Article: What Would Reagan Do About Torture?

Steve Chapman, writing in Reason magazine, sums up feelings I have long had about the debate over so-called "enhanced interrogation methods" practiced by the CIA against Al-Qaeda suspects.

Political conservatives, including those at the Wall Street Journal and my old employer, National Review, have been far too uncritical of these methods and the people who practiced them.

Partly they do this for political reasons, it seems to me. Because in a political prize fight with the left, fought for current advantage, they are rooting for their old warrior Dick Cheney. Who is flat out wrong about this issue.

Partly they and Cheney make this case because they are all uncritical about the underlying moral principle they are embracing. Which Chapman notes, is "the ends justify the means."

Chapman makes two important points, which I would like to elaborate on.

The first is that no less than Ronald Reagan denounced torture and supported legislation banning it.

From Chapman:

"He would get an argument from Ronald Reagan, who signed an international ban on torture, which made no allowances for grave security threats. 'No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture,' it says.


"Reagan undoubtedly knew what modern conservatives forget—that once you rationalize torture, there is no logical place to stop. If threatening a prisoner with a power drill is permissible, why not drilling holes in him? If choking is OK, why not strangulation? If threatening to kill a detainee's children passes muster, why not actually killing them? If 30 wall slams don't do the job, why not 100?"


Reagan's moral logic was unambiguously clear. The ends never justify the means.

What would conservatives say to that?

Perhaps they might argue that Reagan had the luxury of saying such things because he was not faced with "an immediate threat."

Perhaps. But I find, as I noted in a previous post, a disturbing eagerness for some conservatives to adopt the morally liminal persona of Col. Nathan R. Jessup. Perhaps in a need to feel culturally "important." To make a patriotic contribution.

Jessup, you may recall, is a character in the play and film "A Few Good Men" who is both proud, and tortured by his existence in a morally liminal space from the rest of society:

"Son, we live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and curse the Marines; you have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives and that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use then as the backbone of a life trying to defend something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you," and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest that you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to. "

The morally arrogant Jessup embraces ends-justify-the-means thinking to "save lives." In so doing he inflates his own sense of importance as a kind of morally liminal superman who lives on the boundaries of society.

Yet, when he returns to civilization, to a world of laws, he finds himself, paradoxically, disoriented in being charged with a crime for ordering the death of someone under his command.

Why do societies have laws at all? Just laws. To protect people from those who think they can do good and "save lives" or other morally righteous things by trampling over what man possesses from God and nature." In other words, law itself is a rebuke to utilitarianism.

If some conservatives do not seek to "conserve" the idea that the ends do not justify the means, or that there are, in the same vein, limits on the power of the king rooted in nature itself (Magna Carta anyone?) then they stand for the conservation of nothing.

I have long thought about this debate, and even the so-called "conservative" position on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of Toykyo and the total war assault on Dresden, that the right has adopted utilitarian ethics in direct contradiction of all that they stand for otherwise.

Reagan may have had his own moments of "utility" emanating from his perceptions of immediate threats. That is a longer debate.

But in a choice between Reagan conservatism, or today's regnant "Nathan R. Jessup conservatism" on this issue, I have always been a Reagan conservative.

The second point Chapman makes is a good one, and more philosophically subtle, but supports the first and needs to be looked at more carefully.

The CIA Inspector General's report on these methods, Chapman notes, came to no conclusion about the "effectiveness" of their use, because, as the author of the report noted, you cannot. The reasoning is utilitarian, which is inherently shaky in its attempts to calculate the long term benefits of any act, since you have no alternative to future to test it against.

As no less a conservative than Hadley Arkes, a contributor to National Review and other conservative journals, noted in his book "First Things" "The effects of Ceaser crossing the Rubicon are never all in."

Which sums up perfectly the philosophical criticism of utilitarian reasoning. Only by selectively looking at the "effects" of such actions as atomic bombings, waterboading and more, can you say that they "worked."

Worked for whom, and for how long?

Leftists are wrong about many things, and far too eager to attack America. They also embrace their own utilitarian reasoning when their "emergencies" seem to justify them. They would break down the rule of law just as quickly, if not more so, than libertarian-minded rightists.

But their criticism and reminders about what "works" here are useful. They are not automatically wrong to see utilitarian acts in war as inherently generative of, if I may borrow a term from another field, "codependent" responses. Or, as the CIA calls it: "blowback."

More concretely, President Barack Obama is wrong about so many things, and I find his policy positions dangerous. That is worth emphasizing.

But his being wrong about those things is not a good reason to stop up our ears and reject outright the argument that emanates from his mouth that America will be hurt by acts like these. To reject an argument because we reject a person or persons politically is anecdotal and illogical folly.

Only by selectively looking at torture from the perspective of an American public relations campaign can one say it worked, while ignoring all the things that may yet happen as a result: in generating more terrorists, or destroying the American brand abroad, which leads to easy rationalizations of acts of terrorism and total war against America.

Maybe not in ways that are immediately tangible, but America can be hurt by ends-justify-the-means acts.

Consider this possibility. We are rightfully outraged against the attacks of September 11th. They violate all known moral principles of just war and are repugnant.

But they are, without a doubt, some of the unintended consequences of all acts of total war that preceded and the selective calculations they entailed. Including Truman dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Acts of terrorism against America are acts of total war against a country which in the minds of the fanatics of Al-Qaeda has is collectively "guilty" and has embraced total war itself.

They are wrong about this of course. Collective guilt is morally impossible, except in the minds of fanatics.

"America" has not embraced total war. Even if, as bin-Laden argued, all Americans pay taxes to support the American government.

All Americans live today in a country which is the way it is because of all of its previous choices.

The mistake, made by Osama bin Laden, and Dick Cheney, is that all Americans see it as Jessup's blanket, which we embrace, or in the minds of Cheney, should embrace.

But we do not all embrace it that way. Many Americans have supported total war. Many Americans have not.

What makes a country "innocent" in this regard is that its morality is not determined by the choices of some in power. Even if those in power are supported by a majority.

It is precisely in the room under its laws for moral and political deliberation that all countries are "innocent." And even where there is no room for such deliberation, in totalitarian regimes, a vast majority of the people under such regimes remain "innocent" and deserving of the protection emanating from venerable rules of just war thinking.

Because government exists for the protection of individuals, not groups.

Finally, a personal note, which might provide some political insight.

Growing up as a Roman Catholic, in a Reagan Democrat household, I believed in moral certainties. They were the blanket I embraced, and seemed to provide a simple, straightforward path to self-discovery, self-awareness, individuation or whatever else you might call it.

As I learned only later in my teaching of the venerable myths of all of mankind, liminality and disorientation must follow.

Adulthood did follow, where I experienced the codependent and tribal behavior of politics, 9/11, natural disasters, and my own personal experiences of evil, and tragedy and all the confusing inclinations of my own complex and sinful mind.

At the root of all this confusion is the Creator. The comforting God of my childhood is now perhaps the primary source of my disorientation. I find myself questioning everything about him, and the tangled pattern of his world.

Why the need for emergencies, and moral liminality? Why so much scandal, and confusion? Why is there no simple path in life, where one can relax about oneself and one's choices?

During this time of confusion, I cling instinctively to the principle articulated above, as a last vestige of hope in the Creator himself. The ends do not justify the means.

Because if there are no praiseworthy paths written into the nature of things on behalf of individuals to follow to get where they must be, there is no Creator.

If there are only "circumstances," from which elites help us escape at times, but for no greater purpose for the individuals who do escape; if there is only escape, there is no ultimate "arrival." Life is reduced to mere escape, for as long as possible, and nothing more.

Yes, as Thomas More says in the play, "A Man for All Seasons," "our natural business lies in escaping." Of man serving God "in the tangle of his mind."

But that is individual man, not collective man, or some individual mind making tangled calculations on behalf of the collective. It is an individual act of escaping real evil and choosing real goods.

I find myself disoriented at this point in my life about many things, but not about this one principle. It is the last wall between me, and nihilism.

Logically related to this, is something that has always stayed with me from the Gospels: Jesus, when confronted by individual sinners, never treated them with contempt. It is as if he recognized that even in their sin, there was at some point also personal confusion and disorientation. That all of life entails this disorientation. Jesus forgave them, as a way of righting them again, and encouraged them to keep moving forward.

Perhaps at this time, the proper answer to this political fight is to reflect more on the principles in question, and how individuals in our government have fallen short of right action, during a time when confusion is easily possible. Confusion which lessens, but does not eliminate guilt.

The correct answer is to pardon those involved in our government who were confused. And to move forward.