I discovered this video posted on a very right wing blog recently. It's of an MSNBC debate about waterboarding and torture. The author of that blog had a different view of it than I did.
Sorry, but Joe Scarborough is being enormously unfair here. Arrogant. And a jack ass. (And normally, I like Joe Scarborough.) He is doing his best paternalistic Jack "You Can't Handle the Truth about Our Dangerous World" Nicholson routing here, and it's not working. I think there is also a bit of male chest thumping.
Not everything a left-winger, or so-called moderate says is wrong. There are no limits to what Buchanan and Scarborough are advocating. It offends the sensibilities of people who don't want crude "realist" thugs protecting our freedoms.
As I have said before, the willingness to believe one has to do these things in order to protect freedom, as the "only choice," is (aside from cheap utilitarian reasoning toward which conservatives are usually averse - see previous post) a kind of exercise in Nietzschean over-man beyond-good-and-evil vanity. And, sad to say, some conservatives just LOVE IT.
Showing posts with label waterboarding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label waterboarding. Show all posts
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Two Voices on Utilitarian Ethics and War
Funny how this issue keeps coming back to haunt me. Second time in a week that it hits the news.
While I have long been aligned with the movement from an economic point of view, I have always found the Right's willingness to embrace utilitarian ethics in warfare, or loosely defined warfare, (WWII, "War on Terror") disturbing.
Bret Stephens, a fine and intelligent gentlemen, has written a piece in the Wall Street Journal defending the "limited use" of waterboarding torture; citing as analogous our somewhat morally extraordinary behavior in World War II. A related video link is below.
Contrast that with journalist Stephen Grey's contention, in his new book Ghost Plane, that horrific things have been done during "rendition" of terror suspects, and that there is serious professional opinion that there are other ways to get information beside waterboarding, etc. See the video link below.
My contention against the Right on this issue (and against situationists in general, Left or Right) has always been epistemological.
The claim to "know" what will happen, and thereby justify "extraordinary" actions, even when rooted most firmly in statistical projection, ignores the nature of moral responsibility, where the actions of war lie within human choices.
We can't "know" that a result will come in the same sense we can predict a chemical reaction - because the choice to carry on or not carry on is always there.
And even where we can predict an outcome, the prediction should not hold the same moral weight.
There is a certain degree of moral vanity and underlying self-interest (pace Oppenheimer, see my last post), I can't put my finger on it, in suggesting that a kind of moral uber-man must emerge to do terrible things in the name of goodness, at any time. (The great myth of the "disinterested" utilitarian.)
Is not this moral vanity at the heart of every repugnant "real-politik" politician and so-called "professional" amoral foreign policy operative we have ever heard of?
One is not responsible to single-handedly prevent evil that will come as the result of the choices and actions of others - so long as one does everything one humanely can to prevent those actions directly. That means against the aggressor. Not against those the aggressor knows or cares about.
And even against the aggressor, cruel and unusal behavior is inherently codependent.
I don't know how to "prove" this. Stephens will cite the "facts" of history to make his case. The War ended. But are those all the facts? As Hadley Arkes once noted in his text, "First Things" the effects of Caesar crossing the Rubicon are never all in. Perhaps the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still inform the thinking of Osama bin Laden? Perhaps they still inform the thinking of our foreign policy establishment, creating new ripples of codependence and reaction.
While I have respect for the facts of math and science, I also know that "facts" are often selected with certain biases. Ethical moments are not over when the news cycle is over. Americans look upon the morality of World War II entirely too much through the haze of triumphalist newsreels, and ignore the potentially codependent after-effects.
In any event, have a look at these two videos. Intelligent cases made. But, one is wrong; the other right.
While I have long been aligned with the movement from an economic point of view, I have always found the Right's willingness to embrace utilitarian ethics in warfare, or loosely defined warfare, (WWII, "War on Terror") disturbing.
Bret Stephens, a fine and intelligent gentlemen, has written a piece in the Wall Street Journal defending the "limited use" of waterboarding torture; citing as analogous our somewhat morally extraordinary behavior in World War II. A related video link is below.
Contrast that with journalist Stephen Grey's contention, in his new book Ghost Plane, that horrific things have been done during "rendition" of terror suspects, and that there is serious professional opinion that there are other ways to get information beside waterboarding, etc. See the video link below.
My contention against the Right on this issue (and against situationists in general, Left or Right) has always been epistemological.
The claim to "know" what will happen, and thereby justify "extraordinary" actions, even when rooted most firmly in statistical projection, ignores the nature of moral responsibility, where the actions of war lie within human choices.
We can't "know" that a result will come in the same sense we can predict a chemical reaction - because the choice to carry on or not carry on is always there.
And even where we can predict an outcome, the prediction should not hold the same moral weight.
There is a certain degree of moral vanity and underlying self-interest (pace Oppenheimer, see my last post), I can't put my finger on it, in suggesting that a kind of moral uber-man must emerge to do terrible things in the name of goodness, at any time. (The great myth of the "disinterested" utilitarian.)
Is not this moral vanity at the heart of every repugnant "real-politik" politician and so-called "professional" amoral foreign policy operative we have ever heard of?
One is not responsible to single-handedly prevent evil that will come as the result of the choices and actions of others - so long as one does everything one humanely can to prevent those actions directly. That means against the aggressor. Not against those the aggressor knows or cares about.
And even against the aggressor, cruel and unusal behavior is inherently codependent.
I don't know how to "prove" this. Stephens will cite the "facts" of history to make his case. The War ended. But are those all the facts? As Hadley Arkes once noted in his text, "First Things" the effects of Caesar crossing the Rubicon are never all in. Perhaps the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still inform the thinking of Osama bin Laden? Perhaps they still inform the thinking of our foreign policy establishment, creating new ripples of codependence and reaction.
While I have respect for the facts of math and science, I also know that "facts" are often selected with certain biases. Ethical moments are not over when the news cycle is over. Americans look upon the morality of World War II entirely too much through the haze of triumphalist newsreels, and ignore the potentially codependent after-effects.
In any event, have a look at these two videos. Intelligent cases made. But, one is wrong; the other right.
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