Torture versus collateral damage; the bigger evil?

[carl]

He is trying to have it both ways. He is against it but can see where it can be useful and should be winked at, but only if he is certain that it will work and the person to be tortured deserves it. It is one of those arguments self-absorbed intellectuals please themselves with that ignore the reality of the situation. The reality is somebody ties somebody else down and does things to them. And they continue to do things to them until they feel like stopping. Would Mr. Harris volunteer to do that? Would he say to his son "Go ahead son, I'll be proud of you." Would he approve of his daughter marrying somebody who did that for a living? I doubt it. Intellectuals talking about things they won't do nor do they want their kith and kin to do but it is still ok with them.

The other thing he does is equate the certainty of his musings with the uncertainties of the real world. The "But what if we knew for sure how about then?" argument. Well sir, if you knew for sure then you'd be God and you ain't.

As you can tell, these kinds of arguments really frost me.

His point about us not taking collateral damage seriously enough is good. We should start by stop using such a sterile phrase, 'collateral damage.' We should say what it actually is "Today will killed bad guy B. We also killed a bunch of innocent people who hadn't done anything to us but they happened to be standing nearby bad guy B when we shot a missile at him. That isn't good but bad guy B was so bad they deserved to die too." If we appended that statement to each press release trumpeting our killing of every mid-level leader we might take it more seriously.

[davidbfpo]

Kiwigrunt,

I am not sure this helps, but as a Canadian victim of rendition and torture it may help to learn what they say:

It is about time our governments realise that torture inflicts moral damage on our society, as severe as the pain felt by the people who are physically and psychologically tortured. Our reputation has been stained and tarnished enough.

His short article opens with:

To torture or not to torture, why is this question being asked in America? The answer you will receive is different depending on who you speak to.

Link:http://prism-magazine.com/2012/12/to...sm+Magazine%29

I expect the questions asked over torture extend far beyond the comforts of American debate, although one wonders if it was Americans being tortured at home or abroad that the US public would think torture works.

[carl]

David:

Americans were tortured in the Pacific, Korea and Vietnam. We didn't think it a good thing then. We seem to have become so smug in the belief that nobody will ever be in a position to do that to us again that we are willing to let the beast out because, after all, we are the Yanks, it will never bite us.

[jcustis]

David,

As always, you've added a rich notation which took me on a morning's bounce around wiki pages, blogs, and news articles, and left me more informed than when I woke up.

[carl]

I've always wanted to ask guys like Mr. Harris this.

'Ok Mr. Harris, we know that devil incarnate bad guy knows where the ticking bomb is. Unfortunately we can't get at him to use our sure fire enhanced interrogation techniques that would be applied by highly trained career professional torturers under closely supervised conditions. But we can get to his wife and children. In fact we have them.

Now Mr. Harris you must know that if that bomb goes off many many innocents, women and children, will be maimed and killed. They will suffer immensely as will their surviving relations. Is it really so bad Mr. Harris if we were to send an ear of his oldest child to devil incarnate bad guy with the message that this is only the beginning if he doesn't tell us what we want to know? Wouldn't inflicting suffering on those people be worth all the lives we would save?'

I wonder how he would answer.

[Kiwigrunt]

That’s a straw man Carl. Here’s another one:

My hypothetical child is abducted by a gang. She can just get a phonecall to me describing what they are doing to her (colour that in for yourself). I just so happen to have one of the critters in my hot little hands. How far would I go to discover the whereabouts of the gang?

I think that what Sam is trying to get at regarding torture is that if you can come up with explicit examples where one might consider torture, then you have moved from the absolute to a continuum.

However, I don’t want to get too hung up on whether or not some extremes ‘should’ allow torture. We have discussed that before on a few other threads. I also don’t want to single out the good and the bad of collateral damage per say. What I got from reading Sam’s piece was how we seem to hold torture at a very different ethical level to collateral damage. Torturing one (‘guilty’?) person to achieve X is seen as much worse than bombing a village with some considerable collateral damage to achieve the same X. That could include some dead and injured (tortured?) innocents.

One question that comes to mind is: does our concern regarding torture stem from a genuine consideration for the rights etc. of the recipient or is it more self entered? That is to say, are we more concerned with what the process might do to us and our own morality? This statement quoted by David seems to support that:

It is about time our governments realise that torture inflicts moral damage on our society, as severe as the pain felt by the people who are physically and psychologically tortured. Our reputation has been stained and tarnished enough.

Either way, why do we not hold the same concerns, but stronger, regarding collateral damage? After all, collateral damage often produces more victims, with a greater likelihood of being innocent. (And even there we hold different standards. The comparison of bombing a village in Pakistan versus law enforcers doing similar damage in one of our own towns has been pointed out here previously.)
I think that that is also the main point that Sam is trying to make. (I have not read his book.)

So it is the difference between the two that interests me.

I wonder if we have here a moral conundrum similar to the trolley problem.

[Kiwigrunt]

David, I found this one the most profound statements in your linked article:

Opponents of torture have vigorously been embracing the notion that torture produces false intelligence. This implicitly leaves the door open for the possibility of endorsing torture if it were proven to produce sound intelligence.