Civilised

Read this from The Guardian:

A high court judge yesterday delivered a stinging attack on America, saying its idea of what constituted torture was out of step with that of "most civilised nations".

The criticism, directed at the Bush administration's approach to human rights, was made by Mr Justice Collins during a hearing over the refusal by ministers to request the release of three British residents held at Guantánamo Bay.

The judge said: "America's idea of what is torture is not the same as ours and does not appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations." He made his comments, he said, after learning of the UN report that said Guantánamo should be shut down without delay because torture was still being carried out there.

Yup. The key is what counts as "civilized," what separates the civilized from the barbaric. The American king has determined that civilized doesn't matter much any more for his kingdom. Although our moral intuitions tend towards the judgement that torture is wrong, we're nevertheless pressed recently to rethink the US position on torture. This is largely through ex post facto oopsy justifications, wacky analogies, red herrings, hypothetical leaps of faith, and rhetorical excess by those who have some lord-knows-what reason for promoting torture as policy.

As some of you know, I'm currently editing a book on torture called, well, On Torture, and am particularly interested in hearing what you have to say on this. The book includes original essays by some truly great writers and philosophers (Goytisolo, Todorov, Ehrenreich, Taussig, Britt, Lingis, etc.), and I want them all to push the boundaries of how we think about torture, including the possibility of a justification for torture as policy.

There aren't any good moral arguments for torture. I'll state that flatly. If you're interested, I've explained this in a nutshell here. Edited from an earlier post: For starters, from a philosophical and ethical view there is no coherent justification for torture except, questionably, from the abused "ticking time-bomb" analogy. Certainly not from Kantian positions based in the fundamental dignity of human beings. An exception could be one qualified by lex talionis (eye for an eye). This argument has been used to defend capital punishment: in brief, one gives up one's claim to human dignity when one violates the universal rule that would apply to others whom one has terrorized or tortured or whatever. The penalty aspect then comes from LT -- what to do with this violation? Eye for an eye. But this argument doesn't apply to Abu Ghraib, for example, because, as US generals have admitted, perhaps some 80-90% of "detainees" (itself a consciously chosen term by the administration) were caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. So, without any guilt in the first instance, a justification for torture based on the Kantian-lex talionis combo claim above appears to have no basis whatsoever. In this instance, in fact, if we assume widespread torture and abuse, most of the victims are innocent. Those who are guilty may be found guilty but only after the fact of torture and not prior, as would be necessary to make the claims above.

From a consequentialist point of view, I think things are a little trickier. It appears clear that if there's a ticking time bomb and someone is tortured who gives you the information on where that bomb is and you thus save thousands of lives with the info gained from torture, then there's a case to be made. But it's unclear in practice whether this case holds up. First, in the Abu Ghraib case, it's clear that the outcomes of the use of torture have largely been to strengthen the insurgency in Iraq, help to recruit further fighters -- Iraqi and foreign -- to the cause of battling the American occupation, and has demolished respect for the US worldwide, not to mention its moral standing in the international sphere. These all have extremely negative short-term and long-term consequences. Second, torture is famously ineffective. The person who is tortured will say anything to make it stop whether the information is true or not.

I can't imagine that we can find justification for torture in other ethical approaches such as virtue theory, feminist ethics, pragmatism, etc.

So, what's the point in torture? It's one of the worst things human beings do to each other -- perhaps the paramount abuse of other humans. It's why we end up with odd formulations in capital punishment that killing people who have killed is okay, but "cruel and unusual punishment" in addition to capital punishment is beyond moral bounds. Clearly, if we're looking to consequences, the Abu Ghraib cases and the legal contortions of the Gonzalez memo, etc. suggest that there are some beneficial outcomes in mind on the part of the administration. I have no idea what these could be.

But, recently, Victor Hanson (who once wrote a good book on agrarianism, but is now a winger hack) suggested that,

The question for a liberal democracy is not whether torture is effective, but whether its value is worth the bad publicity and demoralizing effect on a consensual society that believes its cause and methods must take a moral high ground far above the enemy's.

He's right, in a way. I wouldn't use the vulgarism, "bad publicity," but I would say that there's a much larger issue of American standing in the world. And this matters regarding the very nature of international legitimacy. More later on this....

[Cross-posted at Majikthise]