I'm terrified at how ineffectual our argumentative tools are, and annoyed at how much people think we can rely on them.
This was my point below, really. There is only one effective thing you can do: when you meet a Red (as distinct from a Republican), tell him over and over again how nice Argentina is. Or South Carolina. Whichever.
Don't we have awfully strong practical arguments against torture? I mean, it's not what I've focussed on personally, but I thought that the "It really doesn't get you any net useful information" position was pretty solidly based in the experience of actual intelligence types.
I'm just not sure I have the cool to answer questions like Alan Dershowitz's:
"When you torture somebody to death . . . everybody would acknowledge that's torture. But placing a sterilized needle under somebody's fingernails for fifteen minutes, causing excruciating pain but no permanent physical damage—is that torture?"
Doesn't an effort to seek out a bright line amount to a searching for a compromise with people like Dershowitz, a goal post–moving exercise in which body parts or methods are declared to be too extreme but then other (arguably equally) torturous but less obviously grotesque tactics are codified into law? On one hand, I think you're right, we can't abide by arguments that aren't working. But the torture reports make you apoplectic or they don't, and it's not easy to talk yourself down from being beserk over it.
Don't we have awfully strong practical arguments against torture?
Yeah, absolutely, and I'm mad at myself for not having made them sooner and more forcefully.
Well, Jim Henley posed the following question (and phrased it better) in terms of making people think about what kind of proof one would need before deciding to use torture, but it's also useful in talking about what is and is not an instance of torture: What practices would you allow the government to use on your parent/child/sibling/significant other if it has probable cause to think they know something useful and aren't telling?
LB and ogged: Drum has pointed out the problem with this. What (if/what about when) torture (did/does) work? Perhaps we'll come up with new technologies or techniques that make it more reliable. We still shouldn't do it.
I really don't want to hang my opposition to torture on its lack of efficacy. I know there's real scholarship supporting that position, but I still wonder whether it's partially rooted in wishful thinking. The US Army has perfected a system of psychological conditioning for its troops that, so far as I know, has no competing precedent. I suspect that the CIA is capable of similar feats.
The "torture doesn't work" argument reminds me of the "imprisonment's cheaper" argument against capital punishment. It's a nice supplement to the moral argument, but I don't think it will convince anyone -- it doesn't scratch the vicious itch that is the root of the problem. Variations on "make it work" and "I don't care" will come ringing back.
Ogged, I share your pessimism about human nature, but this country's underlying ideology and political system is still pretty novel. I'd like to think we've got a shot. Cue waving flag, etc etc.
Jason Vest's article in the National Journal includes former CIA officers' discussion of the practical drawbacks.
Tom, I've made that argument too. I think the short answer is: if it works, we'll use it.
But I'm pretty sure it doesn't work. That Vest article is good. I tried to explain some other veterans' objections here.
Agree with tom in #6. Pragmatic arguments of the sort that say, "It doesn't work," only mean that we should work harder and throw more R&D dollars at developing more effective methods of torture. And you really aren't going to perfect it if you don't keep trying; can't hit a home run if you won't swing the bat.
I think you should be able to work the "Israelis gave it up as ineffective" angle with almost anyone, if you push it hard enough. Pajamas/OS media types respect them, at least.
There's nothing self-evident about the wrongness of torture.
I don't mean to be drawing false parallels, which this may be, but until the late 18th/early 19th century was there anything self-evident about the wrongness of slavery, the claims of the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding?
There were practical arguments: slavery is not an efficient way to run a farm, slavery is not a good way to run a democracy, and (during the war) if we promise emancipation we can cause chaos in the Confederacy and recruit ex-slaves for the army.
There were moral arguments: slavery is wrong, period; slavery is wrong because of its cruelty; slavery is wrong because it corrupts the slaveholding class; slavery is wrong because everyone should be equal and it makes a mockery of our nation's ideals; slavery is wrong because everyone has a soul; and many more arguments. (I haven't listed them in any particular order; I think chronologically the religious-based arguments were the first.)
And there were practical arguments that made use of the moral context during the Civil War: emancipation gave the Union a moral authority it had lacked during the early years of the war when the fighting was only about preserving the Union; until that point Britain could still consider granting diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy despite the fact that a majority of the British public thought slavery was wrong.
So strategic arguments and moral arguments are not entirely distinct. Saying that torture keeps our allies and potential allies at a distance is a practical argument but it's based on a moral context in which most people in those countries believe torture is wrong.
This line also reminds me of the classic argument against utilitarianism: healthy person checks into the hospital; a number of people are waiting for transplants of various organs that would ensure them long and happy lives; hilarity ensues.
The way to respond to that dilemma is not to say "transplants don't actually work that reliably" or "in the real world the organ recipients' lives aren't likely to be as long or healthy as the quote-unquote donor's". It's to say "your utilitarian framework sucks; go find a better explanation for how morality connects to the real world".
Maybe "it doesn't work" is the way to sell the public on not-torturing. I'd still prefer an argument with a little more oomph.
The utilitarians have a better response than that; if that were common practice, people would soon get out of the habit of going to the hospital at all and the whole system of health care would come crashing down. If it happened all the time, that is—this argument seems to have a strongly Kantian flavor for one that's supposed to save utilitarianism, which isn't even a wizard cocksucker moral theory to start with.
Yeah, I'm familiar with that reply, actually. That's how you get to rule utilitarianism, right? I'm actually pretty sympathetic to that line. Seems like an abstract-enough set of utility rules basically equals morality.
But you guys are the philosophical professionals. My expertise in the field is limited to producing the sort of awful undergrad papers you have to grade.
this argument is going to be won or lost on practical, prudential grounds.
I think that's overoptimistic. The people who want to torture are members of the faith-based community, which means that they create their own reality through the exercise of will. Torture is just that will in its purest form--exerting that much force must accomplish something. They aren't vulnerable to practical, prudential arguments any more than to moral arguments.
They aren't vulnerable to practical, prudential arguments any more than to moral arguments.
Which is why you have to torture them. It's the only thing they understand.
I can't tell if I'm being mocked, but I despair. I don't know, I guess I think most people aren't really committed to torture, and the way to move the mushy middle is to have responsible national leaders get up there and say "The U.S. isn't going to do these things because they're wrong and don't work either," and maybe they'll have some influence. It's not like there was a massive grassroots movement for the Cold Room.
I was mocking, but only ever so little, because I despair in the same way. The comment I didn't write would have suggested working our hardest to remove the torturists from power, in a vein similar to that of 17.
working our hardest to remove the torturists
Which requires convincing the mushy middle to vote with us. Despair.
"Moral arguments are nice; I like them, and they can make a difference in some ways, but this argument is going to be won or lost on practical, prudential grounds."
Like these?
#11: In fact, the most effective rhetorical tool the abolitionists had were moral arguments, including first-hand stories by slaves and former slaves. I think you're mistaken, O., that the argument is going to be won or lost on pragmatic grounds, and I think that believing that is a serious problem--b/c it concedes that, *if* torture worked, one would be behind it.
Emotions and the moral sense are extremely powerful things to appeal to. I'm pretty sure that, in the end, empathy is a far more powerful motivator for action than reason.
Also, re: 13 -- seems like a regime of random organ harvesting could go a long way toward discouraging emergency room use, easing the burden on our overtaxed healthcare system. That's gotta be worth some utils, right? The savings could be used to finance preventive medicine clinics with a "no murdering for organs" guarantee. The leftover money funds a tax cut. Presto! Universal healthcare with bipartisan support.
Well, like I say, I think moral arguments have their uses, but there's a pretty severe disanalogy with slavery, in that slaves weren't really "the enemy," nevermind an apparently completely merciless enemy.
Indefinite detention could be considered a form of?
Opponents of abolition worried that emancipation without deportation would have resulted in a what kind of war?
The parallels don't work completely, especially since the worry about slave revolts was worry about an enemy within and the war on terrorism is about the enemy without, but I don't think they can be discounted too easily.
Except during slave revolts, obviously.
Another disanalogy is that slavery was everywhere visible, but torture is easily ignored.
In re: merciless enemy: It doesn't seem that we've discussed the argument that goes "Lots of these people are just random cabdrivers or people who got narked on by their neighbors or other people we tortured." I wonder if that would move anyone, though it does seem to concede that it might be OK to torture the right person, which would be wrong.
re 27--As many cases of complete innocents as are turned up, the "worst of the worst" argument keeps showing up out there, as though the exceptions only prove the "awful baddies must be detained and repeatedly hit, and if we've detained and hit people, they must be awful baddies" rule.
That Volokh thread was, well, disheartening.
Yeah, I guess one thing I want to say is "Start giving KSM an attention slap, and the next thing you know you're pulpifying a taxi driver who drove past the base at the wrong time. Will people listen? I hope the mushy middle will.
I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, 'Why didn't you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?' They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn't even bother to ask questions.
re 26: Slavery was not everywhere visible in the states that had abolished it and, after about 1830 or so when serious efforts to end slavery in the remaining slave states died out, it was in the free states that the moral argument had the most force. A similar case can be made regarding support in England for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies.
The problem with the 'innocent cabdriver' argument is that the answer is 'nobody's perfect'. If we're allowed to torture some people, and it's really really important that we do torture those people, then it's completely unreasonable to object when we use up a certain number of innocent cab drivers.
I have to think B. is right -- the convincing argument here is going to be that torture is wrong and horrifying and disgusting and that decent countries don't torture. This can be supported with practical arguments: that it's particularly disgusting because it's uselessly cruel, rather than usefully cruel, but the base argument is that it's just unacceptable.
it was in the free states that the moral argument had the most force. A similar case can be made regarding support in England for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies
Yeah, and in fact I just read Bury The Chains, which is the big counterargument in the back of my head. There's some compatibility between visibility/invisibility and matters/is abstract, but I'm going to need to think about how to explain that.
Except that your argument is flippable. Given sufficiently horrible possible outcomes (TTB), we're all OK with torture.
People react to and judge torture based on a whole series of factors, most of which we don't talk about; at some point, you have to realize that the important thing is to preserve certain spaces for people who react as you do. Keep the Blue States Free!!!!
Who are you addressing, Tim?
flippable
Were you a debater?
How is Bury the Chains? My understanding of the British movement is pretty thin and I've been meaning to look it up.
I thought it was quite good, but I'm no historian: I liked all the colorful characters.
Uh, no pun intended.
Hey, historians like colorful characters too, we're just not supposed to admit it.
I was sort of confused when slavery was brought up and it was immediately accepted that if torture were more like slavery, the argument would be easier. I fnd this confusing because when it was asserted that "There's nothing self-evident about the wrongness of torture," I took it that this was in the sense that there's nothing self-evidently wrong with anything.
If people are willing to accept that there is anything which is absolutely wrong, I don't know see how they could find that torture doesn't fall under that description.
I also find the torture::slavery analogy problematic because it seems to me that no matter how much white people tried not to think of it, torture was an accepted part of a more generally awful slave order. Maybe it was an essential part of that awful system.
Frederick Douglass felt it necessary to conclude his speeches about how being property can destroy a person's spirit by taking off his shirt to show his whipping scars. His existential arguments about living in fear and subjugation needed that physical remainder of pain to shock the (almost entirely white) audiences into sympathy.
In a weird way, though, right-wing defenders of torture seem to ascribe too much agency to people under detention. How many times how that Al-Qaida handbook found in Afghanistan, the one that, I hear, suggests that prisoners allege that they were tortured, been cited on right-wing blogs? (Hey, Gary, if you'd care to track down the info on this, I promise to link to you for evermore.) Should the Red Cross register complaints, then people find a way for the Red Cross to be complicit in the deception. Should the decent midranking officers and JAGs find that a crime was committed, then it was a few bad apples, duly prosecuted.
While the denial tactics are not dissimilar from those used in the mid-1800s slave era, I really hope that they have less basis in law, tradition, and politics than did the "peculiar institution." Slavery as policy had been in effect for generations before a meaningful opposition had even gathered.
Now, were we to add the colonial tradition into the mix, I think we'd see some more apposite comparisions.
Just out of curiousity, how many here find meaningful in any way the claim that 19th-c America did do colonialism but in its own territory, the South? (Myself, I find it a useful provocation for furious counter-argument, yet it doesn't quite leave my mind.)
ARgh, too long, especially for an Unfogged thread.
Maybe this is part of the problem: most people already think torture is wrong - even if that's not self-evident, I suspect most people are starting from this assumption or else there wouldn't be such an effort to avoid using the term - so the argument revolves around making exceptions. Anti-slavery activists had to convince people that slavery was wrong: they were arguing about a previously accepted system. We're arguing on a potentially slippery slope; they were trying to climb out of a pit.
Also, in terms of scale slavery was obviously far more widespread than indefinite detention: I don't mean to imply equivalence here. I brought it up because I was thinking about how situations involving moral and pragmatic arguments worked out in the past.
Yes, the abstract / invisible parallel is, I think, quite a good one. Which is why, again, first-person accounts (of whatever--slavery, torture, abortion, even being searched before boarding airplanes) are so important. As an abstract intellectual exercise, we tend to distance ourselves from those affected, making it easier to judge; when it comes to first-person narratives by those who've experienced it, we tend to identify with the narrator.
Jackmormon, you probably don't want to get me started on the colonialism within the US question. I'm not entirely sure where I'd end up - a lot depends on the details: colonialism w/respect to states? territories? people/groups of people? which time periods? - but it would probably take a long time for me not to get there.
Also, I feel like I'm posting too much.
EB,
I'm not an Americanist, but I played one for long enough in front of students that the colonialist argument began to worry at me. Do you have have any reading suggestions?
Regarding torture, I find the idea that a line can be drawn between right and wrong dangerous. I don't care where that line is, like the Halkan Council, I vote we all stay as far from any possible place it might be, as far to the civilized side that is.
That anyone, but especially leaders, in my society would justify torture or perpetrate it changes fundamentally what my society, my country is. And destructively so.
Not to go all Godwin on you, but I believe in that fragility, that veneer thinness of civilization.
My father served and fought, in Hitler's army. That doesn't give me any special insight. It just means that I believe that any society can go to unspeakable places even as its members generally feel safely wrapped in an insulating blanket of goodness and moral values.
When we urge our congressional representatives to plug any loophole, to ban all torture, to err on the side of civilized caution, we are asking them to preserve, or re-establish, (at least partially) what we need America to be, as unquestionably far from that line as possible.
re: reading list (anyone not interested should probably skip ahead now)
I can't think of too much specifically related to the internal colonialist argument; it's more something I've thought about and discussed than something I've concentrated on.
I'm not a big fan of most versions of it, which often seem to focus on the influence of outside capital in a peripheral region without saying too much about politics. Even given the economic differences, it's a strange sort of colonialism in which every individual state (colony?) is equal to every other, every citizen should be equal to every other - admittedly, an ongoing process and an ideal, but one with real force - and in which citizens of any state could go on to become President or fill leadership roles in Congress (again, by legal status, with certain exceptions: foreign born, for example). But when you get into the territorial stage - which lasted for different lengths of time in different places - and especially when you talk about Native Americans, colonialism becomes a much more relevant point of reference.
Anyway, I'd probably be of more help in terms of readings on regional history: my focus was really on the West, rather than the South.
I can give you a few suggestions, but if you'd like a larger list, it'd probably be better if you e-mail me (eb1871 at hotmail dot com) : I'm not comfortable naming people I know personally.
But here goes, based on my admittedly brief experience:
C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South is still worth reading - even 50 years later - and he's got a chapter called "The Colonial Economy."
Edward Ayers' Promise of the New South is very well done, and covers the same time period, but in a different way. It's a good complement to Woodward (and much more recent).
On the west, Robbins, Colony and Empire overstates the case, polemically, but there's a chapter in there on the West and the South in comparison.
And there's a chapter in Rethinking American History in a Global Age on American settlement in comparative perspective.
And...ok, I'll stop now. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Ogged, I think you're really wrong on this one, pretty much for the reason eb states. There's no necessary reason to discard moral argument as if it is *exclusive* to the pragmatic arguments. Not just because the moral argument has legitimate intellectual force to it, but because it is fact very likely to sway many people. Both because I do think American institutions have some human possibility within them that is largely unique and because many Americans are distinctively swayed by moral arguments. You may not win quickly with them, but underneath they're rotting away at the foundations of immoral conduct.
What I think you're right about is not a moral argument against torture but the rhetorical tactics of many who make it. The more those who make the argument paint themselves on the side of the angels, as pristine moral agents, and couple the argument against torture with a wide array of political positions, the more they undercut their own case, make it easier to make torture another one of those things that separates "resolution" from "weakness". It's a only-Nixon-could-go-to-China thing: arguing against torture effectively on moral grounds has to come from a position that accepts the legitimacy of some kind of "war on terror"--in fact, that may be where the moral and pragmatic argument fuse most powerfully, that maintaining legitimacy as a moral agent in the war against terrorism is the most powerful necessary strategic objective in that war. To maintain that legitimacy you have to take the moral arguments against torture seriously and internalize them deeply: they can't just be superficialities or performances.
About internal colonialism of the South, in Reconstruction. Why, it's a fine example of US colonialism as we know it: an undermanned, underfunded occupation following on an admirable conventional victory. The occupation's professed high purpose was swiftly undermined by an absence of commitment to that high purpose and a fair degree of boodling, culminating in a premature withdrawal and leaving the region in the hands of just the sort of oppressors the US initially overthrew.
No torture that I know of, for that you have to wait for the Philippines. Then you get concentration camps, too!
I think eb's right to suggest that the West is at least as good an object-lesson as the South, if not better. The territorial stage was made to last longer in certain territories, where there was an obvious point of racial or indeed cultural conflict (as a Jack Mormon must know). I won't go the reading list route here, though you can email me if you want to ask.
Re: 3 - "But the torture reports make you apoplectic or they don't, and it's not easy to talk yourself down from being beserk over it."
I couldn't agree more.
I'm just not sure we can win arguments with the torture advocates. I hope we try, and I hope we DO win the argument, but I'm increasingly pessimistic that we can.
This is what makes the apoplectic rage I feel when reading those smug bastards on Volokh sneering at torture such an impotent rage
In my darker moments all I can think is that those people really need a fucking good beating and also that maybe the only way the forces of 'rightness' can win this kind of battle is the way that similar battles were won in the past - through actual violence. And that's such a depressing thought.
Nattar,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
We all have the capacity for torture, but we all have the capacity for compassion as well. Yes, it is jarring when one first realizes that we are not 'special,' we do not contain some unique goodness that separates us from the 'evil' people in the past who did evil things.
"There but for the grace of God go I."
The next step after acknowledging the darkness in our nature is to nurture the brightness. Moral arguments will persuade some. Emotional arguments will persuade even more. And sometimes the forces of history are too strong to be overcome.
But if Camelot is to last but a day does that mean it is not worth fighting for? Does that mean one should wallow in the darkness that is fear and self pity and meaness?
Of course not.
I don't have much to add except that I think the moral argument is stronger because the pragmatic argument is probably wrong: I want to believe that torture doesn't work, but it's likely that it isn't wholly useless. Given the perceived High Stakes Scenario, anything less than wholly useless will be a reasonable action.
Our answer can't be an empirical defeasible "It doesn't work"; better to frame it as "Even if it does work, we're better than that."
we're better than that
We can be.
How's this frame: "You want to live like a animal?"
The easy quip back is "yes" but that opens the door to the "choose the light" sermon.
Rotten html tags. Put the F word between "a" and "animal" in my comment above.
OT vis a vis torture, but related to the GWOT. Padilla was finally indicted. In Miami. I don't get the venue. Was he arrested in Chicago? His first lawyer was in New York, and they've been holding him in South Carolina. At any rate, I'm glad that he's finally got access to the court system.
EB, slolernr, thanks for taking up my question. Especially thanks for the short reading list (easier not to be dissuaded that way).
I think people are picking the wrong pragmatic argument ("it doesn't work"). The much more powerful one is that moral reputation is actually an important tool of "soft power" in a global ideological conflict. All the people who wanted to play hardball with the Soviets in various proxy conflicts, well, look back at what they accomplished. It's not very clear that all the games played with espionage and spying mattered. It's not very clear that landmines in Angola or arming Somalia and Ethiopia mattered. It's not very clear that contras and mining harbors in Nicaragua mattered.
What mattered in the end was the unsustainability of state socialism on one hand and on the other, the relative material and political attractiveness of Western societies, coupled with an arms race that the West was better able to sustain and a resolute general strategy of containment and toughness at the negotiating table. (Containment as defense of core territories.) A few proxy wars did matter: bleeding the Russians dry in Afghanistan with counterinsurgencies (though that turned out to be pretty costly post-Cold War), for example. But in all of that, I think the proposition that the West, even at its worst, was deeply committed to human rights, human dignity, liberty also mattered a lot. It was a pragmatic asset in a long-term struggle, a part of soft power.
That's what we're in danger of squandering when we try to justify "light" torture as a generally legitimate tool, or to argue for indefinite detention with no judicial review, or any of the other tactics of this Administration. It's a subtle thing, perhaps, but I think it's possibly the subtle thing which matters most, the finger on the scales.
In my darker moments all I can think is that those people really need a fucking good beating and also that maybe the only way the forces of 'rightness' can win this kind of battle is the way that similar battles were won in the past - through actual violence. And that's such a depressing thought.
I often wonder if people who just think folks need a good beating have ever really gotten a good beating, or known someone who's gotten a good beating (and I'm not talking about you, NattarGcM, but the torture advocates). Because I imagine that if they'd ever known, up close, what a good beating really encompasses, they'd be reluctant to wish it upon most everyone.
eb's slavery analogy seems right to me, even if the parallel isn't exactly perfect. The spirit is right. All social struggles in our country (abolition, civil rights, women's suffrage, the labor movement) have held the moral argument as their irrefutable trump card. The "we're better than this" argument is powerful, and capable of swaying millions of citizens who want their country to be the best it can be. Practical arguments should always be employed to strengthen the moral argument, but the rhetoric should always go something like, "It doesn't work because of x, y and z, it turns more people against us and demonstrated by a, b, and c, but ultimately it's wrong, and we know it's wrong, and we must end it." This is how all winning social arguments in the US have been framed.
Ogged, I don't know if you saw Kleiman's take?
BitchPhD and others have the right idea, I think, in presenting moral arguments against torture. I'd expect that the vast majority of Americans who think torture is okay in some vague set of circumstances are thinking in abstractions. Making it personal, by saying, "Would you want your kids to suffer the same experience?" might change that. Offsetting that, of course, is what I'm afraid is a common view toward victims of torture, similar to one view of people wrongly imprisoned: Maybe they weren't guilty of X, but they're bad people, certainly guilty of something. It's hard to counter irrationality.
I disagree totally that we need to get into a moral pissing contest ("but torture is wrong because____"). Torture is just wrong. It's wrong and bad for the same reason we tell kids not to hurt other kids...because it just f****ng wrong!!
This isn't rocket science!! It's wrong wrong wrong, and you're an idiot if you don't believe it.
The simple fact is that we can't win an insurgency against people that BELIEVE we are BAD PEOPLE if we constantly PROVE THEM RIGHT!!
The moral argument is that torture turns the one doing the torture into an animal, an amoral being with no sense of right and wrong. There is an element of the instrumental in this - torture is wrong because of its result. But at the same time it is not a "practical" argument, such as, we shouldn't torture because some day they will torture us in response, or we shouldn't torture because it doesn't work. The instrumental arguments are inferior because they suggest that torture would be ok if it did work.