(no subject)

[avevale_intelligencer]

Okay. I've been good. I've stuck to the fiction for a while now. But would you believe it, I'm still picking up grief about this here and there, because what I said upset people. I don't know if any of the other people who said exactly the same things I did, and in much stronger terms, are in the same boat. I certainly hope not; no-one needs to be made to feel this way. I was sleeping badly enough before all this blew up. Now? Forget about it.

Accordingly, in response, this.

One of the things that has confused me about the opposition I've encountered to this simple self-evident truth is that so few people have actually come forward and said “hell yeah, I support torture, it's no more than those scum deserve!” I mean, this is America, the land of free speech and plain talking. Instead, I get the sort of mincing equivocations that are traditionally more associated with us British. I mean, I'm used to our lot saying things like “We have to consider a wide range of options,” or “It would be premature at this juncture to exclude any possible course of action from consideration.” I don't expect it from the land of John Wayne and Dr King. If there isn't one single positive argument to be advanced in favour of it, doesn't that say something about the numerous arguments against it? If you're going to play devil's advocate, don't be offended when I bring a long spoon to sup with your client.

And the strangeness of the universe. What the hell is that about? It's as if (to dip a toe into the murky waters of Godwin) Hitler had said “We have a destiny to conquer and rule the world because of rainbows and kittens.” Which, for all I know, he may have done, but I'd bet his argument was a little more coherent than that.

All right, here's a possibility. I've remarked before on the tendency to confuse human law and natural law. One is part of the fabric of the universe, and therefore subject to its well-known and popular strangeness. The other is what we make of it, and is subject only to our will. Otherwise we would have had Star Trek episodes like this:

EXT. PLANET. DAY.

TRANSPORTER EFFECT as KIRK, SPOCK and McCOY beam down. Almost immediately KIRK walks a little way away from the other two and turns round, with his fingers to his head, forcing the camera to move behind them to keep him in shot.

SPOCK: Are you all right, Captain?

KIRK: I...don't know, Mr Spock. I...suddenly have this idea that it would be...perfectly morally acceptable to...hang you up on a wooden frame and cut strips of skin off you with a boning knife.

McCOY: Boning knife? Hell, Jim, we can do better than that! Did I ever tell you there are thirteen places on a Vulcan's body you can burn him with a phaser, or even with a good old-fashioned burning branch, and he won't even pass out?

SPOCK: Gentlemen, I find myself curiously unable to muster any logical argument to prevent you. Therefore, it seems you must proceed.

McCOY: Hot dog! I'll get some kindling!

I can only assume that this confusion between natural phenomena and human morality is behind the invocation of cosmic strangeness as a possible justification for not regarding torture as ultimately morally inadmissible. I can't think of any other reason. Of course it doesn't hold up. As Chesterton wrote, you could travel to the farthest reaches of the universe and visit the strangest of worlds, and you would still find a sign posted up saying “thou shalt not steal.” The reason being, of course, that you had unknowingly brought it with you, part of the general moral baggage we all carry.

Except that it seems we don't.

I'm told that “subjective truths” are harder to establish than “objective truths.” And in some cases, I agree, that is true. Abortion, for example, is an issue where there are “subjective truths” on both sides, and not being either a woman or an aborted foetus, I'm not qualified to comment on them. (I have my opinions, but they don't bear on this discussion.) But this one is different. The only qualification you need to comment on this one is to be a human being who might, one day, be strapped to a plank and forcibly drowned, again and again and again, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or holding the wrong strongly held belief. I think that's all of us on this bus.

It's generally accepted, I venture with some trepidation to say, that witch-burning, bear-baiting, and lynching are now regarded as activities in which a civilised society does not allow its members to engage. I'd like to see (or rather, I'd really hate to see) someone step up and advance the possibility that somewhere in the vast and unpredictable wondrousness of the space-time continuum there might be a place where an acceptable legal practice would be to grab the nearest person of differently coloured skin and string him up. Thanks to this debate, I can't now rule out the possibility that someone might.

But they'd still be wrong. And I, and those who feel as I do, would still be right. As I, and those who feel as I do, are right about this. Some subjective truths are as hard as the hardest scientific fact. This is one.

Comments

[armb.livejournal.com]

I didn't say anything about torture on my LJ because I'm fairly sure none of my very few readers are idiots who base policy on dodgy TV shows, nor dictators who find it a useful tool of repression no mater how useless it is for finding information.
But yes - torture: wrong.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I don't think any of mine are. Which is why this is upsetting me so much.

[howeird]

I don't expect it from the land of John Wayne and Dr King
Both of these guys are dead and buried, and America's moral courage with them, I'm sorry to say. It's why Bush has not been kicked out of office, despite being the minority party for the past year.

Over here, we *do* hear people saying right out loud "torture the bums, they deserve it". I hear it from military folks and their families, rednecks, New Yorkers, just not from politicians.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Well, I could probably go out of my house and find people saying it in the street round here (big army presence here in Wiltshire)...but I could discount that as the effect of reading the Sun, or just not thinking about the issue. I could find racism and homophobia out there as well, and lay the flattering unction to my soul that they don't know any better and I do, which makes me Special.

ha.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I find myself really wanting to not reply ...

... but I do feel your Star Trek script is a red herring.

Not having a moral imperative to not torture, doesn't make it a requirement or a pleasure. There's still empathy, the ability to put yourself into another person's viewpoint and, without religion or "morality", "do unto them as you would have them do unto you".

The Geneva Convention is a perfect example of this, it says (or so I've picked up from TV!) that you fight war as "gentlemen" which means no torturing prisoners or else (the "or else" isn't really spelled out I think, certainly it doesn't appear to be internationally upheld)

I am against being tortured. And I have watched an episode of 24 where a man knew the location of a small atomic bomb in Los Angeles and our American "hero" (against all the rules and with much angst on his face) decides that the only way of getting the information out of him in time is to use torture. Do I think torture is wrong? Hell yes. Did I still sympathise with Jack Bauer and hope that it would produce the result needed? Yes. Would I have had the courage to put the lives of tens of thousands of innocents ahead of my belief that torture is wrong? I hope so. Would I have felt dirty and wrong afterwards however it turned out? Hell yes.

There are times when (to me) it seems torture can be "necessary" when it can save lives ... but whether it is ever "justified" I don't know. And if you get to the point where it is an everyday occurrence and you don't have nightmares from conducting it, then you've lost an essential part of being human.

Summary: torture=wrong, other things=wrong, other options=good but when no other options, then a balance of wrongs may regrettably be required.

But I'm not American.

And I feel that psychological torture (sleep deprivation, shouting at people, using threats against family and friends etc.) is bad too, but that far fewer people complain about it. Even though it can leave a person mentally damaged for years/the rest of their lives/suicidal.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

But in RL, the chances of getting a fact out of someone by torture - particularly someone with a strongly held belief - is pretty small.

Wanna bet your life on it?

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Yup, that's about how I feel about it. Plus something else I was thinking about.

It's all using undefined terms. Define 'torture', for a start. Is it morally wrong to lock a person up and question them, with no physical violence at all? That can be defined as torture (and people have died under it) -- so do we say that it is always wrong to take anyone in for questioning for any crime? Of coursee not. OK, so we've defined one limit which is acceptable. How about flaying them alive, or the rack? I think most of us would agree that that's not acceptable. OK, so we have a limit the opposite way. How about depriving them of food? Of sleep? waterboarding? They are somewhere in the middle, and the point is that what /I/ define as torture (which includes waterboarding, I think) is neither universally accepted nor is it amenable to reason. This can be seen in the insistence of certain administrations to put the line in a different place to where I and others put it.

So if we can't even define "what is torture?", how can any absolute "torture is always wrong" make any sense at all? I can define people posting memes as 'torture' and under that statement say "everyone who posts a meme is evil". Or a president can say "usng the rack isn't torture" and therefore declare it to be not wrong. Neither is provably correct.

Whether any particular type of interrogation will give the desired results ("the truth") can influence whether that type of interrogation is worth doing in any particular situation. There are certainly some extreme forms which are counter-productive in that way (the subject either 'confesses' what they think the interrogator wants to here whether it is true or not, or they become unable to say anything), but there are other forms which may still be considered 'torture' (I consider sleep deprivation to be at least partly physical, not just psychological) which can be effective.

And I'm not American either, nor have I been 'brainwashed' by 'propaganda' about it.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

And one could also debate whether wiping out 83.2745% of a particular race or species really counts as "genocide." Playing with words is so much fun, isn't it?

Sorry, that was excessively waspish, but I am so tired of this sort of muddying the waters. It is fairly clear what kind of activity, over and above imprisonment, defines "torture," and yes, deprivation of food, water and/or sleep counts. (I call dibs on that last one.) None of these are "somewhere in the middle" of anything, let alone the deliberate, coercive, often invasive infliction of pain and terror that is what I believe I am talking about. If you really want to define coming across a meme while choosing to surf the net in your comfy chair as being subjected to torture, then you are, I believe, rather desperately looking for a way in which I can be shown to be wrong. Why you would *want* to do that is...well, it's beyond me. I've certainly gone far past being stimulated by the discussion.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Yes, the meme example was deliberately a limit on the definition so low that no one I know would consider it 'torture'. So we have at least one example of something which is not in the definition. How about sending a child to its room "until they say sorry"? How about putting a class of kids in school detention until one of them confesses (or 'grasses' on the culprit)? How about a similar thing for a person suspected of a crime? How about if they are suspected of knowing about a crime? Is the non-concensual use of drugs in such interrogation acceptable? Where do you draw the line? Is it the same place as other people? If not, what makes your position of the line any more valid than theirs?

My point is that the statement "torture is always wrong" is meaningless unless you define the term. Until I know where that line is I cannot say "it is always wrong", because for all I know you are against any interrogation of anyone anywhere for any reason. I believe[1] that the initiation of force is wrong, but I also believe in self-defence and the defence of innocents against the initiation of force by others, and sometimes that can mean forcing aswers from them by some method.

[1] Note that. "I believe". This is my opinion, not Absolute Truth, I make no claim to have absolute knowledge of anything. And I believe[1] that no mortal can validly make that claim (not even the Pope!). (I reserve opinion on whether any immortals can validly claim to know Absolute Truth, since I am not an intimate of any immortals.)

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Of course it's a red herring. I wrote it that way. What I was attacking was the notion that location in space-time could have *any* effect whatsoever on the moral value of a particular type of action. I made the effect extreme to save space and emphasise the point.

In any case, it would never have made it to the screen back in 1969. These days, of course, it would be a prime-time mini-series all on its own...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

There are certainly people who believe that there are moral absolutes that are cross-cultural and "cross-temporal" (for lack of a better adjective) and are true, always true, everywhere true.

"We believe these truths to be self-evident ..."

But natural law doesn't have these truths applying to any other creature, but somehow we (homo sapience) are supposed to have a bunch of them ...

... personally I feel a lot of what some people claim is "automatic/inbuilt/natural" is social and programmed and nurture ... children will "naturally" take toys from other children, hit them to get the to release that toy and learn to lie at an early age "he hit me first".

But at the same time we *are* social creatures so we'll fight to protect other members of our family or tribe (whether biological, national or football). See the opening scenes of 2001.

Lynching is not "allowed" (though similar things and "honour killings" still happen) ... but it is better if a jury of your peers, should you happen to live in Texas, find you guilty? Does the "humaneness" of the method of execution change the fact they are killing you? Is locking you away for 20 years with rapists and thugs who can and will use you sexually and play power games with your head, really that much more humane?

I am not a moral absolutist ... maybe I should be, but I'm not. And with the definition of what comprises torture being already poorly delineated, I can't say "all torture is wrong everywhere everytime". I can say that it degrades those to practice it, and those that accept it happening.

But I don't criticise you if you have different opinions, because it would be a boring world if everyone thought the way I did :-)

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Isn't it funny that the people who drafted the Geneva Convention (http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/385ec082b509e76c41256739003e636d/6756482d86146898c125641e004aa3c5) didn't seem to have any of this trouble defining torture? They seem to have had a fairly clear idea what they were talking about, clear enough that they didn't need to exclude being sent to the Naughty Step or whatever. I suppose all this ambiguity must have grown up in the last forty-nine years.

And as I have said till I'm in tears at the necessity of saying it again, I am all in favour of a plurality of ideas and opinions in most cases. However, in this one case, I will be happy to take the world as boring as I can possibly get it, because if everyone thought the way I do on this single subject it would be a far bloody better world. And I await argument on that point with considerable interest.

[ci5rod.livejournal.com]

C S Lewis would point out (and does -- I've got Mere Christianity as my bedtime reading at the moment) that moral imperatives or Natural Law or whatever you want to call it consist of things we know we ought to do (or not do) but don't (or do), and that this is our collective yardstick of Right and Wrong. Ab initio, torture is Wrong. As you say, it being "necessary" or at the very least excused does not and cannot make it Right.

[meritmaat.livejournal.com]

I ran out of sympathy for Jack Bauer after a while, I think when he had the kids of the one terrorist shot to get the information...
(this is merely an information, it is by no means meant to be aggressive in any form. Gotta be careful by now .. :-))

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I am sorry you are being bothered about this - particularly as this is one of the few times I agree absolutely with you.

Setting all the moral relativism aside, torture does not work. All it does is make the torturer look good for a while, until his/her bosses find out they have gained nothing expect a very bad reputation.

[lexin.livejournal.com]

Torture is completely and utterly unacceptable under any and all possible circumstances.

I'm with you on this, and with lil_shepherd. Not only is torture morally wrong, it's unreliable as a method of getting at the truth.

A torturer may (probably will by the third day) get information, but whether it'll be worth having is debatable. Targets of torture will say anything - anything at all - to make it stop.

Further, in most situations for which people posit using it, the one with the terrorist with the information that could save a city is the usual one, three days is too long.

Torture has no redeeming features:
it's morally wrong,
it's unreliable, and
it's time consuming.

It fails on every possible ground anyone might have for using it.

[dickgloucester.livejournal.com]

I'm in complete agreement with our host, here. Torture is wrong.

So then surely its reliability or the amount of time it takes is irrelevant.

If it's wrong, it's wrong.

I may seem naive here, but anything else is splitting hairs.

[armb.livejournal.com]

Morally if torturing one person a bit in ways they would eventually get over was absolutely certain to save millions of lives, I'd be tempted to support it as still wrong but the lesser of two evils.
But in reality, that just doesn't happen. If you know for absolute certain this person has the information you need, the chances are you can find it anyway without being diverted by them making up whatever else they think you want to hear along with (possibly) the truth. And if you don't know for certain, you're back to torturing a possibly innocent person until they make up whatever they want you to hear for nothing.

[jahura.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying that your argument is wrong here. I'm just curious. In a situation of obtaining critical information from someone who is politically opposed or threatened with death or death of their family if they tell, what method would you reccommend?

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I don't know. The Nyrond in me says "find another way," because for them there always is another way (lucky them). I think that in at least some cases there is another way in real life as well, and possibly even one that works (see comments passim about how this one doesn't), but that's not something I can be sure of. I only know what I would not do or tolerate being done in my name.

[rdmaughan.livejournal.com]

Then you don't get the information.

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" Benjamin Franklin.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Then I don't. And I take the responsibility for that, and for its consequences. Which, apparently, makes me a coward.

Are you using the Franklin quote to refer to the freedom to torture, or the freedom from torture, or is it just a general reference?

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

It appears to be a reply to jahura who asked what you would do to get the info if you didn't use torture, and ninja replied "they you don't get the information".

That's the obvious corollary of the no torture absolute, if there really is no other way in the time allowed.

Taking a moral high ground and saying "I am willing to let thousands of people die rather than sticking to our "no torture" principles" is high courage, not cowardice. It puts a point of principle ahead of human life. This is what Gandhi, the civil rights protestors etc. did ... of course if you are willing to spend other people's lives to maintain your principle, then that's also what some very not nice people did too ...

... I believe the Franklin quote is to agree with you, those that would give up the "freedom from torture" for temporary security, will end up with neither.

[jahura.livejournal.com]

"Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society."

- Benjamin Franklin

[meritmaat.livejournal.com]

I would just like to hug you, if you don`t mind.