Torture versus collateral damage; the bigger evil?

[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.

[Fuchs]

Societies have progressed and regressed over time, have been replaced by others who did the same, rinse and repeat.
Over time, mankind has learned a few lasting lessons.

One of these lessons - widely understood to be self-evident (save for Hollywood) is that preventive arresting or killing of people who *might* turn into criminals is not appropriate. In fact, it is so utterly inappropriate and proven to be a poor idea that it is almost perfectly universally loathed.
Some practices such as this are so bad, mankind has learned to forego all analysis of costs and benefits in specific cases in favour of a universal maxim of "don't".

This was also true of torture, which was understood to be cruel and a thoroughly poor idea in the Western civilisation.

Sadly, the previous line was written in past tense because a few years ago a really big Western country did a really big regressive leap and actually left the consensus of Western civilisation on torture.
It even did so overtly, officially - unlike a generation or two ago when only a handful people working in the shadows ignored the norms of their civilisation.


The unwillingness to heed the hard-earned wisdom of earlier generations was and is strong in them.

[carl]

Fuchs:

That was very well said.

Something has happened to ethical standards in the US, especially among the elites. It reminds me of something that my civilian self seems to see happen in the spec ops world, the attitude that they are not bound by rules. If they can do it, it is ok to do.

The elites who advocate torture show the same signs of having been cut loose from any moral base, if they think it is ok, it is.

As a foreign observer, do you think there is something in US culture that states that once you reach a certain status, you are free from any rule? More than in other Western nations I mean. It is almost as if we are creating an aristocracy.

Kiwigrunt:

It may be a strawman or not. But it is the same kind of contrived argument that the ticking time bomb argument is. In both cases, it is designed to justify that which is unjustifiable.

Maybe the difference between torture and killing the wrong people is in one, the rhetorical you is face to face with the victim, in the other it is done from afar. Maybe too, it has to do with growing amorality that infects our elites. It is convenient for them to knock off people who shouldn't be knocked off and who don't have the political power to stop them, so why shouldn't they?

[Fuchs]

Carl, I think it's a human problem (or probably a "male humans" one, dunno for sure).

It's quite similar to bankers and politicians losing the sense for how valuable money is. 0.5% of a hundred billion don't look to them much different than 0.5% of their latest car purchase any more.
The experience of "unusual" circumstances (such as having power) often leads to the abandonment of "usual" conceptions.


The U.S. is different in many regards from Europe and other places, but the consistently biggest difference is simply size. The U.S. simply has more often the critical mass required to do stuff (good and bad) than other nations do.
Much that's "special" about the US can be traced in part to this difference.

[carl]

Fuchs:

Very good point about size. I think we often forget how big this country is and how many people over 300 million is. At least I do.

[Bill Moore]

We regressed morally at so many levels during this conflict. We made a deal with the devil (Pakistan) that allowed AQ senior leadership to escape and plot for another 10 years. We declared war on Iraq based on less than compelling evidence (the 1% doctrine), and shifted forces from an unfinished conflict i Afghanistan to Iraq. We publically endorsed torture as official policy, which as you have pointed out will put our forces at much greater risk at an unknown time in the future. We hired thousands of low quality contractors, many of them based on their political affiliations, to provide poor service at a high price. In many cases creating significant set backs to the overall operation. We aggressively pursued social and political engineering trying to create mirror image societies insteand of facilitating self-determinatio. We foolishly embraced a doctrine that has failed repeatedly throughout history, and now want to capture those lessons for future conflicts. Instead of collective sacrifice, we gave our citizens a tax cut for political expediency at the start of two wars and wonder why we can't manage our budget. We threw billions of borrowed dollars at the problem with no real strategy, and when it didn't work we surged billions more and now are looking for an acceptable exit.

I'm coming to the point where I think a nation's values (real values, values its people live by) are more important than its size, its economy, or the size of its military. Actually the values increase in importance as a nation gains power.

Maybe the pending economic crisis will drive us back to our core values that made us great to begin with.

[Fuchs]

Maybe the pending economic crisis will drive us back to our core values that made us great to begin with.

Invade neighbours, annex terrain, invite immigrants to take the booty?

[carl]

Instead of collective sacrifice, we gave our citizens a tax cut for political expediency at the start of two wars and wonder why we can't manage our budget.

Bill:

This brings up a very important point that I try to keep raising. The Americans were not averse to something like a war tax being imposed. We would have gone for it. The political elites were afraid to ask us to do it. They lacked any real backbone or moral courage as evidenced by all their defense of torture. Hell they lack any real moral base.

The Americans do have a moral base (Fuchs, restrain yourself). We are much as we were as far as willing to sacrifice for a war goes. It is the elites who have changed. If they are morally adrift, as I think they are, they will never see the need to sacrifice for anything for there isn't anything really good. Because they only know themselves, they figure everybody is like them and since they don't recognize there is anything worth sacrificing for they figure the rest of us feel the same way. So they won't even ask.

I am convinced it is the same thing when people say Americans are casualty averse. We aren't. The elites are. In their morally relativistic world they see nothing worth dying for so they figure the rest of us are like that.

We have a big problem now and will get bigger if we can't figure some way to address this cultural disconnect between the elites and the rest of us.

p.s. Tax rates don't matter. You can't spend rates, you can only spend revenue. And revenue goes up when you lower rates, generally. We still should have had a war tax though.

[Dayuhan]

I think Entropy effectively addressed the OP's original question: torture is intentional, collateral damage is accidental. Apples and oranges.

The point of thread diversion arrived here, as far as I can tell:

We regressed morally at so many levels during this conflict. We made a deal with the devil (Pakistan) that allowed AQ senior leadership to escape and plot for another 10 years. We declared war on Iraq based on less than compelling evidence (the 1% doctrine), and shifted forces from an unfinished conflict i Afghanistan to Iraq. We publically endorsed torture as official policy, which as you have pointed out will put our forces at much greater risk at an unknown time in the future. We hired thousands of low quality contractors, many of them based on their political affiliations, to provide poor service at a high price. In many cases creating significant set backs to the overall operation. We aggressively pursued social and political engineering trying to create mirror image societies insteand of facilitating self-determinatio. We foolishly embraced a doctrine that has failed repeatedly throughout history, and now want to capture those lessons for future conflicts. Instead of collective sacrifice, we gave our citizens a tax cut for political expediency at the start of two wars and wonder why we can't manage our budget. We threw billions of borrowed dollars at the problem with no real strategy, and when it didn't work we surged billions more and now are looking for an acceptable exit.

I'm coming to the point where I think a nation's values (real values, values its people live by) are more important than its size, its economy, or the size of its military. Actually the values increase in importance as a nation gains power.

Maybe the pending economic crisis will drive us back to our core values that made us great to begin with.

That sparked a digression into the impact of tax rates on government revenues.

Not that it's any less a digression, but I must say I think it would be a good idea to have entry into a war accompanied by a mandatory war tax, partly because that would help pay for a war, but far more because it would make politicians think twice, or thee or four times, before they decide to go to war.

The idea that moral degradation or a lack of moral courage could result in the use of torture may have merit. It's also true, though, that the idea of "moral courage" can also be twisted into a conviction that the morally courageous know what is right and must do what is right no matter where that leads. People who know they are right are a good deal scarier to me than people who accept that they might be wrong, or at least not completely right, even though doubt may in some circles appear to signify a lack of moral courage.

I don't know that moral courage or moral degradation have anything to do with the current economic problems.