And there was a shitstorm, there were congress hearings and so on and the government survived by blaming bad low level individuals, as you know. They won’t openly come out and admit using torture, even though in this case I’m sure unprincipled expediency would have at least some support. I think this is a good proof.

I had assumed “[t]orture is incompatible with our [US] culture.” But if so this shit wouldn’t have happened at all I would think. Or the Abu G. revealtions would have created such a shitstorm that bush and his lot would have resigned in disgrace, and trials would be underway.

Instead 2 years later, the situation is pretty much the same.

How would you attempt to prove that “Torture is incompatible with our culture?

Zdenek, on the other hand, does have internet access in his house, so he has access to the free online version of Waldron’s “Torture and Positive Law”. This presumably is what he means when he says

( because of the sorts of reasons Waldron advances yes I have his paper )

but it doesn’t answer my original question. Does he have access to, or, better still, has he read, the books and papers which he has been citing when, for example, he admonishes Steven Poole for misunderstanding

Dershowitz’ view which is spelled out in greater detail in “why terrorism works ” ( 2003

Does this mean he has read either Dershowitz or Waldron? Unlikely, as the only argument he is able to extract from them is the rather pathetic “argument from the number of pages Waldron devotes to X”, which is not, need I say it, a good one.

Since Zdenek doesn’t understand these things I will spell them out. Waldron devotes many pages to this issue because he is responding to arguments that might be made for legalising torture. Zdenek has so far failed to make any such arguments, and so noone needs to devote a similar amount of space to responding to him.

Misstating what people have said up thread is not an argument. Misstating the views of well known philosophers, which one hasn’t read but has looked up in an online encyclopaedia, is also not an argument. Making phony citations, complete with publication dates and journal names, to books or articles one hasn’t read is also not an argument.

For an example of the first, I argued above that there is no presumption that because an action is morally permitted (in exceptional circumstances) it ought to be legally permitted (“law and morality are different things”). Zdenek chooses not to reply to this claim, but instead addresses the claim that “there is no connection between law and morality”, which I did not advance, and which does not have to be advanced by someone who believes that torture most remain absolutely prohibited in law.

Without wishing put myself under any implied obligation to respond the rest of Zdenek’s voluminous crap in any detail, I will only say that it is amusing that the most well known advocate of the type of position abb1 is trying to defend, and which Zdenek finds to be so utterly without merit that he is driven to troll every other thread on this blog denouncing it in a largely incoherent way, and which is not, as has been frequently pointed out by readers of this blog, common among them or The Left in general, is Michael Walzer, who is now, sadly, a card carrying member of the “Decent Left”. So Zdenek’s dichotomy of

“Decent Left” = deontologist/consequentialist

v.

Everyone else on “The Left” = relativist/postmodernist/determinist

is revisionist, to put it politely. To put it impolitely, it is stupid and pretentious.

Wait…when did abb1 become The Left? Somebody alert the authorities!

If it really was our current cultural practice as you say, then we wouldn’t know that it’s wrong, we wouldn’t even notice it.

It’s like, say, the fact that some people don’t have internet access in their houses. Is it ‘wrong’? No, we don’t think about it as ‘wrong’ in the same sense as discrimination of women. It’s normal, natural. Then, say, 50 years from now some people may be saying that it’s wrong and immoral, but a majority will think it’s Okay. And 80 years from now maybe everyone will feel that it’s as wrong as torturing people. Evolution.

Now, slavery isn’t and wasn’t justified as far as our modern culture is concerned, but it was justified as far as the slave-owning cultures were concerned.

If slavery is practiced somewhere on earth now, it’s wrong as far as our culture is concerned, but if the people practicing slavery have enough authonomy, then there isn’t much we can do about it (other than refusing to cooperate) as we don’t have the jurisdiction there. That is unfortunate, but the good news is that they can’t impose their culture on us either.

1) enequality is morally justified and when we try to bring about greater justice we are doing something immoral ( this follows from P1)

2) slavary was justified and when it was abolished we did something morally wrong

3)discrimination against homosexuals was/is justified and when we abolished it we did something morally wrong.

4) exploitation of workers was/is morally justified…

And so on the point is that if the principle is true it rules out criticism of injustices and this is incompatible with the left commitment to bringing about juster/better world ( we have incoherence ).

1) hard left sees law and morality as mask for class interest so hard left has no resources to consistently argue against torture .

2)post modern left sees law and morality as social constructs that reflect our culture and hence brohibition of torture is just contingent fact reflecting our culture . Torture may be ok in a different culturel setting. Again no principled way to be opposed to torture.

3) decent left :(i) consequentialist left : problem here is that torture may be requred
(i) deontological left ( Kant,Rawls ): this is the best hope for resisting Dershovitz type argument but the problem is that this is just enlightenment outlook and we are back to relativism.( so popular with CR ).

So what is the principled left position against torture ?

This is wrong and it is easy to show that there is a connection between morality and law that actually shifts the burden of proof to people who oppose D : consider racist laws South Africa had on statute books or Nazi law that criminalized hiring of jewish teachers or slaving laws and so on. In all these cases the pattern is that you take a law and you argue that it is incompatible with moral considerations and the force of that is sufficient to change the law so that it is consistent with morality .
These sorts of considerations are enough to show :

1) that there is a presumption in favour of thinking that if a given law is incompatible with moral intuitions it ought to be changed ( so S. Miller is wrong ).

2) It is the critics of D who have to come up with an argument to show that moral permisability of torture does not lead to legal provision for it ( that this is roughly right is reflected in the amount of space Waldron and others devote to showing that the move should not be made )

3) slippery slope arguments become important to block the move D is making ( problem is as I said D has a reply to such tactics ).

Re slippery slope arguments : to argue that if you legalized torture then you would be led to legalising rape and then legalising boiling to death ( because once you permit one there is no principled way to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable practices ) is a slippery slope argument.