Note Apos does not respond to Lemur’s point. So far it’s looking like game, set and match goes to Lemur.
It is bizarre and unfair indeed to expect me to respond to an onslaught of posts, and if I don’t get to something immediately, it is assumed that I am ignoring it.
Sure: but that itself gives the game away. There are situations in which CD is justified, and their are situations in which torture is justified. Why should there be a general approval for one, arguably much greater harm in the course of a good end, and a hard and fast line against another much lesser harm in the course of a generally much GREATER good: line that most people even eventually break down and admit isn’t realistic?
In terms of CD, you actually know that many of the expendables ARE indeed innocent, that they have not committed any crimes that you know about, and indeed you know that you have absolutely no cause to threat their lives in particular.
One could say the exact same thing about CD, and yet we don’t. We accept that our military commanders have some degree of judgement about what is too reckless. We accept that they will not be “willy-nilly” in their bombing campaigns, and when they are, we condemn them.
This isn’t an argument.
Again: I’m unmoved by this because there isn’t such a standard for CD. The inevitable outcome of most military operations in civilian areas is CD. Would you really be willing to say that if military operation that risks CD isn’t important enough for commanders to go to jail if there is CD, then maybe it’s not so important? If so, I commend you, but you stand in stark contrast to the realities of modern warfare and the normal progress of our military justice system. We’d certainly end up with a whole lot of soldiers in jail.
CD, which is arguably a much worse harm, is already far far more routine than the approved torture of a few carefully selected figures with time sensitive information that could save many lives.
Again, you are acting like I am making a case for torture. I’m not. I’m making the case that there is a gross disconnect between our feelings about the rightness of torture and our feelings about CD. I don’t know whether I support either, but I am intrigued by the idea that one could support one but not the other.
So my response to your paragraph here is not to disagree with you, but again, to point out that the government apparently has the authority to cause far worse harm through CD (and in the case of WW2, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents in a single targeted attack that we blame on our enemies for making necessary) than it would from the ability to torture in even more limited circumstances.
It’s not. But then, perhaps our acceptance of CD is premised on the idea that it will only ever affect foreigners?
Not anymore. The next time a plane is hijacked and is headed for a tall builidng, don’t be surprised if the airforce shoots it down rather than let it crash into the building. We got caught with our thumbs up our asses last time.
I understand what you’re getting at Apos and I agree that its odd that we’re prepared to accept massive levels of CD but not even a slap to a known terrorist for a tangible gain.
I think many posters are thinking along the lines that war is inevitable, CD is inevitable in wartime, therefore CD is inevitable: which is true but ignores the all important attempts to mitigate CD.
An army can always do more to avoid civilian casualties. Of course, in many cases this would result in a far higher death toll among this army’s soldiers. So we (the people for whom the army is fighting) agree that civilians on THEIR side are more expendable than OUR professional fighters. Like it or lump, that is how it is done.
In the case of torture then (and let’s, for the sake of argument limit this to enemy combatants who have, beyond doubt, been involved in fighting our troops), it does seem odd that we would baulk at inflicting a measured amount of pain - even if it were to save the lives of some of our troops.
In other words, we’re prepared to kill innocent civilians to save our soldiers but not harm in any way enemy combatants once they are out of the field of combat.
… to achieve the same aim.
Like it or lump? 
I think I see the problem – you’re approaching this as an abstract, while the solution is a practical matter, as has been pointed out repeatedly.
Well, abstractly speaking, maybe the problem is that a captured terrorist is under our protection – we have captured him, removed his liberty and his ability to defend himself from us, so an attack by us on a captive is in a sense a betrayal. Even though there’s no real contract between a captured terrorist and us, there’s a sense that how he’s treated while in our custody REFLECTS on who we are.
Now the civilian populace of an enemy state is not in any sense ours, nor under our protection. It’s up to that other government to protect them. We won’t kill them unnecessarily, but it’s not really our job to preserve their lives.
This is wispy stuff indeed compared to the practical realities of war, but may account for the inconguency you perceive.
Another small problem with torture - some people might say anything, just to get the hurting to stop. Some people might purposely give the wrong information, just to spite the torturers. And some might die without saying anything at all because they’re so dedicated to the cause. And of course his friends on the outside might become slightly desperate - nobody wants to be captured alive only to be tortured to death.
Yeah, war isn’t nice, and it’d be great if we didn’t do it. But if we’re going to fight, we’re going to try to fight nicely. If the civilian gets bombed because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, sorry, we didn’t mean to, and we’ll try to do better. A combatant who has surrendered/been captured is already in our power, and it would be counterproductive to hurt him or her further.
That depends on whether you think moral judgements should seek to maintain some sort of abstract consistency, or whether they should just basically be THEMSELVES a mean to an end: to make easier the paths and conventions we’ve already chosen.
I’m not sure, again, that this holds up. Under the Geneva convention, the people in Iraq are under our protection. Killing them in the course of a greater end could be seen as just as much of a betrayal. And again, this “contract” is largely subjective: I’m not sure why it should affect moral judgements of whose’s life or pain is worth more or less than other people’s.
While not precisely racism, this is basically the same idea: different people’s lives are worth different amounts depending on where they happen to live. I don’t think morality can take this seriously, given that the whole point of universal moral reasoning is to try cut out the irrelevancies of tribal affiliation, gender, and so on when considering the wrongs done to various people and weighing them.
I believe we’ve already covered this. Yes, just as the efficacy of specific military attacks can be questioned because the CD might be too high, the efficacy of certain tortures might be questioned because the subject might be too well-trained or not well informed. But this is, again, just a matter of haggling over the relative price of the acts in specific situations, which is not the same thing as saying one is permissible and the other is not. Even if it is far less likely that we’ll find ourselves in a situation in which torture is worth the risk of trying it, that doesn’t make torture less viable or justifiable as an option: it just means that the chance comes up less.
This raises another moral bizzarity, namely, that people are willing to countencence KILLING someone in order to deter other murders, but not torturing people to deter crime. They are willing to set people up in situations where they are miserable (prison) or commonly subject to things as excruiatingly similar to torture as brutal rape, but not to actually directly torture them. Are prisoners and convicted murderers to be treated as means to ends or not?
But the whole point is that it is NOT always counter-productive. What I fear is that we see and the messiness of war as more acceptable than torture merely because of convention and historical accident rather than any sort of consistent moral standard.
And what deeply worries me is that I can see lots of similar bizarrities in many of our moral decisions, many of which the philosopher Peter Unger has written about (where some seemingly morally irrelevant but psychologically influential criteria), or Peter Singer has brought to the public attention (i.e. that we are OURSELVES willing to agree that 10$ is better spent on a starving child than on a lousy night at the movies, and yet feel no moral imperative to give away that 10$ to the child and are unwilling to consider someone who chooses the movie over the child a monster, even though they WOULD be willing to call a monster who didn’t spend 10$ to buy a rope to save a drowning child or an epi-pen to save an allergic child).
Are we really against torture ?
Who knows what goes on, when certain “ally” countries, with terrible human rights records interogates terrorists for example. Would we turn down valuable info, if it was known that it came from some lowlife terrorist who had the info extracted from him/her using various techniques that certain whiny people find objectionable? I doubt it.
I support both torture and collatoral damage. It all depends on the circumstances of course.
Interesting point. Didn’t the US send several Iraqi detainees to Egypt soon after the recent invasion for that very purpose?
I support neither, for the record.
As mentioned earlier in the thread, if a domestic airliner were to be hijacked again over US soil, the air force would not hesitate to shoot it down. Would those passengers not also be under the protection of the US government?
They would be sacrificed for the greater good.
Of course, that’s not the best example, since those passengers are likely to die anyway.
But indeed, our morals aren’t consistent. They’re mostly based on gut reaction, ingrained social norms, upbringing, propaganda, etc…It certainly is upsettling when you take the time to think about it (I wish I could not think about it), but if you pit gut reaction against logic, gut reaction is going to win 99% of the time.
We’ve to learn to live with that, because there’s no way we’re going to find an internally consistent moral system anytime soon. Or more exactly, maybe we could find one, but we would perceive it as abhorent. Even if it objectively resulted in less harm being done.
For instance, in your example of the man who has an epi pen in his pocket he has no use for and let a kid who need it dying on his doorstep, using the line : “What? I gave 20 $ to a charity that feed starving children in Africa yesterday. I’m better than you!!” will bring him nowhere. He will be viewed as an heartless smartass. You try and publish an article in a paper congratulating him for his high morals. He’s perfectly right, though. He did more good than you.
You might be able to talk yourself into thinking he’s right, but try having a dinner with him and not thinking “He left a kid dying at his doorstep yesterday. He left a kid dying at his doorstep yesterday. He left…”. Have fun.
And maybe it’s a good thing. Because I can’t help thinking that someone who is systematically guided by his intellect rather than by his gut feeling is someone who doesn’t have any empathy. IOW, a sociopath. He’s excellent mass-murderer material if he can think of a good reason (a reason that you might not like).
Innocent civilians in, say, Falujah are likely to do die too. Admittedly not as likely as passengers in an airliner used as a missile, but likely none the less.
Also, I can quite easily conceive of a situation in which hijackers’ motives are unclear - a situation in which, if the hijacked plane had not been shot down, it could have landed without loss of life.
I know what you mean to say, but I have some challenges:
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the goal of military action is not about “killing people”.
It is to achieve a political result. If you threaten someone and they back down, you can achieve your objective without violence. In addition, highly effective miltary action (killing lots of people) can lead to stiffer resistance.
For example, one of the major problems with the US in Iraq is that the political objectives were and are terribly muddled. (The only reason for invading initially was the immediate threat of WMD’s. This turned out to be bogus. So suddenly the reason becomes regime change. This is illegal under UN laws. In addition, how do you tell terrorists apart from Iraqi loyalists who consider they are defending their homeland? When will US troops leave? What will constitute a legal Government? It’s worrying to see US forces bombing Iraqi cities. How does this accomplish peace?) -
you state “torture is to get information that ‘might’ save lives?”
How do you feel about torturing someone who doesn’t have the information? What does it say aobut your society that you are willing to use torture? -
you state “we’ve many times simply ended up killing innocent people and missing the enemy. We still accept the overall policy as a matter of course.”
Some of us don’t accept this.
Do you also accept ‘friendly fire’ as a natural consequence of US military action? -
one of the problems of having the most powerful armed forces is that politicians tend to think that should be the first response to problems.
Actually human rights organisations and various legal systems do object strongly to this. ANd it’s not tricky to mandate.
The worrying thing to me is that you think we all support this ‘hero’.