Consequentialist arguments for deontological claims

“For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle.”
–Moby Dick, Chap. 1

One complication, John, is that many claims of right include provisos with a consequentialist form (though not a maximizing one). So Nozick, for example, defends a strongly deontological form of libertarianism, but rights to property have to discharge the test that private ownership doesn’t make people worse off (compared to some baseline). Hence his concern also to argue for the benefits of private ownership.

I find more and more that when I dig during discussions, the real separation between myself and the other party is deontological. At which point things often peter out, as shifting deontologies is most often filled with all the problems David @2 points to.

I do find the refusal to acknowledge a deontology very aggravating. It seems to me to be a denial of reality. I think this is one of the root difficulties in economists talking to (for example) sociologists or anthropologists. Economics has some deontologies, but many economists don’t want to talk about it – but in the end, just as logic rests on the premises, deontologies matter.

“I do find the refusal to acknowledge a deontology very aggravating.”

Perhaps even more aggravating is the occasional determination to deny that anybody IS a deontologist. A lack of self-awareness can be understandable, sometimes one’s own premises are so ‘self-evident’ one doesn’t even notice them. Less forgivable is a refusal to admit anybody else could reason differently.

” I’ve never been able to understand why the principle “only consequences matter” isn’t a deontological one.”

It is, of course.

Given the current state of the Eurozone, one question that springs to mind is whether Ordoliberalism is consequentialist or deontological?

Test for bang your head emoticon:

There was a great post on Balloon Juice a while back (by mistermix I believe) that argued that people’s politics where just a reflect of what their individual psychology. No one cares about facts or logical arguments. I have found this to be sadly accurate.

People with a lot of empathy tend to be on the left and people who lack empathy tend to be on the right. Since you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into people rarely change their points of view.

When I was younger, I read a lot of theology. Yeah, yeah. I know I wasted my youth.

Anyway it became a game for me- every time I read a catholic philosopher defending a deontologically held belief by reference to its consequences, I’d have an imaginary drink. I’d end up imaginarily hammered every time.

I should have had real drinks. Would have been a better use of my time.

The only beans that really make me fart are “ranch beans.” But they taste good, and they’re often real cheap, and, of course, my own farts smell OK to me, so I don’t let that hold me back.

#14 Plume

Atheism now is the absence of religious belief.

No, atheism is a religious belief just as consequentialism is a deontological belief.

If you have a set of rules and you judge ethics by how well it fits the rules, you are being deontological.

If you have a set of rules that starts with:

Rule #1: Judge ethical decisions according to how good their consequences will be.

then you are being deontological. OK? Because you have a list.

But atheists today? They believe in no god or deity. And since the issue of “faith” is for those who believe in things without evidence — and there is no evidence of a god or goddess ever having existed, anywhere . . . . a modern day atheist does not fall into that category.

An agnostic who has no opinion about any gods does not fall into that category. An atheist who believes there is no god is expressing a religious belief. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If you believe there is no god because you have never found any acceptable evidence that there is, you are believing there is no god without actual evidence there is no god. On faith.

“If you believe there is no god because you have never found any acceptable evidence that there is, you are believing there is no god without actual evidence there is no god. On faith.”

Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn’t work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It’s just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don’t see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
[Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]

“Come on. That’s just silly table turning.”

When arguing with J it has to be remembered that he will take literally any position and then defend it to the death with thousands of words. In the Sandy thread he was arguing with me that having a gun pointed at me would be a good thing. The guy is just a very, very long winded troll.

Rich- uncertainty about consequences doesn’t mean you can’t be a consequentialist.

If anyone is a consequentialist, it’s insurance companies. They have nothing BUT uncertainty.

You just do the best you can.

Also, it’s not that agnostics have no opinion on the matter. Their opinion is to wait and see and that any kind of ultimate reality is unknown and likely unknowable. That is an opinion too.

a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable; broadly : one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god

They would change their mind upon further evidence. As would an atheist. Atheists don’t believe in gods and goddesses — because there is no evidence for them. If, however, Thor appeared before them, impossibly huge, with his hammer, speaking Old Norse, and then smites the ground causing a new Grand Canyon to form — right in front of that atheist — they’re going to “believe in” Thor.

Patrick: “If anyone is a consequentialist, it’s insurance companies. They have nothing BUT uncertainty.”

Insurance companies have to have an opinion on one of the easiest questions involving uncertainty that I can think of. For instance, for life insurance, “when is someone with the following characteristics likely to die”, with all of the evidence from death certificates available to them to create statistically well-populated curves of all kinds and with the expertise to analyze them. I can’t think of any question that people typically argue about that has such good evidence available.

Who knew that flatulence could produce such an interesting discussion!

I think that nearly all economic expertise functions in arguments in this same way: people with such expertise believe that they know about consequences to a much greater degree than they actually do, and that therefore when someone brings up a general moral rule about fairness this can be ignored.

Couple things to bear in mind. Moral rules are often discounted for reasons having little to do with ontological hubris. And also, people who spend time and effort studying the world (OK, specific aspects of the world) often do have greater insight into cause and effect than people who do not invest such effort. But, yes, your comment was a good one.

The longer the time horizon, the more consequentialist arguments start to look actually principled.

Yes.

Also, J Thomas, you would do well to distinguish between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ atheism.

I wouldn’t be so pessimistic about the value of political debate as some of the commenters here. Debate is fruitful among people who do not hold to their positions with dogmatic certainty and respect each other’s reasomableness. It has most chance to change minds when the discussers already share the same broad commitments.

An agnostic who has no opinion about any gods does not fall into that category. An atheist who believes there is no god is expressing a religious belief. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If you believe there is no god because you have never found any acceptable evidence that there is, you are believing there is no god without actual evidence there is no god. On faith.

I was tired of this wanked-out argument by the time I was eight years old.

Atheism is no more a religion than baldness is a hair colour.

Not collecting stamps is not a hobby.

Somebody has to repeat it: atheism is a religion in the sense that not collecting stamps is a hobby. I would have thought that the difference between a belief about religion and a religious belief is fairly clear.

#23 MPAV

In the Sandy thread he was arguing with me that having a gun pointed at me would be a good thing.

You completely misunderstood and I gave up talking about it.

But I’ll try one more time since you brought it up again. You mostly don’t get to choose whether somebody else points a gun at you. In a way it doesn’t really matter whether you think it’s a good thing because it’s out of your hands.

But if it happens, you can shut down or you can wake up. When you’re shut down things happen to you and it’s still pretty much out of your hands, but you probably won’t get shot for resisting. You might get shot when you’re no longer of value.

If you wake up you are likely to have a fantastic experience. You might think that you have no negotiating power because somebody is pointing a gun at you and they can kill you. But in fact you do, unless saving your miserable life is the only thing that matters. They have not shot you yet, so they probably would prefer not to shoot you. If there are others they want to impress they might shoot you just to show the others that they’re serious, and they might choose somebody at random or might wait for somebody to do something they don’t like. And they might have other reasons to avoid shooting you.

Maybe they just want money. It may be easiest to just give them money. But maybe they want something you aren’t willing to give.

If somebody is pointing a gun at you and they haven’t shot you yet, almost every time they want you to pay attention to them. If you look like you’re willing to listen to them, IME they are almost certain to talk. And they will tell you the truth. All the lies people tell because they’re afraid of what other people will think of them, go away because they think they have all the control.

It feels like some big victory when they point the gun somewhere else, but it isn’t — they’ll point it at you again. The big victory is when it’s over and you’re still alive.

I’m not saying it’s a good thing when this happens. But you might as well get whatever you can from it. It might be the last minutes or hours of your life, and do you want to spend that time shut down?

Looks as if Shatterface and I crossed comments.

“If you wake up you are likely to have a fantastic experience.”

You see? He will literally take any position. He is a troll.

“Less forgivable is a refusal to admit anybody else could reason differently.”

This doesn’t make sense. Suppose you believe a priori that beans must not be eaten and I believe that based on the best available research, beans are a healthy food and preferable on environmental grounds to eating a lot of meat, then we aren’t “reasoning” differently. We start from different premises or if you prefer values but we should still be able to employ the same rules of reasoning and with good will on both sides we should be able to agree that each of us employs a valid chain of reasoning (in your case the chain is short but it’s nevertheless valid). There is only a problem if you don’t want to admit you are starting from an a priori and instead make up a chain of reasoning claiming that bean production is environmentally destructive etc. If I can show that your claims are factually wrong but you still stick with your premise, then again you are not reasoning any differently, it’s just that you are dishonest about your premise.

As my good old buddy Billy Shakes used to say,

“there is nothing either good or
bad, but thinking makes it so”

Consequential arguments are a way in which the differently deontologically committed can still discuss things and maybe avoid contests of force. So hiding one’s real principles may have a good purpose, consequentially speaking.

Besides religious belief, agnosticism, and hard and soft atheism, there is the contention that such questions as ‘Is there a God?’ are meaningless, since the thing referred to is undefined.

I guess it’s a matter of where you’re coming from, but I find it odd to treat “deontology” as if it implied that the alternative to consequentialism were adherence to arbitrary rules. I’m Kantian enough to believe that the fundamental imperative is not a matter of whim or prejudice but is bound up with what makes us what we are, i.e., rational beings. Unlike Kant, I don’t expect the fundamental imperative to provide answers to all ethical questions; but I don’t think it is empty either because it implies an obligation to respect not only principles but people, to whom I owe an explanation that goes beyond a personal whim. “I hate beans, damn it!” doesn’t count.

J Thomas,

We all have “beliefs.” But it’s a huge leap to go from “belief” to “religion.” I believe we landed on the moon in 1969. I think there is more than enough evidence to support that belief. But I’m not a member of a religion because I hold that belief. As far as I know, there is no religion of the Moon Walk, except perhaps for rabid fans of Michael Jackson.

Religions are, among other things, containers of a particular set of beliefs. It’s a system of beliefs, organized around certain key things. One of the keys is that this “religion” was “revealed” to us by a messenger, a prophet, and includes a set of signs to also be discovered. It also involves a journey of sorts and a process of further discovery. There are also avenues toward esoteric knowledge that most layman adherents to that religion never encounter. And all religions have supernatural aspects to them. If they don’t, as in some forms of Buddhism, then they are better classified as philosophies, rather than religions.

Atheism is not in any way, shape or form, a “religion.”

#48 Anarcissie

Besides religious belief, agnosticism, and hard and soft atheism, there is the contention that such questions as ‘Is there a God?’ are meaningless, since the thing referred to is undefined.

I like that but I don’t know the name for it. We surely can’t decide whether or not there are gods until we get it defined just what a god would be, and how it would be observed.

I agree with Shatterface, a 50-foot-tall Thor with a great big hammer appearing in the world would not impress me all that much more than a brontosaurus. It ought to take more than just being a great big guy with a great big hammer to make you a god, though if the great big guy wants to be called a god it might be prudent to lie to him about that.

If we are going to judge by consequences, will we have a list of consequences we think are good, and a list we think are bad? Or do we just play it by ear?

@53

>I like that but I don’t know the name for it.

Non-cognitivism.

As Rich Puchalsky says in his excellent comment, the foundational problem is uncertainty: we just don’t know and the costs of processing information are high. We’re all guessing, and then rationalizing about our guesses. Particularly with regard to political and economic arguments, what is in dispute is some policy rule and its supposed consequences, and much of the necessary information is outside of our own immediate experience. Even the nature of the problem — formulating a rule for others to follow — is somewhat outside of our immediate experience, and sufficient information about even claimed consequences is not local, that is within the ambit of personal experience.

Given uncertainty and information processing constraints, deontological and consequentialist argument just designate polar opposite styles, and each inevitably proceeds from the initial guess (and that’s what the original asserted proposition is) in the direction of the other pole. Starting with a rule, one looks to rationalize the rule by adducing consequences. Starting with consequences, one looks to rationalize why a functional relation (a rule) can be said to relate y to x.

It is certainly possible to be an annoyingly adamant consequentialist on the internetz, insisting that it is simply a fact that I’m right, or that some statistical correlation ought to substitute for an asserting principle.

MPAVictoria 12.30.14 at 4:04 pm

“Umm people in the US are EXTREMELY ideological about government. Think of Tea Party types who think that the government cannot ever do anything right.”

And who abandon that belief the second that they’re getting goodies from the government, or the government is kicking the sh*t out of somebody they hate.

Brett, you obviously don’t know enough atheists.

Yes, Brett, sure.

Atheists aren’t the folks who seem so insecure in their beliefs that they need them constantly reaffirmed, at least on a weekly basis, and often several times each week. That would be, in America at least, Christians.

JT 54

Atheism requires a religious belief, without evidence for that belief.

Here lies the human condition. At 45 JT accepts the soft/hard atheist distinction and by 54 he has forgotten it.

Plume 12.30.14 at 5:37 pm @ 62 — I can see you did not take part in Usenet’s alt.atheism back in the day. Many participants had to reaffirm their faith several times a day, if not several times an hour.

There also people used to argue about whether atheism was a religion, which of course depends on the definition of the word religion. Some were able to agree that it was a ‘religious position’.

Anarcissie,

People who choose to go onto usenet obviously wanted to discuss the issue, and likely in a sustained manner . . . and as can be seen here, even on the much slower moving CT, there is constant back and forth on particular topics. I think you’re drawing a false conclusion from that context.

And: there is no legit definition of religion that could possibly include an atheist as a member thereof.

Chris Bertram @3

One complication … is that many claims of right include provisos with a consequentialist form (though not a maximizing one). So Nozick, for example, defends a strongly deontological form of libertarianism, but rights to property have to discharge the test that private ownership doesn’t make people worse off (compared to some baseline). Hence his concern also to argue for the benefits of private ownership.

As Rawls once remarked (I’ve added the words in brackets for clarification): “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging [the] rightness [of institutions and actions]. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.” (A Theory of Justice, orig. ed., 1971, p.30)

71

WORD.

If you don’t brush, you’ll get cavities.

Ehrman says that, but the process of being pushed by your research into more liberal forms of Christianity is not cleanly distinguishable from the process of deconversion.

A logician might say that Biblical study provided him with no rebutting defeaters- but it quite apparently provided him with undercutting defeaters.

Lisa Schweitzer @51: students pulling their hair out and wailing “how am I supposed to propose and evaluate rules without thinking about the consequences of those rules?”

I’m with your students (and Rawls @70, and the OP). I don’t understand why you call the following a deontological argument: “some rules of conduct tend to be better then others when it comes to the outcomes, and since we don’t know the future, it’s probably best to live by principle and virtue to the degree one can.” Sounds like grade-A, blue-ribbon consequentialism to me.

I think consequentialist reasons for deontological claims are usually used to convince others using reasons you don’t believe yourself but that you think they should accept. As an example, I have Catholic friends who talk about the dangerous side effects of the contraceptive pill as reasons against contraception – but (assuming their premise is true, which is doubtful) if a 100% safe contraceptive came out on the market tomorrow they’d still say you shouldn’t use contraception.

@MPAVictoria
To beat the Tea Party we need to get past this area of confusion. Ideology is a terrible word for understanding voters.

Tea Party voters believe an empirical claim about the abilities of government. This belief is not arrived at through reflection or deduction. They think it has been proven by the “failure” of the Great Society.

That’s why Krugman and others are on the right path when they ditch the word “ideology” and focus on empirical wrongness. Not because Krugman will change Tea Party minds, but because he influences the elites in the media. For the media, ideology isn’t false, can’t be false. He said, she said is the best way to cover it. But convince the media that there is an objective fact of the matter and, eventually, they stop reporting both sides of the debate as equally true.

Thorton an excellent response and I concede your point.

A number of points, which don’t claim to be any kind of coherent whole, but merely additions to certain areas of the discussion:

1. I loved Russell on Pythagoreanism: (This isn’t verbatim, but pretty close) “…a religion based on the transmigration of souls and the sinfulness of eating beans.”

2. I think the whole “Is atheism a religion” subthread is just epistemological hair-splitting, and not very productive. Don’t I just get to say “look, I believe that p(God(s)) is so low that it’s functionally indistinguishable from 0, and I live my life that way”? I don’t think that makes me an agnostic rather than an atheist.

3. I just got done teaching an intro course on this stuff (we used Sandel + Gorgias, Utilitarianism, and GMM for those that are interested.) One of the things that my students had a tough time wrapping their heads around was that consequentialism even was a moral system at all (as opposed, I suppose, to some kind of value-neutral default). I’d frequently hear comments in the vein of “well, I can see how consequentialism might justify (eg) Omelas, but that doesn’t mean it’s morally right.”

4. In the vein of Whitehead’s claim that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato, isn’t much of this discussion an extension of the questions raised in the Euthyphro? Is x just because it is beloved by the God(s) (ie. deontological), or is it beloved by the God(s) because it’s just (where “just” = consequentially “good”, whatever that means)? I suppose that those upthread who are arguing for conservatives and liberals actually thinking differently would respond that that’s why Whitehead isn’t right – that Plato (and everybody else pre-postmodernism) assume a rationalism that just ain’t so.

5. Like others, I thought Rich P had an excellent comment above about deontology and torture.

6. Plume @78: I’d describe my journey as similar to yours, maybe complicated by the fact that I spent much of my childhood (literally) living in a seminary (where my father was teaching.) It’s difficult for me to square the incredulity you describe (and that I also feel) with the lives of people like my father (an Oxford-educated minister, who studied under, inter alia, both Lewis and Tolkien), my current girlfriend (a loyal Catholic who left her comfortable upper-class retirement to go and work as a researcher for a defense attorney after serving on a jury and being horrified by the inequities of the system, but yet doesn’t believe in evolution), or, for that matter, Pope Francis. I’d be interested if you have thoughts on this disconnect.

One more thing: Conceding for a moment that it can sometimes be useful (for empirical reasons) to compare the non-religious to religious groups, I think it’s noteworthy that the non-religious are the only group to have a majority oppose torture. (http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/12/22/americans-learn-to-stop-worrying-and-love-torture/)

I suppose this indicates what happens when deontological imperatives collide with (perceived) consequentialist need.

@Thesophist
Does your Catholic girlfriend know Pope Francis believes in evolution?

Thornton – Yes, she does. Let’s just say that discussion of the issue between us is..complicated.

@Matt
Good comment. I think the thing I’m driving at is that elites imagine you are the average voter, but the numbers at your reunion tell the real story, in my opinion.

So many people reason that their inner experience is “normal”.

Dr. Hilarius@88- “Often the answer was that nothing could ever change their mind.But they still wanted to debate the issue to try and prove me wrong. Sigh.”

Isn’t this why Dawkins and others refuse to debate creationists and other liars ? Just sharing a stage with them concedes too much and gives them an unearned platform & prestige.

Pragmatism and consequentialism presume de-ontological (or, if you prefer, non-cognitive) beliefs. If a consequentialist argues that X course of action causes cancer in children, he’s implicitly assuming that you care about cancer in children, and are generally against it.

He’s probably right, in that evolution has left us with a number of pre-programmed biases that can be appealed to. One major non-cognitive belief that people usually have, individually and collectively, is “I am a good person, and people who resemble me are good”.

Nine @ 99: I once had the privilege of taking Niles Eldredge (paleontologist, then at the American Museum of Natural History) out to lunch. He had taken a sabbatical to debate creationists and work against their increasing influence in education.

He told me about running into uber-creationist Duane Gish in South Africa. Eldredge challenged Gish’s usual claim that no transitional fossils exist to support evolution. Eldredge took Gish to a museum collection (could have been trilobites, I don’t recall) and showed him an extensive series of transitional forms. Gish agreed it looked like a pretty complete series. The next week Gish was speaking and made the same claim for the non-existence of transitional forms.

A technical term for what you describe, John, is “reflective equilibrium.”

“We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons … after forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow. I call this process belief-dependent realism…Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time.”

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3QP38C30BVXNV/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

I think it’s noteworthy that the non-religious are the only group to have a majority oppose torture.

That’s a good point.

Still, I blame Allen Dulles.

I call myself an atheist and mean I lack theism, just as something that is asymmetrical lacks symmetry. There happens to be no theistic god that makes any sense to me – not Ra, not Brahma, not Odin, not Jehovah (who as I understand it was once the war god of a pantheon, whom the Hebrews decided to focus on), et cetera. Agnosticism is a separate category – one could be an agnostic atheist or a gnostic atheist. Richard Dawkins, for example, is an agnostic atheist – although something like 6.9 on a scale in which 7.0 would be a gnostic atheist.

I think the vast majority of atheists are like myself and Richard Dawkins, but could be wrong.

The semantic issue is not important per se, but I get annoyed when somebody else tries to tell me what it means when I call myself an atheist. I have had more than one creationist do so. They also like to say that science itself depends on faith and is a religion. They are added by those philosophers who say “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” and that the principle of induction is not valid. In real life, e.g. murder trials and engineering design, we make critical decisions using the opposite assumptions. Consequentialism – it’s what works!

Deontology isn’t the belief that certain things are inherently good or inherently bad. It is, very specifically, the belief that certain kinds of actions are mandatory or forbidden. Consequentialism doesn’t do this. It merely says that actions which lead to better consequences are better, without making any claims about duty. Some consequentialists max a bit of deontology in, in that they think that people have a moral obligation to maximize utility, or at least maintain some baseline level of “adequate” consequences. But other consequentialists think (and I’m inclined to think) that all you can ultimately say is that some things are better and some things are worse.

And in specific reference to Jay@101, deontology isn’t de-ontology, it’s deont-ology, where deont- comes from the Greek word for duty.

I haven’t read all the comments but two quick points.

1. The following is a travesty as a characterization of “deontology”, or rather, of a deontological commitment:

I believe rule p because Pythagoras said it

Whatever a deontological commitment is (and as it happens, deontology is mostly a bit of nonsense based on a misreading of Kant), it is certainly not a facile deference to authority.

2. I fervently hope for the day when the standard contrast with consequentialism (which, as it happens, is a morally corrupt doctrine—see Rawls, several papers by Bernard Williams, or Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” if you have any doubts) ceases to be some nonsense about deontology. I sadly realize that at least in the English speaking world, this hope is utterly futile.

Pursuant to the point Rich Puchalsky raised: torture is generally rejected on deontological grounds, as is usually the question of whether it is is effective. If torture is impermissible, the question of its effectiveness is moot. As we’ve seen in American policy, as well as in popular fiction, some rules are more important than others, and the rule against torture seems to rank so low in the hierarchy that it’s generally expected that it will be ignored.

In this case the evidence-based consequentialist argument, that torture is useless or counter-productive, supports and perhaps replaces the deontological argument.

js @115 and 116
If you have time I would like you to explain these points more. I did find the OP very confusing, partly because (as your first comment has made me realise) there seemed to be a confusion between ‘following authority’ and following rules’, which are completely different things.

As others have suggested (I think), we use rules of conduct because we can’t always predict outcomes, but also because of values or empathy (eg ‘do unto others’). Is that deontology or not (if it’s not deontology, which you say is a misreading of Kant, then what is it)?

The other question that isn’t being looked at (I think – I’ve skipped over the comments about religion, atheism, etc, because I just don’t find any value in those debates) is that people are talking about consequentialism as being a judgement about what’s “better”. You say consequentialism is “morally corrupt”, which I find very interesting and would like to hear more about, but the other point is, how are people deciding what is “better”? They must be using some kind of rules or values to determine this, but these seem to be ignored in the interests of presenting themselves as (‘hard-headed’, ‘sensible’?) consequentialists or pragmatists.

what seems to be ignored is the possibility that morality is never coherent as it adapts to a changing world that presents changing moral questions.

So many moral arguments seem to assume a First Mover of morality. Either the rules or the good or the better or the veil of ignorance or whatever that is somehow self-justifying.

Why can’t “the better” be subject to change even as we use our present conception to design rules of thumb that make the world better?

“Torture can really only be justified by consequentialist arguments, because how can a human being admit to himself – or others – that “torture is good”?”

Well, some north American Indian groups thought torture was an essential test of virtue, and ritual torture was a key part of many Maya and Aztec rituals (including public self-torture by royalty: offering pain and blood to the gods).

For the goodness of suffering see Job, Book of…

People are conflating consequentialism as a basis for ethics with the use of consequential arguments to justify what ethics ought to be.

To comment on dbk@122:

Torture can really only be justified by consequentialist arguments, because how can a human being admit to himself – or others – that “torture is good”?

You sure sound like you are setting up a consequentialist argument for choosing deontological ethics — if we adopt consequentialism that may lead to us becoming a society of torturers! And if you did mean to imply that, well I don’t think you’re the first in this thread to imply that deontological ethical systems have better consequences. But to get back to my point above, unless your deontological ethical system was handed to you on stone tablets from an infallible deity, the best justifications for any rigid principles you might choose to put in your deontological system are going to be consequential arguments, but that doesn’t make your system consequentialist if it ultimately consists of a set of rules to be followed rather than examining consequences on a case by case basis.

To answer the question of how torture would fit in a deontological system, it would be the same way war does. A consequentialist views war as a terrible thing but not always worse than the alternative. A deontologist might be a pacifist, or they might have a just war principle whereby if certain conditions are met then war is a righteous cause. While I don’t think it would be a good principle to adopt one could certainly invent a principle of just torture in a deontological system where under certain conditions it is good to do so.

While I’m not firmly in one camp or the other, I actually think the real world debate over torture highlights the strengths of a consequentialist ethics. Consider the ticking time bomb argument. While this might seem like an expression of a consequentialism, I think it is better understood as a consequentialist argument that is directed at deontologists. How would a consequentialist react to this argument? Well gee, I suppose in the unlikely scenario that we know such a terrorist attack is underway and don’t know enough to stop it but know we will know if we torture this terrorist, yeah maybe in that case it would be okay. But in a consequentialist worldview this has no further implications — the judgement is based on the severity of the consequences and so this does not imply torture is reasonable in any less pressing scenario. It certainly is not relevant to the question of the morality of the more routine use of torture that CIA engaged in. How does a deontologist react to this argument if they take it seriously? There are two possibilities: I would let a city be vaporized rather than cross this line, or alternately, draw up a new set of principles that accommodate torture. And I would argue that the latter is what happened for many people and was precisely the point of the argument: not to argue that torture was just in the unlikely ticking time bomb scenario that the argument describes, but to argue that torture could be just. And it strikes me that in the post torture-report debate, the argument from the pro-torture side remains grounded in hypotheticals while the anti-torture side refers to the facts in the report. Because in consequentialism, the real world consequences matter and should be conclusive and the hypothetical situations that weren’t involved are irrelevant to judging the real world program that existed, but in deontological ethics the hypothetical arguments could still be relevant for establishing what our principles ought to be and therefore are relevant to determining the principles the program should be judged by.

“Endorsing beliefs that the mainstream media won’t take seriously and risking being called crazy demonstrates that you really must be on our side in a way saying some more ordinary less risky thing couldn’t demonstrate as well.”

Certainly true. Every in-group needs a way of outing the uncommitted, and being willing to say something the out-group will mock serves this purpose pretty well. Since the MSM are definitely representative of the 0ut-group if you’re on the right, being willing to raise their ire does signal group loyalty.

The left, too, have their idiocies that one must mouth, though for obvious reasons being mocked by the MSM wouldn’t serve the same purpose on your side, as they’re “in-group” relative to you. You could probably identify them yourselves, if doing so wouldn’t risk getting you booted from the club. (Taking Marxism seriously, for instance.) You are human, after all, and this is just another primate behavior, not something confined to your out-group.

Back on topic, the general problem with consequentialism, in it’s pure form, (As opposed to something like rule utilitarianism.) is that people mostly won’t have the data or reasoning capacity to genuinely engage in it most of the time. Acting on the fly you’ve got to be a deontologist, even if you think you should be consequentialist, because you really don’t have the time or the information to reliably work out the consequences.

Ironically, the main consequence of consequentialism is giving somebody the wiggle room to rationalize doing bad things, by just imagining the right set of consequences.

Oops. Should have been: “Consequentialists, on the other hand, may *not* have a conclusion for one case have any necessary implications for what […]”

Brett@127 (OT),

Not taking Marxism seriously is a sign of a hopelessly narrow perspective on the world, especially regarding capitalism. Even if it’s just to be “well rounded” in your overall education, it needs to be a part of that. Dismissing it also means dismissing dozens (if not hundreds) of the most brilliant thinkers ever to have put their thoughts to paper, and this covers many fields of inquiry . . . from literary theory, to psychology, critical theory, geography, sociology, history (with dozens of subsets), economics, etc. etc.

Whether we’re discussing acts generally considered to be good, or generally considered to be evil, it’s often difficult, or at least it seems so to me, to distinguish deontological and consequentialist justifications. There are people all over the world who’ve effectively been forced to listen to Dick Cheney claim that thousands of lives were saved by torturing someone they knew and loved. As this is often the kind of consequentialism being hawked by the powerful to the powerless, no one should be surprised that they aren’t buying it. We may doubt the content of Cheney’s rationality, but its form is more or less impeccable.

Brett @134,

That you would try to equate one of the truly indispensable and seminal studies of capitalism with Hitler’s hate-filled, racist, bigoted id going amok . . . proves just how stupid and ignorant you really are.

To clarify a bit, in 11th century Christendom, or among the Taliban today, Cheney might have said Deus vult! and been considered a proper deontologist. Today, on CNN, he apparently feels the need to be considered a proper consequentialist. Is this progress? (That’s a trick question — as we all know — but in the present context, it’s trickiness seems unavoidable.)

William @137,

It seems that all too many Americans are willing to go along with Cheney’s view, tragically. When given the old ticking time bomb scenario, a majority says torture the guy. And, as mentioned already, a majority of Christians say torture the guy.

Would have to double check, but I think the percentage goes way down when the wording does not include “24” like conditions. And, as far as we know, there were no ticking time bomb scenarios in any of the torture cases.

@140,

Do you mean using the categorical imperative? In a way, Rawls does, but he tries to add the virtually impossible restriction of stepping back and away from any semblance of personal interest in the process. If I understand the two things correctly, and I may not. Have not read either of them in a long time. Not since the 1990s.

” I might accept that religion could be a personal good, but, as it is usually constituted, not a public good.”

This seems right to me. Individual people might get a great deal of comfort and satisfaction from their religion. My mother does for instance. On a societal level it has turned into an oppressive monster that must be slayed if we are to have a truly equal and free society.

I’d add that, in practice, governments don’t set out to slay religion to make their people enlightened. They set out to slay religion because they want to take it’s place.

Plume @ 141

I was thinking more of the level of abstraction in Rawls. I don’t have any disagreement in principle with his conclusions about what would be best, but he does seem to press all the juice out his ethical argument, i.e. rarely offers more than passing references to the complexity of human motivations. As with the arguments of well-meaning Keynesians in the op-ed pages of recent times, I constantly found myself scratching my head and saying, okay, but what about….

“Which is, I think, only to be expected when people in a position of power decide they’re entitled to dictate what other people believe.”

The cognitive dissonance is amazing…..

“The cognitive dissonance is amazing…..”

Amazing enough for you to elucidate?

MPA @149,

Cognitive dissonance and irony, too. The religious powers that be have always wanted to “dictate what other people believe.”

Consequentialist arguments are only distinct from deontological arguments if the consequentialist denies any validity to the notions of intrinsically moral goods and evils, which would therefore be bad consequences in themselves. Torture is not an evil if they find the ticking time bomb or torture is evil if they don’t, versus torture is wrong. Yet, consequentialism seems to imply that rule breaking in itself must be regarded as a wrong. Torture is wrong because it’s illegal.

Forgive me but this seems to be a case where philosophy is screwing up everything, talking about “consequentialism” as if it’s actually a thing. There’s the notion that some things are wrong because some authority said so, and there’s the notion that actions are good or bad for people (which people and how much good are the details where the devil is.)

Not to mention that nobody here seems to be in favor of “society” attempting to “slay” religion, or “dictat[ing] what other people believe.”

On atheism: There’s a sense in which “there is no God” is a theological belief. But obviously “I don’t even know what the word ‘God’ means” means something different from “The holy book most respected these days is a fictional narrative, like Homer’s Odyssey.” It seems entirely possible to believe in angels but not in God, even.

Where on the other hand agnostics tend to say “to say ‘the Bible is true’ has some kind of meaning, but it’s not that God exist in the naive way children believe it, and it’s not that the Odyssey is false, and for all I know it may be justified to say ‘God exists’ even on the basis of all these basically agnostic beliefs, and so I’ll keep on with the shell of some religion or other, for the consequentalism.”

Bianca,

As mentioned before, I’m one atheist who has always been fascinated by religious belief, religions, myths, etc. etc. I devoured Campbell and Graves at an early age, and moved on to their intellectual peers and descendents, and have read a great deal about the roots of Christianity (and other religious traditions) with a special interest in mystics from all religions.

I see those mystics as the Olympians of the spiritual, as they moved beyond names, labels, doctrine, dogma to reach places where few people go, where all the colors blend into one, to borrow a little from U2. And it is in that place that destructive differences are gone, that there is no more contest for religious supremacy, and the center is everywhere and nowhere.

To me, it’s preferable to have no contest for supremacy, either because we’re absent organized religions, period, or people have managed to transcend them all via Olympian feats of spiritual grandeur. Failing to open those doors is our real problem, IMO.

I oftentimes wish I could take the mystic journey, because I think it would show that “faith” is not necessary in the end. But it is to begin that journey.

If we study cases and their consequences it is for the purpose of creating rules. We can’t make use of a single case if we make no reference to general cases.

And as Val mentioned, even to apply the judgement ‘good’ to the outcome of a particular case is to generalize it! Now it belongs to the general category of ‘good outcomes’ which by definition are desirable.

It seems like–not sure here–it isn’t possible to even think about ethics, or a good society, without employing both empirical reference to consequences AND rule-making, which due to having a generalizing nature is subject to being interpreted as deontological even though it might be better understood as statistical.

Please tell me if this makes sense.

And Peter T @ 123 makes an important point which emphasizes the importance of culture, or habit. Torture, which helps us grapple with this abstract problem because it is extreme, can be integrated into a culture as something important. That is worth a moments contemplation.

[Is looking at moral rules as ‘working hypotheses’ the least problematic of the alternatives?]

Wm. Timberman @140

Before we can agree on the most effective rules for governing our behavior in the interest of a presumed common good, we have to know something about why we behave the way we do, in fact, behave.

I’d suggest respectfully that there are some misunderstandings here.

First, Rawls is not, I think, primarily interested in propounding rules to govern individual behavior. The principles of justice that he argues would be chosen in the original position govern the basic structure of society, and while he argues that people living in a just society will develop a desire to act in ways that support that society’s institutions and their continuation, the principles of justice apply directly to the society’s institutions and not to individual behavior (this is one of the points on which G.A. Cohen criticized Rawls).

Secondly, there is in fact a fair amount of discussion of human motivation in TJ. Rawls makes some basic assumptions about human motives to set up the hypothetical choice situation (the original position). Then there is a fuller discussion of moral psychology in Pt 3. Part of his aim (again, as I read it) is to argue that there is no conflict between being ‘rational’ and acting justly (or morally): it’s rational to want to live in a just society (i.e. one based on the two principles) and in such a society it’s rational to act justly, i.e. in ways that support or strengthen its basic character, partly because such a society gives, on balance, everyone the best chance at a (psychologically) satisfying life, i.e., the kind of life in which people feel they are doing something worthwhile and exercising (at least to some extent) whatever particular abilities they happen to have. This is an oversimplification of what he says, of course, but seems to be at least a significant part of what he’s driving at. You don’t have to find it all persuasive (I’m not sure I do) and it is somewhat abstract, but the discussion is there. I’m not sure Rawls’s arguments were always well-served by his prose style, but that’s a separate matter.

“religion for you”

Bianca @167,

If that’s how you took it, I failed to communicate my thoughts.

I’m an atheist in the sense that I don’t believe in gods, goddesses, theologies, or in any kind of supreme being. I haven’t entirely ruled out the possibility of previously unknown forces in the universe that we might, at least initially, consider “supernatural.” But it’s my belief that over time they would become “natural” to us with more study. This counters some definitions of agnosticism which say these things are unknowable. I don’t go that far. We keep changing the unknown to known, and while that often produces still more unknowns, I think, some day, if we avoid destroying ourselves, we may just knock out enough unknowns to know at least what we don’t know, etc.

But I have ruled out some other things, at least for myself. No religion, sacred text or myth comes within thousands of light years from depicting those great unknowns accurately, and perhaps the biggest obstacle in their way is the insistence upon anthropomorphizing the unseen. To me, there is no way the Cosmic Other could be anything like us. That said, and perhaps because they’ve done that, I don’t really think the authors in question intended to depict any of those things accurately, literally, in the first place. I think they knew that poetry, symbol, allegory and metaphor were the best ways to confront those mysteries. They knew they’d never solve them. But they might just get closer to some larger “truth” indirectly.

In terms of actual decisions and arguments, hardly anyone holds to some single philosophy or method. Most people judge by a mixture of intentions, rules, and outcomes (more or less virtue-based ethics, deontology, and consequentialism) together with heuristics that are hard to classify (“I think that anything that my political tribe stands for is right and anything the other tribe favors is wrong” isn’t really a rule, but it’s generally the most important principle).

I’ve already written about the problems with consequentialism in public policy: uncertainty and uneven access to information and evaluative power. Judging by virtue-based ethics / intentions is even worse: a large majority of people think that their intentions are good, and the worst people are likely to be soothed by having an external prop supporting their view of their own intentions, whether this is religion or some political ideology.

Plume, I completely agreed with your own narration and moral conclusions when you said

This pervades our society, above and below ground, and any society still in the thrall of organized religion, most especially the Levantine.

IMO, we will all be better off once we cast off the ultimate dictator. “God.” Not to replace him with others. But to do away with the idea of rulers of any kind, period.

I found this sentiment you were writing about whose narration ended here is true for my own journey. I am one of those people Bruce Wilder asked about. After converting to Christianity in my teens, I gave it everything I thought I could give (excepting what I later learned was something I cannot ever give away), and married and changed life plans to go to Bible college, and did it. Even in the declining conservative environment of the school, I was still learning things through my unpaid apologetics research that rocked my shit in the tectonic world. I still kept the faith; you know the story. I planned on and worked on a dissertation on Pascal. It got to be too close to home, and then it was home. I am far from Christianity these days, and even far from the leftist vogue saturating and squenching academic philosophy in its urban form that helped inoculate me from the pragmatic centrist vogue saturating and squenching academic philosophy in its suburban form. I found the exact same apologetics games were playing out in places like this, in the academic blogs, where communities of philosophers get together and shoot the shit to fellow words-on-screens, but only once I got myself completely out of fighting any particular such game as it related to an ever-fading heartfulness in the Jesus story.

I’m saying all this, because it’s just surprising to me that someone who wrote what I quoted will later go on to say such things as

Not taking Marxism seriously is a sign of a hopelessly narrow perspective on the world, especially regarding capitalism. Even if it’s just to be “well rounded” in your overall education, it needs to be a part of that. Dismissing it also means dismissing dozens (if not hundreds) of the most brilliant thinkers ever to have put their thoughts to paper, and this covers many fields of inquiry . . . from literary theory, to psychology, critical theory, geography, sociology, history (with dozens of subsets), economics, etc. etc.

There are brilliant racists, brilliant bigots, brilliant sycophants, brilliant Very Horrible People. We all read Kant. I read Bernasconi’s takedown of how race came conceptually to be the other day. He puts it in Kant, largely. I think he’s on to something there, and I’d like to see some Blumenbergian philosophical tradition of unearthing how nonconcepts become real similar what Bernasconi does. We just have to look at Kant the way we, those usual us, now look at our former apologetics days—especially to see we’re always still in them.

So if there’s anything brilliant in Kant, and enough for people to specialize in the guy, then let’s admit he’s a brilliant racist—and at least of the sort of racism or sexism or classism or elitism we diagnose in one another, in the way several of us go after J Thomas or whoever delurks for a moment to rant. If the very little evidence of a comment on a blog is enough to accuse someone for sinning the sin of being Not Worth Our Time Due To Being A Waste of Cognitive Resources, then certainly Kant—and a huge hell of a lot of philosophers we are forced by the rest of academic standards to teach as standard package to our clients the consumers—fit these standards. But he’s still brilliant, right?

Then being brilliant isn’t enough to give a shit. We’ll need more, won’t we? What is that? Is it really just what side a person dances for?

Or are there one set of rules or principles for blogs and another for The Academy? (But this just gets back to the question why moral consistency is what we crave for others, and rarely for ourselves, and if it’s really even consistency, a universal response to any variability, that we need morally….)

I was going to quote you also on calling Brett’s position “rightwing nonsense.” I’m teaching Russell Kirk alongside Emma Goldman this semester, so it’s not like I have chosen sides necessarily, but I want to point out that you called it “classic” as though it’s part of the nonsense (your word) I might find in some paleoconservative writing, something a lot more classic than what passes for conservatism today, now that cropped hair and black-rimmed glasses are no longer the fashion concurrently of both dominant sets of the white and black supremacists—part of when we really did believe ideas have consequences, including especially our own ideas and not just those of others.

But I’m hoping you’re here enough to realize you’re still undergoing the process that resulted in you concluding what you said and what it was that moved me, this idea that you couldn’t accept a God because you more strongly cannot accept rulers at all, and how that idea was part of the lessons you picked up from your own process of deconversion becoming the evacuation of, what I call, godneed and godrule, an idea that’s also part of the larger narrative you want to argue for, … at least for it here, right?

Your religious views are grounded in an on-going anarchic spirit, so you said. But then there’s what you also say. It’s always the also-saids we find fascinating in one another.

But the thing I see pointed out by someone like J Thomas (whom I took with the pointed gun thing to be riffing off that famous scene with Raymond K Hessel, itself riffing the eternally turning hourglass Nietzsche’s demon speaks of, itself riffing off Pascal’s wagering challenge to consider the worth of one’s life now [and not many years from now, not years from now, not months from now, not ten minutes from now, but] when compared against the life you will have once you endeavor to train for as one’s eternal habit [what you called the initial step of faith], itself riffing off all the sales techniques philosophy has perfected for us by getting us to better use our imaginations under penalty of eternal death [and what’s more eternally dead for the philosopher than being conceptually ignored? At least being misquoted or misunderstood is to still be relevant and not be left behind, worth changing one’s mind about, since as Descartes secured immortality for himself by getting us to agree: to even be deceived is to be something being, since passivity in the one case is activity in the other, and only what moves, is —after the early modern period, that is]) or William Timberman in his responses (who doesn’t seem to get the gun pointed back at him the way J Thomas solicits; so maybe there’s something to it) is something like this:

Who rules you without you knowing it, because for you it just seems the way things really are?

I mean, take how Timberman talks about Rawls. I guess others have asked this before, but I’ll ask and be corrected on it: if when veiled I were ignorant about who I will be when again no longer veiled and so concluding the patterns of justice go thus as the story we know goes, why the background assumption the only things I could be are humans? I might be the trees, the rocks, the governments, or the chickens, the pigs, the cows. I might even be a planet or a galaxy cluster. It’s a big universe of possible things I am—philosophy helped me use my imagination to see the other sides of things, the same seeing that led me out of a particular Jesus narrative. Wouldn’t our sense of justice as to its theoretical operations informing our practices also include some sense of how justice means for all those other things I might be (and, from a very thorough-going materialist position, understand myself to actually be)? Crazy idea, right? But to step further back this far, you at the very least have to step far back away from the things you think are right about political claims, moral claims, philosophical claims, all claiming we do on blog comments included.

It takes a very open mind to think unthinkable sorts of things. Maybe even a brilliant sort of mind. But when we start saying people are deficient, when we mock them, when we use words and phrases and patterns of symbolic interaction that humiliate, aren’t we setting up for us, maybe where we don’t think too much about it, a new set of rulers who dominate over the inferiors? Aren’t we saying we not only know better, but this knowing what the other hasn’t yet learned grants us license to dehumanize them through ridicule and mockery? And laughing while we do so?

But maybe if I weren’t so afraid of dehumanization or objectification—for all I know by contemporary sciences and our understanding of how consciousness forms, I am neither human nor not an object but all of the above, meaning we need different words (words needed differently), not simply new ones, not simply etymologically reconstructed old words—maybe if I thought of a larger justice including the things I exclude from justice routinely (rocks, clouds, beans, dogs, &c) as unwittingly as slave masters excluding their own unthinkably human pieces of talking property, maybe if I really opened up to doing away with godrules and godneeds, so did away with monarchs by doing away with the archos, then maybe I’d be open to the weirdest thoughts, all the weird insanities of the nonsensical and the absurd, and I wouldn’t be so afraid of being inhuman that I’d need to feel secure in mocking it, humiliating it, so that it won’t keep doing word things at me, even if I can just more easily scroll past it, if it really is just the way people troll us by using more words than what we deem, collectively, is normal and not yet prohibited. We’ve already crossed out all the other options, so this is the right one, we feel.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just writing nonsense to distract from having to fix this toilet. I apologize for dragging the rest of you into these distractions from your other pressing concerns.

Charles R,

I don’t have the negative view you have regarding Marx and Marxists. I see his work as emancipatory, and the people I’m talking about hold real democracy and human emancipation above all else. I’m not talking about Lenin and Stalin, both of whom I condemn and despise. I’m talking primarily about Marxists in the humanities and economics. Scholars, philosophers, economists, sociologists, etc. I’m talking about the Marxist-Humanist tradition.

A current organization along those lines.

http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/

And for me, adding the Green Left to the deal is imperative. I have left-anarchist leanings, and I know Marx had his major falling out with them. But Marx also talked about the ultimate destination being a classless, stateless society. That’s my dream as well. No gods, no masters. It wasn’t his motto, but it could have been. And I don’t hold him accountable for the later perversion of his writings or actions taken in his name. Jesus doesn’t get the blame for the Inquisition, etc. etc.

No gods, no masters also includes Marx. Which is why I said he should at least be a part of any well-rounded education. Dismissing him strikes me as needlessly narrowing one’s perspective. And because he’s been so radically marginalized here, in America — but not so much in Canada and Europe — it’s all the more valuable to stretch one’s horizons and include him — and Marxist writers in general.

RP @ 128

You may not like their premises or their conclusion, but the reasoning involved in “Torture is wrong and we should not do it” is far less suspect than “Torture is wrong because I have the evidence to show that it produces bad consequences, including both direct and unintended consequences”.

I confess I don’t understand this. To me it sounds like you’re imputing a process of reasoning to an assertion of fiat. Like there was a hidden Tough Guy in there laying down The Law.

Charles R
I guess others have asked this before, but I’ll ask and be corrected on it: if when veiled I were ignorant about who I will be when again no longer veiled and so concluding the patterns of justice go thus as the story we know goes, why the background assumption the only things I could be are humans? I might be the trees, the rocks, the governments, or the chickens, the pigs, the cows. I might even be a planet or a galaxy cluster.

The comment of mine currently in moderation addresses W Timberman’s remarks on Rawls, but in the meantime I must say that this passage from Charles R is one of the more bizarre, weird things about Rawls I’ve ever read — possibly the most bizarre. The idea of the veil of ignorance is not that the hypothetical people behind it don’t know anything — they do know some things, and they certainly know they are humans not galaxy clusters. I’m turning off my computer for the day. The amount of sheer, unadulterated nonsense (not necessarily mainly here at CT, but in general) is getting to be too much.

Don’t go away, LFC!!

:^)

I really enjoyed that bit from Charles R, actually. Expanding notions of justice to include treatment of non-human animals is a logical extension and philosophers such as Peter Singer have written convincingly about that inclusion. Including inanimate parts of the natural world is a more difficult stretch, conceptually, but it’s not ridiculous. It could be one way to reason about the preservation of glaciers, mountaintops, and other inanimate features of the natural world.

As I have written in a long Singer thread in the past, the most intractable problem with notions of justice that expand beyond humans seems to be mutually incompatible needs. If all animals should be treated well, what does that mean for obligate carnivores and their herbivore prey? If you are inclined to technical hedonism, as I am, it may be that the proper minimax strategy is universal extinction. This is a counter-intuitive result, to be sure! But without radical re-engineering of the neurological basis of our experiences, the depths of suffering are much deeper than the heights of pleasure are high.

A year of delights cannot compensate for a day of grim horrors. The expectation value for hedonic utility of each new life lived is below zero. I have sometimes wondered if that’s an answer to the Fermi Paradox. Most species that could undertake interstellar travel first realize that the only winning move in the game of life is not to play, and voluntarily refrain from reproduction until they go extinct.

I wanted to make one other quick point in my 169 that I left out because the comment was already too long, but here it is.

Val @119 mentions “values or empathy” as sources of rules of conduct that we use to regulate our behavior. I think this gestures at an important point that I would put this way: there are motivational structures that are absolutely essential to our intuitions and beliefs about moral conduct, but which consequentialism can’t ultimately make room for.

This is not to make the mistake of saying that consequentialism is a theory about motivational structures; of course it isn’t. Nevertheless, insofar as consequentialism insists on prescribing actions that maximize some sort of aggregate of some sort of utility function, it will—under certain circumstances—run up against deeply important motivational structures, ones that are characterized by or grounded in non-consequentialist commitments to certain values or to treating persons, or certain persons, in certain ways, etc. At best, this means that taken seriously, consequentialism isn’t really workable prescriptive theory for moral conduct (which, generally, it wants to be).

After the Apollo spacecraft landed on the moon, I read an interview with a tribeswoman from a rural area in, I believe, Malayasia. When asked if she believed that human beings had walked on the moon, she said, no, the mood was a goddess, and she would never permit herself to be sullied in that way.

So, I suppose, the statement, “Human beings have walked on the moon,” is now a religious statement, yes?

js, I was happy to give you the benefit of the doubt. It would have been OK for you to accept that benefit.

This is actually hilarious. So, how exactly were you giving me “the benefit of the doubt”?

I understood!

How exactly did I appear to be condescending?

JT,

LFC’s stand is not sheer idiotic blather.

Nor did js. suggest that it was.

godoggo/J. Parnell Thomas,

You’re hammered already aren’t you? Happy New Year!

Not hammered, but I did just have some beans.

Beats me about the other guy.

Thank you! I will!

We. Definitely we. ;-)

Oops, Not J. Parnell Thomas. Sorry about that, I copy-and-pasted without reading carefully enough.

@ 202

Marx & Friedman are philosophers. They talk a lot and do little. They get used as ‘court painters’ by the Doers. The struggle that matters is the struggle between the people who do things. In a manner of speaking, the struggle between Team Gandhi and Team Capone.

Here is a good illustration of what I’m talking about.

Matt: A year of delights cannot compensate for a day of grim horrors.

Days of grim horrors, unfortunately, have the habit of occurring now and then; over a lifetime they pile up. The only way to escape the deaths of others is to predecease them, or never to have made their acquaintance, either of which is arguably worse than the alternative.

A happy new year to all.

js. 190
I imagine LFC understands my comment

Yes, I did understand your comment. It was perfectly clear, to me at least.

Dear js, thank you for your further explanation, that was very interesting. Perhaps you could explain further sometime what you consider deontology to be, if it is a thing – or concept – worth considering.

This thread did descend into weirdness, no doubt. Perhaps someone could, charitably, suggest that J Thomas go back and read the comments, understanding that he has made a fundamental mistake of fact or logic (I’m not quite sure how to classify it, though I see the mistake quite clearly), which has led him astray for quite a long time now. There must be a name for this – just not recognizing when you have made a mistake and gone down a false trail, even though other people are trying – sort of, maybe half heartedly – to tell you. Painful.
New Year’s Eve is well over here, but maybe is the explanation for gibberish there. Happy new year to all.

Mattski (slightly OT),

You mentioned the Dalai Lama earlier. If my memory is correct, you’re into Buddhism as well. As mentioned, I studied and then practiced Zen for a bit and intend to go back to it this year.

The Dalai Lama has self-identified as a Marxist.

Here’s a short list of famous anti-capitalists, socialists, Marxists, communists — leftists in general.

Shelley, William Blake, William Morris, George Orwell, Einstein, Picasso, Hemingway, Pablo Neruda, Steinbeck, Helen Keller, Camus, Sartre, Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Gramsci, MLK, Kafka, Dorothy Day, the Dalai Lama, Naomi Klein, David Harvey, Richard D. Wolff, Gar Alperovitz, John Bellamy Foster . . . and Gandhi.

I’m in excellent company.

;>)

Here’s Einstein’s “Why Socialism,” from the original Monthly Review Article.

#216 Val

Perhaps someone could, charitably, suggest that J Thomas go back and read the comments, understanding that he has made a fundamental mistake of fact or logic (I’m not quite sure how to classify it, though I see the mistake quite clearly), which has led him astray for quite a long time now. There must be a name for this – just not recognizing when you have made a mistake and gone down a false trail, even though other people are trying – sort of, maybe half heartedly – to tell you. Painful.

No problem, Val. I’ve been wrong before, and I handle it by continuing to be wrong with my current approaches until I find new better ways. It isn’t painful for me. It’s what I’ve found that works.

I could listen to people who tell me I’m wrong and who tell me what I should do instead, and obey them. But usually as I learn more I find that they are if anything wronger still. Often I learn interesting things from them, though.

But you haven’t done that. You’ve merely explained “You’re doing it wrong, dude”. Thank you for sharing, merry christmas and happy new year.

J. Thomas (too many Thomases, it took me a minute to figure out which Friedman JQ was referencing above):

You ask why you should worry about what Rawls says, and whether you understand what he says in the correct way. Perhaps it’s because you seem to be someone who wants to be “academic,” in a lay sort of way. And because this means understanding what is written in books, and how really smart people have decided is the correct way to understand what’s written in books. So you should be very concerned about what’s written in scholarship about Rawls. True, there’s some value in thinking things through for yourself, but it’s easy to get disconnected from tradition if you do this. And over time you might get pushed in directions you don’t want to go (though maybe you do, I don’t know you). So, if that’s an argument that persuades you, you should be concerned that people who know a lot about Rawls keep saying you’re wrong and shouldn’t say what you do about him.

I read somewhere that if have the wonderful lamp, or a special ring, some of those things could actually be your slaves.

From what little I’ve read of Rawls, the veil of ignorance seems intended to combine the idea of a social contract with Kant–it’s a tool that imaginatively transforms the people in the social contract theory’s original position into Kantian reasoners. So Charles R’s comment about Kant and racism seems relatively consistent with the concern that Rawls doesn’t have a good way to incorporate concern for other species (who would never have been Kantian reasoners in the first place).

I personally see nothing wrong with trying to extend individual innovative ideas that can be found in Rawls, though this will mean sometimes ignoring some statements in the book where they prevent moving in that direction, and obviously will conflict with the goal of trying to become a Rawls expert.

Mattski @225,

I have never even remotely suggested we could leap into a truly socialist, egalitarian, truly democratic future. I have repeatedly said it’s not going to happen any time soon, if ever, and that I won’t live to see it happen. It will be a long, hard slog. But I have said that the liberal idea of endlessly postponing action is wrong, and that their constant excuses regarding “not having the votes” don’t account for their not even trying to discuss changes. It’s really a self-fulfilling prophecy. They won’t ever have the votes unless they push for these changes — win, lose or draw. That’s how you change minds and move the Overton Window. Not through silence, etc.

So, in short, yeah, I know it’s a process. Do I want to speed it up as much as possible? Certainly. But I know we can’t leap into that world tomorrow. And I also know we never will if we don’t even take the first step. Neither of the two main parties has or seemingly will.

Here’s a cite for the Dalai Lama’s Marxist:

http://www.tricycle.com/web-exclusive/occupy-buddhism

And another one from the Guardian:

Dalai Lama and Marxism

The Dalai Lama has a refreshing tendency to confound western caricatures. As a cuddly old monk, he could comfort fans by fuzzily connecting us to an imagined Shangri-La that contrasts favourably with our own material world. Only he won’t play the game, regularly making ethical, political, scientific and (ir)religious statements that rudely pop the projections laid on to him.

He was at it again the other day, telling Chinese students that he considers himself a Marxist. This wasn’t just playing to the crowd – although it was reported with surprise (at least in the US), the ideological alignment is longstanding. In 1993, he said: “The economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis … as well as the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and [it] cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation. For those reasons, the system appeals to me, and it seems fair.”

My impression is that J Thomas was purposely misreading js. Being sarcastic/ironic. (just addding this b/c JT doesnt seem to want to clarify that point, for whatever reason)

More seriously J Thomas, you did a similar thing to MPAVictoria in the ‘having a gun pointed at you’ stuff. She was trying to say something to you about that, but you kept not getting it and going on with your own train of thought – ostensibly as a response to MPAV but in fact not.

It’s kind of frustrating to observe, because there is an opportunity for dialogue and learning in cases like that – I mean you could have learnt something from MPAV, and possibly you could have explained to her what you were trying to say if you had understood what she was saying (though I’m not sure about that) – but it was missed. It can be kind of funny but it’s also frustrating and I think it lowers the standard of discussion.

Plume,

I have never even remotely suggested we could leap into a truly socialist, egalitarian, truly democratic future.

That’s funny, then why is one of your most oft-repeated phrases, “It’s not rocket science”? Your characterizations of capitalism and socialism are cartoonish in the extreme, Plume. There is nothing, and I mean nothing in your writing that approaches the subtlety of what Einstein wrote in the link you provided. What do you think Albert’s response to your crude polemics would be? Dismay, that’s what I think.

But I have said that the liberal idea of endlessly postponing action is wrong, and that their constant excuses regarding “not having the votes” don’t account for their not even trying to discuss changes.

More crude, inaccurate generalizations that paper over reality.

Well, I for one think that science fiction is just some bullshit because even though I’ve read almost none of it, I’ve read a couple of sentences in @194, and if you ask me, a ‘sentient nebula’ is fucking nonsense.

Kill your idols indeed.

Rich P. @221

There’s a difference between being “ruled” by a textual authority and suggesting that someone might want to pay a smidgen of attention to the reasons that a particular writer wrote what he/she did.

Rawls’s theory is about human societies (as were those of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant that he says in preface to TJ he’s building on and carrying to a higher level of abstraction, or words to that effect). Given the fact that R’s theory is about human society, it seems a little unfair to tax him with not doing something he didn’t set out to do.

It’s as if Rich Puchalsky set out to write a book about his vision of anarchism and I came along and said “Hey Rich, neat book, but why have you ignored the issue of religious and ethnic minorities in multiethnic states?” Rich would be completely justified in replying: “Um, because that’s not what my book is about.”

It’s not a question of kowtowing to a particular writer, treating him/her as an infallible authorty, etc. It’s a question of being minimally sensitive to what a particular writer sets out to do and the context he/she’s working in. So I don’t think what I wrote had anything to do w Charles R’s point about (in your words) “replac[ing] this ultimate dictator … with lesser ones in form of textual authorities who they demand be taken seriously….” I was not “demanding” that Rawls “be taken seriously”; rather, I was just reacting almost viscerally to what struck me as a somewhat absurd suggestion. Maybe I misread Charles R’s intention, but I think a fair reading of what he wrote suggests he was expressing puzzlement about why R. focuses on humans. And I was simply saying he focuses on humans b.c that’s what Rawls, and the other writers he’s in conversation with, focus on. A fairly simple, basic point, ISTM.

Now, is the treatment and status of non-human animals an important issue? Sure. Is the relation of humans to their environment (animal and inanimate) important? Definitely. But if you want to charge Rawls with species-ism because he focuses on humans, you’re going to have to charge a lot of others with that too, probably including your favored Bakunin and Kropotkin. Offhand it doesn’t seem like an especially productive line of criticism to me, though I cd be wrong.

Rich P
Charles R. complained about people being condescending and dismissive, based on them playing standard apologetics games on behalf of their dead authorities. LFC then was condescending and dismissive in exactly the way that Charles R. had written about. js. was then *even more* condescending and dismissive

This is just bullsh*t, for reasons I detailed above.

#222 Bianca Steele

And because this means understanding what is written in books, and how really smart people have decided is the correct way to understand what’s written in books. So you should be very concerned about what’s written in scholarship about Rawls.

The main reason I would be very concerned about what people write about Rawls, is if they wind up accepting ideas that look wrong. Then I want to find out where the problem is. Maybe there’s something wrong with what they believe, or something wrong with my assumptions or logic. Either way I want to know. I’m no more concerned with what Rawls actually said than I am about Lieh-Tzu, or Teresa of Avila, or Wittgenstein or Darwin. But some of the things that have been attributed to them look interesting.

True, there’s some value in thinking things through for yourself, but it’s easy to get disconnected from tradition if you do this. And over time you might get pushed in directions you don’t want to go (though maybe you do, I don’t know you).

I’d expect that getting too connected to tradition would be more likely to push people in bad directions. If you think “Here are some people who have left their footprints in the sand, I’ll follow them some and see where they lead” that’s OK. If you think “Those people in the past must have known where they were going and where they went must have been the right place” then you are likely to be disappointed.

It’s usually more efficient to listen to live scholars than dead scholars, because they can answer questions. If they see they have something wrong they can rethink it.

On the other hand there’s the analogy with software. The earliest versions may have serious bugs but they will clearly express their intentions. Later versions that have lots of patches to fix discovered bugs are likely to be much harder to follow. What can work better is to follow the original enough to get the ideas, and then track the known bugs enough to see where the original thinking was misplaced. Then you might get something cleaner. But it’s a big effort and hard to get permissions.

So, if that’s an argument that persuades you, you should be concerned that people who know a lot about Rawls keep saying you’re wrong and shouldn’t say what you do about him.

I’m not talking about Rawls. I’m talking about the arguments people make here, some of which they attribute to Rawls.

You may be suffering from insufficient arrogance. There are exercises you can do to increase your self-assurance, if you want to do that. When you try to understand things, you must depend on yourself because your only alternative is to appoint an authority to tell you what to think. If you believe you are not smart enough to follow other people’s ideas and you should accept them without understanding, why try to understand?

If you believe that Rawls is better than you and so you mustn’t judge for yourself, if some prophet of Rawls says that you aren’t competent to judge, why try to understand? Just find the bottom line where he tells you what to do and do it. It is disrespectful to try to follow his arguments when you know already that you aren’t qualified to do it.

If you aren’t willing to suppose that maybe everybody else is wrong and you are right, and later suppose that maybe you were wrong before but you now see that something different is right, then you have no business getting involved except as part of some sort of authority-appreciation club.

J @ 242

Okay, then.

js.: “Well, I for one think that science fiction is just some bullshit because even though I’ve read almost none of it, I’ve read a couple of sentences in @194, and if you ask me, a ‘sentient nebula’ is fucking nonsense.

Kill your idols indeed.”

But I’m an ardent Stapledonist! How dare you insult my guru. I think that I’ll post 5 or 6 comments listing everyone admirable in history who ever believed something similar to Stapledon, and explain how you just can’t think seriously about these issues if you don’t study Stapledon’s works.

(More seriously, Stapledon prefigures Žižek little bit, in that he wrote: ” I am not a Marxist, but I have learned much from Marxists, and I am not anti-Marxist… Marxism and Christianity spring from the same emotional experience, but each in its way misinterprets, falsifies.”)

Awesome thread btw. Happy NY, Timberteers.

Rich @246,

You definitely can’t think seriously about Stapledon if you haven’t read him. You can’t write a good book or movie review if you haven’t read or seen the material.

Remember, you were the person who made the sweeping statement that Marxists were apparently everywhere and always wrecking Green initiatives. You’ve clearly stereotyped them to a very silly degree, and have shown no ability to accurately portray Marx’s views or those who call themselves Marxists or Marxians. Or, those who are just interested in expanding their perspectives to include them.

Marx and Marxists have been seriously marginalized in America, but not in Canada or Europe. I see you and others like you as just accepting national cultural and intellectual stereotypes, and taking the easy way out. I’m used to that coming from my fellow Americans. But the truly odd part is the anger. As if Marx and Marxists are some threat to the Establishment. As if the few people who say they’re Marxists are enough to shake the capitalist foundation, and the foundational capitalist brainwashing in place. As if it’s such a horrible thing for a tiny, tiny minority to dissent.

Open minds are all too rare these days.

#227 Val

js @ 184 told LFC that he/she (LFC) should sometimes just “ignore sheer idiotic blather”. You @ 188, wrongly thought js was accusing LFC of talking “sheer idiotic blather”, and you persisted in that error for quite some time. Various people tried to point it out to you, but for some reason you didn’t take their comments on board.

This is a lesson for me in how easy it is to say things that will be misunderstood.

From my point of view, my interpretation of LFC’s comment and also my interpretation of js’s comment were the kindest I could find. Of course I knew I could be wrong about what they meant, but then I’m often wrong about what other people mean. I didn’t want to assume that they were intentionally saying things that made them look bad.

I didn’t keep that interpretation of js’s meaning for a single minute after I saw that js told me he intended the meaning that made him look bad. And I didn’t keep my interpretation of LFC’s comment for a single minute after I saw his denial, either.

But you believed that later discussion was about me not understanding what they claimed for themselves that they said. My understanding of it lined up very well with Rich Pukalsky #221. At first sight LFC appeared to be making exactly the mistakes that Charles R pointed out, almost as if he was following Charles R’s instructions. It was easier for me to see that as caricature than as sincere. And js appeared to be agreeing with him, though the wording was unclear enough that he could have been pointing at him. More charitable to think that he was objecting to LFC’s claim as if he did not realize it was parody.

I would still prefer to believe those interpretations but the authors said they were wrong. So I don’t.

LFC: “Since no one here has taken this approach w/r/t Rawls, this comment is completely inapt.”

I was joshing Plume w/r/t Marx., in response to js. twitting me over anti-Marxism.

LFC @ 238: “It’s not a question of kowtowing to a particular writer, treating him/her as an infallible authorty, etc. It’s a question of being minimally sensitive to what a particular writer sets out to do and the context he/she’s working in. So I don’t think what I wrote had anything to do w Charles R’s point about (in your words) “replac[ing] this ultimate dictator … with lesser ones in form of textual authorities who they demand be taken seriously….” I was not “demanding” that Rawls “be taken seriously”; rather, I was just reacting almost viscerally to what struck me as a somewhat absurd suggestion.”

Charles R. wrote about people doing the same apologetics games. How often does a non-fundamentalist Christian draw on the Bible as an infallible authority? They don’t. Instead they demand that you take it seriously on their terms. If you question whether we should be taking same ancient tribal legends as a guide towards anything, they’ll say that you aren’t seriously taking the context into account, that the writings were made under certain assumptions of that day and have to be evaluated taking those assumptions into account, and react viscerally to the absurd suggestion that maybe maybe what they’re doing is apologetics when what we’re talking about is the current day.

To answer your example, if I’d written a book about anarchism and someone many decades later said “Why does this book ignore the issue of religious and ethnic minorities in multiethnic states, something that many anarchists are concerned with these days?” it doesn’t help if someone then writes “But Puchalsky’s whole project was baed on writing about anarchism ignoring the the issue of religious and ethnic minorities! You can’t take it seriously without knowing that. I’m going to leave this ridiculous discussion” etc. etc.

Rich,

If it’s joshing, I apologize for my own tone. Communication is roughly 90% (or more) non-verbal. Can’t always see humor and irony on the page.

I certainly wasn’t “twitting you over anti-Marxism”. For one thing, I imagine you’ve read your Marx.

#238 LFC

Rawls’s theory is about human societies (as were those of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant that he says in preface to TJ he’s building on and carrying to a higher level of abstraction, or words to that effect). Given the fact that R’s theory is about human society, it seems a little unfair to tax him with not doing something he didn’t set out to do.

Agreed, that would be unfair to Rawls.

It’s not a question of kowtowing to a particular writer, treating him/her as an infallible authorty, etc. It’s a question of being minimally sensitive to what a particular writer sets out to do and the context he/she’s working in. So I don’t think what I wrote had anything to do w Charles R’s point about (in your words) “replac[ing] this ultimate dictator … with lesser ones in form of textual authorities who they demand be taken seriously….”

At the time Charles R was talking to Plame about Marx. I’m thinking that if you’re talking to Americans and you want to talk about an idea that was inspired by Marx, you really ought to file off the serial numbers and present it as something else. Otherwise somebody will say “This is Marxist and therefore it must be wrong” and somebody else will likely say “No, everything Marx ever said was right” and your idea, whatever it is, will get ignored. Regardless whether Marx was a genius who got everything right, his name has beome a dogwhistle that will attract hounds from all over who will have a howling context. Why start that? (Anyway, at that point it wasn’t about Rawls.)

I was not “demanding” that Rawls “be taken seriously”; rather, I was just reacting almost viscerally to what struck me as a somewhat absurd suggestion.

I get those visceral reactions too. I try to lie down until they go away.

Maybe I misread Charles R’s intention, but I think a fair reading of what he wrote suggests he was expressing puzzlement about why R. focuses on humans.

Charles R talked about Marx, and Kant, and Hessel, with mention of Descartes etc, and then he brought in Timberman on Rawls:

I mean, take how Timberman talks about Rawls. I guess others have asked this before, but I’ll ask and be corrected on it: if when veiled I were ignorant about who I will be when again no longer veiled and so concluding the patterns of justice go thus as the story we know goes, why the background assumption the only things I could be are humans? ….

It takes a very open mind to think unthinkable sorts of things. Maybe even a brilliant sort of mind. But when we start saying people are deficient, when we mock them, when we use words and phrases and patterns of symbolic interaction that humiliate, aren’t we setting up for us, maybe where we don’t think too much about it, a new set of rulers who dominate over the inferiors? Aren’t we saying we not only know better, but this knowing what the other hasn’t yet learned grants us license to dehumanize them through ridicule and mockery?

I interpret this not so much about why Rawls restricts his thinking to humans, but more to ask why Timberman should. And he is not blaming Timberman for not already taking the path he suggests. He says it’s hard to do, but worth doing.

He started out gently suggesting that Plume might be setting Marx up as an idol to replace god, he did not mention the idea that you would do that with Rawls. Is it more important to get clear what Rawls thought, or instead what might be useful for us to think? No one mentioned Rawls in this thread until you did. Rawls looks to me like a likely valuable resource, worth bringing up. But if it’s vitally important to get it clear what some dead white guy thought, maybe Pythagoras would be a better choice. (Except that he ran a secret society and tried to keep outsiders from getting it clear….)

I’ve certainly read a fair amount of SF, and I see js.’s point in calling it bullshit or “nonsense,” in the sense that there aren’t obviously the kind of limitations on what a writer can imagine that there are in other kinds of writing, so it might be worse than counterproductive to assume every example of SF should be taken seriously. It seems to be stuff taken out of the writer’s head based only on imagination and logical extrapolation with no connection to reality. Of course, since so many people have taken Stapledon seriously, that in itself is an argument for taking it seriously. And when one group of philosophers takes SF seriously and another group aggressively calls it bullshit, it might take some time to figure out what’s going on.

We were talking about Rawls, and Rawls “veil of ignorance” — like so many philosophical thought experiments — seems to me to be highly related to SF as a genre. As such, I think that the idea of rejecting SF as bullshit and simultaneously taking Rawls seriously is comical, a mere bias in favor of high-culture texts over low-culture ones. I should break out and polish up my series of romantic comedy adventure short stories based on philosophic thought experiments and erotic novels (originally written in comments here).

This is the best Rawlsian text.

#263 Plume

“Otherwise somebody will say “This is Marxist and therefore it must be wrong” and somebody else will likely say “No, everything Marx ever said was right” and your idea, whatever it is, will get ignored.”

In short, people need to relax. It’s 2015. Marx shouldn’t be this kind of lightning rod at this point in time.

And yet, your own example has repeatedly shown that Marx has been this kind of lightning rod in recent days and weeks, here on CT. You bring up Marx and people hear the dogwhistle and come running to say “Marx! Marx! Marx bad!”. You start explaining that Marx is good, they start talking about Stalin, and it’s another dozen times around the same old merry-go-round once again.

I don’t want to tell you not to do that, if it’s what you want to do. It might even do some good. Maybe if you repeat the same thing over again enough times, your opponents will get too tired to respond vigorously.

I saw that happen once in a salt-water aquarium. I’d leave the lab around 3 AM each morning, and the aquarium was in the hall and I”d stop and watch it a little. There was a hermit crab who had some sort of interest in an anemone. It would drag its shell over to the big anemone and tap against the side of the thing. The anemone would bend over and brush its tentacles around, and the crab would huddle inside its shell until the anemone straightened back up. Then it would tap again and the anemone would bend over again. About the third day things had changed. My interpretation is that the anemone got tired and started bending slower and slower, until the crab had time to cut its way inside and start literally eating the anemone’s lunch. The anemone had a piece of shrimp in its stomach and the third day the crab was eating that while the anemone was slit open.

But if you actually have an idea you want to discuss, it might be better to talk about the idea without ever blowing the dogwhistle. Possibly if you talk about the idea without using the word “Marx” maybe the merry-go-round won’t start. More likely the conditioned reflexes have been established to the point that people will start talking about Marx when they see *your* name, but maybe not.

This paper may be of relevance:

Nisbett, Richard E.; Timothy D. Wilson (1977). “Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes”. Psychological Review 84: 231–259.

It’s possible that attempts at introspection can result in confabulation: I believe X (for reasons not accessible to consciousness); when I am pressed on why I believe X, the brain concocts a plausible justification for believing X that may be entirely unrelated to the (unconscious) reason for believing it.

#269 Rich Puchalsky

Ah, then you were joking about something, but I don’t know what.

I thought he was parodying his concept of some other commenter’s position.

Like for example, somebody who disagreed with Rawls who had not in fact read Rawls. But who ludicrously believed any ideas they found in a science fiction context.

Such a person would deserve to have his own idols mocked, more than someone would deserve to be mocked for paying attention to an eminently respectable philosopher.

Two comments.

#1. Rich Puchalsky is right about Olaf Stapledon. The first three pages alone of Star Maker say more true and important things about what successful though imperfect social life is like than many millions of words by others about that, and it’s important to look sometimes at ultimate cosmic vistas in the company of a guide who can say those true and important things about a handful of lives too.

#2. This could be just me, but I get the feeling that a lot of people genuinely don’t know – and can’t easily find out – how consequentialist or deontological they’re being until sufficiently test in ways that don’t conveniently present themselves all the time.

My personal case in point is libertarianism and health care. There was a time when I said, and believed, that the benefits in general liberty were worth the costs in personal well-being the US paid in not having a national health care system, along with the gains I thought there were in not having the budgetary costs of such a thing. The more I learned, though, the more I found that we’d actually been paying more and getting less all at the same time, and that people with reliable national health care systems simply didn’t suffer impairments in their practical powers of choice or quality of life that a lot of Americans (including a bunch of my friends and colleagues) did. So the breaking point approached: how dedicated was I to a particular notion of liberty such that it had to be clung to no matter what the real costs in human suffering (and wasted money and all the rest)?

Gradually I realized that the answer for me was “Not that much, actually.”, and that I’m more dedicated to concepts of liberty insofar as they contribute to real betterment of real people’s lives. I simply couldn’t be deontological in that particular way and feel that I was in tune with all the rest of my values, so I eventually stopped trying and acknowledged the change in self-conception. I wasn’t actually engaging in a different kind of moral reasoning, but it felt different thanks to changed information and conclusions changed on the basis of that.

Conversely, there are times when I find myself going “yeah, no, even if it were to be all that and a bag of chips, I still wouldn’t want it” about other things. It also often comes as something of a surprise.

And I think this is true for most people about many of their principles.

p.s. I do sort of like the question “Who rules you without you knowing it, because for you it just seems the way things really are?” Charitably interpreted, it’s a call to examine one’s assumptions, I guess, and I can’t object to that.

But the phrasing “who rules you?” conjures up the specter of a Malevolent Dead White Male Hand, almost perhaps like something out of an SF movie. Personally one of my own regrets about my education is that didn’t read enough Dead White Males, not that I read too many. (I’m for reading other people of course as well: non-whites, females, non-dead, etc.) But the lurking implication seems to be if you read the Bible or Marx or Rawls or *whatever* with any degree of attempted sympathy or even understanding, you are subjecting yourself to evil influences or something. Which I think is rubbish.

from Charles R @175:

But maybe if I weren’t so afraid of dehumanization or objectification—for all I know by contemporary sciences and our understanding of how consciousness forms, I am neither human nor not an object but all of the above, meaning we need different words (words needed differently), not simply new ones, not simply etymologically reconstructed old words—maybe if I thought of a larger justice including the things I exclude from justice routinely (rocks, clouds, beans, dogs, &c) as unwittingly as slave masters excluding their own unthinkably human pieces of talking property, maybe if I really opened up to doing away with godrules and godneeds, so did away with monarchs by doing away with the archos, then maybe I’d be and I wouldn’t be so afraid of being inhuman that I’d need to feel secure in mocking it, humiliating it, so that it won’t keep doing word things at me, even if I can just more easily scroll past it, if it really is just the way people troll us by using more words than what we deem, collectively, is normal and not yet prohibited. We’ve already crossed out all the other options, so this is the right one, we feel.

If you want to be “open to the weirdest thoughts, all the weird insanities of the nonsensical and the absurd,” why can’t you just be open to them? Why go through all this preliminary rigmarole about “doing away with monarchs by doing away with
the archos” etc. etc.?

LFC: “Whatever most of this passage means […] it’s striking that someone who apparently wants to break the enslaving chains of dead authorities is not shy about referring to dead philosophers himself: Nietzsche, Pascal, Descartes.”

In Charles R.’s comment he pretty strongly implies that he teaches college-level philosophy: “If the very little evidence of a comment on a blog is enough to accuse someone for sinning the sin of being Not Worth Our Time Due To Being A Waste of Cognitive Resources, then certainly Kant—and a huge hell of a lot of philosophers we are forced by the rest of academic standards to teach as standard package to our clients the consumers—fit these standards. But he’s still brilliant, right?”

Italics added above.

LFC: “When you write, on a blog, a long, rather complicated, rather stream-of-consciousness comment, and when you include in that comment a passing reference to galaxy clusters in the same passage […]”

This is why I’m opposed to complaints about civility. In my experience it is always the people who complain about civility who are the least capable of understanding how their own writing is uncivil to others. LFC complains that someone called him a “lying liberal”, and understands that this is uncivil because calling someone a liar is uncivil, but is unable to understand that skimming someone’s comment and then saying that it’s bizarre, weird, and sheer unadulterated nonsense, based on something that LFC didn’t understand, is itself highly uncivil. When it’s joined to “I am opposed to mockery and humiliation” it’s just sad.

LFC: “Why go through all this preliminary rigmarole about “doing away with monarchs by doing away withthe archos” etc. etc.?”

It was a necessary part of his point.

I’ve always thought of deontological claims as the useful bookends that keep consequentialist reasoning from falling over. As others have noted, consequentialism cannot be taken all the way without disappearing into speculation or falling into endless regress, so underneath it is almost always some absolute claim: “torture is bad”. Those with children are familiar with this story in daily life: you give reasons, they query the reasons, you explain the reasons, they query the explanation and you end up saying “do it just because it’s the right thing to do” .

Sometimes – indeed quite often – the question is not “why do you believe that?” but “which side are you on?”. A question that can only be answered deontologically. Cheney is on the side of the torturers, and reasons his consequential way there. The only way to avoid being reasoned into evil is to refuse to go there.

Come the revolution, Rich and Bruce will join the Reds, Andrew F will join the Whites, Brett will discover too late that hunting rifles and a copy of the 2nd Amendment are not a defense against an airstrike and Plume will be shot for being a nuisance all round. But much of the CT will end up waiting tables in exile, telling passing journalists that if only people had reasoned correctly this tragedy could have been avoided.

R. Puchalsky 280

This is why I’m opposed to complaints about civility. In my experience it is always the people who complain about civility who are the least capable of understanding how their own writing is uncivil to others. LFC complains that someone called him a “lying liberal”, and understands that this is uncivil because calling someone a liar is uncivil, but is unable to understand that skimming someone’s comment and then saying that it’s bizarre, weird, and sheer unadulterated nonsense, based on something that LFC didn’t understand, is itself highly uncivil.

In fact, upthread I did not say his comment was bizarre, weird, etc., as you are perfectly well aware. I said the specific part of the comment referring to the veil of ignorance was bizarre. I’m not even sure Charles R. or you should regard this as uncivil, however, since Charles R. himself, in the passage I quoted (I truncated it accidentally) at 278 says, at least as I read it, that he wants “to be open to the weirdest thoughts, all the weird insanities of the nonsensical and the absurd”.

This thread has reinforced what I have recently decided is one of my New Year’s resolutions, which is to spend much less time reading CT and, especially, commenting at CT.

I can see why the Beans example was chosen. It may not be easy to find clear distinction between deontological vs consequentialist. Most things have negative environmental consequences of one kind or another, even if to a minimal degree. But whenever there are any negative consequences, a deontologist may propose those as the justification for not getting their hands dirty in replacing bad with better.

There is a very easy example to see in the USA. We have a political system which essentially makes third parties impossible. We have mostly winner-take-all races in geographically gerrymandered districts. No proportional representation. And then additional things piled on top of that due to the principles of power.

Braving this impossible situation, deontologicals refuse to vote for a lesser-evil candidate, even though the candidacy of the pure hearted but almost-certain-to-lose-candidates may lead to the consequence of the greater-evil being elected. There are only very few counterexamples in the history of the USA where third party candidate led to a more progressive outcome (though one could argue that those counterexamples were worth all the rot ever since).

I see third party voting and all the hand wringing over it in the USA as a good example of the deontological vs consequentialist arguments. It would be nice to change the system, but I don’t directly see that coming out of futile campaigns–except through the avenue of intermediate worse outcomes which are unlikely to have future benefit.

I think Chomsky has the right outlook on this. He advises voting for the lesser-evil because of the consequences of small changes to large concentrations of power. But he also advises not wasting a lot of time about it. Get on to other things that can actually have a more substantial effect on society. Participating in the rigged elections are only a tiny part of a person’s social responsibilities.

Peter T, your #282 was a thing of beauty forever.

Peter T @282,

and Plume will be shot for being a nuisance all round.

I don’t remember ever having a conservation with you before, Peter T. So, let me introduce myself:

My name is Plume. Fuck you.

People who accuse people who accuse people of being uncivil of being uncivil are the uncivilest people of all.

Tricky things, consequences.

Wouldn’t any deontological claim based on an arbitrary appeal to authority be fallacious anyway? I don’t think that “because X said so” is a legitimate rule-based ethic.

deontologicals refuse to vote for a lesser-evil candidate,

Oh, wait—this is so much better! Have any of you people bothered to look into what “deontology” is, beyond glancing at a wiki page? Or some third-hand popularizing text?

Rich Puchalsky, hopeless romantic. “The tips were optimal”, said no mohel ever.

Sad to see the flaming here. I think the comments section here is the best, and commenters like Plume and Bruce Wilder and Sandwichman are among the best bloggers anywhere. Can I say I most often get far more out of the comments section than the OP? It’s certainly far longer, and a wide spectrum and reaction and interaction, often covering more interesting related principles.

Actually, I don’t see any nuisance writers. Some people would have to be invented if they didn’t exist, just to give representative counterpoint. And they’re doing that well! Just in my own tiny viewing of the massive archive.

js @298.

Worst thing since Mahmud of Ghazni? Tell me how you would explain to an articulate child that they should not sit in their baby brother, without resort to any rule, principle or axiom of behaviour? Consequential threats not allowed. I really want to know – it will be in almost daily use around here.

Ze

True, but it’s not just the calculation issue. You can’t begin to evaluate consequences without first having some values to evaluate against. It’s all very well to say “that hurts people”, but for many people in history that’s not a bad thing. See my Mayan example. Or the many who have thought war a good thing. Or honour. Or chastity. JQ presumably thinks social democracy is a good thing because it fosters the virtues he cares about. I agree with him, but I wouldn’t know how to sell the idea to Eric Blood-Axe, Jade Jaguar or Henry V.

“Well-being of the tribe”? Or the individual? What constitutes “well-being”? Now or in the hereafter? And so on.

I think we’re pretty much forced to use “deontology” in this thread because JQ used it in the original post. As he wrote, it’s probably not the right word, but we sort of get what he means by context. So what’s a better word to describe what he means?

I would guess that simple statements of value are necessary for any morality and do not equate to deontology. “Torture is wrong” is a different kind of statement than “Don’t eat beans because Pythagoras said so.” But “torture is wrong” does not necessarily imply that someone will decide on a rule against torture. They could, as many people do, hold that torture is wrong but that it still has to be done because not torturing is even worse (because of worse consequences, or even, in the U.S., because many people feel that torture is a form of punishment that is wrong but not as wrong as letting people go unpunished.) There’s a lot of moral reasoning, implicit or explicit, that goes between “torture is wrong” and “and we should not do it.”

Fundamentally, there’s no getting around the is/ought distinction; Logic and empirical knowledge can inform you on how to achieve goals, they cannot give you goals. In that sense, some degree of deontology, if you want to call it that, is unavoidable in all moral systems.

What’s this thing with torture? Everybody knows that torture is wrong, there is no controversy. Similarly, everyone knows that cannibalism is wrong, yet they also realize that should they ever find themselves stranded in the Andes they’ll probably end up eating human flesh. So what, where’s the issue.

Though I suppose “torture is wrong” shifts the reasons for or against voting for a candidate away from issues where there’s a split in the population, whether economically or politically motivated, and where one group might be tempted to oppose the status quo. It allows cooperation between people who have nothing in common, except their mutual commitment to imposing a deontological principle.

#318 The Fool

“Most of the time, the deontologist will keep on coming up with new consequentialist arguments as the old ones are knocked down.”

That’s because deontologists have no other choice. Having stated their rule, there is no other way to support it than to point to consequences, so if you want to actually make an argument — rather than a proclamation — then barring divine revelation all there is consequences.

Sure. If you say “Because God doesn’t want us to,” it’s just a proclamation. If you say “Because God will punish us for it”, then it’s consequences.

<i.Those of you who imagine that consequentialists are really deontologists because they say things that sound “rule-y” — actually those are just rule consequentialists. They use rules (because they can be useful!) but their position is not based on rules.

I dunno. Once you decide to base things on consequences, how do you decide which consequences are good? Do you have a set of rules about what’s good or do you just play it entirely by ear?

If you don’t have any rules then how is consequentialism different from “I just want what I want when I want it”?

And funnily enough this one kind of relate to the topic at hand:

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/60

Sorry for such a lengthy comment – this is a very interesting topic

Rich Puchalsky,

“How often does a non-fundamentalist Christian draw on the Bible as an infallible authority? They don’t. Instead they demand that you take it seriously on their terms. If you question whether we should be taking same ancient tribal legends as a guide towards anything, they’ll say that you aren’t seriously taking the context into account,”

That might be the case in America, I don’t know, but it isn’t so much the case in Australia – numbers of Christian churches here are active in the reconciliation movement, especially since the churches had a big role in the indigenous assimilationist policies and stolen generations.

The role of the churches in assimilation meant that numbers of indigenous people became Christian, but Christian beliefs can fuse with their own spiritual understandings and practices.

As an example there is a Catholic reconciliation site with clips of indigenous people talking about their spiritual beliefs

http://www.yarrahealing.catholic.edu.au

I would say the problems you encounter with exploring Jewish and Christian texts like this are threefold – problems inherent in reading texts ; problems of understanding other times and cultures; and problems of the difficulty of rendering metaphysical experience into words and conveying it believably.

I find the idea we have in Australia about indigenous people here helpful in this regard – for non Australians this is the idea that one – normally indigenous people – can inhabit two worlds simultaneously.

The most prominent history and anthropology arguments about this issue that I know of are the ones about Captain Cook’s death in Hawaii – the three main notable interpretations I think are by Sahlins who is Marxist and materialist and theoretical but focuses on differences generated by culture ; by Dening who was an Australian ethno-historian and Catholic ; and Obeysekere who was pacific and found Sahlins’ interpretation offensive to islanders (Dening says Sahlins’ was more true to the existing sources).

Pacific history happens to be a good area for looking at deontology because Pacific Islanders kept many deontological beliefs and obligations such as cosmologies, spirits, seasons, rituals, taboos etc – but European societies discarded many for a long time now.

I find the support for consequentialism over deontology here surprising since it is quite obvious the consequences we can see in play in the world now do not bear up this idea that giving up deontological obligations is an improvement and leads to good outcomes – therefore logically a consequential appraisal of the consequences of giving up deontological obligations could only find deontological obligations worked better than the assortment of ethics they’ve been replaced by.

It is unfortunately too lengthy to summarise with proper respect for detail – but Greg Dening’s interpretation is not so famous but very interesting since he was a Jesuit priest for some time and continued to be Catholic – so he would have believed the transformation in the Eucharist rites as well the as other sacraments, and also late in his career wrote a history I haven’t got around to reading about some Catholic Churches in Australia in the second half of the 20th C described as “an ethnographic history of the prophetic imagination among ordinary believers in times of great religious change” With the prologue starting with the Holy Spirit among the disciples at the first Pentecost and then the Holy Spirit in the works of Vatican II and the Australian parishioners.

What I would like to draw to attention in Dening’s interpretation are the episodes he recounts where two worlds coincide in the one event – worldly for the English and other worldly for the islanders – and the allusions Dening draws to parallels between the events of the death of Cook/Lono and Christianity.

On the island there were once two seasons – the season of the Chiefs (this is archy as it means Chiefs, I thought I would say since the term was brought up earlier) and the strangers which went for 8 months and the other season, not of Chiefs but of Lono and the natives and the land and fruitfulness which went for 4 months.

The Chiefs were considered strangers because their ancestors had come from over the sea to rule the people of the land who believed in Lono.

Lono’s season – makahiki – began before the winter solstice and seems to have been a bit like Saturnalia – the Chiefs were sent to withdraw to their private residences while the commoners and the priests had the run of things and there was much festivity.

These seasons and the obligations to fulfil their rituals would be deontological.

The islanders’ sign for makahiki was the cross. One year Captain Cook’s ship arrived in the season of makahiki and it came in bearing flags with crosses.

Once upon the land Cook was called Lono by the islanders until his men also came to call him Lono and Cook himself participated as Lono in the rituals.

That year the high chief took his time and didn’t arrive until the 25th of December and came with great ceremony and majesty beyond the normal amount and gave Cook a feathered cloak and sailed a great canoe around the Resolution.

Cook asked to set up a tent by Lono’s temple from where he could watch the stars – the priests were agreeable and unsurprised for they too were watching the stars to find when the season would end at the setting of the Pleiades.

The day of the end of the season of makahiki and Lono’s rule ended that year on the 4th of February – and it just so happened that this was the very day Cook and his men would leave the island.

Before going they asked for some wood from Lono’s temple for firewood and the priests agreed (except for one statue of Ku) as it just so happened that on the last day of the season Lono’s temple was always ritually destroyed – and so it came to be that the Englishmen fulfilled the ritual of the destruction of the temple.

Makahiki always concluded with a ritual sacrifice – and it just so happened that one of the Englishmen died – and thus he was to become at once the year’s ritual sacrifice and also the first to have a Christian burial on the island.

They said their farewells and promised to return in a year after searching for the North West Passage.

But something went wrong with their ship and instead they returned after 7 days. This was out of season for Lono’s return – and the islanders were not hospitable so the English then began to use force on them. It so came that Cook fired at an islander but their matted vest protected them and then the islanders fell upon Cook/Lono and killed him – thereby carrying out the ritual death of Lono in the season of the Chiefs.

Cook/Lono’s body was taken up a hill to a temple of Ku – and the flesh of his body was shared out and was eaten.

The Englishmen savagely retaliated by not only killing many island men but capturing others and then stringing the dead island men’s heads around the captives necks.

The islanders asked the Englishmen when Lono would return again , and every year for forty or so years Lono returned in the season of makahiki.

Dening says it is Sahlins’ conclusion that this makes god an Englishman.

A couple of the sailors noted in their reflections about the events that the islanders seemingly saw things incomprehensible to themselves – and Dening himself , former Jesuit, happens to make some curious digressions :

One being – “There were two strange scenes in those confused days after the killings. One, in the side of the mountain on the temple of Ku, Cook lying there dismembered but resurrected in those who possessed him. The other, in the great cabin of the Resolution, the gentleman of the two ships observing the proprieties of the navy in dividing up the clothes and possessions of their late commodore and buying them in a small auction”

Another being about the strangeness of others’ gods and sacraments – of course the islanders did not call Cook a god but akua – and Dening says “The islanders I know about, the kanaka, maohi, and enata, had no difficulty in calling beings akua or atua in ways that offends my Euro-centric rationality.” But this would seem an odd comment from a former Jesuit priest who poor and lonely presided over intimate Eucharists with friends at Harvard, thus in every day rooms ritually transforming the everyday objects of bread and wine into forms of akua himself.

And the other is in his views about the Christian missionaries who came to the island, who, says Dening (to the likely amusement of Marshall Sahlins), adopted proto-Marxist strategies to convert the natives – “The natives would not be converted they argued until they were first civilised. They would not be civilised until they wanted the material goods of civilization so desperately that they would change their means and relations of production to create the surplus to buy them” .

I was shocked and disappointed to discover not a single mention of trolley problems in 324 comments.

Granted, I didn’t read them (on consequentialist, not deontological, grounds), but my browser’s search function has never misled me.

A few thoughts:

(1) We are creatures of both deontological and consequentialist reasoning. Given the limits of bounded rationality and the nature of human reasoning and habit, societies filled with thorough consequentialists would be unlikely to survive, as would societies filled with thorough deontologists.

(2) The causal explanation for the fact that we employ both forms of reasoning does not undermine either of them. Yes, our sense of morality is contingent, but so what? Here we are, here are our values and beliefs, and that they are contingent does not make us or them less worthy of fighting for (or, less dramatically, of acknowledging their relevant and operational role in our inescapable practical reasoning).

(3) Cheney has a very different view of the probability and nature of certain threats in the world than many of you do. Is his view of torture driven by a different sense of morality, or simply a different sense of reality? Only half tongue in cheek (which is actually quite difficult, if you try it).

(4) LFC, I’ve always enjoyed your comments, even though we frequently disagree, and it would diminish the quality of these comment threads were you to leave. Granted, sometimes interactions within these threads are somewhat below the standards of friendly conversation or discussion, but I often don’t respond at all when I read an interesting comment or post (for various reasons – one may be considering what was said, not have the time to add anything, not have anything to add, etc.)., and I’m sure that applies to others as well. Also, from a consequentialist vantage, if we allow immoderate comments to drive out more moderate commenters, then the conversation becomes dominated by the extremes, and everyone loses. And from a deontological vantage, well, pick your principle, there are lots to use here.

(5) On torture again: as a policy, there are strong arguments against it. Certainly on a visceral level there are strong cases against it. But we generally accept ethically a lot of pretty horrible things for the sake of desired consequences. The principle of proportionality in war is a good example. So it’s difficult for me to square the notion that the effectiveness of torture under all circumstances is morally irrelevant with the notion that the effectiveness of putting a missile into a building in which there are both children and combatants is morally relevant. If we’re willing, and view as ethically acceptable, to kill children for the sake of eliminating an enemy position in a war (imagine the cause to be as just as you like – the war to end wars, poverty, disease, death, twitter, and English cuisine), why should we be any less willing to torture that same enemy if torture were to have the same degree of effectiveness in achieving the same ends (it doesn’t, but that’s not really the point)?

Even the deontological principles I know that I would not break under any circumstances could, were the consequences of not doing so sufficiently severe, appear to me be unethical to follow in those cases of sufficiently severe consequences – and although I would nonetheless honor the principles. I’d simply be forced to conclude that I ought act unethically in such circumstances, which would be tragic for both me and also for any hopes I have of logical consistency in moral philosophy.

“If you think that you are in a situation in which torture looks like a good idea, you should no longer trust your own judgment.”

When we finally dismantle the CIA the above will make a fine motto for whatever organization eventually springs up to replace them.

/I know I know. Keep dreaming.

“Torture would be comparable to cannibalism if human beings constantly rationalized the eating of human flesh the same way we have repeatedly, throughout history in the civilized world, rationalized torture.”

In our ordinary life, which is, to say, typically in all 100% of our lives, I don’t think anyone ever brings up torture as an acceptable solution to our ordinary problems. We have enemies, we have people we hate (a nasty neighbor, colleague, whatever), but it never occurs to us to torture them – as far as know. Personally, I once had a strong desire to slash my horrible boss’ tires – but torture? Never entered my mind.

It always involves some hypothetical terrible extraordinary circumstances. The thing is, we don’t know how we might behave in terrible extraordinary circumstances. All our consequentialist and deontological ideas would, most likely, fly out of the window. And we know that. So, that’s the context here, as I see it. That’s why, I think, too much is being made of those polls. Government abuses are, of course, a different matter.

Programming machines can be a metaphor for making rules for people. If the machine has to be rewarded, penalized for cheating or starts to program you, it becomes a more interesting metaphor.

One of the interesting aspects of incentive construction is its artificiality compared to the realized value of actual consequences. The boss does not feel your pain. Self-discipline seems to require disassociation.

#332 Bruce wilder

Every schoolyard bully who has made a weaker kid cry out, helpless and humiliated, knows torture”works” . The rhetorical trick is to raise it from a coward’s grubby perversion to the ultimate effort of the hero. Just the thing for a greedy draft dodging pissant to elevate as a signature national policy.

Well, but consider the Iliad, Book 10. Odysseus and Diomedes are sneaking around at night, and they catch a trojan who’s sneaking. They don’t actually torture him, they just get him real real scared that they’ll kill him. Then Odysseus promises he won’t be killed and he tells them everything they want to know. Then they kill him.

I read that in WWII the standard procedure for the Germans and the Russians to get battlefield info was to collect some POWs and line them up. Ask the first one some questions and if he didn’t answer fast enough, shoot him. Then do the same with the second one. They reliably got results by number four.

But the Americans were the good guys, so our approach was to line up the POWs and ask the first one some questions, and if he didn’t answer fast enough take him behind a truck and let the others hear a shot. Ditto the second. They claimed it worked just as well. The fact that the POWs couldn’t tell for sure whether the others were being killed didn’t make them any less scared. If anything it made them more scared because they didn’t know.

In general it is not necessary or particularly useful to apply pain to make people talk. Fear is the point, and fear of death is likely to be better than fear of torture. They will most strongly believe you might actually kill them if they see you kill somebody else. The one killed doesn’t actually have to know anything important, since his role is to die to prove that you kill people for not telling you what you want to hear.

It’s pointless to torture people who know you won’t let them go. I think that was the point of the torture the Iraqi police did to criminal gang members. They were making deals with the criminals, and the criminals they released wanted to have whip marks and burns etc to show their friends how macho they were. It would look bad if the police released them with no marks on them.

Bruce Wilder @ 333

One of the interesting aspects of incentive construction is its artificiality compared to the realized value of actual consequences. The boss does not feel your pain. Self-discipline seems to require disassociation.

A very Zen thought, this, although you don’t appear to have intended it that way. In order to be free, the individual has to deconstruct himself, to recognize what besides himself has been responsible for making him what he is, to disentangle the forces impinging on him, and if not to master them, to recognize them for what they are — something, it seems to me, which is quite alien to the experience of most libertarians, and therefore what, in the end, makes their individualism seem so shallow.

When I was very young, and very much estranged, I ran across this: La République du Silence. It appealed to me because of its heroic posturing, I suppose — I was young after all — but there’s a core truth in it very much like the core truth of Buddhism: to know who you are, you have to be able to see what you’re part of, and how you’re part of it. In Sartre’s case, once he managed this, the Nazi occupiers became irrelevant, even though they retained the power of life and death over him and his friends.

Not ethics pre se, this, nor politics, nor economics, nor philosophy either, for that matter, but relevant nevertheless in pretty much the way you’re suggesting.

I should probably add that to my mind, Sartre’s position, and that of the Zen master are almost polar opposites of Rawls’s veil of ignorance, yet sees far more effective as a means to judge what is fair, and what is not.

It figures that Andrew F. would argue that we might as well torture because sometimes we shoot missiles into buildings with kids in them. On another occasion he’ll say that we might as well use missiles on buildings with kids in them because after all, we torture. But he’s perfectly civil.

Bruce Wilder: “Every schoolyard bully who has made a weaker kid cry out, helpless and humiliated, knows torture”works” .”

Yes. Not to try to dispel the fog of “This is so remote from everyday life, no one does this”, but of course one of the lead torturers in Abu Ghraib was trained as a U.S. prison guard. America locks up a greater percentage of its population than any other country on Earth (except, perhaps, North Korea) and our prisons are places where people go to work and use torture as a means of control every day. As of 2012, we had nearly half a million prison guard jobs in the U.S., and it’s a high-turnover job.

Ze Kraggash 01.03.15 at 8:22 am
‘In our ordinary life, which is, to say, typically in all 100% of our lives, I don’t think anyone ever brings up torture as an acceptable solution to our ordinary problems.

Many people beat and terrify their children. The goodness of doing it has been enshrined in popular culture, in law, and in scripture.

(as shown in The Battle of Algiers, where it in fact does work)

Probably not, actually. http://www.salon.com/2004/06/21/torture_algiers/ The is very, very little evidence that torture is more effective or faster than other methods and a lot of evidence to the contrary. Despite this, people are very determined to believe in torture’s effectiveness.

But I thought we were talking about the methods used by the CIA, Gestapo, the French in Algeria

The methods employed are determined by the specific situations–torture at Guantanamo doesn’t work the same way as torture in a CIA black site, which doesn’t work the same as way as torture by parents, police, guards, gangs, or bullies. But in all of these situations, torture is never something we have to do, it is always something we want to do. In some situations, that means we want to have to do it.

Ze: And (roughly) no one condones homicide. But they know that under some, definitely highly unusual and highly dramatic circumstances, they may have to kill somebody.

Ah, yes. “highly dramatic” — Hollywood scriptwriters assume American moral magisterium.

If you do, in fact, kill someone, it is likely (statistically) to be very much not something you have to do, but something senseless, callous, cruel or negligent. You got drunk, too drunk to understand or care that you should not be driving a car. Or, you had to have a phone conversation, when you were driving. Or, that safety meeting with your employees was boring, and those guys surely have the common sense not to . . . and surely they knew the risks when they took the job. Or, the quarterly profit numbers were not coming in, and really the contaminants are not that dangerous when dispersed in a large body of air or water; people need your products, your employees need their jobs. The training of U.S. Marines has one aim: to save lives! Your wife should not have called you that name, or shamed you about losing your job. Really, you just wanted the money in the till; why didn’t they just do what you told them to?

“Hollywood scriptwriters assume American moral magisterium.”

True that. And not just American, and not just Hollywood, but whoever controls the tv. Is this a groundbreaking discovery?

Rich @341: It figures that Andrew F. would argue that we might as well torture because sometimes we shoot missiles into buildings with kids in them. On another occasion he’ll say that we might as well use missiles on buildings with kids in them because after all, we torture. But he’s perfectly civil.

It’s remarkable how much of the world you can fit into your caricatures Rich. Does this make life easier or harder, I wonder. In any case, with apologies to your sense of figuring, actually I noted the tension, if not contradiction, between our moral acceptance of some acts and our moral condemnation of other acts. The acceptance of collateral damage in the course of war is difficult to fit coherently into a framework that includes the absolute rejection of torture (or other acts). I think most of us believe (consciously or not) in some moral absolutes, but I also think that the existence of at least some of those beliefs is far more contingent on circumstance than we like to believe.

My personal view on ethics inclines towards pragmatism (in a philosophical, not sociopathic, sense). I don’t expect or need my ethical framework to be fully articulated or without any contradiction, and I don’t expect all ethical disagreements to be subject to rational resolution (even if we were all perfectly rational creatures). Ethical beliefs are a tool to enable us to live lives which we think and feel are just, harmonious, fulfilling, good, etc. They’re the only somewhat haphazard product of evolution and history, which includes arguments and reasons but not exclusively so; and they’re an essential part of life for most of us.

So, as I said, I imagine that in some circumstances I would probably choose to follow a moral absolute I happen to believe in, even while according to other ethical beliefs I might also believe that I was acting unethically in doing so.

As to torture, the value of the ends at stake, whether the means in question are the only way of achieving those ends at acceptable cost, and who is to be on the less pleasant side of the means in question, are all factors that would and should enter into anyone’s actual decision process (and there would be more if the question were one of policy). I think the third factor is more likely to trigger deontological principles than the second or first, though all could. But I doubt the self-awareness of anyone who claims that she needn’t consider any of those things to answer the question.

Abu Ghraib was senselessly sadistic, and is easy for most of us to determine to be ethically outrageous.

The waterboarding of KSM? I think the context of the decision, what was known at the time, what was unknown, what was uncertain, what was at stake, who he is, all make that a much more difficult question ethically, unless you believe that waterboarding was certainly less effective than other, less objectionable methods, in which case there is no ethical quandary at all.

Andrew F.: “In any case, with apologies to your sense of figuring, actually I noted the tension, if not contradiction, between our moral acceptance of some acts and our moral condemnation of other acts.”

Let’s make that the tension between *your* moral acceptance of some acts and *your* moral condemnation of other acts. Other people find that they can condemn both torture and firing missiles into buildings with children in them during war. Other people, indeed, find that they can condemn all war that isn’t convincingly done only for defensive purposes, as none of America’s wars within my lifetime have been.

Other people, in fact, don’t try to drag public policy down to the lowest common denominator by everything morally consistent with the worst things that we do rather than the best.

Rich, I’m asking more about ethical conduct within war rather than about ethical justification for entering into a war. So let’s presume a war the cause of which, for one side, is as just as you can imagine. In such a war, would you say that it would be unethical to undertake any action that will foreseeably cause the injury or death of non-combatants? Would this rule continue to hold if the enemy were using non-combatants as human shields?

J Thomas, but those aren’t the only two options on the spectrum, are they?

So let’s presume a war the cause of which, for one side, is as just as you can imagine. In such a war, would you say that it would be unethical to undertake any action that will foreseeably cause the injury or death of non-combatants?

If there is a war that starts out with one side essentially blameless, that distinction becomes much less stark if the “just” side kills innocents in order to expedite winning the war. A just war requires just means, not just good aspirations regarding the end state. The historical record so far as I can see is that humans have yet to wage a just war. I would welcome counterexamples.

#355 Andrew F.

J Thomas, but those aren’t the only two options on the spectrum, are they?

Andrew F, my suggestion is that we start from wherever we are in the spectrum and try to head toward peace. That is, toward a negotiated solution where we get what we need.

Sherman’s stated position is that heading that way is counterproductive and useless. (I don’t say that he in fact did what he argued should be done.)

It looks to me like he has claimed a place on the spectrum, and I offer a direction to try to move on the spectrum. He describes a method, and I describe a purpose. He says that my intentions have bad consequences. I say those intentions could cover a variety of methods, and I can’t predict what methods would get good results since after all the enemy gets a vote too.

Or, to sum my 259, sociology precedes economics.

@AndrewF
The waterboarding of KSM? I think the context of the decision, what was known at the time, what was unknown, what was uncertain, what was at stake, who he is, all make that a much more difficult question ethically, unless you believe that waterboarding was certainly less effective than other, less objectionable methods, in which case there is no ethical quandary at all.

The burden of proof is surely in the other direction–only if you have evidence that torture would increase the odds of acquiring useful intelligence can you make a consequentialist case for employing it. Torture can “poison the well” for other interrogation methods. Whether we would know more or less if we hadn’t tortured is pretty much unknowable, and not just for us in the general public–“It is unknowable whether, without enhanced interrogation techniques, CIA or non-CIA interrogators could have acquired the same information from those detainees”. Left unsaid is the very real possibility that we would have acquired more or better information. The word “unknowable” doesn’t sit well with consequentialism.

Given that KSM was already talking before torture, and that he wasn’t in CIA custody for very long before the CIA decided to torture him (“Let’s roll with the new guy”), KSM was not a good candidate for torture. The CIA was dissatisfied with the information he was giving out–either lies or stuff he thought the CIA already knew. They still complained about him doing this after he was tortured. They now claim that his lies were actually useful to them. Taking that as given, we still have no reason to think that his lies were more useful because of torture than they would have been without torture.

“The burden of proof is surely in the other direction–only if you have evidence that torture would increase the odds of acquiring useful intelligence can you make a consequentialist case for employing it.”

I think when you frame it this way, you set yourself up for losing. The issue is not the lack of effectiveness, it’s barbarity. This one, I think, is a pure deontological case, not consequentialist. Civilized people don’t torture, period. Of course once we shed our veneer of civilization, all bets are off.

The ethical case against torture, like the legal case, is fatally undermined by the deficit of power and political will among the ethically concerned. Those who tortured did it because they could. It was an exercise of power. Those who want to claim that torture is unethical or illegal have to be willing and able to punish the torturers. We cannot and will not. And, as long as that political fact remains the case, our speculations are idle. Our pragmatism is sociopathic, despite (or because of) Andrew F’s denial.

The burden of proof is certainly on those who think the torture of KSM was ‘effective’. Look at it this way. What kind of information were they looking for by the time they began to waterboard KSM? There was no plausible ‘ticking bomb’ situation (KSM had been inactive for too long, any hypothetical attack he might have known about would have (1) either happened or (2) been changed after his capture) So they were looking for more detailed background intelligence; Al Q membership, organisational structure, where specific people were based, etc. Whatever about using torture to get information about an attack in a hurry, does anyone *really* think that torture is better than conventional interregotation to get that sort of information?

” The waterboarding of KSM? I think the context of the decision, what was known at the time, what was unknown, what was uncertain, what was at stake, who he is, all make that a much more difficult question ethically, unless you believe that waterboarding was certainly less effective than other, less objectionable methods, in which case there is no ethical quandary at all.”

Is this just saying that we should look at how the decision to torture was made in its proper historical context? If so then I agree – but it still doesnt say it was the correct decision, either morally and practically.

#363 Consumatopia

Torture can “poison the well” for other interrogation methods.

It can. A person who was ready to talk to a sympathetic ear can decide not to because he has been tortured.

And it can go the other way round too. I now this sounds ridiculous, but I swear it sometimes works — a victim who has been tortured can choose to reveal things to the sympathetic guy who doesn’t do it, to help him get ahead. He can actually get involved in the office politics of his interrogators.

#363 Ze Kraggash

“The burden of proof is surely in the other direction–only if you have evidence that torture would increase the odds of acquiring useful intelligence can you make a consequentialist case for employing it.”

I think when you frame it this way, you set yourself up for losing. The issue is not the lack of effectiveness, it’s barbarity. This one, I think, is a pure deontological case, not consequentialist. Civilized people don’t torture, period. Of course once we shed our veneer of civilization, all bets are off.

Yes. So it’s easy to argue that civilized people should not torture other civilized people. But people who are at war do things they wouldn’t otherwise. And people tend to respond to the enemy, too. At the beginning of a war between, say, Germany and Austria, or the northern and southern USA, I predict there would be no torture because it’s people who start out feeling civilized who somehow are fighting people they kind of like. The rules of civilized behavior would likely break down over time, as they realized that they were in fact in the process of mercilessly killing each other, and the dropping little niceties could give then an advantage at doing that.

Perhaps one of the things that made a difference in public opinion this last time was the videos of people getting their heads cut off. There’s nothing particularly worse for the victim about having his head cut off compared to just getting his throat cut, as far as I know. (Supposedly with a vigorous throat-cutting you lose consciousness immediately.) If it comes mostly by surprise it’s probably kinder than getting stood in front of a wall and given a last cigarette etc. But it horrified a lot of Americans and persuaded them that the enemy was barbaric and awful and didn’t deserve any inalienable rights.

I’m talking in the context of a blog comments section where people are shooting the breeze. I don’t really expect the national security council to be debating my latest comment.

RP @ 370:people not in the upper reaches of the 1% have no power to do anything in contemporary America, so you might as well say that all political discussion is idle, all pragmatism sociopathic, etc.

Not all. The point of the criticism is to highlight how political discussion becomes idle by failing to acknowledge the reality of power.

Academic discussion of ethical issues is notoriously prone to attempts to find ethical dilemmas in the form of analytic puzzles, while in the real world ethical dilemmas are rarely puzzles, and more likely motivated by threats and bribes than ambiguity. This hiding from power – more an American vice than an academic one, I think — is more about avoiding the discomforts of insignificance and powerlessness.

My comment was prompted by reason’s remark referencing Krugman. Krugman’s politics is significantly shaped by such considerations. He hides the ugliness of our politics, and where it cannot be hidden, says soothing things. He will write earnestly about “soaring inequality” and wring his tiny, soft, well-paid hands over, say, Euro policy or the niceties of QE. He will apologize for Obama.

What Krugman is reluctant to do is to acknowledge the full sociopathic intent of policy and the futility of good intentions in the existing environment. Policymakers in Krugman stories are inexplicably dense and wrong-headed, but rarely greedy and vicious. Republicans can be vicious, but then must also be figures of comic delusion, a la Tea Party. Mr Lesser Evil is well-intentioned albeit fumbling, and does a lot of insufficiently acknowledged good things.

It is an idle, feel good about yourself politics that suppresses or diverts any anger, despair or action. But, the argument that it is wankery is not an argument that it is the only possible politics or all politics.

The only rational torture policy is to tie yourself to the mast so that we don’t torture even when we really want to–because we know in advance that we will really want to.

That, or like any crime, we have to actually punish it after the fact.

One may be forced — a peasant press-ganged into serving on the gun deck of HMS Victory will have little hope of stopping the Battle of Trafalgar — but one can avoid being seduced, i.e. England expects can kiss my ass. This little shifting of individual conscience won’t impress Nate Silver, at least not initially, but it can have consequences — must have them, despite the incessant din of Panglossian analysis coming at us from every media outlet in the neighborhood.

You might say, accurately enough, that there’s a war going on, and every thought, every action, takes place in a defined theater of operations. The comments threads at CT are one such theater — a minor one, but not insignificant, I think. For those with a true taste for battle, there are others, lots of ’em. And not to worry. Whether you go looking for them or not, they’ll find you.

Bruce Wilder: “The point of the criticism is to highlight how political discussion becomes idle by failing to acknowledge the reality of power.”

This reminds me: I should make my usual inquiry to Andrew F. about whether he still purportedly believes that the head of the NSA would not flatly lie to Congress, and to the people in an officially released position document, about surveillance. Also, whether NSA surveillance would not be used to catch ordinary criminals (and then by extension find dirt on anyone who’d angered a political boss somewhere). Both of these things without the part in parentheses have provably happened within half a year of Andrew assuring us that they wouldn’t happen.

But yes, “reason”‘s post @ 366 is exactly why people often assert a moral basic like “torture is wrong” without turning it into a rule like “we should not torture”. I referenced this all the way back up at #24: the arguments for torture in the U.S. were always consequential, and always sought to pit one moral basic against another (the other one, in this case, being “blowing up groups of people is wrong”). If you want to do this through formal logic, the arguments for turning “torture is wrong” into a rule often have to do with privileging actuality over potentiality (if we decide to torture, it’s actually true that we’re doing something wrong, and only potentially true that something bad will happen if we don’t) or sins of commission over sins of omission (it’s worse to commit a crime than to fail to prevent someone else from committing one). The second of these is highly related to Blackstone’s formulation: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”. Interestingly, if you look up Blackstone’s formulation on wiki, you’ll see the usual suspects in opposition to it: Bismarck, Pol Pot, Andrew Volokh, and Dick Cheney.

But yes, I take the point about the reality of power being far different from this kind of formal ethical talk. It’s why I gave up on liberalism.

Rich Puchalsky: It’s why I gave up on liberalism.

I confess I cling to liberalism, still. But, I have largely given up on (my fellow) liberals.

@370

Focusing the lion’s share of your activism (and commenting about torture at in a thread like this isn’t activism, but an opportunity to display attitude) is certainly futile because regardless of torture’s wrongness, no state has ever not tortured. Some states have tortured less than others. But focusing on torture as a means toward anarchism is pretty close to futile. Focusing on torture as a means toward reducing elite power, on the theory that a government not led by an elite 1%, at the same time, won’t torture, and will also be better in all other sorts of ways, is absolutely futile.

And at the same time, we’re not talking about anything that might affect a decision anyone reading this might someday make–except Bruce Wilder, above, who lists a bunch of topics public relations experts have identified as things ordinary people should pay attention to. Maybe there’s a theory about how talking about torture will affect the public relations experts, or how it will help us make day-to-day decisions. If so, I’m sure we’d like to hear it.

#382 Bruce Wilder

Pure deontological arguments seem like empty assertions and pure consequential arguments seem like stupid correlation shopping — so there’s good grounds for leaving the poles. But, we hardly need dust bowl empiricism to confirm that torture is a lousy way to get reliable and useful information that one does not already know.

Yes, exactly. If you try to use scientific method, you can find out about some things but not others. As one particular example, it’s hard to study consequences that unfold over a longer time frame than your experiments. As another, it’s hard to study consequences that happen on a larger scale than you can study. When the consequences expand over the whole world, your control group is weak.

So if you want to collect data and find out the truth about the world, you *can* limit your arguments to the things you can collect data about. But things you lack evidence about are not less important just because you don’t know.

You can weight the things you know higher than the things you don’t know, but that’s pretty risky too.

In the end, people wind up using their fantasies about what they think is going on, because they have to decide on some basis. It’s easier to go with what you actually believe than with things that kind of make sense and have some partial evidence but that you don’t believe.

“Both cancel each other, unless we get evidence.”

If they cancel each other out, I win. I was attacking a consequentialist argument from Andrew, not making one. If we don’t know whether torture works, then the deontological case against it wins. This is not hard.

“Uncontrolled, anecdotal evidence.”

I didn’t say you would find evidence that torture doesn’t work. I said you wouldn’t find much evidence that it does. It could very well be that torture is just so associated with thuggery that it’s impossible to find and maintain a disciplined, competent team of interrogators who rely on torture.

The ethical and practical problems with establishing a systematic torture regime just for the sake of determining whether torture works are so innumerably vast that I’m not even bothering to list them. It makes no more sense at all than proposing to increase GDP by giving employers the right to punch employees in the face.

Peter T @358: If a society permits or institutionalises torture, or plumbing, it will end up with well-articulated reasons why torture/plumbing is good, noble, essential to the continued functioning of the universe…And a group of torturers, with pay-scales and uniforms. Who will defend the rights and honour of torturers everywhere (by torturing their opponents – how else?). So before one starts to argue the cost-benefits of torture, one should consider whether one really wants such a group in the neighbourhood.

I think there’s something to the logic of this argument (normalizing activity X results in higher probability of activity X expanding or of the development of an interest-group supporting the existence of activity X), though I wonder a little about the details here.

Suppose the question is not whether we want any plumbers at all, but whether we’re going to allow plumbers to use a particular sort of pipe. The logic of the argument may still apply, but not quite as clearly. For instance, we developed nuclear weapons, and in an extreme circumstance we used them. But we haven’t used them since, and we haven’t been especially eager to do so. They’ve remained a tool that we will use only in very exceptional circumstances.

Consum @363: The burden of proof is surely in the other direction–only if you have evidence that torture would increase the odds of acquiring useful intelligence can you make a consequentialist case for employing it. Torture can “poison the well” for other interrogation methods. Whether we would know more or less if we hadn’t tortured is pretty much unknowable, and not just for us in the general public–“It is unknowable whether, without enhanced interrogation techniques, CIA or non-CIA interrogators could have acquired the same information from those detainees”. Left unsaid is the very real possibility that we would have acquired more or better information. The word “unknowable” doesn’t sit well with consequentialism.

Some interesting logic to this argument too. If I could restate it to be sure I understand it, it’s: Given that we don’t know whether torture is effective, and that there are even reasons to think it could reduce the intelligence value of a captured terrorist, then from a consequentialist vantage the argument in favor of using it is weak.

The next step might be, “since there are no compelling consequentialist reasons, and there is a strong deontological reason, or norm, or standard, against doing so, it would be more consistent with our ethics to not torture.”

As to KSM… I think it’s an open question, at least based on what I remember reading in the SSCI Report and in the Minority Response and the CIA Response, as to whether the techniques used were effective. I agree with you as far as that question is concerned. As to the merits of the arguments for and against using various techniques proposed… I really don’t know. It’s possible that the wrong answer had the better argument at the time.

But, separately, the belief that KSM possessed important intelligence is very well grounded and I don’t think it was a mistake to designate him a high value target.

Consum @378: … people who think that our spies and military are essentially good but for the aberration of torture that they somehow believe is at odds with American values, despite the fact that political and even popular culture seems to rally around it–and those of us who realize that the system is essentially bad and use torture as just one more example of the insanity associated with imperialism.

Values at the edges of the circumstances in which they normally apply are contested things, whether we’re talking about circumstances in which we would use of nuclear weapons or the circumstances in which some would propose use of torture. The program at issue here – a CIA program, not a military program (the military took a fair amount of flak for things that, it turns out, they weren’t the ones doing) – was controversial within the USG, even among those you might not think it wouldn’t be. One of the most surprising facts in the SSCI Report, actually, concerned an exchange between the DoD and CIA regarding Red Cross access to detainees at Guantanamo who were “graduates” (shall we say) of CIA’s RDI program. CIA wanted DoD to invoke an exception and deny access, given what the detainees who had been to black sites would say. The person speaking on behalf of the DoD, according to internal CIA traffic, refused, stating that he was tired of the DoD being criticized for what the CIA was doing, that DoD had no legal ground on which to deny access, and that he frankly did not think that the US should be in the business of disappearing people at all.

That DoD official was Paul Wolfowitz.

Regardless of your view of the merits, or magnitude of the deficiency, of the program in question, it seems to me that it was in fact an aberration from normal American practice.

Rich @381: I should make my usual inquiry to Andrew F. about whether he still purportedly believes that the head of the NSA would not flatly lie to Congress, and to the people in an officially released position document, about surveillance.

An amusingly false memory on your part, Rich (amusing as an example of how selective our memory – including my own! – can be). The reporting of Snowden’s leaks began with the telephone metadata program – Clapper’s (who was not and is not the head of the NSA) false statement to Congress preceded, and was widely reported in conjunction with the reporting on the telephone metadata program, prior to any discussions we had about the NSA. Quite obviously I did not make the claim you remember me making.

The discussion you’re actually recalling was about a later report on PRISM. In our discussion you held that PRISM involved the search of the content of every American’s email. I disagreed, and cited numerous disclosures from the USG on the program. You claimed that none of these disclosures could be trusted – that they were essentially all lies.

So here’s what I actually said. Highlights: …as I’ve said repeatedly, government abuse can occur and does occur. The question is whether there are adequate procedures and oversight in place to minimize that occurrence. … In the case of PRISM, not only are there three branches of government involved, including one whose members have lifetime tenure and are not beholden to anyone, but there are also opposing political parties involved. … I can see reasonable arguments for making the process of review more robust – perhaps by adding a devil’s advocate to the proceedings, or perhaps by expanding the amount of legal interpretation that may be released to the public. But it strikes me as almost paranoid to choose to believe that every statement by government officials on this subject is a lie, regardless of the circumstances.

To return to this thread, you never answered my question about a hypothetically just war, and whether ethically acceptable conduct in such a war could include actions that would be known before the fact to cause the deaths or injuries of non-combatants.

Anarcissie, I apologize. I misread your comment horribly wrong, and that is completely my mistake I see in hindsight. I confess that my weirdness tends to make me think curt responses are usually dismissive ones, because usually, as anyone can see, they are couched this way, but it’s a prejudice I’m going to have to work on. Thicker but more receptive, sensitive to the subtlety beyond expectation, skin.

I also like what your talking about, which is why I want to point back to something like poetry. If we understand grammar as strictly the obedience to the legal construction of sentences, then your point I completely agree with. Correcting grammar, policing language, has to rank very highly in any ideology to maintain “clear communication.” Sometimes people even think it ought to be efficient.

But poetry offers some skill at working against the grain of grammar and device, occasionally, as well as training one’s thinking when form and grammar demand particular restraints. This is why I can’t get completely behind anarchism, even in words, even in concepts concerning the god. There is value not only in restraint (on governments, power, our selves, &c), but there is a way of overcoming the usual dialectical oppositions between “right” and “wrong” precisely through isolating one’s self to the grammatical assertion that two opposites are the same thing. To fix the terms at that level is to then try and work hard, to work backwards to the conceptual background within which words take on meaning—does this sound right? And to then question how the background works to lend those meanings is to trace the conceptual background’s evolution from the nonconceptual realities in which human language users live and share, out and about, experiences, towards the alternative frameworks available to use, to share, to resettle within.

I’m probably making no sense, and I’m sorry for that.

If I could restate it to be sure I understand it, it’s: Given that we don’t know whether torture is effective, and that there are even reasons to think it could reduce the intelligence value of a captured terrorist, then from a consequentialist vantage the argument in favor of using it is weak.

The next step might be, “since there are no compelling consequentialist reasons, and there is a strong deontological reason, or norm, or standard, against doing so, it would be more consistent with our ethics to not torture.”

Yes, that matches what I said, but what I said was incomplete. The consequentialist case for torture requires some kind of evidence that torture will tend to increase rather than reduce the intelligence value. But that’s not symmetric: there are plenty of consequentialist reasons against torture that don’t depend on an assumption of negative intelligence value. You also have to take into account larger issues like the damage that torture does to our institutional, political, and cultural norms; or the propaganda/recruitment value to your enemy. There is more than one major terrorist who was radicalized by an abusive experience in prison. (Disentangling these larger consequentialist arguments from deontological arguments can get kind of vague and arbitrary, as expressed by BW @382.)

#389 Consumatopia

“Both cancel each other, unless we get evidence.”

If they cancel each other out, I win. I was attacking a consequentialist argument from Andrew, not making one. If we don’t know whether torture works, then the deontological case against it wins. This is not hard.

I apologize, I was not tracking your responses well. If what you were doing was to cancel a consequentialist argument by someone else by making your own opposing consequentialist argument, then yes, they do cancel.

But the deontological case only wins among people who accept the deontological case. That includes nobody who has already rejected it and who believes that torture is acceptable when it gets good results.

I didn’t say you would find evidence that torture doesn’t work. I said you wouldn’t find much evidence that it does.

That leaves the question open.

The ethical and practical problems with establishing a systematic torture regime just for the sake of determining whether torture works are so innumerably vast that I’m not even bothering to list them.

Your argument has horrible problems also. You say that we don’t know what works and we must not find out. But your opponents say that they do in fact know what works, and that they are the experts. They can’t tell you the details that would prove them right because national security, so you have no choice but to take their word for it. They say the survival of the nation is at stake and you have no right to put your ignorance and superstitious beliefs in the way of that survival. Shut up and let them do the job they know how to do, or else.

If you believe that the fight is won, that the US government has officially decided to stop doing torture and all secret US government organizations in fact have quit doing it, then it would be stupid for you to agree to start it up again to test how well it works.

But at some point when there is already a lot of disorganized torture already going on, it would not be stupid at all to do controlled studies. A whole lot of Americans believe without actual evidence — based on common sense — that torture works no better than other methods. If they are right, a properly-done study would show they are right. That would help a lot. Also, if the US government announced that result, it would help a lot worldwide.

Robespierre: “I assure you, one can be a consequentialist and still think that giving the secret police the power / impunity to spy on people, disappear them and torture them is a bad idea.”

There are virtue-based and deontological arguments for torture in an American context too: roughly, argument-via-_24_ “torturers are tough guys doing what wimps won’t do” and “we have a duty to do whatever might protect America, whether it’s likely to work or not”. They just don’t sound as credible to the audience on this blog. In general, I think, intellectuals prefer consequentialism because it’s a kind of activity — rationalization — that they’re good at. So we’ve focussed on consequentialist justifications, which were actually the more or less official justifications for a while. Only now that his consequentialist argument are gone and it’s proven that he had innocent people tortured did Cheney go to some mixture of the two others I’ve listed above.

While I’m at it, there are more bad consequences for torture, apart from the harm to the victim. One is that government that tortures is terrifying and disgusting. Citizens of a democracy are not supposed to be terrified and disgusted of their government.

Consum @395: You also have to take into account larger issues like the damage that torture does to our institutional, political, and cultural norms; or the propaganda/recruitment value to your enemy. There is more than one major terrorist who was radicalized by an abusive experience in prison. (Disentangling these larger consequentialist arguments from deontological arguments can get kind of vague and arbitrary, as expressed by BW @382.)

All fair points and important considerations.

Rich @396: You claimed that officials would be unlikely to lie to Congress because they would get in trouble if found out. But Gen. Keith Alexander (the former head of the NSA’s) lie to Congress and to the public about the 54 plots supposedly thwarted by surveillance was exposed in October, and he didn’t get in trouble for lying.

I said precisely what I quoted in my comment above, which certainly allows for the rather obvious fact that sometimes officials lie. You were arguing that there was a massive institutional conspiracy to deceive Congress and the courts by producing huge volumes of deliberately falsified information. I said that this was unlikely, and that there are self-interested reasons for bureaucrats not to want anything to do with something like that. Everything we’ve learned about the NSA’s programs since then, by the way, supports that view.

As to Alexander: Alexander didn’t lie at all (Clapper, arguably, did). Here’s what I said in January on the subject, beginning with Alexander’s actual statement in June 2013:

[transcript of Gen. Alexander’s speech; June 2013] Here are some statistics of those 54 events. Of the 54, 42 involved disruptive plots — disrupted plots. Twelve involved cases of material support to terrorism. Fifty of the 54 cases led to arrests or detentions. Our allies benefited, too. Twenty-five of these events occurred in Europe, 11 in Asia and five in Africa. Thirteen events had a homeland nexus. In 12 of those events, Section 215 contributed to our overall understanding and help to the FBI — twelve of the 13.

Then I quoted the exchange between Leahy and Alexander in October, which was reported badly and misleadingly as Leahy somehow exposing a lie. Here is Senator Leahy questioning Gen. Alexander months later:

SEN. LEAHY: Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and out of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S. Would you agree with that, yes or no?

DIR. ALEXANDER: Yes.

As you can see, Alexander didn’t lie at all. Leahy’s question merely confirmed the facts Alexander gave in his June speech – though it was reported as though Leahy had forced Alexander to divulge some new fact. In fact Leahy was using Alexander to rebut the sloppiness, or deliberate spin, of other politicians in their descriptions of Alexander’s original statistics.

Interestingly, this is another example of selective memory. We remember things that reinforce a favored narrative, and we forget or discount things that don’t. I include myself in this as well, of course.

The speed with which information is communicated these days makes it all the worse. We’re naturally drawn to sources of information that agree with our existing views, we have little time or energy to fact-check those sources, and we remember what those sources tell us more strongly than we remember anything else.

Rich @396: And no, I don’t think that your question “What if we were in a defensive war against an attacker who used children as human shields?” is worth an answer. If you like hypotheticals, I invite you to consider this post about the torture/ ticking bomb scenario by Jim Henley.

:) And here I thought it was only politicians who declined to answer hypotheticals. The principle of proportionality is a real thing, and will remain part of warfare, so I don’t think questions about it – even and perhaps especially in the context of a just war – are idle. Neither, quite obviously, is torture merely a hypothetical – or for that matter coercive techniques that walk to the very edge of the category.

But boy, what a great way to avoid thinking about hard questions: sorry, I don’t consider hypotheticals. You could resolve most of moral philosophy in an afternoon.

Jim Henley’s post was very good, though the existence of “The National Anthem” episode from the excellent Black Mirror series is worth noting. (Obviously it didn’t exist at the time he made the post.)

The problem with hypotheticals that Henley described–“The ticking bomb scenario is presented as “What would YOU do?” but it’s not, in truth, got anything to do with you. The proper question is, “What should we prudently allow officials embedded in the security bureaucracy to do with impunity?””, basically what Robespierre said @398, is very real.

But there’s an even deeper problem. What if thinking about the hypothetical, especially seriously considering it in a public way, affects the probability that the hypothetical will come true? “What should we do if an invading army uses human shields?” is exactly that kind of question. Both answers have a cost. If you say you won’t fire upon them, you’re basically inviting an invader to do that. If you say that you will, you’re weakening your own norms against killing of innocents, and you risk that other nations will see you as warlike and cooperate with you less. Better to keep your mouth shut. A politician who refuses to answer similar hypotheticals isn’t being cagey, they’re being responsible.

Roughly the same calculus applies to torture, of course. If I thought anybody who mattered was paying attention, I wouldn’t be talking about it the way I do.

Hypotheticals are never free. Answering can very well make the world a sadder place than if you had left it unanswered. Observing a system always changes its state.

Oh dear, Andrew F. failed to quote the part of Leahy’s question-and-answer that comes right after that. Let’s try that again:

SEN. LEAHY: Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and out of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S. Would you agree with that, yes or no?

DIR. ALEXANDER: Yes.

SEN. LEAHY: OK. In our last hearing, Deputy Director Inglis’ testimony stated that there’s only really one example of a case where, but for the use of Section 215, bulk phone records collection, terrorist activity was stopped. Is Mr. Inglis right?

DIR. ALEXANDER: He’s right. I believe he said two, Chairman; I may have that wrong, but I think he said two, and I would like to point out that it could only have applied in 13 cases because of the 54 terrorist plots or events, only 13 occurred in the U.S. Business Record FISA was only used in (12 of them ?).

So only one or two out of the original 54, or the original 13 if you prefer. Come on, Andrew F., you need to do better in your tireless defense of evil. You should work that selective memory thing a little harder.

And yes, given that I can’t remember a single event in all of history where an attacking nation used children as human shields, I don’t see any great need to answer that hypothetical.

@bianca, “no state has ever not tortured” could lead to anarchism, it could lead to attempts to create new kinds of states (I personally think the nature of the state will change radically with the rise of intelligent machines and algorithms, either radically worse or radically better), it could mean that we need to work to make the state torture less (which does not mean admitting that the state is ever correct in torturing), it could mean that even thinking about state power and coercion is inherent corrupting and we would be better people if we gave up on ordinary politics. I think all of those are live possibilities, so talking about torture is productive to me. But there is no “gauntlet” to get through, even if all four of those possible implications are wrong, it wouldn’t mean that torture is not wrong.

And on the other side, torture is a perfect issue for people who aren’t really opposed to anything and aren’t interested in politics at all: apolitical moralists, right wingers, liberals looking for a feel-good issue that won’t challenge anyone as much as health care reform or income redistribution will.

A) this is just ‘display’ on your part.
B) you’ll see above that many of us are arguing that torture is part of a continuum including corporal punishment, police brutality, prison abuse, imperialism or even the state itself more broadly. We’re seeking a broader explanation for the popularity of torture.

I thought the OP was about the way people who seem to meet that description cut very close to dishonesty.

Yes, which is why it was so important to bring up a counterpoint of people doing the opposite thing being just as dishonest. I know you resent people talking about torture but it’s really obviously relevant to the topic whether you like it or not.

Mostly, I don’t believe deontological thinking is less prone to rationalization than consequentialist thinking is.

I agree with you about this, BTW. For example, propertarian deontological thinking, what I’m guessing JQ had in mind when he made the post, is just rationalization. But if you think the consequentialist case for torture isn’t dominated by either ignorance or rationalization, you haven’t been paying attention.

A) this is just ‘display’ on your part.

Unfair and untrue. Who would I be “displaying” for? The non-existent multitudes who supposedly support me in comments? What can I gain by “displaying” my opinions here?

B) you’ll see above that many of us are arguing that torture is part of a continuum including corporal punishment, police brutality, prison abuse, imperialism or even the state itself more broadly. We’re seeking a broader explanation for the popularity of torture.

These are all issues that can be embraced by people who are 98% authoritarian, the same way charity and free non-profit hospitals can be embraced by people who oppose interference with the free market and with oligarchy.

You say you’re trying to focus on bigger questions, which will persuade people not to be authoritarian anymore. I’ll believe that when I see it. In the meantime, I’ll continue to worry that you’re alienating people (like me, I admit) who feel like your arguments appeal primarily to authoritarians.

#406 Bianca Steele

If your conclusion from “no state has ever not tortured” is “we should all be anarchists,” then maybe focusing attention on torture make sense for you, if it persuades people to be anarchists. (If your focus is on persuading people, with some idea in mind of how they could influence some real change, or in understanding things better, it’s not just “display.”)

If, instead, it persuades people that “torture is wrong” actually isn’t true, or isn’t always true, that is what I mean by counterproductive.

If it persuades people that they believe states are necessary evils, and no state is ever going to give up the ability to choose occasionally to torture, but this means they have to switch from thinking of themselves as on the left to being on the right, or they have to give up politics or debate entirely, or they’re just not going to support you anymore, or their thinking is inconsistent and they have to leave all thought of “necessary evils” and similar things to the right-wing or to the elite or to whoever, to me that also seems counterproductive.

It looks to me like it’s gone meta. You’re talking about how to use rhetoric to manipulate people into the result you want, because you already know what’s right and so all that remains is to figure out which key is best to turn in the locks of other people’s brains to make them vote your way.

Is there any possibility that we could look for ways to find out the truth, and then believe in it? Of course we’re surrounded by liars who’re trying to hide whatever truth there is so they can manipulate people better. But if we join their ranks, then hasn’t the enemy already won? (Not the enemy that wants us to torture people, but the enemy that wants us to ignore the truth and pick the side that can better manipulate us, and then use our skills to manipulate more still.)

It’s funny how Bianca puts ‘display’ in scare quotes despite the fact that she threw the accusation first. But, yeah, I guess I would have to agree with her that anti-authoritarianism can be embraced by authoritarians.

You say you’re trying to focus on bigger questions, which will persuade people not to be authoritarian anymore.

No. I don’t know how to persuade people not to be authoritarians. You clearly don’t either, otherwise you would have done it, right? But I think the first steps to figuring out what to do is to understand the scope of the problem. By all means, keep fighting for whatever electoral bandaids we can get to stauch the bleeding for a bit while we’re looking for something better. But we can’t confine our analysis of the problem to what pollsters say is acceptable to the median voter, because what the median voter finds acceptable is precisely the problem. Actual progress is going to require solutions that nobody has imagined yet. You can’t argue people out of being authoritarians, but maybe we could demonstrate that a different way of life is possible–as soon as we figure out what that different way of life is.

@J

Is there any possibility that we could look for ways to find out the truth, and then believe in it? Of course we’re surrounded by liars who’re trying to hide whatever truth there is so they can manipulate people better. But if we join their ranks, then hasn’t the enemy already won? (Not the enemy that wants us to torture people, but the enemy that wants us to ignore the truth and pick the side that can better manipulate us, and then use our skills to manipulate more still.)

I hope there is such a possibility. Advocacy has it’s place in the search for truth, though. I don’t know if you saw Farrell and Shaliza’s stuff on Cognitive Democracy. crookedtimber.org/2012/05/23/cognitive-democracy/

I was waiting for this inevitable next step. The problem is that the NSA has not always been so careful to weasel-word its claims so that they sound impressive but, on careful examination of syntax, are not quite lies. Here’s one source.

Two weeks after Edward Snowden’s first revelations about sweeping government surveillance, President Obama shot back. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany,” Obama said during a visit to Berlin in June. “So lives have been saved.”

That’s Obama, though, who has a politician’s license to lie. The NSA played a more careful game, only occasionally doing things like having Alexander give a public speech with a slide with “54 attacks thwarted” on it. And at a Congressional hearing, Alexander said ” “The information gathered from these programs provided the U.S. government with critical leads to help prevent over 50 potential terrorist events in more than 20 countries around the world.”

“Critical leads” does not equate to “increased overall understanding and was of some help”. Could Alexander be convicted of lying in Congressional testimony, if such a thing ever happened in these cases? Probably not. Was his “critical leads” official statement deceptive, given that politicians were going full steam ahead with the 54 cases claim and the NSA wasn’t correcting them? Yes. You write that “it’s probably a good sign that you had more important things to attend to. :)”, but what you’re smiley-ing about is an inability for a member of the public to trust any NSA statement without expert analysis of syntax and possible evasions, many of which members of the public simply don’t have the background knowledge to anticipate. It’s the disempowerment of democracy, the purposeful creation of ambiguity that no one can be expected to cut through so that no meaningful public engagement is possible.

Consum @405: The problem with hypotheticals that Henley described–“The ticking bomb scenario is presented as “What would YOU do?” but it’s not, in truth, got anything to do with you. The proper question is, “What should we prudently allow officials embedded in the security bureaucracy to do with impunity?””, basically what Robespierre said @398, is very real.

Philosophical hypotheticals can be used in all kinds of ways. We might looking for answers about our own morality, and those answers may inform how we choose to answer certain policy questions.

But there’s an even deeper problem. What if thinking about the hypothetical, especially seriously considering it in a public way, affects the probability that the hypothetical will come true? “What should we do if an invading army uses human shields?” is exactly that kind of question. Both answers have a cost. If you say you won’t fire upon them, you’re basically inviting an invader to do that. If you say that you will, you’re weakening your own norms against killing of innocents, and you risk that other nations will see you as warlike and cooperate with you less. Better to keep your mouth shut. A politician who refuses to answer similar hypotheticals isn’t being cagey, they’re being responsible.

There’s a place for deliberate ambiguity, see e.g. Taiwan, but this hypothetical has long since been answered as a matter of policy: military forces will fire upon military targets even if those targets are using human shields.

But that doesn’t stop us from considering it philosophically, for ourselves, or perhaps as a policy-critique.

Yes, you’re hitting the selective memory thing just as I predicted you would. But the problem is that the claim that the 702 program led to critical leads is also collapsing. For instance, here’s one study:

NSA programs involving the surveillance of non-U.S. persons outside of the United States under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act played a role in 4.4 percent of the terrorism cases we examined

But more to the point, you’re simply repeating the NSA defenses. Alexander was criticized for doing exactly what you describe — combining the FAA 702 and Section 215 programs to make Section 215 look more effective. This is one of the ways in which not-quite-lies are used, using deniable ambiguity, in order to keep the public from knowing what’s going on. And at every stage of the process, people like you can say “oh, you have selective memory” unless they interpret the NSA statements exactly as you say they should be interpreted — an interpretation that was discouraged by design of the original statements themselves.

Now that you’ve detailed exactly what someone would have had to know in order to know what parts of any NSA statement are deceptive and can’t be detected as such without a whole lot of expert background, I repeat my original statement: we, as members of the public, might as well assume all NSA statements and documents are lies. They are functionally equal to lies, in that they don’t say what they seem to say, and no one can determine what they really do say until information from other sources comes to light. There is nothing paranoid about this: it is a rational response to the exact apologetics that you’ve used in this thread.

Consumatopia: “Nothing about that critique requires him to take a position on what one should do if an invading army is marching kids in front of them”

Once again: this has *never happened*. No attacking country that I know of, ever, has used children as human shields to defend military installations, because it’s a desperation tactic and attacking countries are not desperate. On the other hand, what Andrew says is a matter of official U.S. military policy has sometimes happened because the U.S. has been the attacking country, not the defending one, in all wars in my lifetime. We kill children with bombs and missiles quite often, not merely hypothetically.

Switching gears here back to OP.

In domestic policy, we’re motivated to believe that our ethical system will lead to prosperity–we want to believe our ideals will be vindicated by history. Some people think about international policy the same way, e.g. candidate Obama’s “false choice” between liberty and security (so long ago).

But not everyone wants to see things that way. Some people want to believe that we pay a cost for our moral ideals, that we’re fighting with one hand behind our back, and if we really wanted to we could “take the gloves off” and easily triumph over our foes. This, perhaps even more so than a desire to torture, is part of the reason why belief in torture’s efficacy is so widespread.

More interesting is the case of narratives in which torture is effective that are nonetheless anti-torture, like Battle of Algiers. One of that movie’s themes was that French war crimes were a consequence of French war aims. “Should we remain in Algeria? If you answer ‘yes,’ then you must accept all the necessary consequences.” It’s actually back in the first category of historical vindication–the badness and inevitability of torture is proof that the French should not have tried to stay. If torture didn’t actually work, that narrative would be complicated.

In defense of Rich I have always assumed official statements about the NSA surveillance programs should be disregarded completely and have never been steered wrong even once in understanding what is going on. I also note that the distinction between making false statements, and purposefully making misleading statements in order to mislead people about material facts, is not an important one.

#415 Consumatopia

Advocacy has it’s place in the search for truth, though.

Maybe. The way I see it, there’s a split between how you find out the truth and then what you do about it.

If you find something that’s true that people don’t want to believe, then it might be important to find out why they don’t want to believe it. Probably they already believe something else that they think contradicts it. It can be important to find out why those don’t really contradict, or why the other idea is wrong, or whatever. Looking at that can lead to valuable new truths.

But if you instead notice that your truth implies that you will get bad results unless other people change their behavior, and you notice that telling the truth will not get them to change their behavior, and you look for whatever lies or half-truths will get them to change their behavior without understanding, that does not seem to me to have a place in the search for truth.

But I could be wrong. This could be one of those cases where I think I see a contradiction between my truth and somebody else’s, and later I find out they don’t really disagree.

But look at the expertise that one has to develop in order to even begin to evaluate these consequentialist claims against people in authority who are determined to falsify and mislead. Choosing consequentialism means effectively writing 99+% of people out of any decision-making process.

Oh FFS, we don’t live in the Middle Ages, and even to claim peasants and medieval artisans had no sort of expertise is stupid and condescending. I’d argue that choosing deontology means decisions get made in armchairs instead of out in the world.

Bruce refers to “professional ethics.” Do you really think the professions are the 1%? Do you have no knowledge of the history of the liberal professions and their historical opposition to the economic 1%?

#430 Cosmotopia

“So we must either make a deontological argument that you can’t justify sins by worse sins, or else accept that there can be occasional exceptions.”

No, there is something you’re forgetting.. Do you trust the person who’s going to decide when to make those exception?

If there can be exceptions, then somebody has to draw the line about which exceptions are OK and which aren’t. Maybe there’s a fuzzy border area where it’s kind of a tossup.

If you are deciding then you have to decide for yourself. If you are judging somebody else’s choice, then you have to decide based on the best evidence you can get, or else on some sort of rules that don’t need much evidence.

Some people say that you have no right to judge them. You’re being a Monday-morning quarterback, deciding what they should have done when you weren’t on the spot making the choices. You have to decide for yourself whether you have the right to judge them.

Did Jesus say you shouldn’t judge *anybody*? Not even Stalin or Nixon? Or is it OK to judge anybody you want, knowing you’ll have to take your turn in the barrel? Or are there gray areas where maybe it’s OK to judge and maybe it isn’t?

If it’s okay to torture to defuse a ticking bomb (though that’s stupid because there’s no evidence torture is the fastest interrogation method) how about a high value terrorist who might possibly be planning some attack you don’t know about ….

My own view is that when it’s you on the spot, making the choice, you have to do the best you can. If you believe that torture is the only way that’s likely to work, then choose whether to do that. (If you don’t believe that, then this particular choice is easy.) People on blogs have the luxury of doubting everything, but when you have to choose, then you make your choice informed by whatever knowledge and false knowledge you happen to have.

My stand is that if you do something that’s wrong, then you have responsibilities. If you do it on the job, first you must tell your boss what happened. He may decide that you were too incompetent and he may choose to fire you. Or he may decide it was immoral and fire you for tarnishing the honor of the organization.

Second, you must tell the judicial authorities. They should have a trial and decide what consequences are appropriate.

Every single time you do something that is morally wrong.

There’s a crisis. You do something that’s maybe incompetent and maybe immoral. Afterward you get judged for it. There’s some question whether you should be judged more harshly if you actually got bad results, but it’s predictable you will be. So if you do this stuff and there was in fact no bomb, people will have a lot more contempt for you than if there was. Even if there was no way for you to tell the difference.

And if the bomb blows up, and you survive, they will look hard for things you did wrong. For example if you had vital information that could have gone out to people who needed it, and instead you wasted your time trying to torture more info out of somebody that you reasonably could not expect to get it from in time, and could not disseminate it quickly enough if you did get it, they will be on you like flies on shit.

There are reasons that our institutions aren’t built that way. I’m not clear what to do about that.

Consumatopia,

I usually like your comments, and I’m disappointed you’ve chosen this thread to try to take me out, but you’re losing it. Maybe you should stop while you’re ahead. I mean, I really love the way you throw new little catch-phrases into your comments, that you never use again, like “possible worlds” and “average,” it makes you look so sophisticated! But here’s a hint: don’t drink and read.

#435 Bianca Steele

I usually like your comments, and I’m disappointed you’ve chosen this thread to try to take me out, but you’re losing it.

Somewhere above you said something that reminded me of a stand I dislike, and I responded far more harshly than your own post deserved. I should tell you that I was not trying to “take you out” but was responding mainly to what you reminded me of.

It’s possible sometimes that happens when other people respond in ways that seem disproportionate.

Consumatopia
Battle of Algiers. One of that movie’s themes was that French war crimes were a consequence of French war aims. “Should we remain in Algeria? If you answer ‘yes,’ then you must accept all the necessary consequences.” It’s actually back in the first category of historical vindication–the badness and inevitability of torture is proof that the French should not have tried to stay. If torture didn’t actually work, that narrative would be complicated.

If torture didn’t work, and attempted genocide didn’t work, then the argument could be made that the French should not try to stay in Algeria because they did not in fact know how to stay in Algeria. If you take off the gloves and do everything you can and it still fails, then you really really need to give up.

#407 Rich Puchalsky

And yes, given that I can’t remember a single event in all of history where an attacking nation used children as human shields, I don’t see any great need to answer that hypothetical.

Israel in Gaza. They took Palestinian children and basicly used them to clear minefields. The Palestinians, knowing they would be invaded, would install IEDs under their welcome mats and behind front doors and sometimes arrange for whole houses to fall down on invaders. Children who knew where the mines were would refuse to step on them. IEDs that were controlled by nearby agents would give the agent the choice whether to blow up the children, or perhaps wait and try to blow up the children with the soldiers. And from the Israeli point of view if the children did get blown up by IEDs it was a gain for the next generation.

I vaguely remember the Israeli Supreme Court said they couldn’t do it, and then they did it again anyway. But possibly this is all propaganda. I wasn’t there. The only reliable witnesses were Israeli soldiers who might be reporting it because they want the Israeli army to look bad. Anybody else who reports such things might be doing it for propaganda against Israel.

And of course, it wasn’t exactly an invading army. If the land morally belongs to Israel then they have the right not to take casualties while pacifying it, don’t they? Shouldn’t they be able to kill as many terrorists as possible while taking no casualties themselves?

It’s impossible to describe the situation without using loaded words, and I don’t know how to use them without seeming to favor somebody or other.

Rich @417: The problem is that the NSA has not always been so careful to weasel-word its claims so that they sound impressive but, on careful examination of syntax, are not quite lies.

There is a huge damn distinction between intelligence that “contributes” to an understanding, and intelligence but for which an attack would have occurred. It was that distinction which Senator Leahy – not the NSA – rightly pushed to the front in discussing these intelligence programs. It’s easy to claim that the Section 215 program had some value. Leahy’s criticism was – is – that the program is non-essential; hence his emphasis on the distinction.

That you then bizarrely introduce Alexander’s accurate responses to Leahy’s questions, which make Leahy’s point, as an instance of perjury or deception merely compounds the deviations of your internal narrative from reality.

Rich @421: But the problem is that the claim that the 702 program led to critical leads is also collapsing. For instance, here’s one study: … [stating that] NSA programs involving the surveillance of non-U.S. persons outside of the United States under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act played a role in 4.4 percent of the terrorism cases we examined

Rich, the effectiveness of the Section 702 surveillance has been proven beyond question. No one, not even the most ardent critics of the NSA in Congress, have questioned that. And the PCLOB, which found the Section 215 program to be both useless and likely mistakenly authorized by the FISC, concluded without any doubt that the Section 702 programs produced vital intelligence and were extremely important. Here’s the PCLOB Report on the subject – not the report of some organization that had zero access to the actual program.

Alexander was criticized for doing exactly what you describe — combining the FAA 702 and Section 215 programs to make Section 215 look more effective.

Seriously, are you kidding? Go re-read Alexander’s June statement which I quoted above – he very explicitly and quite clearly separates the two programs, and he continued to do so throughout. Hell in every statement you and I have quoted he has separated the two programs – as did Senator Leahy, as did the PCLOB, as did every major participant in the public discussion. Both programs were at issue because both were the subject of the initial press reports in June 2013.

I don’t expect anyone to remember events perfectly, but at least admit your mistakes when you’re confronted with the facts Rich.

#439 Andrew F

Rich, the effectiveness of the Section 702 surveillance has been proven beyond question. No one, not even the most ardent critics of the NSA in Congress, have questioned that. And the PCLOB, which found the Section 215 program to be both useless and likely mistakenly authorized by the FISC, concluded without any doubt that the Section 702 programs produced vital intelligence and were extremely important.

I question that, very much so. The report you quote says:

Presently, over a quarter of the NSA’s reports concerning international terrorism include information based in whole or in part on Section 702 collection, and this percentage has increased every year since the statute was enacted. Monitoring terrorist networks under Section 702 has enabled the government to learn how they operate, and to understand their priorities, strategies, and tactics. In addition, the program has led the government to identify previously unknown individuals who are involved in international terrorism, and it has played a key role in discovering and disrupting specific terrorist plots aimed at the United States and other countries.

This is absurd. No serious anti-US secret force will use point-to-point internet communications for anything. In the example they give, somebody who volunteers to join AQ contacts them over the internet. He is clueless and asks them how to make explosives. They send him some information and he travels toward New York intending to make explosives for the first time, from written instructions, and blow them up. When he finds out the FBI is watching him he goes home. Some of the other incompetents are found in NYC with supplies they have bought intending to make explosives. Some cooperate with the FBI, one gets a life sentence. The FBI did them a kindness by stopping them before they blew themselves up.

More and more of NSA’s findings are about groups that are utterly incompetent, and they argue that they are using this to find terrorist organization strategies, tactics, and priorities.

This is like looking for your keys under the streetlight. It’s looking for shadowy spies under the streetlight.

How many billions of dollars did this stuff cost? And they use it to find terrorists who want to make explosives but don’t know how? Pathetic.

Andrew F.: “That you then bizarrely introduce Alexander’s accurate responses to Leahy’s questions, which make Leahy’s point, as an instance of perjury or deception merely compounds the deviations of your internal narrative from reality.”

Alexander made a false claim which he was later forced to retract when enough evidence had emerged to impeach it.

“Here’s the PCLOB Report on the subject – not the report of some organization that had zero access to the actual program.”

Yes, let’s trust the people appointed by the Executive to investigate the executive branch. After all, they have access.

“Hell in every statement you and I have quoted he has separated the two programs – as did Senator Leahy, as did the PCLOB, as did every major participant in the public discussion.”

Sen. Leahy, July 31,, 2013:

It also has been far too difficult to get a straight answer about the effectiveness of the Section 215 phone records program. Whether this program is a critical national security tool is a key question for Congress as we consider possible changes to the law. Some supporters of this program have repeatedly conflated the efficacy of the Section 215 bulk metadata collection program with that of Section 702 of FISA. I do not think this is a coincidence, and it needs to stop. The patience and trust of the American people is starting to wear thin.

I asked General Alexander about the effectiveness of the Section 215 phone records program at an Appropriations Committee hearing last month, and he agreed to provide a classified list of terrorist events that Section 215 helped to prevent. I have reviewed that list. Although I agree that it speaks to the value of the overseas content collection implemented under Section 702, it does not do the same with Section 215. The list simply does not reflect dozens or even several terrorist plots that Section 215 helped thwart or prevent — let alone 54 [blocked plots], as some have suggested.

“Logically it reveals that most people do not have any moral absolutes.”

Logically speaking, under rule utilitarianism, we choose our moral absolutes according to how we expect them to be followed under probable situations. Thus, improbable hypotheticals are of little use in judging moral absolutes.

Consumatopia: “Okay, it’s a long thread, and I’m not sure I understand the question you were asking Rich, sorry if I got that wrong. (And also sorry to Rich for getting involved.) ”

There are a good number of foolish and incoherent people who it’s better to ignore in comment threads like this.

But the point of Andrew F.’s hypothetical and associated argument is simple. As I wrote before, if you want consistent morality, you can either decide to be consistent with the worst things you support or the best. Under a very wide range of moralities, people agree that killing children with missiles is as bad as or worse than torturing people. Andrew F. points out, accurately, that our government kills children with missiles all the time. So why shouldn’t we also torture? He wants you to be a consistent supporter of both child murder and torture.

He’s right that “And while I suppose Rich might even oppose air strikes in opposition to ISIS, that’s not the view of most on the subject.” I do oppose air strikes in opposition to ISIS. It was earlier military intervention that created ISIS in the first place: that’s history, not “consequentialism”. I’m not really sure whether I’m supposed to be arguing deontologically or consequentially in this case: there are so many alternates — but it’s true that I would oppose all other air strikes that have occurred since WW II (a case of credible defensive war) as well. Andrew F. can bring up hypotheticals all he likes while defending horrible and immoral actualities, but this serves no purpose in illuminating his morality or anyone else’s. It’s already clear.

Late to this and I haven’t read the thread. I agree that using the terms ‘deontology’ and ‘consequentialism’ tends to confuse things – would ‘principled’ and ‘pragmatic’ have been better perhaps?

I think it’s human nature to seek coherence in one’s belief (so people who belief ‘X is wrong in principle’ are more likely to be persuaded that ‘X has bad consequences,’ and vice-versa) and to be slow to abandon core beliefs in the face of disconfirming evidence. I also think it’s often unclear to us why we hold the beliefs we do. So I think that to some extent the kind of behaviour you’re talking about is human nature, although I’m sure it can be pathological if taken to extremes (and I’m sure it is on the internetz).

#448 Andrew F

The point isn’t that if we agree on a principle of proportionality in war, then we should also agree on torture. The point is that there is a tension between the consequentialist reasoning we use to justify measures we take in war, and the deontological reason often given for opposing torture.

Here’s the strong point to justify unethical measures in war:

“The technology of war has changed to the point that the enemy will win unless we do X. Maybe they will win by doing X, or by some other way, but they will slaughter our armies, and win, and it is bad for the whole world for them to win but especially bad for us. So we must do X even though it is something that good people like us would usually never do, because the alternative is so bad.”

Here is the weak point to justify the same things:

“The outcome is not in doubt, but by doing X we can save the lives of US soldiers and end the war quicker. So X is the right thing to do.”

So for example while the US military was invading Iraq, there was some question whether Saddam’s forces might use chemical warfare. It would not have won the war for them, but it would have given us extra casualties and slowed the tempo, and very likely we would be less merciful. So to prevent that, we publicly announced to the whole world that if the Iraqis used poison gas on us, we would use nukes on them. Most nuclear power have promised that they won’t nuke a nonnuclear nation, but the USA has never made that promise. Anyway we claimed Iraq secretly had nukes. Most nuclear powers have promised they won’t nuke another nuclear power unless the other power nukes them first, but the USA has never made that promise. I think we have made treaties with Russia that say we won’t nuke them if they keep the treaties, but we’ve never promised that to any other nation. So we wouldn’t break any promises by nuking Iraq.

Still it seems like a damfool thing to do, to prevent some US casualties and end the war quicker. But I think if I was fighting there I’d welcome an announcement that we were doing things to help keep me from getting killed, that might kill a bunch of Iraqis instead.

I went on to note that even under such extreme circumstances that violating a deontological norm might be something I would agree to be the ethical thing to do, there are deontological norms that I would not – even in such circumstances – choose to violate.

Interesting. Like what? You are in what you believe is a just war. Your whole nation will be genocided unless you do X. But for deontological reasons you believe that X is wrong. So you instead agree that your whole nation will be genocided and the bad guys will win.

What norm is worth that in your heart?