I recently responded to someone's questions about torture, using Jack Bauer as an example. More recently, I ran across my friend's blog post about the exact same thing. It is just so eloquently written that I had to repost it. Alden Utter, you rock.
Want to feel shivers up and down your spine?
Read:
So, here's what I would do. First I would google waterboarding to understand the basic concepts than I would try it on myself. First, self inflicted and then, if necessary, inflicted by my wife.(she has no problem torturing me. We've been married almost 15 years.)These are the results of my research and experience:
We can talk all we will about torture; for example, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and Tom Tancredo have expressed support varying degrees for waterboarding. McCain, naturally, is against all tortures on principle.
But Scylla has walked the walk. And the results... Well, back to the text
It took me ten minutes to recover my senses once I tried this. I was shuddering in a corner, convinced I narrowly escaped killing myself.
... If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I'd take the fingers, no question.
So, let's talk Kant and Mill. Briefly.
There are, for the sake of this discussion, two kinds of moral/ethical viewpoints: Utilitarianism, and what Kant called the Categorical Imperative. In Utilitarianism, the best actions are those which do the most good to the most people, and the least bad to the least people. The Categorical Imperative, on the other hand, is a philosophy whose two central calls are that we must "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law," and that we must treat all other people as ends into themselves, rather than as merely means. These two philosophies are both reasonable positions which almost instantly become contentious.
And both of them, interestingly, are against the use of torture in almost all applicable circumstances.
The Categorical Imperative rationale is the most obvious: we wouldn't want to live in a world where it is universally agreed that "Torture is a legitimate tool for gathering information", and you inarguably treat the torturee as a means for learning where the bomb is. But the utilitarian angle is a little fuzzier. The most obvious reasons are that the torture of alleged terrorists weakens the US resolve (or if it doesn't, it should), ensures the continued torture of US prisoners without our having the right to complain, and leads to further terrorism as the US becomes viewed an immoral, power-loving oppressor (which the fact that it engages in torture supports). But there's a better reason:
Torture does not work as advertised.
This isn't obvious, in part because of shows like 24, which portray the Ticking time bomb scenario as a constant, real-life event along the lines of rainstorms, rather than a thought experiment, nice to think about but having no relation to the real world, along the lines of Schrödinger's cat. And in the Ticking time bomb scenario, the terrorist is known, and the information he will give you is true. 24, in it's way, is as divorced from reality as Buffy the Vampire Slayer is: torture on the show is a magic rite which can only be performed on the guilty, and will conjure information that no other spell could summon.
But here, in Earth-Prime, torture doesn't produce information. Torture destroys the individual, causes the community to fear the government, and degrades any nation which practices it. Those are what torture accomplishes; if that is your goal, mission accomplished. But to think that someone willing to die blowing up the Sears Tower would tell you the bomb was in the Sears Tower when telling you it was in the Chase Auditorium would stop the torture just as swiftly is a level of cognitive dissonance normally reserved for cdesign proponentsists.
Jack Bauer is a protagonist, a main character. And, to an extent, he can be viewed as a hero—an anti-hero, but a hero. But the ideas he holds, effective as they are in the universe he inhabits, do not work in the real world; his ideals are not ones America can, or should, embrace. If we want to model our society on a character from fiction, let's chose one isn't an anti-hero.
I suggest Bilbo.
Don't board me, bro.
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