NABA NABA hey!

Something is very wrong with Mona Charen. That's obvious to anyone who reads her repugnant recent column and it's apparently obvious to Charen as well. She's even managed to creep herself out with her eager defense of torture and thus her self-esteem is at an all-time low.

So Charen does what many of us do when we're feeling deservedly ashamed and repulsed by our own failures: She looks for someone worse with whom she can compare herself favorably. As the great moral philosopher Thornton Melon said, "If you want to look thin, hang out with fat people."

This practice provides a useful measurement of the gravity of one's situation. Charen has searched the globe, looking for someone, anyone, who might make her look good. Unable to find any obvious moral inferiors in this hemisphere, she finally settles on al-Qaida. Triumphantly, she points to an al-Qaida torture chamber discovered last May and gleefully recounts the atrocities that were committed there:

The room contained torture implements including hammers, whips, meat cleavers and wire cutters as well as a crude torture manual, displaying various methods of inflicting unbearable pain. These included using a blowtorch on the skin, gouging out eyes, using an electric drill to cut through a hand, and many more.

See? Don't you see? Charen never personally took a blowtorch to someone's skin or gouged out anyone's eyes. She's Not As Bad As those people. Sure, she might be a loathesome apologist for techniques learned from the Spanish Inquisition, the Nazis* and Stalinist Russia, and she may be actively and aggressively undermining the sacred American and journalistic principle of innocent until proven guilty, but look at those people -- they're even worse!

I am certainly willing to concede that point. Mona Charen is correct: She's Not As Bad As al-Qaida. Nor is she yet anywhere near As Bad As any of those regimes -- the Inquisition, the Nazis, Stalin, North Korea -- from whom she thinks we should take lessons in interrogation techniques and military justice.

Charen has lowered the bar so far that the bar is no longer even visible, yet she still expects us to be impressed that she made it over. Well, whoop-dee-frickin'-doo.

The bad news for Mona Charen is that life doesn't work this way. Our success or failure as human beings is not graded on a curve. The existence of people like Timothy McVeigh or Jeffrey Dahmer or Uday Hussein does not give the rest of us a free pass to get away with everything this side of mass murder or cannibalism or serial rape. Countries, cultures and governments aren't graded on a curve either. It doesn't matter if your government looks good when compared to Kim Jong Il's or Turkmenbashi's -- that doesn't make it a healthy democracy or a free and open society.

The NABA NABA pinheads like Mona Charen aren't really trying to convince you and I that they're good people. They're trying to convince themselves. And they're failing. They know this is nonsense. They realize that their claim -- we're Not As Bad As the worst people you can think of -- is just about the saddest, flimsiest, least-impressive claim one could make.

Settling for second best is unambitious and uninspiring. Settling for second worst -- and trying to pretend you're proud of it -- is just pathetic.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* Godwin can bite me. This isn't a Nazi analogy. Charen advocates, as a matter of American policy, the explicit imitation, adoption and refinement of forbidden interrogation techniques once used by the Third Reich against its enemies. There's nothing analogous about it.

Comments

[THX1138]

Fred, when you wrote "Our success or failure as human beings is not graded on a curve," I instantly thought of this passage from Thomas Merton:

"To some men peace merely means the liberty to exploit other people without fear of retaliation or interference. To others peace means the freedom to rob one another without interruption. To still others it means the leisure to devour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed those whom their greed is starving. And to practically everyone peace simply means the absence of any physical violence that might cast a shadow over lives devoted to the satisfaction of their animal appetites for comfort and pleasure."

Keep up the good work and happy Christmas!

[David]

The last word on Godwin as far as I'm concerned, courtesy of xkcd.

The whole point with Godwin is that Nazi comparisons tend to be made in usenet posts and such in grossly inappropriate circumstances, so flame wars about which text editor you use would bring up the nazis becomes of some bizarre, incidental alleged similarity between a bit of reasoning in some post and something Hitler did, usually with several layers of metaphor between them, on the level of "Oh, you like to dress neatly? You know who else liked people to dress neatly? HITLER!", or whatever. But when you're actually talking about torture and secret police and secret prisons, the comparison is no longer inappropriate...

[Lizzy L]

Thanks for the Merton quote, THX1138. Would you let us know where it's from? Merton is so dead on... Sounds like part of something I might like to read more of, especially right around this time of year, when some of us are celebrating the incarnation of the Prince of Peace.

[Abelardus]

Okay, maybe I'm defeating the purpose -- i.e. getting off-tangent when I want to end all off-tangents -- but how many Scotts/Scottbots are there? And why are they allowed to post in that cheesy third-person narration? Moreover, why are they allowed to post here; does it add anything to the discussion?

OTOH, I like most of what everyone else has added to the conversation.

[Abelardus]

Addendum: A lot of the "it's okay if I do it if they started it" reminds me of the two-wrongs fallacy I learned of in philosophy.

[twig]

Moreover, why are they allowed to post here; does it add anything to the discussion?

Welcome to the Internet.

[Yggdrazl]

First, all morality is not relative

The idea that morality is relative (e.g. that there is no one true set of moral rules for us to discover) does not in any way imply that we have to base our morality on what our *enemies* are doing. That's how I read what John said. That position isn't objective or relative morality; it's just stupid.

[THX1138]

Lizzy, RE: Merton quote

That quote is from New Seeds of Contemplation if I recall.

The Cold War Letters are good too. :-)

[Technomad]

"J0urnalistic principle of 'innocent until proven guilty?'"

ROTFLMAOASTC!

I'm old enough to remember Watergate, and how the press leaped on Nixon. I can also point to quite a few other cases where the press led the lynch mob...the recent unpleasantness in North Carolina, the "Satanic child molestation" scare, and so on.

I'd rather have twelve Klansmen in the jury box at my trial than twelve journalists.

[Geds]

It had to be pointed out (afterwards, by people NOT on Fox) that it's a somewhat different experience knowing that the people doing it to you are your friends, and will stop as soon as you give the signal. It takes some of the... y'know, terror out of it.

There was an episode of Mythbusters where they decided to try to find out if Chinese Water Torture was actually a torturous experience. So they had Adam sit in a recliner, able to get up any time he wanted and they had that cute redheaded build team member chained to a table. They then proceeded to drip water on their foreheads. Adam just kind of sat there like, "Yeah, whatever." The other one was reduced to tears fairly shortly because she just couldn't handle the whole being confined and not being able to relax part of it.

So that, combined with the post on Straight Dope that Caravelle linked to, indicates it might be possible to actually break volunteers through torture. I don't know what actually happened with the Fox News thing, though, so I can't say how they handled it.

[Hellsau]

-Waiting for instructions from the unoriginal programmer-

Gladly.

10 Claim that when fighting cowards, any action is morally acceptable.
20 Claim that two wrongs make a right.
30 Go to 10

[Ecks]

A lot of the "it's okay if I do it if they started it" reminds me of the two-wrongs fallacy I learned of in philosophy.

It also reminds me of my stupid brother, who deserved every inch of what he got as a child, because he always started it.

/snark.

I'm just kidding. Borrrowing one's moral reasoning from a five year old sounds like an excellent way to run a super power.

Not someone else: "I also don't disagree that relativism makes moral arguments worthless, and is therefore a worthless position to take up when discussing morality. I just don't think you're making much of an argument.

Not sure I really understood your post here. Agreed that there are a lot of complexities to morality, and that both of the following positions are wrong:
a) There is one and only one set of universal moral precepts that must be enforced upon all people without exception
b) All morality is personal and relative, and what is right for one person has no implications under any circumstances for what should be right for anyone else.

The truth is clearly somewhere in between. Shooting random people for fun is clearly objectively wrong. Wearing a particular piece of religious clothing is clearly up to the individual conscience of the observer. There's plenty of gradations in between (telling white lies, maybe, or fiddling bits of your tax return). That said, I think it's pretty clear to most functioning non-psychopathic adults that murder, rape, and torture all belong in the former "clearly bad" category, even if we can sometimes get so caught up in extreme situations that make some of us do those things, as the above discussion of the NY Times article illustrates. John's claim to justify torture with moral relativism puts it on a level with fibbing to your spouse, or drinking a bit too much here or there - you say it's bad, I don't, so really who's to say. And THAT is so far wrong it's beyond jokes.

[John]

Ecks says "First, all morality is not relative. "You say serial rape is wrong, I say it's right, quite trying to arrest me." That's the easy shoot down." I'd reply that you need an argument rather than an assertion. Morality is in the eye of the beholder. There is no objectively Right morality. If you think you have an argument for The One True Correct Morality For Humans, I'm willing to listen to your reasons. BTW, there probably is an objective large primate morality that evolved, but it isn't consistent, nor is it Right. It just is.

Next, you say "your answer here only makes sense if we assume the following: There are a finite number of bad guys out there, they are basically eeeevul, and once we've killed them all, by hook or by crook, the world will be safe again." Well, there *are* only a finite number of bad guys, since there are only a finite number of guys period. So that much is right, but the rest is not (except for the degenerate case of killing everyone, in which case the world would probably be considered safe). I assert it isn't the only way to make sense of my position. I don't believe eeeevul-ness is meaningful outside of an (arbitrary) morality, so both sides can easily conclude the other side is eeeeevul. So what? And the world is never safe, so we need to learn to deal with an unsafe, imperfect world filled with people who, for various reasons, disagree with us on a fundamental level about what is Right Human Behavior. I see no rational reason to rule out, a priori, any behavior that might be necessary to stop a group who wants to kill me or my family. It is nice to limit the destruction if both sides agree on rules of conduct, but if one side declines to keep the rules, why should the other side remain obligated to do so?

For the Not As Bad As crowd -- you are assuming that there is some objective morality that is the basis for the NABA yardstick. I'd like you to prove the existence of the NABA yardstick first before continuing your line of reasoning. IOW, why is torture bad? Because it offends your sense of morality? Fine, but why should anyone else care?

Jersuglac, or whatever, I have no idea who the 101st Fighting Keyboards might be. Feel free to ignore all of this. 8^)

[Ecks]

Serious question: Why doesn't someone set up a water boarding station on the steps of the capital, in full public view, and challenge anyone who denies that it is torture to voluntarily undergo it then and there? From the Straight Dope site it seems it can be done reasonably safely (with attendant medical precautions - tho if someone broke a bone struggling to free themselves, they'd have quite the dilemma over whether to even try to sue - it'd clearly be an admission they had consented to torture if they did), and if done right, could produce a stream of instant converts. Plus it calls the chickenhawks on their bullshit in a way they can't walk away from without losing face. I'm quasi serious about this, why NOT do it?

[Duane]

IOW, let's torture folks until they admit something?

[not_scottbot_incarnate]

To respond to the question of how many Scottbots - multitudes, if you count all the clever subtextual names. How many authors? - at least me, and somebody else, recently.

The original Scottbots in their multi-named glory added about as much to most discussions as Scott himself - but hopefully, in a more amusing way. (Being a dark lord of the Internith was just a side issue - let's not get deeply involved with lynch mob mentality and dsmvwllng, as this story is complicated enough.)

The Scottbot series was an attempt to handle an individual who actually plays decently enough within broad limits, in my eyes at least, but who at the same time kept making many of the same remarks, regardless of the subject at hand - hence the name Scottbot. And in all fairness, mocking as Scottbots could be, they tried to be as fair as possible, admittedly without pulling any punches.. Which is why the 'idiot' comment was actually disturbing to me - Scott has received some pretty vile abuse, which considering the amount he writes seems quite unearned, to the extent his personal abuse seems pretty much reserved for the host of this forum, and figments of his own imagining. Lashing out at someone, though thoroughly human, seems to be a sign of something which should cause a bit of reflection - picking on someone is never good, especially when an individual is singled out by a group. Even if the reasons for that singling out are understandable, and to an extent, self-inflicted.

Scottbot, in the end, failed to a certain extent - it did little to improve the level of conversation. It was an experiment by a long term reader to try something different than what has become increasingly common in the brave new Web 2.0 world - banning IP addresses silently, requiring all participants to become data points subject to technological controls (which just happens, as an 'unintended' side effect, to make those particpants more easily monetized - cookies, avatars, referrers, cross linking, etc.), accusing anyone with a minority opinion of 'trolling' (leading to banning IP addresses silently, oftentimes), or even just accepting the fact that some people are honestly obnoxious without being an embodiment of evil incarnate, instead of the current and growing Internet practice of defining minority opinion as damage, and routing around it. The Internet is increasingly becoming a user generated echo chamber, and very few people seem aware of it - or if so, the amount of attention or money involved ensures that they continue their practices without hesitation or doubt, like the Internet's greatest moderator ever (who still is probably convinced that anyone that speaks out against hypocrisy and censorship is part of a vast hydra headed sock puppet). Maybe they are right, that dissent and stupidity are too disruptive in a forum, so it must be mercilessly eliminated. At least Scottbot has not proven the opposite to be true, unfortunately.

Notice that Scottbots essentially never appear on the Left Behind threads - Scott's comments are often well observed and sharp, and there is no reason to single him out for any attention there.

Hope this helps, at least a bit.

[Praline]

Why doesn't someone set up a water boarding station on the steps of the capital, in full public view, and challenge anyone who denies that it is torture to voluntarily undergo it then and there?

I said this above, but I think it may be a serious point: the people who insist on torture tend to be the people who are most frightened. They're callous and hateful, yes, but they're also convinced that they live in an unbelievably dangerous world, surrounded by demonic individuals who are motivated by pure evil, that society is on the verge of collapse, that almost nobody can be trusted unless they agree with you about absolutely everything, that no methods but the most extreme can possibly have any effect on the dreadful enemy, and that, in general, we're all clinging to a tiny floating spar in a hurricane ocean.

These are not the people you'd expect to subject themselves to a frightening experience. For one thing, noboby enjoys physical suffering and panicky people probably suffer even more than most, especially with a torment that's all about inducing panic. For another, the idea of losing something you consider a safeguard against the horrible, horrible danger - in this case, the idea that disaster can be prevented by dragging information out of evil terrorists by hook or by crook - is utterly terrifying. It would mean admitting the possibility that you might not be able to get simple and fail-safe ways of preventing bad things from happening. That's asking a child in the night to give up his security blanket.

Of course, these are adults, not children, and should not be allowed to cling to comforting delusions if those delusions involve inflicting true nightmares upon others. There's no excuse for condoning torture. But I think there's a sound psychological reason why torture-condoners won't submit to the experience themselves: both physically and emotionally, it would be unbearable for them even to contemplate.

[Drak Pope]

I'm quasi serious about this, why NOT do it?

Because the pro-torture types won't undergo it themselves. Either because they know it's torture and believe it's necessary to win the war on terrorism, or because they want to believe it's not torture and wouldn't dare do anything to shatter their delusion.

[Praline]

We could, of course, try to force pro-torture people to undergo waterboarding by way of testing their point. But that would make us the bad guys, and we would have defeated ourselves. Alas, if we want to fight the good fight, which is to have people who aren't brutal getting to decide what gets done, we have to respect pro-torture people's rights to refuse to put their mouths where their money is.

[Froborr]

Moral relativism is not the same thing as amorality. Just because I believe (as I do) that all morality is rooted in the assumption that some states of being are preferable to others, and therefore must necessarily always be subjective (killing people is wrong only if life is better than death, for example), doesn't mean that I don't have any morals, or that I'm an anarchist. Nor does it mean I find the NABA defense any less nauseating.

True moral relativism is not a simple position at all, but a complex balancing act between, on the one hand, my own moral imperatives and, on the other, the differing beliefs and wishes of others. John's position is not moral relativism at all. It is not even a moral philosophy at all.

What John appears to be arguing is that there is a universal moral code (a position starkly counter to moral relativism), but that one is only required to follow it when dealing with other people who follow it. Thus, the rules of John's moral system don't apply to "people who shoot from hospitals" and so on, and one can do whatever one wishes to them.

As for Charen, I see no need to impute self-esteem issues to her comments. If one accepts her premise that the "interrogation techniques" in use at Guantanamo and elsewhere are not torture (I do not), then her position follows logically and her point -- "This is what REAL torture looks like" -- makes sense.

John and Fred both appear to share the same essential "meta-ethics": Anyone not following the "accepted" moral code (accepted, of course, by John or Fred, respectively) has something wrong with them. In John's rather more violent case, this means that they can be killed and tortured freely. In Fred's more charitable view, it calls for psychoanalysis into the persons's self-esteem issues, because of course any healthy, sane person would automatically agree with his views.

Ultimately, this does nothing but muddy the waters. I see no reason to believe Charen has self-esteem issues. She simply reasons from a different set of underlying assumptions regarding right and wrong. I regard these as the wrong assumptions, but I recognize that they are such only on the basis of my assumptions. There is no objective or rational way to get from there to here, and it is futile to seek one.

All I can do is vote according to my ideas and attempt to persuade others to vote as I do, while Charen votes according to her ideas and attempts to persuade her own set of others. There is no way of knowing which will prevail, if things will get better or worse according to my notion of "better", but I can and do write and speak and work for it.

That's moral relativism. Or at least as close as one can get in a comment on a blog post, anyway.

[Ecks]

Because the pro-torture types won't undergo it themselves. Either because they know it's torture and believe it's necessary to win the war on terrorism, or because they want to believe it's not torture and wouldn't dare do anything to shatter their delusion.

But that's the beauty of it. The very dearth of people willing to submit to it would be a pretty strong visual statement about how radically unpleasant it really is. It's basically win win. Either some people agree and come out shaken as hell, or nobody does, and you get lovely footage of the crickets chirping, and all the right wingers hurrying past trying to look busy and not afraid.

[getaclue]

the nazis utilized "enhanced interrogation techniques" too... "The phrase “Verschärfte Vernehmung” is German for “enhanced interrogation”. It’s a phrase that appears to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court. The methods are indistinguishable from those described as “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the president. As you can see from the Gestapo memo (click on picture at the top of this post), moreover, the Nazis were adamant that their “enhanced interrogation techniques” would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner. At least, that was the original plan."

only even the nazis didn't waterboard.

GEEZ people, getaclue

[Ecks]

Froborr I really like your analysis. It's a nuanced take on moral relativism, and a good point that Fred is perhaps rather over-pathologising Charen. Please don't think I'm stealing it, but it really is good.

The problem is that to have a livable human society, we have to set aside certain moral rules as not subject to being voted down, because otherwise you get tyrannies of the majority (what do you do if 55% vote in favour of gassing the Jews? Shrug and say "don't blame me, I voted against it"?). This is why America has its Bill of Rights, Canada has its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the UK has its unwritten constitution... Things like freedom of speech and freedom from arbitrary arrest are too fundamental to be left to the vagueries of the electorate. There's only a small number of these essentials, though, and everything else is subject to democratically elected mandates, which function according to the type of consensual moral relativism you describe so well.

The reason we're so upset about Charen (and John) is because they're trying to treat this inviolable fundamental set like the other negotiable ones. This isn't just an exercise in political philosophy, Really Bad Things have historically tended to happen whenever the fundamental ones have been messed with too far.

[John]

Froborr, you have misunderstood. Apologies for not being more clear. I do not believe in any universal (to humans) moral code, beyond perhaps the innate large primate behaviors wired into us by evolution. I do believe that humans develop moral codes, but since these are inductive constructs, rational people can reasonably arrive at very different conclusions about what is moral. Therefore, appeals of the form "dear {insert name of deity} you are descending into evil when you do X" do not really tell me much about how intrinsically bad X is, except in the opinion of the speaker. Another logical, reasonable, rational moral code may well permit X. Absent some objective reason to rule categories of behaviors out of bounds, why should I concede to my enemy that I'm not going to do X, especially if said enemy isn't willing to rule X out as well? Note that this doesn't *require* that I actually do X, or even believe that X is a reasonable thing to do. I'm just not willing to rule it out of bounds without some compelling reason.

For example, the MAD doctrine between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was predicated on not ruling out nuclear retaliation, killing hundreds of millions of innocent civilians and plunging the surviving world into the unknown. One might think that such an outcome would be morally objectionable, no? Nevertheless, MAD stopped people slaughtering each other on a massive scale in world wars. Proxy wars were fought, but with far less destruction and loss of life than otherwise would have occurred. So it does appear that some good (by a definition of saving lives and free societies) might come by not ruling out what appears to be intrinsically evil actions.

I hope this is more clear.

[Ecks]

John, the fact that hard situations often require difficult tradeoffs. I think you've successfully intuited htat morality is not a simple black and white book oh inescapable answers. But i still think you're taking it way too far into the realm of 'anything goes'. Psychopaths are people who do not feel empathy, and will therefore screw people over horribly, for sometimes no good reason (one of the first signs is that they will torture and kill small animals for fun)... And this is almost universally seen as a huge moral liability. Moraity may be something our big primate brains just made up, but so is love, so is fairness, so are countries, so is freedom, so is friendship. That doesn't mean any of those things are meaningless, infinitely pliable, or that any given person's take on them is no better than any other person's take on them.

Interesting things about human moral reasoning: We all go through stages of reasoning styles, with some progressing further than others (see here). All humans across the world seem to base their moral reasoning on the same two or five bases (don't even bother reading, there's a nifty video here).

[Froborr]

Ecks: Thanks for the compliment. As for the stealing thing, I meant to say on that other thread but never got around to it that I didn't take issue with you repeating my idea, but with what I perceived as the implication that I hadn't said it. In other words, it seemed to me like you were saying I hadn't been very nuanced when I actually had made an effort to do so. Clearly I misread you, so let's leave all that in the past.

I absolutely agree with you that, in order to have anything like a civilization, we must have some agreed-upon principles as a starting point. In the case of the U.S., that's the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights. I happen to think these are excellent principles, and would go extremely far in combatting threats to them. If it comes down to civil war against the PMDs, as seems possible but not necessarily likely, I would be willing even to use violence in defense of those principles. Not because my own sense of what is right is somehow "truer" than theirs, but simply because I must act according to what I see as right, without asserting any kind of cosmic or universal claims.

John: I quite agree with you up until "Why should I concede to my enemy that I'm not going to do X?" In the case of torture, I will conceded to my enemy that I'm not going to use torture because torture is wrong. I feel so strongly that torture is wrong that I am willing to act to prevent the torture of my enemies, even at the hands of people who don't agree with me that torture is wrong, even if the enemies themselves don't believe torture is wrong. There is no *objective* reason to consider torture wrong any more than there's an objective reason to consider murder wrong, or raping children wrong. Nonetheless, it is my belief that it is wrong, and I will not stand idly by while it is being done. Not because my moral code is true and yours false, but because my moral code is *mine* and I must therefore act according to it.

Being willing to do a little evil to achieve a great good is very, very dangerous, and must only be done with great care and an enormous amount of introspection and, preferably, a neutral third party watching. Being willing to do a great deal of evil to achieve a great good has not, to my knowledge, ever actually succeeded in accomplishing much other than evil. It is, to use your example, not at all obvious that the MAD doctrine was responsible for the proxy wars of the Cold War era. Other factors that may have played a roll include economics, occupation with empire-building activities closer to home (Russia in Afghanistan and the "Iron Curtain" countries; the U.S. in Latin America), the awareness of a high cost-to-benefit ration of direct warfare (conventional OR nuclear), and pure dumb luck (quite probably the only thing that kept the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming the Cuban Missile War -- certainly it cannot be attributed to the pathetic leadership of Kennedy or Krushchev).

Further, keeping "intrinsically evil actions" on the table necessarily means accepting a non-zero probability that one will be performing these actions in the future. Advocating such a position is equivalent to accepting that there are circumstances under which these actions are permissible. I do not consider this to be true of torture. Or, for that matter, nuclear war, terrorism, or any other strategy that relies on targeting civilians.

[Froborr]

Ecks: I believe you're thinking of sociopaths, not psychopaths. Also, the Kohlberg theory is far from accepted fact; it has been controversial since its inception, and there seems to be a good deal of evidence that people do not necessarily go through his stages in order or at all.

[Robert Hutchinson]

Everyone has thoroughly covered most of the repugnance in the linked article, so I'll just take a moment to note the ever-reliable bit that shows up at the end: "could it be" that Democrats[*] are actually sad about things improving in Iraq? That is, sad that fewer people are being maimed and killed?

Well, she didn't actually state that that IS true of Democrats--she merely offered the question. So, of course, that's Not As Bad.

[*]Note to Ms. Charen: I am not a Democrat, yet I violently disagree with you too. Thanks.

[Ecks]

Ecks: I believe you're thinking of sociopaths, not psychopaths.

Two words for the same thing. In modern psych parlance "psychopathy" is the preferred term (that's the one you'll find in DSM IV, and the research literature), but there's no particular reason for that, I don't think.

Also, the Kohlberg theory is far from accepted fact; it has been controversial since its inception, and there seems to be a good deal of evidence that people do not necessarily go through his stages in order or at all.

There are certainly a lot of quibbles about the details of it - stage 6 is considered largely hypothetical because we've never found enough people who fit that actual description.), but the whole thing seems to be broadly supported. Anyway, I put it out not to say "see, morality definitely works exactly like this," but to show the general point that it has broad patterns and regularities and universal features to it, and isn't always just individual monkeys making their own weird stuff up.

That said, I agree with almost all of your 12:22 post (the one right before the one cited here), so I don't think we're at any real loggerheads.

[Ursula L]

What I do know is that if I fight honorable opponents who abide by the GC or the UN, I fight honorably as well. When I fight cowards who shoot from hospitals, who do not hesitate to use and kill children, who fight dishonorably by my standard, I take nothing off the table.

So, if your opponent makes it a practice of killing small children who have no interest or involvement in the conflict, it suddenly becomes okay for you to kill small children who have no interest or involvement in the conflict? You aren't doing to the opponent, you're doing to people who have no interest in the situation.

When your opponent fires from a hospital, the people in that hospital aren't your opponent - they're innocent bystanders. The fact that a madman next to them is shooting at you doesn't make them have any interest in the conflict beyond suddenly being the victim of your own atrocity. They've been victimized, in a small way, by you're opponent, but they'll be victimized in a much worse way by you, if you suddenly start treating them like targets. You've become the worse monster - not just standing by them (against their will) to fire, but actually firing at them.

It is a common problem that, if people fighting on one side claim to be fighting for the benefit of a particular group, they are taken at their word as actually being representative of that group and fighting in that group's interest.

But that's madness. Even with governments - they may say that their army is fighting for the interests of the people in their nation, but is that ever actually the case? In most wars, the people in the army aren't even fighting for their own interests, they're coerced into fighting for the interests of a handful of others. What cold war soldier, in the US, actually had any interests that were being threatened by the USSR? Beyond that, did they have any interests being threatened by the actual people who would have been hit by the bombs they were expected to fire if ordered?

You see occasional moments of sanity, in history. For example, the Christmas "truce" the first winter of WWI. Soldiers on both sides realized they had no reason to fight each other, and for one day, they didn't. Yet somehow, that realization never gets taken to the next logical step, a refusal to fight at all, when they aren't fighting anyone who actually has interests against theirs, but, at most, other equally uninterested people being forced or coerced to fight, or worse, attacks on people who are not actually fighting, or able to fight.

[not_scottbot]

For all those expecting justice in the U.S., an example of the jury system at work. ( http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/12/24/driveway.shooting.ap/index.html )

' Judge Barbara Kahn said the jury would have to return on Sunday if they didn't reach a decision. Larche told the Post the judge told them a mistrial would burden the families and the next jury.

"I thought about my family and the families of the other jurors," Larche said. "It was not worth it in the end."'

Think about it - sending a man this juror considered innocent to jail was not worth the 'burden' on his and other families. Anyone think such worthy American citizens are going to lift a finger to actually punish torture? After all, ten people on that jury thought the accused worthy of conviction, which meant that this juror actually needed to stand up for what he considered right and just - and he punts, just like our vice president did in tems of serving his country, because he has better things to do with his time

Merry Christmas.

[Jeff]

Wearing a particular piece of religious clothing is clearly up to the individual conscience of the observer.

Not necessarily. It is custom to remove all items that might be used in hanging oneself when put in prison. Should an exception be made for a Muslim woman's head-scarf. One forfeits rights when put in prison (whether innocent or guilty); should this right also be forfeit?

=============================

[sociopath and psychopath]:Two words for the same thing.

I thought the psychopath was the serial killer (John Wayne Gacy) and the sociopath was the mass murderer (Timothy McVeigh).

[Bugmaster]

@Ursula L:
I agree with most of what you've said, except the following:

In most wars, the people in the army aren't even fighting for their own interests, they're coerced into fighting for the interests of a handful of others.

I don't know if "most" is the right qualifier. In many wars, the soldiers did indeed believe that they are fighting for the survival of their country and their way of life; to protect their families back at home (Leningrad and Stalingrad circa WWII come to mind); or, perhaps, to create a better world. Now, you could certainly argue that they've been wrong about that, and, as you say, many of them have simply been coerced (oddly enough, Leningrad and Stalingrad circa WWII come to mind again), but many of them really did have a personal stake in the matter.

[not someone else]

Not sure I really understood your post here.

It is a bit... run-on, isn't it. Teach me to post at the crack of dawn, I suppose.

Shooting random people for fun is clearly objectively wrong.

I don't think so. I think it objectively hurts people. I think allowing the practice of running around hurting people, under some circumstances, will objectively cause a society to take forms a lot of people don't like because it's antithetical to their interests.

I don't think any of that constitutes a standard of behavior that objectively "ought" to be done by everyone, or that there is any logic that can show any objective standard of behavior to exist without including subjective assumptions. That doesn't necessarily make those assumptions bad things, but they're still subjective.

I also don't believe that compassion is necessarily the only sensible starting point for morality. My own sense is based on no such thing, and I'm not any sort of sociopath.

[damnedyankee]

I see no rational reason to rule out, a priori, any behavior that might be necessary to stop a group who wants to kill me or my family. It is nice to limit the destruction if both sides agree on rules of conduct, but if one side declines to keep the rules, why should the other side remain obligated to do so?

Because you're not going to take them out alone (as a nation), and why should anyone else (allies, strategically important countries or entities) help you if you turn into just as big a bastard as the other guys?

[damnedyankee]

"The 101st Fighting Keyboardists", BTW, are a collective name for those bloggers out there who vociferously support the Iraq War and sanction any tactic in its pursuit, yet, despite being of age to serve in the war they adore from a distance, will never come within a thousand miles of a battlefield or even their local recruiting office. They tend to hide their cowardice with puffed-up, tough-talking rhetoric, apparently thinking that "they also serve" with their chest-thumping babble.

See also: Yellow Elephants, Flying Monkeys

[Cathy W]

"Why should I concede to my enemy that I will not do X?"

I don't have links, nor even a specific source off the top of my head - but I have heard that in World War II, POW's kept in American camps wrote home to their friends and family, mystified but pleased at the humane circumstances of their confinement - with the result that as word got around, enemy units given the opportunity to surrender may have been more likely to take that opportunity.

In the first Gulf War, Iraqi units were surrendering to CNN camera crews because they knew Americans treated prisoners humanely, possibly more humanely than Saddam Hussein treated his conscripts.

Do you think, given Guantanamo, given Abu Ghraib, given reports of God-knows-what at "CIA black sites", given our former Attorney General's assertion that the Geneva Conventions are "quaint", that anyone's going to be in a hurry to surrender to the US military (or media) in the near future? Whatever else the torture has accomplished, it's bolstered the morale of reluctant combatants on the other side.

[Ursula L]

I don't know if "most" is the right qualifier. In many wars, the soldiers did indeed believe that they are fighting for the survival of their country and their way of life; to protect their families back at home (Leningrad and Stalingrad circa WWII come to mind); or, perhaps, to create a better world. Now, you could certainly argue that they've been wrong about that, and, as you say, many of them have simply been coerced (oddly enough, Leningrad and Stalingrad circa WWII come to mind again), but many of them really did have a personal stake in the matter.

Even in terms of "protecting from invasion", they're only have to do it because soldiers on the other side, who will never personally gain much from their attack, are attacking at the orders of their leaders, against their own interests. The transformation from a mad plan of a handful of leaders to the actual horror of war happens when people who have no good reason to do so decide to fight.

[Ursula L]

I see no rational reason to rule out, a priori, any behavior that might be necessary to stop a group who wants to kill me or my family. It is nice to limit the destruction if both sides agree on rules of conduct, but if one side declines to keep the rules, why should the other side remain obligated to do so?

Because, if you're just as bad as the other guy, there is no reason why you should win.

Your life, and the lives of your family, are no more valuable than the lives of any other human being on the planet. You can, by your behavior, be a person who is a credit to humanity, and whom others will see good reason to protect. But if you're just another monster willing to commit atrocities, there is no reason for any other human to care about your fate, except for the hope that all the people willing to commit such horrors won't harm too many bystanders as they're going at it.

Some wars need to be lost. If you're the type of person who will do anything and everything for self-preservation, without care for your fellow humans, then your wars will be those where everyone else looks at you, and says "that's the side that needs to loose."

[John]

Cathy W, you give an excellent reason why POWs ought to be treated humanely. Or at least, have the enemy think we treat POWs well; surrender becomes an option rather than "fight to the death since we are going to die horribly anyway." But it isn't a reason to take torture off the table. There were many cases in WWII where we didn't treat POWs in accord with the GCs, especially in the Pacific theater. The captives from a German sub were held in secret so they could not reveal that the Enigma machine and keys were compromised, for an example. For another, the Allies stocked mustard gas in Europe for use on the Germans if they went first. The Allies didn't rule out the use of chemical agents, and let the Germans know it. You don't think they trusted Hitler to keep his side playing fairly, do you?

For those of you who keep bringing up raping little children, please go back and read what I wrote. I said I wouldn't rule it out. I didn't say I would rape small children, even if the enemy did so. But I do think the enemy ought to know that any behavior can be reciprocated.

If you think I'm being a bastard because I wouldn't rule out X, you are a bigger bastard for fighting at all. You accept that soldiers will be killed, maimed, and mutilated horribly, you know that innocent civilians will also be killed, maimed, and mutilated horribly, and you have the chutzpah to call me a bastard? Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.

[Ursula L]

I said I wouldn't rule it out. I didn't say I would rape small children, even if the enemy did so. But I do think the enemy ought to know that any behavior can be reciprocated.

The small children aren't your enemy.

What you're saying is, that your enemy will know that you will not rule out committing atrocities uninvolved innocents. Which means, to everyone in the entire world, you are just as much a threat as they are. As unprincipled, as selfish, as cruel, as evil. You're willing to do to anyone based on what they do to you.

If you won't rule out raping small children, then you're a monster. Better that you loose a thousand wars, than win one.

Being a decent human means ruling out some types of behavior, whatever the personal cost. There are things that it is better to die, better to be destroyed, than to do and become.

To take your WWII example - even if the Nazi leaders decided to use mustard gas on allied civilians, the small children of German cities did not make, and are not responsible for, that decision. If you use that gas against those children, you aren't doing to your enemy. You aren't "reciprocating." You're taking out your rage on innocent people who had nothing to do with the act that has upset you. You're a monster who will gas small children, and no better than any other monster willing to gas small children.

[Praline]

John, it isn't logical to argue both for having 'the enemy think we treat POWs well' and having 'the enemy know that any behaviour can be reciprocated'. If you can think of a way of convincing people that we treat POWs well while reciprocating any mistreatment a brutal dictatorship deals out, you're a more ingenious person than me.

Suppose the Other Guys know that we'll 'reciprocate' any bad action. Do you think, really, that'll make them hold back? People are people everywhere, and one of the commonest human thoughts is 'It's different when we do it to them rather than them doing it to us.' There's not a person on the world who, hearing of a fellow-citizen being tortured by the enemy, is going to think, 'Gee, I guess we started it, so let's just let that go.' They'll think: 'Bastards, look what they're doing to our people!'

And then a fair number of them are going to think, 'Well, if we want to be safe, we have to let those bastards know we'll reciprocate anything they do to us.' So they raise the bar of what they're prepared to do, and so do we.

The last thing the world needs is a cruelty arms race.

And more than that, what's the point of trying to be the good guys if you act like bad guys? The whole point of bad guys is that they do things like torturing people. If we do that as well, even if we win, we've lost the important fight, which is to have non-brutal rulers in charge. It might be our bastards in charge rather than theirs, but we're not just one nation or one race or one culture; we're one people, and involved in humanity. If it's bad for humanity, we shouldn't support it.

[hf]

Why do so many people seem to believe torture is an atom bomb? Since when does its lack put us at a crippling disadvantage? I can see why Double High Dubya might believe that evil is stronger than good in every case, whatever the evidence says, but not why his viewpoint would be so popular.

[Ecks]

Ursula & Praline both: Bravo, well said, beautifully put. It’s rare to find posts that are both insightful AND inspiring, but you’ve done it.

John, before you get there, pacifism is not the only defensible moral stand. Sometimes you have to forcefully counter the coercion of others, but abandoning all your principles for any scrap of an advantage in doing so, is neither moral nor practical. The notion of “win at all costs” may sound nice, but it is a contradiction because even a “total” victory that lets you dictate terms to your enemy at whim, is not a win when there are no terms you can possibly dictate that will undo the costs you have paid. We could squash AQ tomorrow, but if the world regards us as the bad guys, and feel the need to close ranks against us, then we’ve paid a heavier price than any suicide bomber himself could have inflicted.

You see occasional moments of sanity, in history. For example, the Christmas "truce" the first winter of WWI.

They played a clip on the Canadian radio yesterday of a British chaplain relating the story of this incident to the Canadian soldiers in Kandahar. He told them about the German soldiers started singing carols, the Brits sang them back, then they came out, shook hands, exchanged gifts, and even got a game of football in. “I think the Germans won on penalties,” he said at the end. The poor Canadians didn’t even realize he’d told a joke at all. What can you do

[Caravelle]

I said I wouldn't rule it out. I didn't say I would rape small children, even if the enemy did so. But I do think the enemy ought to know that any behavior can be reciprocated.

Ah, so you want the enemy to think you would rape small children. That will make it difficult for them to recruit others to fight you, sure enough.

We could squash AQ tomorrow, but if the world regards us as the bad guys,

If you squash AQ that way, you are the bad guys. This is easy for me to say from across the pond, but don't worry I have no doubt my own country is (and certainly has been) just as bad, if not worse.
All that thanks to you and people like you, John. Thank you for making the world just that little bit worse for everybody.

[Ursula L]

If you squash AQ that way, you are the bad guys. This is easy for me to say from across the pond, but don't worry I have no doubt my own country is (and certainly has been) just as bad, if not worse.

As someone on this side of the pond, I'll second this. If we use any means, regardless of human cost, to squash AQ, we're a bigger monster than AQ has ever dreamed of being.

There is no valid presumption that if it is "us" doing something (as opposed to "them"), then that something is good. "We" for any value of "we", are as fallible as any other human, and as likely to turn into monsters as any other human. Only constant vigilance that we're actually doing good can keep us as "the good guys."

[Me]

Sure we could destroy AQ in twenty minutes. Just launch a nuke at Pakistan, a nuke at India, a nuke at China, and a nuke at Russia.

Of course every one else ends up dead and the world is made devoid of life, but we still destroyed them!

[Ecks]

I also don't believe that compassion is necessarily the only sensible starting point for morality. My own sense is based on no such thing, and I'm not any sort of sociopath.
I can conceive of a morality that isn’t base on at least some level of empathy, but it’s the authoritarian “Dad/God/the law says X is wrong, therefore it is wrong.” Anything more advanced, even enlightened self-interest (“if I don’t want it to be ok for them to kill me, I better not kill them”), seems like it would involve some perspective taking, and some basic caring about the outcomes of others – and that is the root of compassion.

See also: Yellow Elephants, Flying Monkeys
And “chickenhawks” of course.

Cathy W, I’ve also heard accounts of people in Germany who’s strategy at the very end of the war was: “make sure you get captured by the Americans, not the Russians.” Because, y’know, the Russians torture their prisoners and treat them horribly. America was seen as a far better place… ‘was’ being the increasingly operative word.

[Praline]

I think another reason why some people are attached to the idea of torture lies in a certain kind of child-logic.

I can't cite the source, I'm afraid, but more than one person of a certain kind has been reported to tell the following story: 'When I was a child, I was terrified of monsters in the dark. Then I realised if I was the biggest monster of all, I didn't have to be scared of anyone.'

The technical term for those people, unfortunately, is 'serial killer'.

These are not people we should take any moral lessons from. But it's an impulse that many people feel to a lesser degree: that if there's something scary out there, it'll eat you unless you make yourself bigger, badder, scarier.

Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? The guy huffing and puffing.

The world, though, doesn't divide into wolves and pigs (or that stupid wolves-dogs-sheep analogy either). If you go around blowing down people's houses and eating the inhabitants, you don't get to call yourself a little pig. There's only one conflict in the world that's ever mattered, and that's the conflict between decency and bastardy. You might begin as a decent person, but if you torture people, whatever nation you belong to, you've changed sides. You haven't made the world a safer place. You've made it dangerous, because now there's one more wolf in it. And it's you.

Serial killers accept that bargain, because they'd rather be a wolf than frightened. But personally, I'll take the fear and the uncertainty, over the certainty that I'm on the same side as wickedness.

[Jeff]

I don't have links, nor even a specific source off the top of my head - but I have heard that in World War II, POW's kept in American camps wrote home to their friends and family, mystified but pleased at the humane circumstances of their confinement - with the result that as word got around, enemy units given the opportunity to surrender may have been more likely to take that opportunity.

I don't have links either, but it seems to be a given that German units went out of their way to surrender to American forces instead of Russian ones. It got to a point where a branch of the SS was detailed to find and kill deserters. (Or what Ecks said, amplified.)

Garth Ennis did 2 volumes of comics called "War Stories" Volume 1 and Volume 2 (4 stories each). My favorite is called "Condors in Volume 2, but "Johann's Tigers" in volume 1 is relevant to this discussion.