It is uncharitable and silly to believe that a good person could not have those positions in good faith. You may disagree with it, but "torture is sometimes permissible" is not an evil opinion held exclusively by evil people.
Perhaps he could have the opinion that, as he tweeted, "the CIA saved American lives" in good faith. But he was criticizing a 525-page Senate report on the same day it came out, December 9th. This report has a lot of details on CIA misrepresentations on how they "saved lives". I doubt he read the report before he tweeted.
I don't think that's in good faith.
It is in good company, as Dick Cheney admitted he hadn't read the report, while still asserting it was "full of crap".
Let me give a single example of the kind of CIA claims about the effectiveness of torture that the report documents. On page 188, the report describes a briefing George Tenet and a CIA lawyer gave to some White House officials. (See footnote 1101 for a partial list of attendees.) Their slides included the claim that their torture techniques helped identify Richard Reid.
Richard Reid was arrested before the CIA tortured anyone under this program. This program could not have helped catch Reid unless it also involved the use of a time machine.
You may think this is a silly example, but the report documents dozens of instances of this level of misrepresentation. Footnote 1393 demonstrates another causality inversion that the CIA thinks they caused, in which they tortured someone in 2003 to get enough information to disrupt a plot in 2002.
Check it out for yourself; you can read the Senate report's 525-page executive summary here:
Maybe I'm wrong about torture, and maybe I'm misreading or misunderstanding the report. But I think Conway's dismissal of the report without reading it is in bad faith.
I think the only way it is possible to hold it "in good faith" is to be unconsciously bigoted. That is, you don't realize you're a bigot, probably because you haven't examined your underlying beliefs.
To see this most clearly, try to imagine a situation where you would find it acceptable for an American soldier to be tortured by some foreign power.
First, thank you for providing a thought experiment that challenged my own beliefs on the topic. Something like that is rare.
Given the social climate surrounding the issue, it seemed appropriate to switch to a throwaway. I'll strive to keep the discussion interesting and thought-provoking.
I'd like to followup with you and get some insights. Thinking over your example leads me to conclude, "There is no such thing as what's 'acceptable,' only what's effective."
I think we care about what's acceptable/unacceptable because we need a collective line in the sand for what would be self destructive.
I think if some concepts are not marked as non bargainable, they will eventually be common.
Torture and terror falls in this camp for me. If we agree there are cases it's ok to use them, eventually we'll have a neighbor tortured because of some other thing society abors.
I think Post-911 and the Bush Administration making statements that in order to save lives and prevent more terrorists attacks they had to torture terrorist suspects.
It is a kind of the ends justify the means, the type of road that leads to tyranny. Which is why the Patriot Act got passed and hasn't been repealed yet.
You know that terrorists will use torture and everything they got and won't stick to laws and rules to get their ends to justify their means.
So what prevents us from becoming just like the terrorists we are fighting? Does it really need a fight fire with fire, and it is not terrorism when we do it? Are there better ways to fight terrorism that we haven't considered yet?
> So what prevents us from becoming just like the terrorists we are fighting?
'prevented', not 'prevents'. That's a passed station now, it's official, it's documented and it's absolutely horrible.
You see, when a bunch of deranged idiots does something there are all kinds of mitigating circumstances, but when a nation state does something there are none, unless you want to claim they too are deranged idiots.
Ironic that US Special Forces trained the Taliban to fight the USSR in the 1980's and then later on their leader founder Al Qaeda using the same tactics to fight the USA.
I think US failed foreign policy helps create a lot of terrorist networks. We pulled out of Iraq and Syria too fast and then ISIS/ISIL took over in the power vacuum there. So in trying to end the war too soon, to score points for people back home, we actually made it worse in Syria and Iraq.
In leaving Afghanistan we gave control back to the Taliban.
So the US war effort in the Middle East has failed as terrorist networks just take back control.
The USA won't admit to the things it does, it covers up the Prism NSA spying system, it covers up the torture, it covers up murdering people with drone strikes, then it goes after the news media that reports on all of the bad things the USA is doing to censor it.
Maybe we cannot prevent being a tyranny, maybe it is too late? We had to become a police state with the Patriot Act and Prism in order to fight the war on terror and then what have we become over that?
If we're talking about effectiveness, you then have to define what's the criteria that you're optimizing for - that's mostly the difference between morality frameworks. Certainly there is argument that was made within utilitarianism that if 1 people are tortured so that hundreds of millions of people can avoid having a speck of dust in their eyes, it's still a net gain for happiness (and so it's an acceptable, even preferable scenario to happen).
The fact that it's impossible for human agreeing on the criteria to be optimized asides. Normally there are many reasons that we almost never make morality argument based on effectiveness (unfortunately, I'm not articulate enough to summarize those reasons in a comment). The trolley problem is a good example: if it was a straightforward effectiveness argument, we all know what the "rational" decision should be.
There are multiple morality frameworks, most including torture, and very few that don't. Western Christianity (ie. "New Testament") and it's "atheist variant" Humanism are fully opposed to torture (unless you count banishment as torture, which some do), but most other ideologies aren't.
Take the old testament, which is certainly a moral framework. Or, when it comes to frameworks in use, islam's moral framework, for example, specifies torture as punishment for crimes (whippings, beatings, certain prescribed forms of execution, forcing children to witness execution of convicted parents, ...). But this is not the exception, most religions support torture, mostly only as punishment:
It's not limited to religions either. For instance, most or all person cults support torture.
A lot of people have serious trouble with the concept of multiple moralities, yet of course that's exactly what different religions are. People seem to find it easy to tolerate, oh going to temple instead of church, but if you disagree on marriageable age, slavery, or punishment then you're a monster. Never mind that by that standard, the majority the planet's population fails.
> Take the old testament, which is certainly a moral framework.
The Old Testament (and ditto with the New Testament) is not a "moral framework"; it is a set of stories which have been incorporated as part of the justification or inspiration for numerous moral frameworks, many of which conflict deeply with each other.
This makes it useless for getting a confession to a crime with no corroborating evidence. However, if you have a method of independently verifying the information you get, you can get useful information.
Note: I oppose torture, but effectiveness is orthogonal to my opposition. Something can be effective and still evil.
Not that effective for gathering reliable intelligence in a timely manner, but very effective for other purposes: To punish, to instill fear in potential enemies, to satisfy a need for revenge.
The "gathering intelligence" excuse is used only because it allows "good people" to convince themselves they support torture for rational, "good" reasons. Nobody would openly say they support torture because they want to see the enemy writher in pain and fear and be forced to eat their own shit. Even if this is the real reason.
Can we construct a situation where that would be appropriate? Well, let's get as close as we can, factoring out as many moral variables as possible, to make the question more concrete.
Let's imagine that it's the 1980s, during the Cold War. And let's create an inverse Dr. Strangelove setup.
Let's say that the United States, based on erroneous intelligence, has become convinced that a nuclear attack from the USSR is imminent. To prevent annihilation of the population of the United States, authorization is given to promptly and preemptively attack the USSR and the protocol is started.
Now, let's say that there are a number of persons who are able to disarm these attacks, and that one of them has fallen into KGB hands. The KGB has just one hour to prevent a nuclear holocaust.
To factor out another variable, let's assume that the general being held by the KGB is located somewhere that will be within the blast range of the mutual destruction, such that should the reciprocal attacks take place, the general will in the coming days die of a mix of radiation poisoning and starvation, no doubt a gruesome way to die.
How far is the KGB ethically entitled to go to try to extract the cancelation codes?
Now, "utilitarianism" was mentioned below, and the simple utilitarian would answer, as noted, that if there was even any chance of a small discomfort being removed for a great many, than it would be worth incredible pain for a single person. Such is a common attack on utilitarianism -- that it allows for persecuting the innocent.
However, that's a very superficial view of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism also considers that in trying to maximize the happiness (or some proxy for it) within society, that people care very much about some basic presumption of justice within that society. For instance, I would not expect a society which tortured suspected jaywalkers to be optimized for happiness. It gives us a sense of security and comfort to know that there are certain guarantees in our social systems.
There's also the argument from the perspective of justice (i.e. an argument from rights rather than outcomes). The notion there is that you can construct a set of rights by supposing a "veil of ignorance" in which you do not know where you would fall in a society or situation. For instance, if nobody knew if they were the torturer or torturee, they might both agree that torture is wrong and that it should not be practiced. The "veil of ignorance" is basically what the grandparent's question on transposing nationalities was trying to get at.
The utilitarian viewpoint doesn't lend itself towards as clearly defined of a set of rules for right and wrong. On the other hand, a strict set of rights can draw questions at the extreme ends of the ethical spectrum.
In the abstract that's all fine and good but we're talking about some very concrete situations here that go nowhere near those extremes. Extremes are nice to come down on something 'in principle' but barring extraordinary concocted up scenarios to expose the weaknesses of having a pre-set mind about anything at all it is still very useful to come down to some ground rules that everybody lives by, for instance, laws and in this case the Geneva convention.
The idea is that then if someone decides to cross those lines that you try them in court to see if a judge sees it the same way, if not off to the slammer you go.
I agree. But sometimes thought experiments can be useful in sussing out why we hold certain values. Torture I don't actually consider to be one of those that's particularly opaque, but asking "Why do I think this is wrong?" and looking at the edge cases is often an enlightening process. (And I've been reading a good bit of political philosophy lately trying to resolve some dissonance on other topics where I found my own views inconsistent.)
It's the engineering mindset at work: reduction to extremes can give you a good idea of whether or not something has a discrete solution or if it is multi-valued. In this case it seems to me that it is likely to be multi-valued but only in non-real-world scenarios and for all intent and purposes you might as well treat it as discrete: torture == bad.
If you're inclined to go down that path: the Japanese treated US POWs terribly, and the US still dropped two nukes as a weapons test (there was credible intelligence Japan was in the process of surrendering because of the "regular" fire-bombing campaigns - but dropping nukes was seen as a great deterrent against Sovjet. And as a great opportunity for a field test).
Note: I'm mentioning this because you're scenario isn't quite as hypothetical as one might hope - for neither those bombed nor for the abused POWs.
Do very many people do this thought experiment and say "Wow, I'd totally let the European guy keep the codes to disarm the bomb, but I'd torture the brown one."?
edit: It's a serious question. The claim is that people who support torture do so because they're "unconsciously bigoted." That seems silly so I've posed a counter question: How many people's belief in torture falls apart if they imagine the subject looking like them/sharing their religious views/etc? I don't imagine it's very many.
It's a good question, I have no idea why you are being downvoted.
Consider a person who's moral principles are based on empathy. Empathy is well known to be racist - we simply don't feel equally bad is a black person gets pricked with a needle than a white person. (Errors like this are why I believe empathy is a terrible basis for morality.)
Now consider path dependence. If you first think about a brown person being tortured, you (statistically) are more likely to accept it - you simply feel less empathy for this person. Then when you generalize to the case of a white person, you'll similarly support torture.
Conversely, if you first think about a white person being tortured and then generalize to a black person, you'll oppose it.
So it doesn't happen that belief in torture falls apart, what happens is the example you think of to start with determines that belief.
I still think that's a bit simplistic and maybe politically motivated. Of course groups have different feelings towards their members and non-members.
First study: why in the world didn't they report their findings of how black people felt watching white people get hurt? That's a pretty bad bias.
Second study: are these people just fishing for proof that white people are racist?
> The less privileged the target seemed, the less participants thought s/he would experience pain. In other words, participants associated hardship with physical toughness. Importantly, target race (Black vs. White) was no longer predictive of pain ratings once we controlled for participants’ perceptions of the target’s privilege,
but they just sidestep that part for the conclusion:
> The present work demonstrates that people assume a priori that Blacks feel less pain than do Whites. This finding has important implications for understanding and reducing racial bias. It sheds new light on well-documented racial biases. Consider, for instance, the finding that White Americans condone police brutality against Black men relative to White men
How am I supposed to take these people seriously? Experiment 5 showed that blackness only correlates with a deeper, more predictive factor but they ignore that to go on a socio-political rant about the plight of black Americans. They do everything they can to fit the results into a preconceived narrative. This isn't science, it's social activism masquerading as science. 90% of their "conclusions" was about things that weren't even part of the experiment.
.
This isn't bringing us any closer to understanding how and why people are able to do awful things like commit torture, which should be the goal here. Instead we have to put that question aside and ask why such political bias isn't being called out in science.
For the purposes of the original question, namely how the perceived race of the victim might lead someone to support torture, these questions are moot.
However, they are useful questions more broadly. Ultimately the issue is that people motivated by empathy are going to be inconsistent and biased. While this probably won't lead them to change their opinion, the example use case they first think of may drive their original opinion.
> To see this most clearly, try to imagine a situation where you would find it acceptable for an American soldier to be tortured by some foreign power.
Sure: If a company of US soldiers has infiltrated an area and is planning to blow up a church during a wedding, and one is captured, it might be acceptable to torture him for the information of the plot, so it might be averted. "Might", only if that is the very last resort and has at least some chance of success.
The reason it's hard to come up with such a scenario is that probably most of us assume American soldiers are acting on orders, and those orders are at least well-intentioned, even if they end up doing wrong.
> "torture is sometimes permissible" is not an evil opinion held exclusively by evil people
I took air to mean that support of torture eliminates a person from the top strata of the category of "good person" - by itself a handwavy categorization - that should be held up as some kind of exemplar of virtue, as pg has done.
It's a point I happen to agree with, and regardless of whether or not you think Dante would create a special place in hell for rich guys who provide political cover for torturers, it does undermine to some extent the premise of of pg's article.
Writing an article like this about someone you actually like is dangerous. As Pappy Boyington said, "Show me a hero and I'll show you a bum."
I really appreciate your response, but I think there is a problem with our mental model of a moral paragon.
Is it really smart to believe that childlike simplicity of purpose is morally admirable? That never being seen to take a side in an ugly situation with horrible tradeoffs on all sides is a prerequisite for being a top quality "good person"?
My sense is that rather than courageous, it is extremely easy to take sides like opposing torture in all forms at all times. Such positions receive automatic praise and require little complex thinking. That does not necessarily make them wrong, but we should subject them to an extra shade of rational skepticism.
Relatedly, it is obvious to me that when Ronco takes a pro-torture position, it is not out of personal weakness or malice, as people seem to imagine, but could only be the result of serious careful thought. A sociopath, for example, would never ever take a position so likely to garner knee-jerk criticism for no personal gain. I suppose a troll might, but he is extremely obviously not a troll.
> Is it really smart to believe that childlike simplicity of purpose is morally admirable?
I don't have any idea what you're talking about but I'm guessing we like "smart" rather than "childlike simplicity."
> That never being seen to take a side in an ugly situation with horrible tradeoffs on all sides is a prerequisite for being a top quality "good person"?
On the contrary, regardless of how you define "good person," I suspect having taken a side would be a necessary factor. The more relevant factor would be having chosen the correct side.
> My sense is that rather than courageous, it is extremely easy to take sides like opposing torture in all forms at all times. Such positions receive automatic praise and require little complex thinking. That does not necessarily make them wrong, but we should subject them to an extra shade of rational skepticism.
I don't think the amount of effort or risk involved in reaching a moral decision can be considered an indicator of that decision's correctness. We would not consider someone who took one second to decide to help an old lady across the street to have acted more morally than someone who had to take a little more thought to make the decision based on the same reasoning, after all. And plenty of decisions to choose ethical conduct over unethical conduct are quite easy for most of us to make - you can think of your own examples. Effort isn't any sort of reliable indicator.
Indeed I did; it's precisely what I was replying to. No matter how good a person is, they will encounter moral dilemmas (or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them) with no good option. For any one of these situations you can say "OMG! I'm so indignant that they chose A" ... And the same for B.
> No matter how good a person is, they will encounter moral dilemmas (or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them) with no good option. For any one of these situations you can say "OMG! I'm so indignant that they chose A" ... And the same for B.
It's as if you believe every moral choice, including the choice to support or oppose torture, is a choice of equal moral consequence such that a person deserves praise whichever way they choose. I don't intend to sign on to this new ethical theory of yours.
Okay, let's start over. I'll pick things apart as well as I can.
> Good people can't ever support anything with (moral) downsides?
"Moral downsides" is not, as far as I know, a term of art in ethics or religion so it is hard to know what you mean, but I'm pretty sure you've been downvoted for underplaying the importance of a decision to support something many of us believe to be intrinsically evil.
> Indeed I did; it's precisely what I was replying to.
You were replying to post where I indicated that having chosen to support torture removed Ronco from the category of person so admirable we should hold him up as an example for the rest of us to follow. This is - usefully, I think - a lot more specific than dividing the world into "good people" and "bad people."
> No matter how good a person is, they will encounter moral dilemmas
That is part of the human condition, yes.
> (or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them)
There also exist math problems that could be posed to them. I wonder why you've gone all hypothetical here.
> with no good option. For any one of these situations you can say "OMG! I'm so indignant that they chose A" ... And the same for B.
There are, hypothetically, moral dilemmas such that every outcome is equally bad.
The decision to support torture is not one of them. I do not believe even a supporter of torture would characterize the decision to engage in torture or not to engage in torture as a decision such that deciding one way or the other will result in equally bad outcomes.
> By that standard, there cannot exist good people.
Sure thing; I hope some of it will make more sense now.
>"Moral downsides" is not, as far as I know, a term of art in ethics or religion so it is hard to know what you mean,
First of all, I never used that term; I referred to downsides, and clarified the context in a parenthetical. Because so much of grandstanding about torture is apparently from a deontological perspective (cf. your insistence on things being "intrinsically evil"), this was simply to clarify that the "downsides" were with respect to a moral calculus, not e.g. some CBA of material costs.
Second, certainly you can compose concepts together, even when that combination of the words is not formally enumerated in some lexicon?
Third, it feels much like you're calling me ignorant by unnecessarily drawing attention to specific phrases and complaining about them not being in the official lingo. Now that you know what I'm referring to, could you either a) give the standard term for it which you would not have complained about, or b) apologize for the insinuation, or c) explain why you were unable to infer meaning of a new term the normal way?
>but I'm pretty sure you've been downvoted for underplaying the importance of a decision to support something many of us believe to be intrinsically evil.
That would be a bad reason, since I never "underplayed" the importance of this, which would suggest some sort of "well, yeah that's bad, but no big deal". I'm complaining that, if you are going to write someone off every time their decision has a downside, they can't win, no matter how good they are, and so the existence of such downsides isn't a strike against their goodness at all, any more than a politician is evil for recognizing the existence of tradeoffs between funding for hospitals and funding for schools. (Can you believe (Jack|John) (John|Jack)son? He supported reduced funding for (school|hospital)s! Does he not thing (education|health care) is important?)
>>(or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them)
>There also exist math problems that could be posed to them. I wonder why you've gone all hypothetical here.
That was simply to avoid the (slimy) trick of refusing to engage moral dilemmas -- i.e. consider someone praiseworthy simply because they never had to encounter a hard choice. Is that a reasonable caveat?
>There are, hypothetically, moral dilemmas such that every outcome is equally bad.
>The decision to support torture is not one of them. I do not believe even a supporter of torture would characterize the decision to engage in torture or not to engage in torture as a decision such that deciding one way or the other will result in equally bad outcomes.
Why the focus on the case of the outcomes being equally bad? A "supporter of torture" can (and usually do) agree that torturing people is bad, but not as bad as letting millions die when the bomb goes off. (This is where people usually muddle the distinction between "it wouldn't work" and "it would be bad even if it did work".) They simply don't regard the badness of that option as a dealbreaker. (There's no requirement that the options be equally bad for the logic to apply.)
That's the same thing I'm criticizing on your part. You could equally well play the game of "he advocated letting millions of people die! Bad!" Well, sometimes you can't win. The very best people can be placed in that dilemma, and their having to take one bad branch should not be a strike against them.
The point I was trying to express in one line originally.
> I never "underplayed" the importance of this, which would suggest some sort of "well, yeah that's bad, but no big deal".
Okay, you don't think you're underplaying the importance of a person's support of torture, but in saying things like this you are lumping all a person's transgressions together:
> if you are going to write someone off every time their decision has a downside
This is absolutely not "every time," this is the time the guy used his influence to provide public support for the institution of torture by America instead of using his influece to condemn it.
Incidentally, I'm not talking about writing someone off. I'm talking about excluding him from the very enthusiastic category person we should admire as an exemplar of good which pg created for Ronco. (seriously, he invoked the Bible)
> they can't win, no matter how good they are, and so the existence of such downsides isn't a strike against their goodness at all, any more than a politician is evil for recognizing the existence of tradeoffs between funding for hospitals and funding for schools.
I agree that if we regard all moral transgressions as being equally serious then it makes no sense to draw the distinction between good and bad acts, or perhaps even good and bad people. I just think that is an absurd premise.
> Why the focus on the case of the outcomes being equally bad?
A choice between equally undesireable alternatives is usually what is meant by "dilemma." Some of that is just the dictionary, but more intuitively it's just not usually worth arguing about the cases where one choice is regarded as worse than another.
> That's the same thing I'm criticizing on your part. You could equally well play the game of "he advocated letting millions of people die! Bad!"
In much the same way that I do not believe all moral transgressions are equally serious, I do not believe all arguments are equally sound.
> "torture is sometimes permissible" is not an evil opinion held exclusively by evil people.
... for a rather arbitrary definition of "evil" (and "good"), one I don't share. Doesn't it make you think a little when every depiction and description of hell contains various forms of torture?
Except he doesn't say "torture is sometimes permissible". He supports the specific actions of CIA where torture were used, but didn't lead to reliable intelligence of value. So it was not a "ticking time-bomb scenario", it was "torture because we have the power to do it".
> It is uncharitable and silly to believe that a good person could not have those positions in good faith.
Imagine someone who just straight up punches people in the face without any warning for using the n word. Can that ever be in good faith? At what point is it OK to physically hurt others?
This doesn't justify torture, but I can imagine many situations where it physical violence can be good. I would say it is ethically good to physically harm someone if that harm prevents then from harming others, for example.
There are tons of questions surrounding when it is OK, but to say that physical violence is never appropriate is to live in a fantasy world where evil doesn't exist. There are some forms of aggression that cannot be successfully resisted without resorting to violence.
It's really easy to come up with hypotheticals when violence stops other violence, with no other ill effects and no risk.
Real life isn't as pretty. You meet violence with violence and all you're guaranteed is violence. You may 'win', you may not, but all you're certain to achieve is perpetuating the cycle.
"Good", "evil" and "good faith" are all too ill-defined to be used in a philosophical discussion like this: you will have to define them. It's fine for pg to used, because a) He's almost using good as the opposite of mean, and b) He's not discussing about morality. When it comes to morality discussion, a lot more bets are off and you have to be careful on what basis you're defining "good", "evil" and the like.
To be more on point, there are a lot of "evil" people that are acting on good faith - the comical image of an evil genius who's hell bent on taking over the world for his own greediness or for fun doesn't really exist in real life. You can truly believe that the best way to win a war for your country (and help your fellow country men) is to exterminate the other country, so you make an order to massacre everything that move. That would be evil acting in good faith.
> It is uncharitable and silly to believe that a good person could not have those positions in good faith.
No it is not. Certain things are just incompatible. "good person" and "supporter of torture" are a good example of this.
The illusory "effectiveness" of torture doesn't matter, you may as well ask if slavery is profitable, as others have pointed out. If you're asking that then you have already lost your way.
