Collateral damage - torture. Even a dog can tell the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked.
Not to mention the exclusion of the U. S. A. in 1945, which murdered a couple hundred thousand civilians (I guess you could call them ‘collateral damage’) for the express purpose of avoiding a ground assault.
Despite this immoral action by a civilized nation, the populace was, in fact, ‘won over.’
Where does all this fit in the discussion?.
Well, first of all, before you enter a war, you should make sure you have strong moral grounds for doing so. Our intervention in Bosnia for example, was right and proper. Our involvement in WWII was right and proper. Vietnam, eh … not so much (as in, not much at all). Iraq … not at all, period. It is one thing to harm civilians in an attempt to overthrow a government that is wreaking havoc on innocents in other countries and within its own borders. It’s another thing to harm civilians of a government that doesn’t pose a clear and immediate threat to others. That’s the basic problem here.
We need to proceed with war-making with a lot more reason than we had in Iraq.
As for torture vs. collateral damage: the basic problem with torture is that it is almost useless as a way of gathering information. The terrorists tell thier members: “just resist for 24 hours, so we can move out and change our codes.” So even if the captured terrorist spills his or her guts, we still don’t get any useful info that will let us capture more terrorists, we just force them to do something they are organized to do anyway.
Not that torture is used to gather information, for the most part. In most parts of the world, it’s a terror weapon used by the government against its own citizenry. It’s not a good idea to give your government permission to torture for this reason. Eventually, the techniques used on external enemies will be used on internal enemies, and we’re in the same shithole with those African and South American and Middle Eastern dictatorships that consider all political enemies fair game. You wanna be in that elect society of nations? What ambitions you must have …
It’s possible to torture information out of people without doing them too much physical harm. Sleep deprivation is more useful than pain-centered torture for getting info because it’s so disorienting … leaves the victim in a vastly altered state of consciousness where they may not even be aware that they’re spilling their guts.
Even so, torture is bad for the torturers. It’s one thing to ask a soldier to kill to defend himself and his squad from attack. It’s another to ask him or her to harm someone who poses no threat. If the person isn’t a sadist, it will likely make them very, very unhappy and uncomfortable. They’ll need counseling at the very least. If they are a sadist, it could make them uncomfortable as well, because they’ve likely erected barriers to control their sadism so they can get along in the world, and making them a torturer will breach those barriers.
Torture is a VERY bad thing, a VERY bad idea, and drawing an equivalence between it and collateral damage is just stupid.
Well, if you think the governmenbt of Imperial Japan, which was engaged in slaughtering hundreds of thosuands, maybe millions, in a war of aggression, was the same as the govenrment of Iraq at the time of the invasion, it might have some bearing. But it isn’t, so it doesn’t.
I just wanted to point out that the goal of war is not to kill people; it’s to render the enemy incapable of waging war. If the goal was to kill people then there would be no need for smart weapons or for taking prisoners.
I’m sure that we can agree that in some cases, the vast majority of people would agree that torture could be justified. The classic example is the terrorist who knows the codes to shut down a nuclear bomb that’s going to go off in the national capitol. You torture him for the codes without regrets.
But the reality is that this situation hardly ever occurs. More realistically, you pick up some guy who might have some connection to some other guy, and you lean on him and slap him around to see if he’ll cooperate. You don’t know for a fact that the guy is a terrorist, you don’t know for a fact if he has really committed any crimes, you don’t know for a fact that he has time-sensitive information, you don’t know for a fact that he has any valuable intelligence at all. And so, willy-nilly, torture becomes the policy for everyone who is picked up as a suspected terrorist or insurgent. There’s no way to tell the hadjis apart, so you torture all of them, and either they give you good intelligence or not, it doesn’t matter if they are innocent or guilty or in between.
We have to have policies against torture. We have to punish torturers. My rule of thumb is that if a cop or soldier isn’t willing to risk his career for the imformation, if he wouldn’t gladly go to jail afterwards, then perhaps the information wasn’t all that important anyway. So you can face a jury or a court-martial with a clear conscience in the nuclear-bomb scenario. The last thing we need is an official waiver that will allow the torture of innocents and/or the guilty. If you absolutely positively need to torture some perp and go ahead we’ll decide what to do with you later. But the torturer certainly shouldn’t get a blank check to torture. Otherwise, we will inevitably have more situations like Abu Graib. Torture as routine.
Does torture “work”? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I suspect torture will be more effective against middle-class suburban officeworkers than against fanatical death-obsessed Islamicists. But that is irrelevant. We have prohibitions against torture, not because we are worried that the information gained through torture might be inaccurate, but because we don’t want to give the government the authority to torture us. Because the fact is, the government authorized torturers aren’t always going to be torturing “them”, they are going to be torturing US. You, your family, your neighbors, not just those people with strange accents and funny ideas and different complexions. Oh, you want to be able to torture foreigners, but not real Americans? How is that going to work, exactly?
I think Martin Hyde nailed it in post #3 of this thread.
Both are bad, but one is simply not avoidable (unless you take a 100% pacifist stance). So you don’t torture because you don’t HAVE to, but you allow collateral damage to avoid being conquered and/or killed yourself.
Oh really? But apparently, “everything that can be done” doesn’t include torturing terrorists?
This is precisely the avoidance I was talking about. We are accustomed to accepting that we can always blame the deaths on the enemies, and so leave us in the clear. And maybe it does. But that actually doesn’t change what I’m talking about, in that we are still prepared to accept the inevitability of those deaths as a price to meeting an objective we value more highly: i.e. war. We can avoid war, and risk greater evil. But we can also risk greater evil by not torturing.
It’s easy to create or imagine situations in which it might wlel yeild useful information. And it’s not clear what moral high ground you are talking about. War, as many tell us, is a dirty business. So is torture. But what I want to know is: why one and not the other?
Just as a willingness too shell populated areas, or in the oft defended case of Hiroshima, to incinerate thousands, removes any incentives for enemies not to do the same (indeed, the logic of someone like Osama is coldly true: he sees the West as being at war with his brand of militant Islam, therefore if a mass killing of civilians can plausibly make Americans surrender, or at least fall into a tactical trap that will eventually lead to their defeat, it’s worth it, just as it was in Hiroshima.)
Habit is not an ethical argument unless there is some ethical value to maintaining habits for habit’s sake.
Just to be clear: some might believe that my motive in asking this question is to call INTO question either collateral damage or our prohibition against torture. But actually, I’m not as interested in those questions as I am by some very odd problems with conventional moral calculus itself. This is only one of many many different problems Polerius alludes to.
This first sentance is a giant cop out, conceeding in the parathentical the very point you are trying to reject! BOTH are avoidable. You may not like the outcome of avoiding CD-heavy wars (which is clearly not the same thing as being 100% pacifist), but I might not like the outcome of 100% anti-torture stance either. So what? How does this really make the two things qualitatively any different? You’re a smart guy, but this above paragraph is some very poor reasoning. You don’t torture because you don’t have to, but in the case of CD, you did it because you had to? Why? Because there was something more important to achieve that outweighs the inevitable CD. But the exact same could be said for torture!
As Alan Dershowitz has pointed out, it is not only plausible but quite likely that we will within our lifetimes face situations in which terrorists threaten a major city with a nuclear weapon, and one of our only resources are prisoners whom we can torture: the classic ticking bomb scenario.
If we refuse to torture these guys we are left, as a nation, with some pretty bizarre moral values. For instance, we are willing to conscience, if not applaud, the incineration of several entire civilian cities in WW2 for somewhat dubious gains, but we are not willing to cause transitory pain to a few guys to prevent the incineration of an entire city? That’s moral consistency?
But that’s exactly the point. We KNOW that this is the case. We ACCEPT that going ahead anyway will result in innocent death. I’m not saying that that is a bad choice. It may well be necessary (I certainly lean towards a sincere evaluation of individual cases rather than a general rule or a mass dismissal of CD costs as some seem inclined to do). But it is part of the package of outcomes that we knowingly choose. That is the case no matter how sorry we are that it happens or however much we WISH we could avoid it, or even however much we lay the ultimate moral blame at the feet of those who made the hard choice necessary.
The failure of your analougy is that the dog was intentionally stumbled over (we had to get to work and the dog was in our way) and only reluctantly kicked (it was, you see, attacking a child at the time). Of course, the chosen stumble also kills and/or maims the dogs, and the kick is merely painful.
And how would condoning torture rectify that situation? Do 2 wrongs make a right?
I disagree. The same cannot be said for torture. I do not believe we could have won WWII without killing at least some civilians (although I would certainly concede that we could have killed fewer civilians). However, I DO believe that we could have been victorious without employing torture.
I don’t see how torturing prisoners would result in thwarting such a situation.
I think you’re creating a hypothetical dilemna which has never actually existed.
If it would be okay to torture foreigners, why would it not be okay to torture Americans for equally important information which could be critical to public safety?
If you think it is okay to torture people for war related information, is it okay to torture people for homeland security information? For criminal information? Where do we draw the line?
In my mind, we draw the line at torturing anybody for any information. Seems to me to be a pretty basic moral decision that separates us from the brutal regimes that will torture anyone for any reason.
But I haven’t argued that either is a wrong in the first place. I can imagine specific and/or real situations in which I either one would be wrong, but that isn’t sufficient to rule either of them out of usage or moral imperative.
Which is neither here nor there. This is like arguing that because you can’t win ping pong by using a baseball bat, you should not ever use a baseball bat. Sure, we didn’t need torture to win WW2 (though I’m not entirely sure that we didn’t use it and that it didn’t help) But if our objective is win a baseball game, a baseball bat might well come in handy.
Because they know where and when the strike will take place, or have information regarding how to track down and stop the attacks. To act like this situation is implausible and beneath serious discussion simply sets us up for not having any forethought if and when it drops in our lap.
It’s also avoiding the question. If I can imagine a serious hypothetical in which it is permissible and indeed morally imperative to use torture, then it appears that we are no longer talking about a principled rejection of the tactic, but rather simply haggling about the price of when and where to use it and what the stakes have to be to make it worthwhile.
It would be okay.
Why isn’t it okay to kill Americans in the course of trying to acheive greater objectives in a wartime situation? It is okay.
I don’t know if it is okay. I just don’t see how one can undertake a cost/benefit calculation in terms of causing CD (yes, the means is bloody, but the objective is important) and then spin around and complain about how the ends cannot justify the means. What?
What separates us from the brutal regimes that murder citizens for any reason or are careless in their causing of CD in war? It seems like a lot serparates us from then, not least of which is that we generally have good reasons.
You asked in your OP why we condone CD but not torture. We often condone doing things for self preservation that we would not condone for other reasons. That’s not a cop out, that’s reality. If we thought torture was absolutely necessary for self preservation, we’d condone that, too. In your nightmare nuclcear bomb scenario, most people WOULD condone torture. But we haven’t been there yet. Perhaps we’d even condone a 24-like scenario of torturing the suspect’s family rather than the suspect himself.
War, OTOH, is absolutely impossible to execute w/o CD. So, given the assumption that self-preservation is an end which we strive to achieve, this is one instance when the ends does justify the means. And anyone who says the ends never justifies the means is kidding himself.
I always answer in the same way to this dilemna :
In this “ticking bomb” scenario, using torture might be the only recourse. Use it. But know that you won’t get a pass. It’s still a crime, and you’ll still be tried for it.
If, in your opinion, the danger isn’t worth spending some years in a jail, then we can safely assume that it’s not worth using torture, either.
Apparently we disagree on the meaning of your phrase “regrettable outcome”.
?
No, it’s not like that at all. It’s more like arguing that you can’t win any game with a handful of mashed potatoes, or a wet noodle, or some equally useless object.
O.K., except we’re not talking about a baseball game, nor are we talking about a baseball bat. The analogy is inapt.
But I already said that torture is not a particularly effective method of acheiving this result. I can stand on my head and eat a banana in the hopes that it will track down and stop the attacks, but unless there’s some reason to believe it will help, I don’t see the point.
I do believe such a result is implausable, but I did not say it’s “beneath serious discussion”. I believe we are discussing it right now. Do you care to give us some examples of wars that were won through torture that could not have been won otherwise?
But I don’t think you have proven your case. I could say, “I can imagine a situation in which raping my sister would be morally imperative”, but unless I actually have some evidence to suggest it’s true, it’s merely an unfounded statement.
Clair is correct.
Look, there are lots of things which we forbid our government to do, even if on a case-by-case basis they might seem like good things to do. We don’t allow the government to abridge free speech, even when someone is a jackass. We don’t allow the government to abrdige freedom of religion, even if they belong to Fred Phelps’ church. We exclude evidence that would convict obviously guilty perps because the cops gathered the evidence in the wrong way. We say that a person cannot be compelled to testify against themselves, even if it would solve many crimes if we could just make the perp get up on the stand and admit they did it. We don’t allow cops to beat up perps, even if they richly deserve it.
Why do we do those things? Because we realize that if we allow the cops to beat up perps who richly deserve it, next thing you know they’re going to be beating up perps who only slightly deserve it, then on perps who don’t deserve it, then on grandmothers and little kids. So the rule is, no beating the crap out of people, no exceptions. And of course there are exceptions. Cops do carry out their own brand of justice on the mean streets. And maybe on balance we are better off because they do. But on balance we would certainly be worse off if we openly authorized them to do this.
If you need to torture someone but it isn’t important enough to spend a few years in jail over, then maybe it isn’t important enough to torture them over.
That’s a wonderful way to sum it up. If you really are going to save the human race, or modern civilisation, then by all means rip up the rule book and demonstrate that we were so very very wrong. But if you’re wrong, don’t expect leniency.