Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Friday, April 24, 2009

Enough, Already

For some unknown reason, Megan McArdle is still talking about torture.

I agree with you that we're faster to identify torture when its done to us,but I don't think it's impossible to construct a moral system that allows waterboarding suspected terrorists, but not repeatedly breaking John McCain's arms.

However, there is some dividing line between torture and the merely unpleasant--giving people only old copies of the Donna Reed show to watch would be awful, but not actually torture. Many advocates of extreme techniques say that waterboarding
falls on one side of that line--something distasteful, but okay to do if it
might save innocent lives. So saying "well, was it okay for the Vietcong to
torture John McCain?" isn't very useful, because what was done to John McCain
goes well beyond what they're endorsing.
Didn't you just say that it was better to not debate the fine points of torture? Why are you quoting defenders of torture? Who cares what they think? What kind of person hand-waves waterboarding? Have you research the subject? Does this look merely "unpleasant"? Why am I asking myself all these questions?

Yeah, you're against torture, but your definition of torture is oddly exculpatory.

And I step out for a few hours and come back to this:

The argument for not doing [torture] at all has to rest on proving either that it's morally repugnant, or that there is no way to have an effective waterboarding policy, or that the costs exceed the benefits. Unfortunately, I seem to see too many opponents of current policy simply arguing that it never produces usable intelligence, so everyone else is a big fat moral cretin.

[snip]

That doesn't mean I agree we should waterboard--people will do lots of things for their children that should not be state policy. Only that some of the people I've heard saying they have to resort to these shaky arguments because their opponents are moral no-shows without a shred of decency seem to me to be awarding themselves vast moral credit for parroting, like a third-grader, the trivial truism that torture is bad. They find it easy to call their opponents immoral because they're ignoring a hard moral question. One that is, of course, easy to set aside if you seize on every piece of evidence suggesting that physical pressure is ineffective, and block out the people saying it's worked.


Oh, so that's what all this blathering is about. Not only is your reasoning more reasoned, but your morality is more moral than other people's morality. Just like your wrong decision on Iraq showed that your reasoning was impeccable. It's not that the left made the right decision, it's just that they are automatically anti-war. And anti-torture people aren't using logic, they're just knee-jerk anti-torture.

Your insistence that your brains are extra-superior brains reeks of insecurity. But it has given me an idea--an examination of your thought processes. Later, however. I've had enough for one day.

4 comments:

atheist said...

I don't think it's impossible to construct a moral system that allows waterboarding suspected terrorists, but not repeatedly breaking John McCain's arms."Construct a moral system"?! What, is McArdle a Nietzschean now?

Sure, Ms. McArdle, I bet you could "construct a moral system" to allow you to do whatever the flying fuck you wanted to do. Your morals could be just as easily contstucted as low quality housing. And they could be as easily demolished when you no longer needed them. You could even construct them in such a way that you, Megan McArdle, would feel sheltered by them as you ignored waterboarding by the US intelligence agencies, while at the same time, they could leave the Vietcong torturers outside of their stucture, so you could consider them reprehensible!

Or, you could construct a moral system that would hold Megan McArdle, the Iraq war supporter, completely blameless for the consequences of the war itself, and also hold Iraq war opponents to be faithless, unpatriotic scoundrels. We'd have to work out the premises of this moral system, but I think it can be done. Maybe something like this?
1. I stand in the center of the world, supporting the best people in the world, with my faith and sureness.
2. I am wiser and better than the other people who stand in the margins of the world.
3. If the other people on the margins were to speak ill of me, I would feel less faith and would have trouble supporting the best people in the world.
4. Therefore, my place is to speak well of the best people in the world, and protect my faith from the people on the margins, who are foolish.
I feel like its a start, but not a complete McArdle thought process by any means. I'm sure someone else can come up with something better.

zeppo said...

I heard a really good rebuttal to the argument, "we torture because it is effective." So, if we were to, say, bring out the detainee's 8 year old daughter and started torturing HER to make her father talk, and he did, then that's effective, right? So we should do that more often.

When the answer is, uh, no, then the torture proponent has immediately acknowledged that there is a boundary. And they are therefore arguing that everything up TO that boundary can and should be used.

I CANNOT believe that many people in this country are supporting those actions that make us indistinguishable from such odious governments like the USSR and all those "banana republics" they are tossing about, or the very people we are fighting against.

It's also amazing to me that many of the same people taking this stance regard themselves as Christians in good standing with God.

Just contemplating all this makes my stomach upset.

atheist said...

When the answer is, uh, no, then the torture proponent has immediately acknowledged that there is a boundary. And they are therefore arguing that everything up TO that boundary can and should be used.Zeppo, good point. Though, watch out with tactics like that too. The upside is, it would work with most people, and if the discussion was done on TV people would likely not say it is OK to torture an eight year old girl. The problem with tactics like that is, I'm worried that some people will reply, "Yes, we should torture eight year old girls if it keeps me safe." Maybe I'm just too cynical.

Susan of Texas said...

No, I don't think you are. Some people would do anything if someone in power told them to do it. Religion seems to reinforce this--people seem to think it's fine to break one of God's rules if you're obeying God. Which ought to make them realize something is wrong in their reasoning, but doesn't.