(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

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Confront the thought problem. It is something that could happen - people who have written they'd like to set off a nuclear bomb in an American city have been caught trying to buy them, after all. You somehow have a person who knows where the bomb will be. Do you permit the bomb to go off? You do not need to think in terms of future peace to not want thousands of people to die. This is not ideological, or if it is it is based on the entirely ubiquitous 'ideology' of basic compassion which I certainly hope you share - hell, I imagine in most situations the hypothetical terrorist would. And how is it ideological to disagree with someone? Especially if the someone is stupid or cruel or misguided? Are you suggesting no one can be more right than another, i.e. moral relativism?

I don't think anyone has to 'accept' the sacredness of human life - which I don't actually accept as phrased, by the way, I was just pointing out how Zizek's take is illogical on its own terms. But anyway beliefs are not chosen; in a limited sense they can be assumed for one's own comfort, but to the extent one is dumb enough to adopt a belief for that reason, it's one's needs for comfort that will dictate the choice. But to me these things are logical extrapolations from some biological givens. We can phrase moral impulses in terms of (a small set of possible) arbitrary criteria, but that doesn't mean the impulses are random. They are common to all cultures and eras - ideology is what limits compassion, and to some extent what structures it, but it's not what creates it.

As for your specific, supposedly random criteria: Contributions to a society are valuable insofar as they make humans safer and happier, as is knowledge. Presumably the smart thing to do is make those efforts that keep both us and our children safer and happier - as a major source of human happiness is the projected welfare of descendants that's not all that hard. Believers' lives are no more sacred than anyone else's, and if they have a book saying otherwise their books is stupid. Which we already knew because they're believers.

You can argue that compassion is itself an irrational impulse, and self-preservation too. Fine. So what? I have them and you have them and every other person I have ever met has them. To differing degrees, sure, and sometimes with nasty restrictions on them - the less educated and more damaged, the nastier. So what again? Happiness, broadly defined (and fading into 'health,' which it so closely tracks) is the only standard we can refer to while making decisions as neighbors, citizens, human beings that isn't based on externally-imposed falsehoods. It's hard to argue how much we should sacrifice our own for that of others, but very easy to see that anything we do for others should be for their happiness, rather than for the next world or the master race. Since those are lies.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

Compassion may be a given, but what is universal is a compassion for one's friends, one's family, one's neighbors. Equally universal is a desire to see one's enemies punished. Neither of these impulses should be the basis for any rational argument.

Sure I would want to see my friends protected from bombs. But I know that if this were war (and a jihadist certainly thinks this is war) then the death of enemies in the face of progress might seem, to my compassion, permissable. A jihadist is trying to protect his people, and the countless generations of his people to come, from unjust hegemony. Yet, you say torture should be permissable while murder should not. Why is that? Because my people are the ones being harmed? Because the ends justify the means? That way fascism lies, and no matter how you try to bury it under committees it's still fascism (benign, inert fascism). And the only surprising thing is that I'm the only one taking the time out to point out how you're wrong.

There should be limits to what we can and should do, no matter our intentions. What no human being should be allowed to say is "I am more right than you, therefore I should be able to treat you like an object."



notes: 1) Your critiques of the random axioms are all opinions, and although I agree with most, I would not put them in any supposedly rational argument unless I wanted to sound like a preacher yelling down from a place of moral certitude. 2) Educated people are no more moral than uneducated people. If anything the opposite. I come from uneducated poor people and let me tell you we tip very well.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I don't even know where to start with this. It seems to me that you're not making sense and not listening. First thing you should do is go figure out whether you're a moral relativist or moral absolutist, I'd say, as you alternately sound like one then the other. The next is actually read what I'm saying (what is this murder crap - when did I even mention it?). After that actually confront (answer) the thought problem, in which the intentions of the jihadist do not matter in the slightest, just the foreseeably likely results of their actions. After that look up the definition of fascism.

If you agree with those of my opinions you say you do, you probably do so for reasons. You seem to view opinions as irrational - and also put an extremely strange burden on the concept of rationality because of some pet peeve of yours.

Less educated people are likelier to tip better and support the social safety net because they or those they know well have directly benefited from tips and welfare services. However, less educated people are also more likely to be murderers, rapists, domestic abusers, racists, sexists, homophobes, gang members, xenophobes, and harmers of animals. Which doesn't mean large numbers of them do any of that, but that was the sense in which I cited 'less educated' as a correlate of having nasty restrictions on natural feelings of compassion.

But the compassion thing in general is a near-approach to a valid critique and deserves a longer answer. It's actually quite a complex matter how in-group limitations on compassion are no longer rational, leaving only the compassion, by default, for those able to realize this. But the mess that's the rest of your argument needs to be cleaned up before that's moved on to.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

I am saying a number of things, mainly because I disagree with you on a number of levels, and I'm sorry if you're not following it. As for moral relativism and absolutism I am coming out against any mixing of the practical and the moral. It's like trying subtract the color blue from the color orange. It becomes meaningless.

I did answer your thought experiment. A jihadist decides to commit mass murder, you decide to commit torture, you want to save your friends, he waants to save his country, you both have ideological aims and not rational ones. You do not know that if in torturing this person you will end up hurting more people down the line. You have only your hope. Both you and the jihadist would be morally reprehensible for the action.

Saying that the decision is "practical" does not save it. You could say that bombing new york is "practical" from a radical moslem standpoint, that would not save it either.


I agree with some of your stated opinions because of my own opinions, which are opinions, in that they are unproven, untested and based on things like hope and faith. I hope that all of humanity can act like one brotherhood. I do not know if this is possible. I don't know if this is even desirable, or if the yearing for this would only lead to some soviet dystopia. I would never claim that because of my held opinion I had the right to take a life or imprison a mind.

You also have your own definition of "educated," since, for example, the mess of racists who support the Tea Party has on average more education than the average democratic supporter. Or are you equating "educated" with "moral" again?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I don't even know what you mean about mixing the practical and moral. You'll need to explain this less metaphorically.

Let's alter the thought experiment so that you no longer think I want to save my little buddies. Suppose the apprehended person is Dick Cheney, who has a nuclear bomb hidden in Tehran if it isn't found and disarmed. It's hypothetically possible that this nuking of Tehran will stop nuclear war in the future - be impossible to disprove, after all. But do you stop him?

I haven't yet used the word practical, pragmatic, you'll notice, though I'm not sure what the problem with those is either.

I do not care about any 'standpoint' that does not make sense, except to talk sense into the person holding it until it's replaced. The radical Muslim standpoint is based on lies, and I can tell you exactly what many of lies are. except I wouldn't bother because you already know them. You know the Christian lies, the non-radical Muslim lies, the Jewish lies, the Hindu lies, the racist lies, the Dick Cheney lies. These are not 'standpoints' in the sense of being different, equally valid vantage points of some vast, dark truth in an inaccessible middle.

How is anything I'm saying based on the hope that humanity can act in brotherhood? I don't understand why you're even bringing that up.

College educations are getting pretty worthless in some quarters, I agree, so conceivably having a BA might not be proof against Tea Partitude (though I highly suspect you'll find that correlation if you just look at the demographic). Anything above a BA and there is one hell of a correlation, though. And obviously countries whose school systems are better than ours will tend to have governments - both as cause and effect - diametrically opposed to the Tea Party philosophy in most respects.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

^ white demographic

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Is it - it's kind of rude of me to be romping in late with this, but torture's this thing I've been interested and pursued, and so I just rankly want to toss out that -

the scenario of short-time and great prospective slaughter is the one least approachable with torture. You're the person who's got the code. You don't have to wait very long. There's very little time you have to hang on for to succeed.

Almost any technique that would get you to talk would put you into the kind of state where you'd say anything, and frankly, you can help yourself into that state.

We have this idea that a certain kind of communication continues, clear, within the torture scenario - that the tortured person will understand the situation as we do, understand pain as we want him or her to, and will respond physiologically in a way that we can both trust and understand.

It's how little any of that turns out to line up that's funded all the drug studies. And in fact, that's funding the work into amplifying subvocalized thought. We work on getting ways to make people betray themselves to our advantage, because violence doesn't do it.

I sometimes think that we cling to the ethical hash-out about torture, because for the duration of the conversation, we have the comfort of the idea that torture works. And isn't there something of the bargaining we all tend to, in this? I only have to go down to the crossroads, and the devil etc.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Not rude at all - you step in just at the traditional point principle vs. utility was going to reduce to unprincipled, unuseful mutual throttling.

Do you, as jury member, convict the person who tortured, in either version of the thought problem presented above? Because I don't. Even if there's little chance one can get the information needed by torture, the damage caused is dwarfed by what will be averted if it somehow works.

Yes, the thought problem will never occur - but any conditions that could hypothetically violate principle destroy it as principle, mandate its replacement by something virtual, like a law the enforcement of which can take into account special circumstances (such as is any law, under a jury system).

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

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.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

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.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

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.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

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."

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

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.