proximoception | (no subject)

I find incoherent Zizek's critique of Harris' argument, in The End of Faith, that torture should be permissible on utilitarian principles - i.e. in cases where there's reason to think the harm done while torturing will be less than the harm diverted by whatever info's obtained. Zizek claims this makes other people objects, not Neighbors, thus disregarding "the abyss of the infinity that pertains to a subject." But math can be done using infinites, after all - allowing X number of people to die abandons X numbers of infinite abysses to implode (or evanesce or whatever) for the sake of not harming X+1 minus X. That's so obvious even he must see it - he must ultimately mean some kind of sacredness should be respected. Which of course it should, but that doesn't help with questions of setting things right when it hasn't been, when questions of suffering in abyssal subjectivities are live. Harris wasn't arguing for punitive torture, after all. So how can this line of thought not fall apart? Unless he's suggesting, which he never seems to be, that "suffering shares the nature of infinity" (Wordsworth) but death is no big deal. Is Zizek an idiot? I don't know enough about Zizek, though he did print a good piece on European atheism in the wake of this that put him a lot closer to Harris et al. than to (e.g.) Eagleton and Mieville.

Personally, I accept that Harris is correct, but would argue that this is never a right we should cede to Them, the people that would be in charge of the permitted torture. We need it to not become a precedent, in fact need the punishment of people caught ordering and committing it to be the precedent, not because torture could never hypothetically work to prevent greater harm, but because we're too likely to be lied to by those in charge about the circumstances warranting the torture. Like we are about war, of course, but the threat of being able to wage war is probably foundational for states, hence until states have imploded or evanesced is a power necessarily yielded to the (delegated) ruling Few, whereas torture is not - unless you include any form of imprisonment under the torture umbrella.

We can of course vividly imagine examples where a state's very identity is threatened by knowledge withheld by some single, torturable individual - someone who knows the location of a nuclear weapon set to wipe out central D.C. or Manhattan, is the standard thought problem. But we can even more vividly imagine, having seen it, how a state's very identity can be threatened by the mission creep of treating situations that can lead to that hypothetical situation as being on par with it. And of course since the criminal code is ultimately aimed at a) disincentivizing dire misbehavior and, relatedly, b) empowering discretionary suppression of dire misbehavior, if That Situation ever does happen then presumably legal disincentives, and whatever law enforcers are on hand, will not stop the law-breaking torturer. The possible disincentives won't outweigh the obvious, exigent incentives to torture, for one thing, and any law enforcers in the room will likely help. If it can be made at all clear to anyone what you meant to accomplish by the torture, the Greater Good defense will be a shoe-in. Utilitarianism's built into, or rather laid under, the law already.

Hell, there should probably be a jury system in place to decide whether we should go to war. Alongside every other control we've been ignoring in the U.S. for sixty years.

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I would convict, because it doesn't work. I would do pretty much anything to interpose myself between people and their fantasy that violence gets information.

Violence in a stressful situation is really soothing. The rest is bullshit, the rest is a story that lets you do this thing you're really cued to want.

I think it's quite possible that we really will be able to get information from people using techniques that amplify subvocalized thoughts, or that in others ways invade people's minds - and basically rape them. I think it's possible that a person interrogated that way would have physical sequelae, could be injured seriously in the long term, could be an indefinite suicide risk, etc.

I think, in other words, these would be successful methods that would cause significant damage.

Would I favor conviction then, is the question. Which I'll punt til I'm back from breakfast.

Edited 2010-12-17 16:32 (UTC)

Suppose it did. Suppose the violence got the information.

Thinking torture cannot work is really soothing too in its way, no?

You're completely right that violent fantasies tend to supplant thought here. But we can't round 'tend to' up to 'invariably do' without censoring. And the problem with censorship, as with touching up a photo, is that people eventually catch on that it's happened. Same goes for the (awesomely utilitarian) notion of convicting the torturer not because you would have done otherwise but to send a message about torture. I think I might do the same, now that the option's been revealed to me, but the forcing of the point raises the possibility that a solution forcing no points at all, however difficult, might have been possible in its place.

You defer the very possibility of successful torture into the future, but I'm not sure we can. 'It doesn't work' is probably quite just as an attack on the torture actually being done in our name, since false positives waste resources and torture produces tons of them - it doesn't work overall, we mean. But for the thought problem? Even the possibility that it might work, even the possibility that the evidence that torture doesn't work at all is wrong, would be enough to mandate its use if all other options had dried up, given the number of deaths about to happen.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_mayer

Schrodinger's question, maybe. I think the posing of the thought problem itself can be, basically, immoral. The answer only ever goes one way, because either you allow an imaged other to do it, or admit that you yourself would - at least, I don't see any merit in limiting my own prospective future acts. NB the inevitable referenced Stanford Prison Experiment - in a situation where allowing torture has been beforehand valorized.

Asking the question praises torture, and tells a certain story in a certain way with effects I know to be bad. The only way to resist the outcome seems to be to say no to the question, but I'm sure that's not true, either.

Every time one has the conversation about the one-time-incident, I feel, pretty strongly, one puts the actual, encountered situation in blurrier and more distant view. Actually, this is backed up - we're primed to notice exceptions. Exceptions are where we spend our mental time. While I'm spending my mental time here, I'm actively distorting my understanding of the real situation.

I think I'm morally on the hook for participating in that, or for encouraging other people to. Even though pursuing the question falls into this category of things that sounds so defensible - "pursuing questions."

I don't think we're pursuing questions whimsically off to the side while the ranch burns. I think this is the kind of question that makes us see the lay of the land, hence where water might be.

People will always come up with the thought problem independently because there's room for it. It is the correct answer to, "We must never torture" - a valid objection to what is being presented as an absolute when it isn't one, an objection and not a trick. It's true it ties up the energy of the anti-torture and ambivalent people to have this conversation, but the conversation actually has an end. There's a reason

andalus is going insane. Going from following rules to seeking maximized benefit is the single most alarming shift possible in ethics, and the one likeliest to drive people nuts. Because to assess benefit you really do have to see everything (impossible as that it), and when rules are required you have to establish where they begin and end (hence can never again rely on them as psychic ordering principles for yourself).

If we set things up so that an alarm bell sounds whenever we get near the thought problem, an alarm that tells us we're not able to think right here, that to even be heading here is irresponsible, to even think about this is to harm others, among other things we're doing is we're saying rules can be absolute in general. Who's to say which rules can be absolute in general without reference to what's most beneficial, and how can we know what's most beneficial without having analyzed and compared the possible rules?

What you're saying would be Grand Inquisitor logic if you weren't folding yourself into it - by basically saying you can feel the Dark Side eating away at you while you even think about this. I think I'd actually prefer Grand Inquisitor logic, because at least in that the Inquisitors take a minute while visiting their Jesuses to remember why and where they made their rule. The Inquisitor would pace out every inch of the area where the no torture principle logically founders so as to know exactly how to position the alarm bell. In yours, it's like we can't know why we can't know certain things, we can only know that it's no good to: all the mind's hallways get flooded with blood when we start to know them. The alarm you want to institute is somehow already there.

Your concerns about the uses made of the bomb scenario are not misplaced. It has been used, will continue to be used, will continue to do damage. You can throw it out the window for yourself personally (probably to some cost, I've been saying), but I don't think you can uproot and discard it on the behalf of others, even if that would be of great benefit to them. You simply don't have that power.

And it's obvious I have no power either, pursuing the other route of clarifying what the problem is, where its importance starts, where it ends - which you'd be much better at if you ever took this up, since you have such a vivid sense of how people are liable to misinterpret it (seriously, the things you're saying, right before each gets veered toward the self-silencing taboo, are exactly what's called for). But if anything ever does get through to the 24-mesmerized, it will be reasonable arguments based on what's in front of us. I don't think you can fight fear with fear - that's pretty much the mess we've been in these nine years.