Somebody wrote me off-line about "the agents of Empire," and
my answer seemed too glib. But then I read the following in
the Chronicle of Higher Education which was dead-on the
money. Andrew Sabl is an associate professor of public policy
at the University of California at Los Angeles; he teach
political ethics on the graduate level.
Let's raise the stakes on the politics of noir and therefore
the ethics of noir. Remember what the CIA & Vice
President Cheny want: no ban on torture. The Prez says the US
does not torture.
Here's the noir plot. What you write next defines so
much:
You work for the CIA. You personally do know what's right and
wrong. A bomb is ticking. What would you do to get a
terrorist to talk? How much torture is permissible? Is there
a bomb?
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i12/12b00501.htm
He writes:
'Torture cases are a great way to teach moral theories.
Students prone to believe in absolutes can be asked: Wouldn't
you torture a terrorist to save a city from a nuclear bomb?
And utilitarians, who judge right and wrong by weighing costs
and benefits, can be pressed the other way: Would you torture
1,000 people to save 1,001? So ticking-bomb scenarios seem to
further the best Socratic ends: to question received wisdom,
cross-examine dogmatic beliefs, and make us all more humble
in our judgments...
Skipping around his article:
After the Abu Ghraib torture scandal came out, Rush Limbaugh
said that sexual humiliation seemed a "brilliant" and
"effective" method of interrogation and resembled nothing
more than a Skull and Bones initiation or "good old American
pornography."
"In May The New York Times reported that U.S. soldiers in
Afghanistan had beaten a detainee's legs so brutally that his
pulped tissues resembled those of someone run over by a bus.
He died. Those who questioned him admit they now believe that
he'd been taken prisoner by mistake and knew nothing. The
news didn't receive much notice."
"Meanwhile the TV show 24 has steadily turned the
ticking-bomb scenario from a bizarre hypothetical of
philosophy classrooms into a casual assumption about our
likely future. In this context it invites us to cheer on an
agent who routinely tortures anyone whom he thinks might have
information - and who shows little remorse even when he finds
that he tortured the wrong man.
"The bomb has never been nuclear - and may never be. We can
never be completely sure - rarely even roughly sure - who
knows about it or whether it even exists. And there are
almost always alternatives to torture if we as citizens are
willing to pay some costs and incur some risk." Sabel's key
sentence, for me, anyway...
"When the agents of a democracy practice torture in their
country's name, they will get away with it unless citizens do
more than disapprove."
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