I think that this is a kind of bait-and-switch. The argument is based on a hypothetical kind of open-and-shut case which is not claimed as actual. The hypothetical case is used to strike down an absolute rule. Once the absolute rule has been struck down, though, the exception is not limited to the strong hypothetical case. Instead, all proposals for the use of torture are now on the table. And that was obviously the goal.
I am generally of the opinion that the kind of argumentation students learn in philosophy and law classes, as well as elsewhere in the university, is not much good for serious decision-making. It's mostly good for winning arguments and thus rising within the group heierarchy.
I think this is true of most hypothetical utilitarian arguments, when unquantifiable qualities are treated as though they had been quantified and measured, and beyond that, aggregated socially to come up with an entirely fictitious quantity of social utility. Obviously this kind of argument is usually just formal, stating the kinds of reasons for which you might choose a certain alternative, but the argument is usually given more weight than that, as though the numbers had actually been crunched.
The ticking bomb argument may never have existed in nature, but it's persuasive because it's common in movies, with the hot FBI agent darting around in her skin-tight jumpsuit, and suspenseful music clicking away relentlessly in the background.
FBI agents do too wear skin-tight jumpsuits, when they're undercover.
You betcha to your first point. The real problem with the TTB scenario is that it is used as a stepping stone to massively less persuasive cases: not "We know this guy knows where the suitcase nuke is and how to disarm it," but "These are high-value subjects, and they almost certainly have intelligence that would be useful to us somehow, we just don't know what." At this point, I will agree with any TTB advocate that in a TTB scenario they should go ahead and torture, if they will stop trying to extend that license to the real world situations that we're talking about, where no one that we know of actually has TTB knowledge.
That was crossed with John, with whom I agree in broad outlines and in detail.
Also, hilzoy and Katherine are national treasures.
Also, hilzoy and Katherine are national treasures.
Yes the are.
Okay, but won't you admit that in a situation in which the entire human race had been wiped out except for me and one woman, and she was playing hard to get, I would be justified in raping her in order to propagate the human race? So then, your blanket rule against my having an unlimited sexual right to every woman I see doesn't end up being so absolute after all, does it?
On a non-sarcastic note: Compare the desire for torture to be "on the table" with the blustering about zero tolerance for the Katrina looters.
Come on, Kotsko. They were interfering with others' property rights!
A national treasure? I don't know, I associate that phrase with Zsa Zsa Gabor's defense attorney's closing argument to the jury when she was charged with assault.
A note for those who go in for calling their Senators: tell them to vote for the Bingaman Amendment, S. 2517, to bill # S. 1042.
And these are the people who need calls the most. The yes votes on Graham who are the least hopeless:
Collins (ME) T: (202) 224-2523
Dewine (OH) T: (202) 224-2315
Mccain (AZ) T: (202) 224-2235
Snowe (ME) T: (202) 224-5344
Warner (VA) T: (202) 224-2023
Conrad (D Nd)T: (202) 224-2043
Landrieu (D LA) T: (202)224-5824
Lieberman (D CT) T: (202) 224-4041
Nelson (D NEB) T: (202) 224-6551
Wyden (D OR) T: (202) 224-5244
And the nine who didn't vote:
Alexander (R-TN)
Corzine (D-NJ)
Domenici (R-NM)
Enzi (R-WY)
Hagel (R-NE)
Inouye (D-HI)
Lugar (R-IN)
Santorum (R-PA)
Thomas (R-WY)
To those who don't normally--come on, just this once? Especially if your Senator's on either of those lists.
I've emailed Clinton and Schumer, but they're pretty reliable. Does anyone know if there's any point in contacting Senators other than your own? Or do they just ignore non-constituents?
They basically ignore constitutents, especially those that use email.
>>There is, for example, a vast distance between the much-beloved Ticking Time Bomb scenario and a "let the CIA do whatever" policy.
IMHO for Cheney and the rest of the cabal, there seems to be no vast distance at all. It seems to me that they believe that the continued existance and financially supported operations of terrorist organizations capable of 9/11, the London underground bombings, and the Spanish train bombings, and who say they will do more and greater attacks is, figuratively speaking, the TTB IRL.
Not that I believe TTB, or anything justifies torture.
It's just that if anybody in power does believe this, what they include in their definition of the TTB matters as much as what they what they include in their definition of torture.
I'll call, but I know that Kerry and Kennedy will vote the way that they want to no matter what.
LB, I'm not even sure that I'll go even as far as you're willing to. I don't buy your hypothetical. I'm pretty comfortable saying that the prohibition against torutre is absolute.
So, you saved all of those people, but you demeaned yourself and the value of all life in the process. I think I'd prefer not to be saved, if all life had to be cheapened in the process. And torture, unlike say the battlefield, is a situation where the torturer has complete control over the person being tortured. Legal norms should apply. I haven't yet figured out how to articulate this well, but this is also why I'm opposed to the death penalty, although I'm not an absolute paifist. It is wrong to kill people. Period. Full stop. Or almost. I'm pretty willing to say that, and I think it's wrong to kill any prisoner, but I do understand that sometimes a breakdown of law occurs, and it's necessary to have a war (I know that there are laws of war), but one still ought to recognize that within a functioning system killing is wrong.
No one has considered possible counterintuitive negative effects of the use of torture.
Suppose someone had kidnapped Tom Cruise or Britney Spears and was threatening to kill them horribly, and their lives could be saved only by torturing someone in police custody who was privy to the plot. In the present case, the officer in charge could simply point out that torture is forbidden, smiling quietly to himself all the while. But under the Gelernter Principle, the officer would be forced to ask himself whether this was one of the extreme cases in which torture was justified.
Even if he came up with the right answer -- no -- his job would have been made unnecessarily difficult, perhaps reducing his efficiency and causing him to screw up a kidnapping case involving much more appealing people -- for example, Laetitia Casta or John Kenneth Galbraith.
My question on the ticking time bomb: how do we know that they know, without also knowing ourselves? And how do we know that someone so close to the center of the nuclear terrorist plot wouldn't have trained long and hard so that when captured, he would be able to lead the torturers on a wild goose chase to allow the bomb the time it needed to go off? And furthermore, aren't we dealing with people who have access to suicide bombers, and isn't the whole point of the timer so that the people can plant the bomb and have time to get away? This could go on forever.
My conclusion is that everyone should be tortured, arbitrarily, in case they have valuable information. Submitting to torture should be considered one of the duties of citizenship.
Since torture is such a time-tested method for generating truth, maybe even people who didn't know stuff before they were tortured would become oracles and turn over information far beyond their normal capacity in a non-tortured state. We can't know for sure that torture doesn't have this mystical power until we've actually tested it empirically, and the stakes are too high to impose antiquated Latin words like habaeus corpus to this situation.
LB, I'm not even sure that I'll go even as far as you're willing to. I don't buy your hypothetical. I'm pretty comfortable saying that the prohibition against torture is absolute.
Well, my offer isn't perfectly sincere -- I don't expect anyone to take me up on it, and without the promise to stop extending the exception to non-TTB cases, I haven't actually agreed, just offered to agree. But in a real TTB case, with certain knowledge that the subject knew the location, etc., I think I'd be hard pressed not to allow an exception. This doesn't matter much, though, because real TTB cases with certain knowledge only happen in the movies, and so we don't need to build exceptions into the law to account for them.
I'm just leaving myself the "never say never" out. If Belle Waring's aliens show up and threaten to torture every person on the planet horribly for millions of years, my position is flexible. In real life, not.
The main problem is that we, as a country, aren't giving torture the respect it deserves. I call for the creation of a new Cabinet post: Secretary of Humane Data-Mining. I think it would be a public relations coup if we got a nice Jewish guy, like Alan Dershowitz, or David Gelernter, to fill the post.
Yeah, no I understand that in real life you're against it. But I 'm pretty sure that even if we could know with absolute certainty that the guy knew where the bomb was, and that torture would get him to tell us ( as in the movies), it would still be wrong--even though we saved a million people.
Since torture is such a time-tested method for generating truth, maybe even people who didn't know stuff before they were tortured would become oracles and turn over information far beyond their normal capacity in a non-tortured state.
Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent, Σιβυλλ&alpha, τι θελεισ; respondebat illa: αποθανειν θελω.
A clear precedent!
I have to admit that I become ambivalent when Britney Spears or Tom Cruise is the one holding the information about the TTB. I would never torture Laetitia Casta, but I might pretend to be thinking about it in order to extract sexual favors. John Kenneth Galbraith doesn't really enter into this part of the discussion, but I did just learn that he's still alive at about 95.
Maybe we could run this torture data-mining thing along the lines of plasma donation -- people could come in once or twice a week, get tortured for an hour or so, tell us what they know, and get $50.00. Torture could help stimulate the economy!
I actually heard Kerry's a bit shaky on this.
Or we could argue for it along the lines of individual development: torture builds character.
"That which does not result in organ failure, can only make us stronger." -- Nietzscheney
For the torturer or the torturee, though?
What are the odds -- they're for it.
Suppose someone had kidnapped Tom Cruise or Britney Spears and was threatening to kill them horribly, and their lives could be saved only by torturing someone in police custody who was privy to the plot.
Not only wrong, but hardly even a temptation.
Re 19: I'm embarrassed that I don't know this, but, w-lfs-n what''s that from?
The Satyricon of Petronius. It's also the epigraph to The Waste Land. (For I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, "Sibyl, what do you want?", she answered, "I want to die".)
29: I was in the same boat, so I googled for a little bit until I found the heavily annotated Waste Land, located here.
Actually, I've never read The Waste Land.
But I have read Anne Tyler's short story, "Teenage Waste Land".
w-lfs-n,
I asked you the source, because I didn't know what it was from, but I was perfectly capable of translating it. I'm pretty weak on Silver Age Latin. Also do you know what paragraph, that's what I was asking about. I wanted to go look it up in context.
I'm impressed by your Greek typing skills--even if it iss accent-free and you didn't change the sigma--(I guessthere's no way to do the end-of-the-word sigma unless you're using greek keys or somethign like that.)
washerdreyer, thanks for the link.
but I was perfectly capable of translating it.
You're not the only one here, are you now, missy?
I don't know how to get the end-of-word sigma, or do accents, but typing the letters is easy if you're patient. It's just, for instance, Σ for a Σ, σ for σ—and now you can probably figure out how to get the rest of the letters.
I've read The Waste Land, but was never inspired to look up the epigraph. I did, however, look this one up:
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
Much easier to type than Greek.
Any obnoxious comments I make about Christian girls implicitly exclude andone who reads what I write.
You might want to post that on the other thread.
You know, if stress positions and such are both humane and effective, wouldn't it make sense to use those methods rather than polygraphs for politicians and political appointees with security clearances? Too many traitors have beaten the polygraphs. Let's try hanging Cheney by his nuts for a couple of days to make sure he hasn't been passing stuff through Chalabi to Iran, just for starters.
Prufrock was my teenage angsty poem that I read all the time in high school. Lingering bitterness at not being Prince Hamlet.
38: Why the fuck does anyone use polygraphs anyway? Aren't they inadmissible in court because they're known to be, like, not reliable? Aren't tea leaves less expensive and more pleasant?
I actually heard Kerry's a bit shaky on this.
Sadly, that doesn't surprise me all that much. I'm a bit nervous about how the next Dem president handles this - assuming we manage to get a Democrat in office in 2008 - given the records of Sandy Berger and Clinton on extraordinary rendition.
(It scarcely needs to be said I dread the prospect of any Republican, including McCain, who was on the wrong side of this vote, and whose hawkishness has so far trumped his need to look like a saint.)
Polygraphs aren't completely reliable, which is why they can't be used in court, but they still work pretty well, from what I understand. Not foolproof, but useful as one tool among many for assessing security risks.
Don't actual spies-'n'-things get taught how to fool polygraphs? How much are they really relied upon?
They only work if you don't know how they work, and they still don't work well. They're idiotic, and continued reliance on them is unjustifiable.
If you want a job at the CIA, you need to pass one.
RE 32
I think that anne tyler short story is really entitled "baba o'riley".