realm of thought for a “reasonable person”. The standards of morality have changed since then, thanks in large part to technology and increased material affluence. And that’s to say nothing of the standards of the pagan world, noting for example the infanticide of Icelandic newborns, and the human sacrifices at Uppsala before the conversion by Christian missionaries.

    So. Certainly one can quibble over what the reasonable person (which needs a much more precise definition, in my mind) deems as “objectively wrong”, especially given the human tendency towards hypocrisy. What is not in dispute is that there are now centuries of legal and cultural norms which outlaw the torture of prisoners in civilized countries — the ones with well-established traditions of protected human rights. And there are very good reasons for those precedents.

    How can one argue that the Bataan Death March, or the Korean women used as prostitutes by the Japanese army, were objectively evil actions, but that the mental disintegration of detainees thanks to our modern non-violent torture techniques is morally defensible??

    Cheney and Co. apparently believed that as long as the detainees weren’t missing body parts they could reasonably deny that the approved interrogation techniques were torturous. They were wrong.

    — Mason · Apr 28, 03:54 AM · #

69. I have a couple questions about this big, slow search for the correct answer on torture on the right:

    1) Why should anyone care? Seriously, are we going to entertain Jim Manzi and friends’ path to rediscovering Kant and ask him to consider hypotheticals like child rape to get him back into some semblance of modern western morality? How long is this all going to take? Why should anyone have patience with these people? They are, in aggregate, the losers of our time: morally, in effectiveness, politically. I note that Republican party ID is at 21% – fast becoming ignorable. Shouldn’t we just judge them, as a group, to be morally depraved and move forward?

    2) Are we being played for fools by engaging them? These people have the Bible, they have Burke (Jim, does Geneva qualify as tradition? Shouldn’t you be starting there and wondering what compelled a couple of generations’ worth of policymakers to ban torture a few times over?). It’s awfully un-conservative to be assuming torture policy ought to be questioned or uprooted in the first place, no?

    — Steve C · Apr 28, 04:36 AM · #

70. The number of posts has gotten rather high, I read all of Jim Manzi’s posts and some of the posts of his interlocutors, but I may have missed something. My apologies if I’m rehashing…

    Anyway, it seems as if motivations of the actors (warriors and/or torturers) and practical considerations are playing a relatively small role in this discussion.

    In the “war” scenarios that lead to extreme pain and suffering (napalm aerial bombing, etc), the result may be pain and suffering similar to torture, but the intention was tactical and/or strategic in nature in order to win the military victory. It is very easy to argue that, harsh though those practices may be, that they are directed with a mind toward securing a victory in war.

    However, it is very difficult to argue that:

    killing/maiming in battle;
    captivity alone;
    captivity + torture;
    captivity + humane execution;

    have any differential outcome on the tactical situation on the fields of war in such a way as to make captivity + torture more desirable. You need not be a pacifist to make the judgment that torturing is unlikely to improve the chances of victory. And this is where practical considerations come in. One might argue that unique intelligence could be gleaned from torture that couldn’t otherwise be obtained through non-torture interrogation techniques. However, this perspective has very little support. And indeed, during WWII, the Allies’ official stance on torture was unequivocal (though inevitably in the chaotic swirl of war, it was violated at times). It is hardly arguable that those who chose not to torture in WWII were pacifists. Indeed, many of the arguments behind prevention of torture were more tactical than moral. If the enemy can be expected to be well-treated, they might surrender rather than dying in battle and might give up intelligence more readily in captivity, etc. This is not to mention that much intelligence gleaned from torture is of poor quality, as a properly administered session of torture will open the floodgates of confession, of both real and imaginary intelligence. Anything to stop the torment.

    In any event, it seems like a decision not to torture is very defensible from a non-pacifist’s point of view on purely pragmatic grounds: torture is no better than other types of interrogation (for gathering intelligence) or humane execution (for decreasing the burden of having to house and feed POWs). Because of this, torture of someone already safely in custody cannot be motivated by practical considerations of tactics or strategy.

    OTOH, applying cruel or extremely lethal methods of warfare in times when the enemy is at a disadvantage may weaken the enemy materially, break the enemy’s spirit, or prevent the necessity of having to invest resources in caring for POWs. In this case, there are clear tactical and/or strategic reasons for engaging in this sort of behavior.

    I’m not advocating anything above, just engaging in a probing of your logic. It doesn’t seem like a major stretch to use predicted strategic benefits to justify war and simultaneously to reject torture. Notably, these strategic benefits need not necessarily accrue at every given opportunity for a person to decide that torture is not wise. It need only be plausible in general.

    On the face of it, from purely pragmatic grounds, it doesn’t seem like your logic works very well.

    — J.J.E. · Apr 28, 04:53 AM · #

71. One more comment — ALL the reasons for banning the use of torture on prisoners are ultimately pragmatic. Banning torture is no more “idealistic” than banning rape, another form of violent humiliation.

    Torture is very good at inducing false confessions, and very bad at producing reliable intelligence; thus a pragmatically unworthy, if emotionally tempting, interrogation method.

    [Of course, there are “black swan” scenarios where torture is the only possible way to prevent an imminent catastrophe; but in the case of such a fantastical event the operative will simply have to risk breaking the law and hope that he or she will face a reduced sentence, or be exonerated completely, at the trial. Laws do not magically bind one’s hands!]

    The inductive pragmatic reason (which some mistakenly term “idealism”) is that the use of torture on prisoners is corrosive to the rule of law. Governments that torture their external enemies eventually torture their internal enemies.

    Just imagine the nightmare scenario of the incumbent government having its political enemies detained and tortured “for the security of the nation”. Surely all REASONABLE Americans can agree that would be calamitous.

    There are no “Shining City on a Hill”, “sometimes things in life should be mysterious” sentiments behind this part of U.S. law.

    — Mason · Apr 28, 05:01 AM · #

72. This is a separate thought from my previous post, so I’m making an independent post.

    It seems like a lot of assumed common ground when one talks with somebody from ones own culture (as you and I share) is lacking. I never imagined that I’d seriously go through a point-by-point dissection of why torture is wrong with another well-adjusted American. I think this conversation that the American Right is having right now would be completely implausible in the 40s-50s certainly, and definitely would have been implausible during the Cold War when we were watching the horrors of the Communists come to light. After all, we Americans at least claimed to hold ourselves to a standard higher than those of Pol Pot and Stalin and Mao with regard to how we treated prisoners (it goes without saying that we held ourselves to higher standards on most everything else, too). And before 9/11, there is a broad range of people of all political affiliations who unequivocally denounced torture, including some of the very same techniques we now euphemistically call “enhanced interrogation techniques”, notably water boarding. Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich were among some of the people who denounced torture before 9/11.

    Is it 9/11 that “changed everything”? If so, I wonder why? How can we stoically endure nearly half a million deaths and face the potential of a nuclear Nazi Germany during WWII, or stare down the Soviets with a willing vassal in Cuba during the Cold War and refuse torture and then turn right around and relinquish our resolve on this issue following 9/11? Sure, 9/11 was terrible, but we as a nation have faced much much worse and survived and even thrived. Why do we lose our dignity and our nerve now?

    — J.J.E. · Apr 28, 05:02 AM · #

73. I agree with Andrew Sullivan’s sentiments regarding torture (vs. warfare):
    http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/04/why-is-torture-worse-than-warfare.html#more

    My moral objection to torture isn’t in its violence – or the separations of power – but that is essentially a form of slavery. Reducing the tortured person to, in effect, a slave – reduced to a subservient of their torturers, and forever broken as a human.

    We have turned away from slavery – and I believe that you, Jim, wouldn’t support slavery – so I think that torture is the same.

    There is something wrong with treating a human as sub-human, deliberately aiming to ‘break them’ from their human shackles, their human rationalities, into an animal – to get information? Theres a reason the Romans tortured their slaves, but not their citizens (and often citizens were once their enemies).

    Its not worth it. Its different to warfare. As Andrew Sullivan says: “It is the difference between two boys duking it out on a playground and a gang of boys restraining one while another beats the crap out of him.” That sentiment, but on a higher level.

    — Ev · Apr 28, 06:47 AM · #

74. Read Michael Walzer’s “Just and Unjust War”; the treatment of prisoners and hostages, and the oddity of morality in combat is discussed in detail, and in historical perspective.

    For the short answer to why it’s currently illegal: The constitution, Article 6, states that any treaty signed by the President and ratified by Congress becomes a law on par with the constitution itself. The UN Conventions on Torture are exactly such a treaty, and are thus as integral to the fabric of US law as the Constitution, per article 6.

    — drew · Apr 28, 11:17 AM · #

75. I think Consumatopia has the best argument on the thread.
    Even under simple preference utilitarianism, this is way worse than simply killing someone. Killing someone erases their preferences. Torturing them negates their preferences, like we cut them off at some sort of cartesian pineal gland, dividing their body from their will.
    Torture, exactly like slavery, is the negation of freewill.
    And that is the antithesis of humanity.

    — matoko_chan · Apr 28, 11:48 AM · #

76. I remember when I was a kid and I first learned that there were “rules of war.” I wondered how there could be rules to govern an all out battle in which each side’s very existence was threatened. War is legalized murder and assault. You are trying to kill me, I am trying to kill you, but still certain actions by either one of us are considered beyond the pale? Killing you is ok, but there is something WORSE than killing you that I must not do? As I got older it made a little more sense intuitively, and the practical value of such rules became more apparent (especially from the perspective of a citizen of the world’s only superpower). But the moral logic remained puzzling. If we capture Osama himself, is it morally acceptable or unacceptable to torture him to get information about Al Qaeda’s leaders and plans? I want to be able to say it would be wrong, but an ironclad argument for that conclusion evades me.

    — andrew · Apr 28, 01:32 PM · #

77. One answer is to look at how the U.S. Marine Corps treated Japanese P.O.W.s during the second world war. The USMC treated them humanely for two reasons: It was required by the Geneva Conventions, and it produced useful battlefield intelligence.

    I don’t think the Marines in the Pacific is exactly the example of humane treatment you’re looking for.

    The constitution, Article 6, states that any treaty signed by the President and ratified by Congress becomes a law on par with the constitution itself. The UN Conventions on Torture are exactly such a treaty, and are thus as integral to the fabric of US law as the Constitution, per article 6.

    That’s not at all the law. Maybe it should be the law, but it isn’t. With some exceptions, treaties are only US law to the extent Congress passes a law to effectuate them.

    — Adam Greenwood · Apr 28, 02:38 PM · #

78. I’m not getting from Manzi’s post that he is pro-torture. I’m actually reading a profoundly conservative appeal to the traditions and institutions of our society as the compelling argument against torture, and there I agree with him. I see this as a warning to conservatives who are overturning tradition by arguing for torture.

    Let’s face it, without appealing to religion the moral underpinnings of our society are extremely shaky. Pragmatism can ultimately take you anywhere. As odd and troubling as it is to see conservatives defending torture on utilitarian grounds, it’s pretty odd as well to see Progressives waxing moral about the absolute and self-evident wrongness of torture, something you won’t see them doing in most other areas of American life. It seems that Manzi’s post highlights how the torture debate has put both sides on unusual ground.

    — Peter · Apr 28, 03:31 PM · #

79. Everything you say about torture also applies to the tactic of slamming planes full of civilians into buildings full of civilians.

    — libarbarian · Apr 28, 03:52 PM · #

80. Peter, I agree. I think Jim’s ‘problem’ here was that he buried the lede, leading people (including Larison, whose post I completely agree with otherwise) to miss what he was pointing at.

    Of course if Jim did that intentionally to drum up some business, more power to him, I guess.

    — Erik Siegrist · Apr 28, 04:18 PM · #

81. “Maybe I’m morally obtuse about this (again, I mean that non-rhetorically), but I don’t see how a non-pacifist makes the moral case against torturing captured combatants.”

    Morally? Because they can’t fight back.

    — MNPUndit · Apr 28, 05:24 PM · #

82. I agree with Peter. I do not read this piece as an indication that Manzi favors torture. Quite the opposite. He simply bases his opposition to torture on the fact that our history and tradition are what tell us where to draw the line, and that torture is on the other side of it.

    — andrew · Apr 28, 05:50 PM · #

83. I’m not getting from Manzi’s post that he is pro-torture. I’m actually reading a profoundly conservative appeal to the traditions and institutions of our society as the compelling argument against torture, and there I agree with him. I see this as a warning to conservatives who are overturning tradition by arguing for torture.

    This is definitely what Manzi was driving at. See here: http://www.theamericanscene.com/2008/03/14/more-on-prostitution-and-the-law

    The problem is not that Manzi is wrong to think that abstract reasoning’s utility is limited, but that he’s wrong to think the wrongness of torture is an example of this. Note that most of his examples focus on killing people, but many of those subject to torture envy the dead. Torture is wrong exactly like rape is wrong, for pretty much exactly the same reasons. If Manzi had named this post, “Why is Rape Wrong?” it would make no less sense than it does now. Not very many real world controversies can be solved at by parsimonious moral reasoning, but torture happens to be one of them, as several comments above make clear.

    There aren’t many unambiguous debates in American politics and usually there’s a reasonable case to be made on both sides, but somehow an obvious wrong like torturing enemies appeals to the worst tendencies of today’s America—believing that everything good guys do is good and that all problems are solvable by sufficient application of reason and power. Perhaps these are delusions that otherwise reasonable and decent people may find themselves subject to, but they are obviously wrong nonetheless.

    — Consumatopia · Apr 28, 06:58 PM · #

84. I agree wholly with Consumatopia.
    Torture is wrong for the reason that rape is wrong and the reason that slavery is wrong.
    It is anti-human.
    Try a thought experiment…would it be ok to rape female terrorists to extract information?
    To enslave JUST ONE terrorist to stop a jackbauer scario?

    — matoko_chan · Apr 28, 09:14 PM · #

85. I think that this is less of a moral issue and more of a rules issue – but I will try to address it in a moral framework. We, the civilized nations of the world, have decided that there must be some rules to warfare. Without limits we have found that some of us are willing to do things that are abhorrent, thus there must be limits to what is acceptable to do during war – but not many.

    In this case the rule seems to hinge on the idea that once I have actively asked you for mercy, in the form of surrender, that you are obligated to grant me that mercy with the understanding that I will do the same to you.

    Prior to asking for mercy (in the form of surrender), pretty much anything goes, upon asking for that mercy you are legally, and perhaps morally, required to grant it. This likely has a grounding in Judeo-Christian ethics.

    — jake peterson · Apr 29, 12:06 AM · #

86. This likely has a grounding in Judeo-Christian ethics.

    HAHAHA
    Sure, just like the Inquisition.

    — matoko_chan · Apr 29, 02:38 PM · #

87. HAHAHA
    Sure, just like the Inquisition.

    Yes, and like religious tolerance and modern liberalism, too. Are you really that ignorant of the relevant history?

    — John Schwenkler · Apr 29, 02:48 PM · #

88. In the wake of the recently released Torture Memos by the Obama administration, the following is offered as food for thought. Our immune system, a mechanism that has to continually balance cooperation with conflict/defense strategies, provides a roadmap through these trying times.

    Assume for the moment that torture was used on terrorists like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) (”“principal architectof the 9/11 attacks). The science of immune systems (Immunology), Evolution and an analysis informed by Game Theory — a branch of applied mathematics that is used in the social sciences (most notably economics), biology, engineering, political science, international relations, computer science, and philosophy — offer us billions of years of ‘best practices’ in dealing with deadly threats that can be translated to the moral challenges our society faces in the Global War on Terror.

    In principle, an immune system’s mechanism works to protect an organism by attacking pathogens that would do it harm. White blood cells, or leukocytes, are constantly at work defending against harmful microbes in the body. The fevers we experience when our bodies get the flu, a ‘high-level attack’ and a disease that takes 250,000 to 500,000 humans annually, are part of the overall defenses the immune system utilizes. Because the body doesn’t operate properly in a fever’s high temperatures, it maintains a normal temperature when it is simply experiencing ‘low-level attacks’, like the germs that infect a small wound on your hand.

    Unfortunately, the immune system’s protection comes at a price; it’s a two-edged sword with built-in imperfections. Sometimes it attacks the very organism it’s trying to defend. This condition is called Autoimmunity. Rheumatology is one branch of medicine that treats one of these imperfections.

    Eons of Evolution have given us a mechanism that precariously balances aggressive actions with unintended consequences. We must remind ourselves that the attack-and-defend interplay between pathogens and immune systems is not a steady-state system, but is co-evolving. One of the more fascinating adaptations is the process of active immunity and its production of antibodies. With active immunity, an immune system is constantly re-programming itself in response to the diseases/attacks it has survived.

    Much like the immune system uses fever, our society should keep waterboarding as a legitimate, but rarely used, tool to protect the greater good. Particularly against individuals like KSM who are determined to destroy our society.

    The argument is often made that the Geneva Conventions and policies against torture are there to protect our soldiers. But the historical evidence doesn’t support this claim. The Nazis and Japanese abused POWs during WWII. POWs were tortured during the Vietnam War. And more recently, our troops have been tortured to death in Iraq.

    Like a doctor treating a patient, our society should be guided by the core principles of ‘first do no harm’ and the Golden Rule (treat others as you would have them treat you) as we debate and evolve our policies. Implied within the Golden Rule and the Geneva Conventions is an expectation of reciprocity; even from our enemies. It’s worth remembering that al-Qaida and its operatives are not signatories to the Geneva Conventions and have no claim on its protection.

    While water boarding is an extreme tactic, it is justified by the extreme measures our enemies have taken against us. Our challenge is to make sure that we judiciously use this tool and don’t allow a potential abuse that would result in an attack on the very society we’re trying to protect; ala an autoimmune disease. We must be mindful of the potential hazard of declaring the operation (our anti-terrorism tactics) a success at the expense of losing the patient (our ethics and morals).

    — Porkopolis · Apr 29, 06:33 PM · #

89. Adam Greenwood: Please look up the definition of ratify.

    — Marcos El Malo · Apr 29, 07:38 PM · #

90. matoko_chan –

    The Christian community, and Europe in general did indeed come to grips with the horrors of torture – and decided that they were beyond the pale.

    Ethical standards evolve slowly over time. We are a dense people.

    — jake peterson · Apr 30, 01:25 PM · #

91. Can I just ask those out there who favor torture/ harsh interrogation how they would approach the case of Mahar Aher, the non-US citizen (Canadian) who was captured in New York and detained in the US before being flown by the US to Syria to be “harshly interrogated”. He was later released with no charges and it appears to be a case of mistaken identity. Assuming he was indeed tortured at the US government’s request – could/should there be criminal charges against those involved? Should he be allowed to sue for damages? Should those involved voluntarily resign? What is the moral and/or pragmatic response from the US government (hypothetically assuming the facts of the case are true and he was innocent and indeed tortured)?

    — Michael Y · May 7, 08:32 PM · #

92. Michael Y asks:

    “Can I just ask those out there who favor torture/ harsh interrogation how they would approach the case of Mahar Aher, the non-US citizen (Canadian) who was captured in New York and detained in the US before being flown by the US to Syria to be “harshly interrogated”. He was later released with no charges and it appears to be a case of mistaken identity. Assuming he was indeed tortured at the US government’s request – could/should there be criminal charges against those involved? Should he be allowed to sue for damages? Should those involved voluntarily resign? What is the moral and/or pragmatic response from the US government (hypothetically assuming the facts of the case are true and he was innocent and indeed tortured)?”

    As noted with the immune system analogy , no defense mechansim is perfect. Even our own immmune system has not figured-out how to prevent autoimmune disease, and it’s been fine-tuning its strategies for billions of years. These strategies can be abstracted using the tools of Game Theory. When so doing, the abstractions model the challenges societies like ours deal with against terrorism.

    Mr. Aher’s unfortunate circumstance has its roots not in the U.S. actions, but in the terrorists that forced an aggressive response by the U.S. He’s another victim of the terrorists that set in motion a set of responses that sometimes, just like our immune system, affects the innocent.

    — Porkopolis · May 10, 08:54 PM · #

Commenting is closed for this article.

↑ Is Barack Obama the First Hipster President?

↓ Re: When to get married?

All contents copyright The American Scene unless otherwise noted. Colophon. Archive.