Tortured Absolution...

Having had a little break this holiday to catch up with the family, catch up on the news, catch up on sleep, and crawl around the roof clearing gutters in a thunderstorm -- between all that I actually had a few moments for reflection.  While ideally we would all be free to meditate on peace, goodwill, and brotherly love, some jerks want to ruin the moment by insisting that we discuss the merits of torture.

I have been reluctant to weigh in on the torture debate, mainly because I don't want to lend credence to the idea that there actually is any "debate" about torture.  There isn't.  There is no school of moral thought, no legitimate argument, no reasonable disagreement about whether torture should play any role in modern society.  It shouldn't -- except as an example of ancient barbarities abolished by the advance of civilized thought.  In the clear words of Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, a British judge called upon to examine torture recently, "The torturer is abhorred not because the information he produces may be unreliable but because of the barbaric means he uses to extract it."

But no.  Against all better judgment some sophomoric sophists have left their dorm rooms and aired a risible argument they think trumps the liberal namby-pamby intellectuals.  From the same minds that brought us "faggotsezwha?", we get the so-called "ticking bomb" scenario.  Forced into our Sunday papers by Charles "pull my finger" Krauthammer in the Weekly Standard, the argument starts by ginning up a suitably frightening terrorist attack on some American icon, like an atom bomb in Manhattan or a dirty bomb at the Super Bowl.  Furthermore we have to imagine that we have captured a suspect who knows -- and who we know knows -- how to defuse the bomb but refuses to talk.  Oh yeah, and we only have an hour, and normal interrogation hasn't worked, and we'll save many thousands of lives.  Thus we must torture.  QED.

This argument's legion flaws have been pointed out by others.  As a law-enforcement scenario it's utterly implausible.  The clear knowledge of what, who and when, but with complete ignorance of where, who else and how is so contrived as to be laughable.  The emphasis on torture as the only viable option betrays deep confusion about intelligence work and the reliability of coerced testimony.  But this story did not come from FBI files.  Instead the fanciful machinations of this narrative find their roots in popular culture, where such complex constraints seem commonplace.  The "ticking clock" is the simplest of the plot gimmicks employed by Hollywood screenwriters to drive the third act of an action movie.  No wonder this argument resonates with frat boys.  But should the lessons of a weekend Syd Field screenwriting class be applied to the field manual for real-life investigators?  (Don't answer, Bruce Willis fans.)

As a moral argument it's a con.  Following Pascal's famous Wager, its meager moral force comes from stacking the deck with improbable but virtually infinite evils in order to counterbalance a horribly concrete one.  Any ethical position that could fail under this kind of rhetorical attack would have to be weak to start with.  Sure it would normally be bad to mow down all the people in your local church with automatic weapons, but what if they were working against their will for space aliens on a plan to exterminate humanity?  And there's no way to break the mind control, and you only have an hour -- surely mass murder would be OK in that case -- YES?  This is why the Supreme Court will not hear constitutional challenges based on thought experiments.  There has to be a real person who has suffered real harm, and the person brings the case has to have standing.  Likewise an ethical argument has to be based in reality, not a movieplex fantasy.

The form of this argument should make us suspicious from the start.  Right wing ideologues normally tout moral absolutes.  They point to ancient commandments as inviolable law backed by supernatural force.  They sneer at situational ethics and moral relativism.  So why are these same people now making an argument that tries to put a situational gloss on the evil of torture?  It seems like they should side with the moral certainty of opposing torture, not be throwing it into doubt with bizarre scenarios.

Krauthammer is quite explicit about his wedge strategy.  By finding a clear exception, however hypothetical, he hopes to break the prohibition on torture.  Thus broken by appeals to situational ethics, Krauthammer then retreats to his absolutist position and demands that because he can get one minor concession from liberal ethicists, torture is no longer absolutely forbidden.  The floodgates are open and he argues we should use torture in proportion to how much it might help reveal useful information in every possible case.  Do you feel soiled yet?

This reasoning amounts to a double standard.  I call this "personal exemptionalism," and it is one of the hallmarks of absolutist logic.  It operates by forcing every ethical question into a personal context.  Ethics teachers often rely on the second person to introduce "what would you do" kinds of questions for students to consider.  The ticking bomb scenario is presented that way, with you as the protagonist who has to decide if torture might be the right choice in this case.  This sets up the listener to decide if they accept or reject an abstract principle on personal, emotional grounds.  However, normative ethics requires a more objective viewpoint.  We can't consider only if a moral prescription is good for ourselves and people like us to follow, but must also consider if it's good for everyone else, individually and as part of a society.  Making all ethical choices personal, and ignoring the objective, lets absolutists get the answer they want every time.

Personal exemptionalism is also a trap for liberals who fail to recognize it.  A perfect example, typical in it's sickening explicitness, is the first question asked of Micheal Dukakis during his 1988 debate with then Vice President George Bush Sr.  He was asked, "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?"  This should look familiar by now.  The question attacks a liberal position as if it were an absolute, in this case opposition to the death penalty, and fishes for a personal exemption.  If the liberal answers yes, then he would be accused of being inconsistent.  If the liberal answers no, as Dukakis did, he would be accused of being insensitive to victims and coddling killers, as he was.

Now let's see what happens if we try to turn the tables.  The symmetric question for Bush might have been, "Mr. Vice President, if your son George raped and killed a woman, would you support his execution for the crime?"  In this case the conservative could spare himself having to consider the personal implications of his absolutism by answering, "My son would never do that."  Bush is thus forever exempt from the moral absolutes he would impose on others.  They quite simply never apply to him.

Basically conservatives start by dividing people into "good people" and "bad people", and it turns out that they are never the bad people.  Any personal ethical question never applies to them.  Consider some other examples.  Should we consider the plight of the urban poor?  "A good person would work hard so they would never be poor."  Should we be concerned about women who need abortions?  "A good person would practice abstinence before marriage and never need an abortion."  What about married women?  "A married woman would be responsible and never get pregnant accidentally in the first place."  What if her husband is abusive?  " A good woman would naturally marry a good man."  What about women who are raped?  "A good woman would stay home, and if she went out she wouldn't dress like a tramp."  Should we be concerned about people who get hooked on highly addictive drugs?  "I just say NO."

QED.

The flip side, of course, is that personal ethics has exceptions.  For any personal ethical standard, there is a complex backdrop of circumstances which might justify any variety of different exemptions.  We don't need to go into detail.  It's sufficient to look at the statistics for any of the so-called moral issues, but especially teen pregnancy and abortion.  They are highest, almost in perfect proportion, to the states where people consider themselves to have conservative values.  Why?  It's simple.  Where ethics are personal, personal responsibility is entirely absent.  A given outcome is the result of personal history, so it can easily be excused by the details of a person's situation.  Personal ethics are -- dare I say it -- situational ethics.

This is important.  This is more important than corrupt politicians, pundits who lie, or a corporate media with a weird standard of "ballance."  All those thing can be understood in terms of money and power -- or more accurately, who has the power to spread the money.  Personal exemptionalism is the key to understanding why otherwise decent people, people you would want as next door neighbors, end up supporting a morally corrupt regime.  This is a difficult problem, but one that has to be addressed head-on.  Those of us who think about ethics have to understand how ethical thinking is perverted and abused by political parties with ulterior motives, and we must understand how to counter it.

The "red" states are really with us, if they could only understand that personal exemptionalism is not ethical in practice, but evil, and that objective ethics (or 'situational ethics' as it's sometimes called) are what they really subscribe to in their heart of hearts.  Is there any way that this discussion can be heard?

- jack*

Comments

[cerebrocrat]

Excellent post. Nice to see you back.

[Zenji]

Jack, i love your blog. I know from my own (BLOGWHORE ALERT! CODE RED!) that is very hard to keep up the quality on a regular basis, so i don't blame you for long periods inbetween....still, i really hope you keep it up, because you talk eloquently and intelligently about issues that matter a great deal to me. I always get new insights from reading your posts.