Warning - Non-food content!
Professor Sandy Levinson at Balkin has a post today concerning the moral gravity of torture compared to, say, carpet bombing. It resembles, in a way, a colloquy I had with Prof. Levinson when I was his student during his visit to HLS. Briefly, I tried to push him to provide a clear answer to why torture was worse than any of the other barbarities that accompany war. The only answer that has even remotely satisfied me is that torture involves the infliction of pain on someone entirely in your grasp. It is, in that sense, especially barbaric, an indicative manifestation of a basic incivility. But I do not see how dropping an atomic weapon on millions of civilians who do not know it is coming is any worse.
I suspect that Prof. Levinson's answer to the conundrum is rather different than mine, in that he would likely say that both the bombing (as well as a host of lesser civilian oriented attacks) and torture are equally indefensible, constitute war crimes, etc. During my talk with Prof. Levinson, and on my old blog, I've gone on the record saying that I am willing to defend our obliteration of Germany during WWII, as well as Hiroshima/Nagasaki, while I am not willing to permit torture (in which I include waterboarding). But my distinction is not based on morals - the man or woman who orders either, I think, bears an equal and possibly indelible, moral weight - but on practicality. Torture doesn't work, it can be used on our men and women, and it looks horrible in a conflict where we are fighting an ideological war as much as anything else. But is the distinction really one of gravity, as people seem to think? I'm not sure.
4/24/2008
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I wonder if the people who think there is greater moral gravity to torture than to bombing share Prof. Jeremy Waldron's concern about creating a cadre of sadists? Though it might seem morally strange, I think we are more troubled by people who are willing to inflict pain at excruciatingly close range than those who inflict it from a mile up in the air. The torturer must closely watch and delicately monitor the level of discomfort inflicted on the subject (think of the torture machine scene from Princess Bride). In contrast, the bomber can remain ignorant in all but the most theoretical sense of the destruction he has wrought.
Or to think of it another way, we are more troubled by the boy who uses a magnifying glass to burn ants alive than we are by the adult who runs a massive factory farm operation, even though chickens have much more complex nervous systems and undergo much more pain.
I think this is more understandable when we talk about animal cruelty, because the morality there is not about a violation of the animal's rights (well, for the majority of us who don't believe there's such a thing as "animal rights"), but about the damage it does to the human soul to engage in such activities. We're just bothered by the ant-killing kid.
But for someone who finds torture of at least possibly guilty persons morally graver than bombing civilians, the same concern is at stake: not the degree to which others' rights are violated, but the violence done to the actor's own soul.
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