(En route to Atlanta) This is something to pass along to colleagues and students:
CIRCLE, along with colleagues at Brandeis and University of California, Berkeley, will hold a special conference this summer on work-in-progress in K-12 service-learning research. Emerging scholars (graduate students and post-doctoral researchers within 7 years of their doctoral degrees) may apply to participate. Applications are due no later than April 23, 2007. Click here for more information.
I ended yesterday’s post with the question, “if killing is worse than torturing, why should we ban the latter–especially if it proves an efficient means of preventing casualties?” I said “if” because this is a controversial empirical hypothesis. Human rights groups argue that torture does not work. It does not prevent terrorism or other grave evils, because those who are tortured can lie or can change their plans once they are captured. It generates false information that justifies even more torture without actually serving national security or any other acceptable end.
This sounds at least plausible. But it isn’t impossible to imagine a situation in which a particular form of torture (duly limited and overseen) actually has beneficial net effects on human happiness. That is, the few people who suffer under torture may–in this hypothetical world–cough up enough true information that there is less terrorism, tyranny, or war. Their suffering is far outweighed by the increased security of numerous others.
What I find interesting is that I don’t want this scenario to be empirically true. I believe in universal human rights, which rest on a sense of the dignity and intrinsic worth of all people. I also think that virtue excludes the use of torture, which is dishonorable. However, I am not so much of a “deontologist” that I’ll stick to principles regardless of their consequences. I won’t say “fiat lex pereat mundus”–let the [moral] law prevail even if the world perishes. Instead, I hope that the effects of torture prove harmful, because then arguments about consequences will line up with arguments about principles and virtues and the case will be easy.
One could, however, be a consistent consequentialist and argue that we should institute torture (with appropriate safeguards and limits) if and only if its net effects are positive. If that is your view, you should actually hope that torture is highly effective. If any practice, P, has both costs and benefits, a consequentialist should want its benefits greatly to outweigh its costs and should then press to institutionalize P. A consequentialist should oppose torture if, as the human rights groups say, it doesn’t work. But I see no consequentialist grounds for hoping that it doesn’t work.
John Yoo, who wrote the official memo justifying the use of torture, still thinks that there are situations when torture is acceptable. “Look, death is worse than torture, but everyone except pacifists thinks there are circumstances in which war is justified. War means killing people. If we are entitled to kill people, we must be entitled to injure them. I don’t see how it can be reasonable to have an absolute prohibition on torture when you don’t have an absolute prohibition on killing. Reasonable people will disagree about when torture is justified. But that, in some circumstances, it is justified seems to me to be just moral common sense. How could it be better that 10,000 or 50,000 or a million people die than that one person be injured?”
I think that’s a serious question, and I’m not fully satisfied with any of the five answers that occur to me:
1) There is a very old tradition of granting rights to prisoners. In war, that tradition goes back at least to the days of chivalry and is often seen as a mark of honor. In criminal law, the tradition goes back to Magna Carta with its rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and so on. But a tradition, by itself, is not an argument. Maybe the distinction between prisoners and others was arbitrary, or maybe it is obsolete in an age of strategic bombing and weapons of mass destruction.
2) Arguably, since we have unlimited power over prisoners, there must be checks on our power. Those checks include due process for criminal suspects and the Geneva Convention for prisoners of war. But note that we also have unlimited power over the people who are sitting below the bomb bays of our airplanes. Certain restrictions govern who may be bombed, but these rules are much weaker than due process. In fact, we can usually assume when we drop bombs that non-combatants (and non-criminals) will be injured, maimed, and killed.
3) Perhaps being tortured or held indefinitely is a special nightmare, more fundamentally dehumanizing than being blown to bits. Then John Yoo’s premise is wrong; torturing one person is worse than killing ten. Perhaps–but I worry that our ability to imagine one person’s torture exceeds our capacity to imagine the clean and rapid deaths of hundreds or thousands of people. Even our own demise is hard to conceive. That means that we may make an arbitrary distinction between prisoners and people caught on a battlefield.
4) There is a set of workable institutions for safeguarding limited rights for prisoners. These include courts, judges, defense attorneys, writs, treaties, and the Red Cross. These institutions work because there is time, once someone has been captured, to go through procedures and call on neutral parties. We have no workable institutions for safeguarding the rights of people on the battlefield. There just isn’t a neutral judge who can be summoned to decide whether it is acceptable to open the bomb bays. That seems true enough, but we have to wonder whether our institutions are adequate and appropriate. Maybe if the English nobility had been worried about civilian casualties as well as their own fates in the king’s dungeons, they would have created institutions to protect rights on the battlefield (not merely in the courtroom).
5) We have a good reason to safeguard the rights of captives: our own government can take us prisoner. If we lose habeas corpus for suspected terrorists, we can lose it for ourselves. That is certainly a concern, but it doesn’t excuse acts of war on foreign lands that may cause individuals to suffer worse than they would under torture. A pacifist replies: War is never acceptable. But what about in 1940? Or 1861? Or 1776? If war is ever justified, then we will sometimes kill people. And if killing is worse than torturing, why should we ban the latter–especially if it proves an efficient means of preventing casualties?
Wittgenstein used “game” as an example of a word that we can use effectively even though the examples are highly various. Some games are competitive, some are fun, and some have rules– but some have none of these features. Indeed, Wittgenstein thought that there was no defining feature of “games,” but there were many individual games that were similar to many others. The word marked a cluster of cases that one could learn to “see” without being able to identify a common denominator. It might be right or wrong to call a given object a “game,” but the test would not be whether the game met any particular criterion.
My favorite example of such words is not “game,” but “curry”–a kind of hobson-jobsonism derived from a Tamil word meaning “sauce or relish for rice.” But there are plenty of curries served without rice, and plenty of rice sauces that aren’t curries. Webster’s defines the English word “curry” as “a food, dish, or sauce in Indian cuisine seasoned with a mixture of pungent spices.” But there are millions of curries that don’t come from India, and some Indian curries are not particularly pungent.
Here are the ingredients for two curries, taken from cookbooks in our house. 1) Whole chicken, onions, blanched almonds, coriander seeds, cardamom pods, pepper, yogurt, salt. 2) Flank steak, peanut butter, coconut milk, basil leaves, fish sauce, sugar, cumin, white pepper, paprika, galanga root, kaffir lime leaves, cumin, coriander, peppercorns, lemon grass, garlic, shallots, salt, and shrimp paste. These recipes both contain coriander and salt, but it is not hard to find other curries without the coriander, and you can leave out the salt. It is hard to find any two curries that share absolutely no common ingredient. Yet the ingredients that any two share may not be found in a third.
If “curry” cannot be defined by its components, perhaps it refers to some cooking method? Many curries involve pastes or thick sauces composed of ground ingredients. But that’s also a good description of romesco sauce from Catalonia, pesto from Italy, or chile con carne. No one would call a minestrone with pesto a curry. We could try to define “curry” by listing countries of origin. But there are dishes from India that aren’t curries. “Country captain” is arguably a curry of English origin. And what about adobo from the Philippines or a lamb stew from Iran? Curries or not?
In short, you can teach or learn the correct meaning of “curry” (albeit with some controversial borderline cases), but you cannot define it in a sentence that will communicate its meaning. Learning requires experience. I believe the same is true of “love,” “happiness,” and “virtue”–but that’s another story.
Prof. Brian Tamanaha says that that he’s “losing [his] stomach for honest academic exchange,” meaning that he no longer wants to write critical reviews of peers’ work. He writes, “I feel like a coward, shirking my responsibility as an academic.” I can sympathize, having been deeply involved lately in making comparative judgments. I’m the chair of a job search committee that’s choosing among more than 225 applicants for–at most–three jobs. That inevitably means making comparative judgments about publications and presentations. I also do a fair amount of peer-reviewing. And I’m on the other side of the table all the time, with plenty of pending articles, grant proposals, and other applications of my own. A book manuscript of mine was recently rejected after a 15-month wait because of a negative peer-review.
It is our academic duty to make such critical judgments. My Institute cannot give jobs to all 225 applicants, so we must judge their merits, or at least their “fit” for our positions. Publishers cannot print even a small proportion of the manuscripts they are offered; they must try to pick the best ones. Even the search for truth requires critical judgments. If you argue that P and I believe that not-P, we cannot both be right. To establish whether P or not-P is the case, I should try to show why you are wrong. I need to do that in public so that you and others can follow and assess my arguments.
Still, making comparative judgments of merit is only one mode of academic interaction. We can also cooperate and learn from one another. Even if you argue P when P is not the case, I may be able to get a lot out of your argument, your evidence, your methodology, or your style. I share Professor Tamanaha’s feeling that making comparative critical judgments is one of the worst parts of academic life–a necessity, but not a pleasure.