(no subject)

[proximoception]

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.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Right -- I agree completely. I would say: torture should be illegal, but if you're president and there really is a chance to save NY by torturing, you'd better do it, illegal or not. You can make the case to the jury (for nullification) later. Sometimes you have to do illegal things (Lincoln, for example). But they should still be illegal, and risk big trouble. There should be a better way to adjudicate this. But there isn't. So I don't think a legal body of any sort should be permitted to decide torture is okay before the fact (which is what Alan Dershowitz wants). But I do think that a jury should be able to nullify the prosecution after the fact.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

"Is Zizek an idiot?"

Zizek will do anything to be surprising, while still maintaining respectable academic-leftist credentials. I liked The Sublime Object of Ideology the first couple of times I read it, but each book and essay is just a rehash of the same attempts at clever outrageousness. So eventually it looks like idiocy, yes.

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is pretty much the same thing as the usual utilitarian position on slavery -- it doesn't matter that in some hypothetical world utilitarianism might condone slavery, because in the actual world where ethics happens we understand enough about human behaviour and the frailty of legal protections to know that the likelihood of benign slavery actually working as such is negligible.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

As usual, I disagree. While pragmatism is useful, the little hairs on my arms get raised in apprehension whenever I hear pragmatism being used in ethics. Ethics is discrete from pragmatism, ethics is irrational while pragmatism is supposedly rational but very easily dissolves into ideology. I've never read Zizek (and don't much care to) but that 'abyss of infinity' line probably means, yes, a sacricity, a sacredness about the individual. Intellectuals avoid using the term 'sacred' because it is obviously irrational, indefensible, not based in utility. But pragmatism hijacks the Sacred too: "Why would we torture the would-be bomber?" you ask the pragmatist. Well, because wach life is sacred (in that it is irreducible, irretrievable and irreproducible). "Sacred" becomes the ultimate utility, because a life is sacred it is worth more than anything except another life (or two, depending on who you ask). But what if, you continue asking, this bomber was bombing people with the purpose of saving even more people (e.g. Hiroshima)? What makes this less reprehensible? In this case we would be bombing an Enemy, and therefore does the enemy has the right to torture us? The pragmatist argument can continue like this ad infinitum, eventually the world entire is both saved and damned by one act which is to be prevented or pre-prevented or pre-pre-prevented. No truly rational answer to this can be given, weighing a world against a world. The answer given is thus irrational: in the original case the man is bombing our friends and is therefore our enemy, and thus can be disrespected, tortured, even killed. In the Hiroshima instance the man is bombing our enemies.

Why is it we want to protect our friends more? Is this pragmatic? We are not bound by blood or even, in this day and age, economics. Our neighbors and friends are neighbors and friends for irrational reasons (proximity, history) and we want to protect them for irrational reasons (pride, nationalism, ideology). You want to torture the bomber not for utilitarian reasons but for ideological ones: my friends matter more than yours. Which is pragmatic in in a local, un-universal, utterly selfish way. It is an action which gets you what you want, and ignores the wants of others not like you. It is pragmatic but it is certainly not ethical.

The main problem is that we are a culture dominated by Reason but this has not made us any more reasonable in our decisions. All it has done is made it easier for us to excuse bad behavior. Today we act disrespectful to those who are not our neighbors and say it is pragmatism and not xenophobia. While tomorrow we give preference to our neighbors and say it is humane. A humanist would give equal preference to family and to foreigners. (Isn't almost the whole of pre-renaissance literature about what happens to those who are disrespectful to strangers?) A pragmatist would not give his family more preference than a foreigner. What we have now is a watered-down pragmatism, a pragmatism which allows people to be irrational and selfish as well as socially consistent.

Been following this exchange with interest.

[toctoc.livejournal.com]

D'you know Jonathan Dancy's work on the role of thought experiments in ethics? I don't offer it as a solution, per se, merely a way of metathinking how this debate has gone...