Excellent Argument for Water Boarding
Over at Instapunk the blogger makes this argument in regards to some comments made by Stephen King.
Sound a bit like waterboarding? Unspeakable. Where’s Amnesty International? Where’s the New York Times? Somebody should do something. Somebody did. Her guards.
“Two guards from Benxi, holding electric batons, shouted, “We will see who is tougher!” The two men tore Ms. Wang’s shirt open and shocked her breasts with two electric batons for 30 minutes.
“Afterwards, they made her stand still for the entire night. The next morning, guard Guo Tieying asked Ms. Wang nastily whom she would follow. Ms. Wang replied, “I will follow the teachings of Falun Gong.”
“Guo Tieying immediately brought in two guards and several collaborators to torture her. They tore a bed sheet into strips and tied her legs in a cross-legged position (with legs double-crossed, as in the ‘full lotus’ position). Next they handcuffed her arms behind her back and tied her upper body to her legs, making Ms. Wang look like a ball. Then they suspended her in the air by the handcuffs, with her hands still behind her back.
“She suffered excruciating pain from this torture for seven hours.
“Afterwards, Ms. Wang could no longer walk with her back straight, but was bent over, nor could she sit straight. Her breasts were disfigured by the intense shocks, and eventually developed serious infections.”
So, all you hyper-moral pacifist purists, if you could learn Ms. Wang’s location and save her by waterboarding a captured guard, would you do it? Or is her permanent crippling and disfigurement a satisfactory consequence of your own personal interpretation of right and wrong? That’s what you seem to be saying by your absolute opposition to any form of physical coercion, even if it doesn’t maim or kill.
November 28th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Let me start by saying I think this is a false dichotomy, because I honestly don’t think that you can obtain better, faster, or more reliable information through torture than you can by any other means. Classicaly torture has been used to obtain confessions pretty effectively, because it gets peope to tell you whatever you want to hear, whetehr it’s true or not.
That being said, if I accepted his premise, tehn yes, if I PERSONALLY could only save this woman by torturing one of her guards, I would do so. And I would fully expect to go to jail for my actions, and would not whine about it.
If the GOVERNMENT had one of her guards, I would not want the government to torture them in order to save her. The consequences of our government getting used to using torture as part of their standard operating procedures are just way too dangerous and far-reaching to justify it’s use in a case like this. (For instance, it’s an absolute certainty that is they start torturing anyone they THINK is guilty and has information, that they’ll eventually mistakenly torture some innocent people, wiping out the net gain from this hypothetical)
November 29th, 2007 at 11:34 am
I hate it when people assume torture is the best way to get information out of people. Show me the data.
I also hate it when people think America should torture people. There was this thing called the Geneva Convention where we signed a treaty pledging not to torture people. Also, do we really want to be on the same moral level as our enemies? Should we not hold ourselves to higher standards? We cannot maintain the moral high ground if we use the tactics of those we condemn.
Plus the things darwin mentioned. I’m surprised that you, Steve, would want to give the government a tool like torture, when you constantly rail against the government’s monopoly on coercion.
November 29th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Government is defined by it’s monopoly on coercion. Without that monopoly the state does not exist.
Geneva convention was signed between nation states. Islamic terrorists that don’t have a state do not enjoy the rights of that treaty. Additionally sawing off a person’s head does not equal water boarding.
Obviously extensive judicial and legislative review should be employed in instances where the executive believes torturing a citizen is justified. However I am not going to eliminate that option because there are intuitively obvious instances where application of torture, as defined by things like water boarding are beneficial. This is something even Darwin acknowledges though reluctantly.
Of interest to me is Darwin’s argument. He seems to be suggesting that the state should not indulge in torture ever. To get around the problem of instance where torture might be justified he concedes that civilians should perform the torture and expect the state to condemn them.
Since he acknowledges the utility of torture, but refuses that option to the state, one might draw the conclusion he believes that certain things the state should never indulge in even if there might be good reason for the state to do so. This reminds me of the argument that I made regarding the injection centers. While it may be the case that their are justifiable benefits for having the state provide sanctuary to drug users, the state should never indulge in this behavior.
My argument was that the state should send a message of indifference if not disapproval of drug usage even if its the case that such drug usage can not be controlled by those the state looked down upon. In this way, my argument was more about the state conveying the proper attitude about drug usage then finding a way to assist those that do drugs even when there are beneficial effects for doing so.
An argument can be made that Darwin’s position relies on the same idea. The state must always send the message that under no circumstances is torture permissible even instance where there are obvious benefits.
It nice to hear someone other than me extend an argument based more on a message or value than one of evidence. Much of the counter arguments I deal with are built around the ‘evidence’. Finally I have an argument more built around something less empirical.
November 29th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
My argument isn’t really about the message being sent, although I’d agree that, like your own argument, some case might be made that sending such a message leads to real, negative results. But I’m more worried about the state using torture on immediate, practical grounds.
If the state tortures people, then eventually it will torture an innocent person. This is inevitable. And it’s completely unacceptable to me- remember, I don’t believe in an afterlife, any superstitious phenomenon, or concepts/ideals beyond their pragmatic importance. All I believe in, and care about, is people, and their actual daily experiences while they’re alive. Because of this, torturing someone is basically the most evil thing you could ever do, in my opinion. Creating a system which guarantees that innocent people will be tortured, or even that evil people will be tortured for no purpose, is MUCH worse to me than a system where we try every other method possibly available to us to defend our security, and very occasionally fail. Note that I still think that implementing torture will actually decrease our national security (we’ll create more enemies than we catch), but my position still stands regardless.
Again, I do acknowledge that there are a very small number of cases where the benefit outweighs the cost of torturing someone. In these cases, if a suspect is in government custody already, I would say that the correct way for this situation to be handled is for some agent to lock the doors, torture the suspect and get the information, and then go to jail for that crime. If your convictions about the necessity of the method aren’t THAT strong, you shouldn’t be doing it.
November 30th, 2007 at 2:01 am
I don’t mean this in a ‘I gotcha’ sense, but as way to serious challenge your claim about torture. For someone so antipathetic towards torture its seems rather surprising your antagonistic position towards disposing Saddam given that he intentionally set out to torture innocent people as means to maintain state control.
In all honesty, I would think someone with your antipathy towards torture would be eager to invade a country to stop widespread state sponsored torture.
December 1st, 2007 at 4:15 am
In my own pragmatic humanist way, I would certainly favor any invasion that I thought, with a very high degree of confidence, would lower the overall number of occurances these - and many other- types of attrocities, over the long run. However, I really haven’t seen a convincing case that this is true for our invasion of Iraq, or that this was the best way to accomplish that goal. Yes, Saddam was doing bad things to teh people of Iraq, and I definitely would have favored doign something to fix that. But as far as I’m concerned, someone being killed on the whim of a dictator doesn’t have it any worse off thn someone being killed in the corssfire between their invading liberators and that same oppresiv regime. And what ever humanitarian violations Saddam was up to, I doubt that the country will be much better under teh islamo-fascists, and I’m not at all convinced we can prevent it from that way. Furthermore, I feel that we’ve squandered our good will and good reputation on the national stage, and that we might have been able to use that to achieve similar goals by peaceful means (I’m nto saying I’m SURE we could have, but I think it’s at least as likely as achieving it through war).
So to summarize, yes, the argument that we invaded for humanitarian reasons,in order to reduce suffering and death, would be a very persuasive argument for me. I just don’t think that things will/have actually happened that way, in this particular case.