Morality of Water Torture The present question regarding the nature and morality of torture offers us an excellent opportunity to advance the level of sophistication of our understanding of morality. We learn best when we are questioning a matter that is meaningful to us. I was eleven years old when Germany and Japan surrendered and WWII was finally over. One searing memory of this war were the stories I read and the movies I watched during and after the war regarding the torture and general brutality that the German Gestapo inflicted upon the people they conquered. I do not know why this left such a strong impression on me but it certainly did. Coincidentally I have been studying “Moral Imagination” by Mark Johnson. This is the same Johnson who coauthored the book “Philosophy in the Flesh” with George Lakoff. I have decided to apply the theories Johnson presents in his book as a means to illuminate this matter regarding the morality of water torture used by my country in our struggle with Islamic extremists. Moral understanding is like any other kind of experience; when we examine a domain of experience that relates to human relationships we must focus our attention on human understanding it self. If we do so we discover that human understanding is fundamentally imaginative in character. “Many of our most basic concepts have considerable internal structure that cannot be accounted for by the classical theory of concepts as defined by necessary and sufficient features…The primary forms of moral imagination are concepts with prototype structure, semantic frames, conceptual metaphors, and narratives.” To become morally insightful we must become knowledgeable of these imaginative structures. First, we must give up our illusions about absolute moral codes and also our radical moral subjectivism. Second we must refine our “perception of character traits and situations and of developing empathetic imagination to take up the part of others.” Empathy is a character trait that can be cultivated by habit and will. Sympathy is somewhat of an automatic response. When we see a mother weeping over the death of her child caused by a suicide bomber we feel immediate sympathy. Often we will come to tears. But we do not feel anything like that for the mother who may be weeping over the death of her child who was the bomber. To understand the bomber we must use empathy. We attempt through imagination and reason to create a situation that will allow us to understand why this was done. This is a rational means to understand someone who acts different than we would. “Empathy is the idea that the vital properties which we experience in or attribute to any person or object outside ourselves are the projections of our own feelings and thoughts.” The subject viewing an object of art experiences emotional attitudes leading to feelings that are attributes of qualities in the art object thus aesthetic pleasure may be considered as “objectified self-enjoyment in which the subject and object are fused.” The social sciences adopt a similar concept called ‘empathic understanding’, which refers to the deliberate attempt to identify with another person and accounting for that persons actions by “our own immediate experience of our motivations and attitudes in similar circumstances as we remember or imagine them”. This idea refers to a personal resonance between two people. “What is crucial is that our moral reasoning can be constrained by the metaphoric and other imaginative structures shared within our culture and moral tradition, yet it can also be creative in transforming our moral understanding, our identity, and the course of our lives. Without this kind of imaginative reasoning we would lead dreadfully impoverished lives. We would be reduced to repeating habitual actions, driven by forces and contingencies beyond our control.” Can you imagine an individual who is a hard headed realist and very accomplished at empathy sanctioning the use of water torture on anyone, friend or enemy?
Running water down the nose of a demonic terrorist is NOTHING compared to his sawing the head off an innocent person. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I was only two so I didn't see the visual images. But the verbal descriptions were enough to make the same impression on me. I was only three years too old to be part of the Baby Boom and the tiny population of War Babies had to choose which generation to tag along with. I chose the Boomers primarily because I couldn't stand the music that the older kids were listening to. In line with that, I found the images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be just as stomach-turning as the ones from Auschwitz. I had no trouble enforcing the Generation Gap and declaring that my parents' entire generation, whether the German, Japanese or American contingent, had abrogated its right to be treated as respected elders, and it was time to turn society upside down and shake it. (Racial discrimination, sexism, and many other institutions venerated in America and elsewhere reinforced this attitude.) I think it is perfectly normal to be revulsed by images of people performing deeds that have no purpose in a civilized society. One can excuse war itself (although I and many others do not) because it is marketed so cleverly to the populace by its leaders, but one cannot excuse sheer brutality for its own sake. Civilization has been a twelve-thousand-year exercise in learning how to override the instincts of the Mesolithic pack-hunter inside us with reasoned and learned behavior. During those twelve thousand years we have painstakingly discovered the elements of an absolute moral code that is necessary for the survival of civilization. (And perhaps even sufficient for the survival of civilization at any given stage.) One of those is that no one has the right to kill another person except in self-defense against a direct threat; in other words anyone who initiates violence has separated himself from civilization. To live otherwise is to devote so much of our attention, energy and other resources to protecting ourselves from each other that the economies of scale and division of labor that produce a surplus and make civilization a superior lifestyle will not accrue and we might as well remain nomadic hunter-gatherers. This is an absolute moral code that is supported by logic and has no subjectivism except insofar as some people claim that they would be happier in the Stone Age. Speak for yourself. You're older than I so you must have met even more people in your longer life than I have. I have personally known parents whose children committed unspeakable crimes. I had no problem empathizing with how they felt. I have no children but I have watched one of my beloved pets kill another and felt the unbearable mixture of emotions: anger, loss, grief, forgiveness... It is not an impossible stretch to imagine how a parent feels whose child has killed his brother, much less a stranger. The empathy you speak of is not buried all that deeply and requires no alchemy to conjure it up. Indeed. Art is a vehicle for connecting us to the emotions of others, or to hypothetical emotions. The greater the art, the more of us it can connect with. Okay. But I don't think that personal resonance is necessary for the understanding. If one truly appreciates civilization, and furthermore truly understands it, empathy is not only logical, but it is natural. Whenever one witnesses a violation of the principles of civilization, one is witnessing a local breakdown of civilization. If that breakdown spreads, we can be on our way back to the Stone Age. That is something we quite reasonably oppose and are willing to devote energy to preventing. I suppose it's a different kind of reasoning than my own hypothesis. If it works, it works. But I think simple appreciation for the benefits of civilization, coupled with an adequate education so one understands why civilization exists and how it works, can motivate the same behavior. Life is full of compromises and we all learn that there are no absolute statements (including this one Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!). There are situations in which we must kill someone who poses no direct threat to us. The classic example is a captured terrorist. If we keep him alive in prison, his buddies will kidnap twenty of our people and promise to kill them if we don't turn him loose. The Israelis will not turn him loose and let the twenty hostages die; other people will make the opposite choice and let the terrorist go off to kill a hundred more people. The only rational choice is to execute the terrorist before his buddies have a chance to start gathering hostages. Waterboarding surely falls into that category. In some few cases it may be the only way to obtain information that will save the lives of a great number of people. We expect our leaders to make difficult compromises. We just expect them to make them wisely. The number of cases of torture committed during one presidential administration when there is not even a declared war occurring should be in the very low single digits, I mean in the range of zero to one. Civilization is resilient and can in fact survive a great many violations of its principles without collapsing. Nonetheless each of those violations slows down its advance. It's reasonable to minimize those violations. It should make us feel better to minimize them, both because we love civilization and because we are outraged by such violations. To achieve perfection is impossible, but to strive for it is noble. We have too many ignoble people in positions of leadership. Nonetheless I feel that the Baby Boomer generation was successful in creating a society that is qualitatively superior to that of its parents. We have waterboarding but no Auschwitz or Hiroshima. The largest body count of any war since WWII is the five million in the Congo civil war, as opposed to WWII's sixty million. We're doing better and the fact that we are not perfect should not stop us from appreciating the fact that we indeed are doing better.
coberst ..... If your family was being held hostage and one of the kidnappers was found but wouldn't tell you where your family was, what would you do?
We have to remember that the accuracy of statements given under torture is dismally low. Trained professionals can resist; untrained amateurs will tell you whatever they think you want to hear even if they don't know the answer. Never forget that the best way to get to someone is not to attack him personally but to harm his family. Now ask yourself, what would YOU do?
You guys overcomplicate the issue: First it is really doesn't matter if the issue is waterboarding or let's say skinburning. Torture is tortue. Second, there is good torture and bad torture. If you can't decide which is which, look up the thread titled the same...
Imagine if every country had their methods of interrogation scrutinized to the level of the U.S, post 9/11. Two wrongs don't make a right, but suppose the information obtained from the interrogation prevented another attack. An attack that might have claimed someone you love. Would you wish them dead, so that the U.S. can claim the moral high ground against an enemy that clearly has no intentions of following any conventions, with regards to warfare? Would that help you to sleep better at night, knowing that while the world might be a little more dangerous tonight, at least the U.S. plays fair in this fight? I realize the presumption is that the U.S., as the worlds lone superpower, is to always take the high road, but what will that really gain against a non-state enemy? The thread starter mentioned the Gestapo, and certainly their methods are the most well known of that era, but an Allied POW of Japan in WW2 was ten times more likely to die than a prisoner of Germany. You don't hear that brought up a lot anymore, but certainly my parents, and my grandparents were acutely aware, and right or wrong, it shaped the way they view/viewed the Japanese culture. Has that legacy of shameful human rights abuses followed the Japanese around the way it has the Germans? I would say not in this hemisphere anyway. I couldn't speak for the rest of Asia who had to suffer under the murderous Japanese on their own soil. At least for Americans, it was an ocean away, so a bit less visceral. Meanwhile the hand wringing will continue, the CIA vilified, a call for heads to roll (figuratively, not Islamic style) and the whole time this is going on, people are being tortured to death in the dungeons of Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran. What a world.
Me thinks you wouldn't and are saying this to just look good. If it were my family and I had the person who knew where they were you bet your life that man wouldn't see any police but I would find my family.
Imagination is not really required. Count how many more US soldiers have died, or just how many people had their heads sawed off, in the reaction to the US methods of interrogation employed at Abu Ghraib. There are some people who credit those photos with costing the US victory in Iraq. I disagree, the occupation was a disaster from day one, but the cost of employing torture at Abu Ghraib was very high. Has any of the info gained from any other US torturing made up for even that - let alone the widespread effects of the other tortures, the eventual price to be paid for establishing torture agencies as a part of the US government, etc.?
According to the PM in Iraq, we defeated alQaeda in Baghdad: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080215182516.1kw853y4&show_article=1
Can you name a case where this happened, where the family had a person who knew where their kid was and had to option of torturing them? Pretty rare isn't it? And it is very rare that you can actually torture someone, get information and save people directly, though this is the scenario that pro-torture people always dish out. And they always assume that the negative results of the torture are simply that that individual bad person suffers pain, when in fact all sorts of 'side effects' happen and many of them come back and smack innocent people.
I think this is absolutely incorrect. Empathy is often innate. You certainly do not have to teach mothers to feel empathy for their children the second they see them. And I can remember as a child feeling empathy - and by this I mean feeling the exact feelings another child who was suffering felt. They cried, I cried. The people I am close to got trained out of empathy and over time have challenged this training. To assume that you have to learn empathy is, I believe, confusing thoughts with feelings. You learn what you are supposed to feel.
Depends if the family member was being held in Abu Ghraib or Gitmo or some unknown secret prison in some foreign country. Not much would be my estimation.
It appears to me that few people have ever been taught anything about empathy. Empathy is an effort of the imagination to walk in the shoes of another. I suspect that anyone who understand the meaning of empathy and has been able to walk in the shoes of another could not torture that individual. Take anyone who you know well and truly despise and imagine torturing that individual. I do not think any normal person could do such a thing. I think that one of the reasons that we humans are on the path to self destruction is partially due to the fact that our culture has never embraced the understanding of empathy.
You know half the time the information they get probably isn't even useful, they were just doing it to look busy! Show me where any real info came out of someone using this method instead of drugging them?!
Empathy is useless when dealing with demonic terrorists. We KNOW what they are: vile POS who want to kill/destroy.
