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 | Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 15:21:55 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
One thing I find disturbing in that post is that it contains the following two sentences, with no hint of irony:
Savage, who I think is also a conservative, inadvertently demonstrates this in her own criticism of his presidency, which considers individual rights no better than Bush protected them.
For example, I have no problems with the government torturing foreign combatants if that's what it takes to protect American citizens. And then, she is far easier on Bush's prosecution of the current war than he deserves.
Now, certainly, the United States government has no obligation to subsidize citizens of other nations, and for it to do so is an expression of unjustifiable altruism. It's equally true that it has no obligation to protect their rights; that's for their own governments to do. But it is NOT an expression of altruism to say that the United States government is not entitled to actively violate the rights of foreign citizens. Americans do not have the right to be exempt from torture because we are American citizens and have a special agreement with other American citizens that protects us from torture as a special privilege; that right is a basic moral principle. The United States government may legitimately stand by while other governments torture their citizens, but it may not legitimately sponsor such torture, or engage in it; it is not the legitimate function of governments to torture anyone.
It should also be noted that torture is not effective. It's long been known that information obtained through torture is unreliable; a victim of torture will eventually say whatever he thinks his torturers want to hear, without regard for the truth, hoping only to escape from pain. That's how many confessions to the practice of witchcraft were obtained, for example. And if the United States government practices the torture of foreign nationals, it is in no moral position to demand that foreign governments should not torture American captives. The establishment of a legal principle forbidding such torture was a major step toward decency, and it used to be expected that civilized governments would respect that principle. Under Bush, the United States took a large step toward outlawry.
And, finally, Americans should not imagine that a government that tortures is a safe government to have. The belief that a government will torture one group of people, but treat another as sacrosanct, is a reassuring fantasy, but that's all it is. The Bush administration has done a lot of really vile things, but I think their attempts to undermine the institutional barriers against torture is their single worst legacy. |
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| Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 17:44:45 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: Burgess Laughlin
E-mail: burgesslaughlin(at)macforcego.com
URL: http://www.aristotleadventure.blogspot.com
> "The belief that a government will torture one group of people, but treat another as sacrosanct, is a reassuring fantasy, but that's all it is."
I am puzzled by this idea. Try this substitution: The belief that a government will bomb one group of people, but treat another [it's own citizens] as sancrosanct, is a reassuring fantasy, but that is all it is. So our government shouldn't bomb other people.
If it is, under all circumstances, morally wrong to torture aggressive foreign enemies of a free country, then it is even worse to kill them. Death is worse than torture (as horrible as some forms of torture are).
So, should a free government take only peaceful actions against aggressive enemies? Boycotts? Shunning? Ridicule?
P. S. -- I worked as a volunteer for Amnesty International for several years, perhaps 30 years ago. I did a lot of reading about the methods used by right-wing and left-wing governments. I had recurring nightmares merely from reading the descriptions presented matter of factly. Many of the torturers were ghouls. However, to treat all forms of torture and all torturers alike--as being the worst possible--is to treat "torture" as a frozen abstraction.
I do support the use of torture against aggressive enemies in certain circumstances: there is no reasonable alternative, the expected information can be verified, and the sessions are fully objective, that is, the method of selecting the torturer (to weed out sadists), the names of the people involved, the goals, the methods, and the results are recorded in writing. This record need not be a file drawer full of paper. A single sheet might be sufficient under many circumstances.
In summary, under some conditions, torture of foreign aggressors in times of war or other emergency situations is moral if done objectively.
That exhausts my contribution. |
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| Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 19:06:56 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Jeff Montgomery
Anything goes, provided you claim to be God-fearing. Next to the "the good of the people", it may be the biggest moral blank check ever written. |
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| Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 19:11:07 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Grant Williams
E-mail: grant.d.williams at gmail
I would go even further than Mr. Laughlin and say that it is morally acceptable for the United States to knowingly support foreign governments who torture their own citizens. For tactical, and only tactical, reasons of course. It is not the United States' fault that these government behave they way they do. The US should not have to choose between it's own security (ie: it is easily demonstrable that by not supporting Government A, Government B's power reaches an unacceptable level) and the individual right of innocent people stuck inside an immoral country. |
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| Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 20:08:31 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: Don Kenner
E-mail: dbkenner(at)earthlink.net
"The belief that a government will torture one group of people, but treat another as sacrosanct, is a reassuring fantasy, but that's all it is."
I don't mean to be unduly harsh to William H. Stoddard, but this kind of platitude is typical of libertarian thinking and illustrates the difference between how Objectivists and libertarians approach an issue. I don't know if Stoddard is a libertarian, but if you troll their sites, or read their journals, you can read this kind of soft, intellectual-sounding pap all day long. It reminds me of so many lefty slogans that socialists always find profound, like "As long as there is one person in jail, no one is free" or "Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing is wrong."
It is amazing that people find this stuff profound or (worse) a guide to action. I tried to convince a liberal friend that having your fingernails pulled out with a pair of pliers or having electric shock applied to your genitals (by Palestinians) might be fate slightly worse than a waterboarding session at Guantanamo, regardless of how one feels about the ethics of waterboarding. He wouldn't even consider it. The U.S. waterboards terrorists so waterboarding is the worst torture on the earth. Good grief! |
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| Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 23:28:05 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
I must point out, specifically to Don Kenner, that his response to me is made up entirely of fallacies. He suggests that I am a libertarian, and condemns my approach as typically libertarian, without attempting rational refutation; I believe that's ad hominem. He goes on to compare my statement to other statements that he disagrees with, including statements made by leftists, and to characters an entire class of views in negative terms, without specific argument as to why my position is wrong. And finally, he equates my view to the views of a liberal friend of his, which he finds absurd. That's a classic straw man argument. It's a sad thing for Objectivism when someone who apparently claims to adhere to it can provide nothing but argumentative fallacies. Not that Mr. Kenner's statements are the fault of Objectivism, or evidence of any failings on its part; I disagree with the conclusions of Mr. Laughlin and Mr. Williams, but they certainly offered reasoned arguments for them.
Though I will question one of Mr. Laughlin's minor premises: that death is worse than torture. All through history, there have been people who chose suicide rather than face torture. Ayn Rand even showed us one of her heroes willing to kill himself rather than see another person face torture. A few minutes of life as someone who dies by their own choice and with as little suffering as can be managed may be a greater value than hours of tremendous pain inflicted by another's will. In asserting the contrary, Mr. Laughlin assumes too much. |
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| Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 6:47:33 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Billy Beck
E-mail: wjbiii(at)frontiernet.net
URL: http://www.two--four.net/weblog.php
On the day that the Y2K election disaster was finally sorted out, I wrote that Bush would be a "spectacularly rotten president".
I win. |
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| Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 7:35:50 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
Burgess Laughlin writes that "under some conditions, torture of foreign aggressors in times of war or other emergency situations is moral if done objectively." Even if that were true as an ethical principle for a government conducted according to rational principles, it's hardly relevant to the current United States government (or any other now existing), whose policies are shaped by two parties with little claim to rationality. Without the Enlightenment heritage of revulsion at the idea of torture, I expect that there would be open popular demands for its use against polluters, abortionists, atheists, and other unpopular minorities. Note that there have already been public assertions by some hardcore greens that global warming "deniers" should be treated as the moral equivalent of Nazis; the potential for hatred is there.
And I think the authors of the Bill of Rights had good reason to include absolute provisions against torture in it. If the government does practice torture, the job of torturer will be tremendously appealing to precisely the people who ought not to have it, by which I mean not so much gloating sadists as people who believe that they and other people have a duty to submit to the greater good. This is a natural path to the corruption of government. Many governments did routinely engage in torture when the Bill of Rights was written, both to punish people who were hated by the masses, such as religious dissidents, and to extract forced "confessions" from anyone accused of various forms of dissent. There were often legal codes regulating torture and specifying what forms could be used. But the use of torture still did not answer to anything that could be called rational criteria. Such strictures tend to erode over time; see for example the way that eminent domain has expanded away from its original strictures of "public purpose" and "just compensation."
Laughlin asks why we should suppose that a government that tortures external foes would torture its own citizens, when it's not reasonable to suppose that a government that bombed external foes would bomb its own citizens. Perhaps observation of the actual behavior of governments, even repressive governments, might count as evidence. In the world today, governments that bomb their own citizens are vanishingly rare; such a course is reserved for terrorist organizations against civilian populations they hope to rule. But governments that torture their own citizens are commonplace. A repressive American government could be expected to behave like other repressive governments. And it's possible to identify reasons for the difference. Governments are quite as likely to identify their own citizens as "enemies" as people of other countries; but bombing such "enemies" would reduce the government's ability to collect taxes and exploit the wealth of a country that it controls. Torture does not. Bombing is not in fact an effective method of controlling territory, and it's not used as such even in wartime; it's used to weaken an enemy country so that the armed forces can go in and take control on the ground, and, if they serve a repressive regime, subject the conquered population to measures such as torture. But the United States government already has control of the United States; it has no need to use bombing to soften us up. |
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| Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 14:50:58 mst
Comment ID: #9
Name: Valda Redfern
E-mail: valda.redfern(at)gmail.com
URL: http://valzhalla.blogspot.com
I cannot see any essential difference between torture and other forms of military action against a foreign enemy. The aim of war is to destroy the enemy's capacity to fight, by whatever means are most effective, however horrible. Wars are not concerned with the guilt or innocence of individuals. If a free country is attacked, the aggressor country is by that fact guilty and everyone who lives there, whether volitionally or not, is fair game. The only proper criterion of what military actions are permissible to a free country at war is ruthless self interest on behalf of its citizens: will firebombing a city help win the war or not? Will machine-gunning an army of conscripts help win the war or not? Will torturing a staff officer help win the war or not? I don't see what's special about torture in this context. |
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| Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 20:17:49 mst
Comment ID: #10
Name: Richard Watts
E-mail: rw1963(at)earthlink.net
William,
"But it is NOT an expression of altruism to say that the United States government is not entitled to actively violate the rights of foreign citizens."
Foreign citizens have the same rights as human beings that Americans do, summarized by the right to be free from the initiation of force. That is, they have the right not to have force used against them, but only provided they observe that same right of others. One cannot attack someone else and claim any right not to be harmed by the victim's self-defense. That would amount to claiming, "Every man has a right to his own life. I am a man, by my very nature as a human being I have a right to my life. And my victim is a man but he does not have that right." If one initiates an attack on others, he has rejected the principle of rights, and forfeits his right to his own life. His victims owe him nothing. They have no moral obligation to submit to death or damage because of his attack -- not so much as a scratch. Therefore, they should end the attack as quickly as possible, by the most effective means available to them, in order to sustain the least possible damage to themselves, preferrably while rendering their attacker incapable of doing them damage in the future.
A nation against whom an attack has been initiated, or under threat of such attack, has no moral obligation to the enemy soldiers. Those soldiers cannot claim they have a right not to be killed. All of a man's moral rights come from his right to his own life. How can an attacker, who forfeits his right to his life, have a right not to be tortured?
"And if the United States government practices the torture of foreign nationals, it is in no moral position to demand that foreign governments should not torture American captives."
A nation initiating attack does not respect its victims' right to their lives. Why would the attacker respect the right of its victims not to be tortured?
If the United States, in self-defense, tortures soldiers of an attacking nation, the U.S. certainly is still in a moral position to demand that foreign initiators of attacks on the United States not torture American captives -- just as the U.S. may kill attackers while still being in a moral position to demand that the attackers stop killing. You are treating murderers and victims as if both were morally equal. This is not the case. Attackers do not retain their rights when they initiate force. Victims do not forfeit any of their rights when they are attacked, nor when they use force in self-defense.
"Americans do not have the right to be exempt from torture because we are American citizens and have a special agreement with other American citizens that protects us from torture as a special privilege; that right is a basic moral principle."
How is it a basic moral principle? More basic than one's right to life? More basic than the principle of non-initiation of force? If so, why? |
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| Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 20:20:49 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: lisa
On "Faith in Massive Spending Increases":
For ordinary citizens, the formula is "faith, hope and a credit card" -- and the result is bankruptcy, or at least credit card counselling. When you are U.S. president, however, the formula becomes "faith, hope and inflation" -- with the belief that the head of the Fed can "fix it" (or so goes the delusion), and that the Fed boss owes his job to you, so he will.
I have been most struck by the parallels between George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter on economic issues -- with their respective stimulus and bail-out packages. I wish the press still attempted to report inflation #s (the way they did when Carter was president). |
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| Friday, August 29, 2008 at 11:18:02 mst
Comment ID: #12
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
Richard:
Your position appears to be a division of human beings into two categories: those who have initiated force, and those who have not. In dealing with the former, you considered any use of force in return to be legitimate retaliation, without restraint other than effectiveness. That is not the normal legal approach: If someone takes an apple from your orchard, you do not have the right to kill them, nor to chain them in your basement and torture them, nor does any Anglo-American jurisdiction recognize death as a legitimate punishment for such a crime. Both criminal punishment and immediate retaliatory force are legally required to be commensurate with the magnitude of the initiation of force. This is part of making law objective and of bringing force under the control of reason; your position amounts to an endorsement of nonobjective law, by making the magnitude of retaliation depend only on the arbitrary discretion of the retaliator. And nonobjective law is not in anyone's interest.
You appear to believe that once a war starts, all law is set aside, and the only question is one of effectiveness in destroying the enemy's capacity to fight. Governments that wage war according to such principles have historically used force to a much greater extent, and inflicted much greater harm, than governments that recognize the concept of "laws of war" and restrict their military methods accordingly. Indeed, the greatest crime of terrorists is their disregard for any concept of laws of war.
Objectivism does not regard a single world government as necessary, or advocate one. But as long as there are multiple sovereign governments, they will need to maintain armed forces, and be prepared to wage war against each other. Such armed forces are not criminals; they are not breaking or rebelling against the laws of their nations, but complying with them. Therefore, it is not proper to treat them as criminals. And it is not always self-evident which side in a war is in the right, or whether both sides may not be partly in the wrong. The law of war is based on this concept; it treats war as a sometimes necessary activity, and attempts to minimize the harm, and to make it possible to disable enemy forces without treating them as criminals. Such measures as requiring humane treatment of prisoners of war and forbidding the use of chemical and biological weapons serve to limit the ill effects of war. And they also are practical on the battlefield, because they make it possible to offer enemy troops the choice to surrender with a reasonable hope of survival, rather than giving them reason to fight to the last man.
Now, I think it's clear that Muslim terrorists are in the wrong, and that their cause is an evil one. But as Ayn Rand pointed out, it's very easy to set aside a legal restriction when it defends somebody repulsive, and then have that be the first step in setting it aside for everyone. The evil of terrorism is that it disregards the law of war; the proper stance against it is a principled adherence to the law of war. Even on a battlefield, there can be objective rules of proper conduct. |
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| Friday, August 29, 2008 at 14:20:42 mst
Comment ID: #13
Name: Jimfw
E-mail: jimfw(at)hotmail.com
The previous greatest deficit was under Ronald Reagan. The Republican Part is, and has been for a long time, the party of big government, deficit spending, and interference into our personal lives at every level. Republicans have learned the trick of sloganeering for limited government because such slogans are effective and appealing. But their is no substance to these slogans; in fact the opposite.
Sincerely,
Jim |
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