Torture versus collateral damage; the bigger evil?

[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.

[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.