A few thoughts in response to Rob's recent post, regarding President Bush's candid acknowledgment that he authorized the waterboarding of several terrorists-detainees: First, and simply to restate what any regular reader of MOJ already knows, I agree with Rob that torture is immoral, and that it is not rendered immoral by virtue of its success at saving lives, or by virtue of its being authorized by positive law. Nor is it rendered moral by the fact that many to condemn it are, to put it mildly, inconsistent in their non-consequentialism.
That said, I was struck by this bit, in Dahlia Lithwick's piece reacting to President Bush's "damn right" quote (about which Rob commented):
Those of us who have been hollering about America's descent into torture for the past nine years didn't do so because we like terrorists or secretly hope for more terror attacks. We did it because if a nation is unable to decry something as always and deeply wrong, it has tacitly accepted it as sometimes and often right. Or, as President Bush now puts it, damn right. . . .
All this was done in the name of moving us forward, turning down the temperature, painting over the rot that had overtaken the rule of law. . . . If people around the world didn't understand what we were doing then, they surely do now. And if Americans didn't accept what we were doing then, evidently they do now. Doing nothing about torture is, at this point, pretty much the same as voting for it. We are all water-boarders now.
Now, my view is that Dahlia Lithwick is frustratingly prone to partisan analysis that does not reflect her intelligence and so does not really illuminate. Here, though, it is different. Here, her reaction to the "damn right" quote does point to something true (though, perhaps, not her intended target): We are, in a sense, "all water-boarders now."
By this I don't only mean (though, I suppose, I do in part mean) that those whose vote in 2008 was, in theory, influenced by their professed antipathy toward and disagreements with President Bush should not imagine that things are all that different now (or that the Democrats in Congress were not, at the time, happy to go along with activities and decisions they later professed to oppose), or that the current administration, if pressed, would refuse on principle to do what the last one did. I mean that very few people actually believe, embrace, and work to operationalize consistently those truths that make it the case that it is wrong to torture even a malevolent person, even if that treatment is legally authorized, even if one is charged with the care of the lives and security of innocent citizens, and even if the treatment workes (i.e., reveals accurate and important information).
If it was wrong to waterboard the detainees about whom President Bush was speaking (and, again, I believe that it was, though I hope I am appropriately sensitive to the fact that a President's choices are more difficult than a Professor's), it must be for non-consequentialist, non-reductionist reasons. If human beings are reducible entirely to electrified, skin-encased sacks of organic goo, then it was not "wrong" -- because nothing is really "wrong" -- to waterboard the detainees in question. And if one's objection to the waterboarding reflects only one's (likely not-fully-informed) sense that it was not really necessary (or if that objection sits comfortably alongside one's enthusiastic embrace of a fundamental right to procure a late-term abortion) . . . well, as Churchill supposedly said, we are just haggling about the price, aren't we?
Monday, November 15, 2010
Thanks to Paul Horwitz for flagging this new paper from Jeremy Waldron, Two-Way Translation: The Ethics of Engaging with Religious Contributions in Public Deliberations. The arguments may not be new, but it's nice to see someone like Waldron lend his substantial intellectual heft to the cause. Here's the abstract:
Using as an exemplar, the 2007 "Evangelical Declaration against Torture," this paper examines the role of religious argument in public life. The Declaration was drawn up by David Gushee, University Professor at Mercer University, and others. It argues for an absolute ban on the use of torture deploying unashamedly Christian rhetoric, some of it quite powerful and challenging. For example, it says: " [T]he Holy Spirit participates in human pathos with groans and sighs too deep for words. The cries of the tortured are in a very real sense, … the cries of the Spirit." The present paper considers whether there is any affront to the duties of political civility in arguing in these terms. There is a line of argument, associated with John Rawls's book, "Political Liberalism," suggesting that citizens should refrain from discussing issues of public policy in religious or deep-philosophical terms that are not accessible to other citizens. The present paper challenges the conception of inaccessibility on which this Rawlsian position is based. It argues, with Jurgen Habermas, that all sides in a modern pluralist society have a right to state their views as firmly and as deeply as they can, and all sides have the duty to engage with others, and to strain as well as they can to grasp others' meanings. It is not enough to simply announce that one can not understand religious reasons, especially if no good faith effort has been made, using the ample resources available in our culture, to try. Of course, many peoeple will not be convinced by the reasons that are offered in religious discourse; but to argue for their rejection - which is always what may happen in respectable political deliberation - is not to say that the presentation of those reasons was offensive or inappropriate
Over the weekend I participated in some fascinating conversations at Marquette as part of a conference on social justice organized by Christopher Wolfe. With folks like Jean Bethke Elshtain, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and John Finnis in the lineup, I (wisely) did more listening than talking. I found Wolterstorff's exploration of social justice to be especially interesting. Building on his previous work on justice, he reminded us that justice is not equality in the assignment of benefits and burdens (as Aristotle would have it), but the rendering to each what he is due (i.e., the goods to which he has a right). Social justice requires us to focus on laws and social practices that create patterns by which members of a community are deprived of their rights, beyond particular instances of injustice. (For what it's worth, John Finnis agreed with this definition of social justice.) Wolterstorff also noted that opposition to "social justice" arises from a variety of concerns: 1) Concern about separating patterns of injustice from the intentions of those contributing to the patterns. As he pointed out, justice does not track with culpability. We can wrong someone without having blameworthy intentions. 2) Concern that the state is the prime mover on social justice issues. He emphasized that recognizing social injustice does not carry implications as to remedy. 3) The deepest source of resistance, in Wolterstorff's view, is that our acknowledgment of responsibility for social injustice requires that we stop the practice at issue, and that's hard to do for those who benefit from the status quo.
My own contribution was less ambitious, as I was invited to defend faith-based initiatives against criticism that such programs are inconsistent with the demands of justice, properly understood. I hope to post the whole thing here at some point, but for now, here's a short excerpt that captures my thesis:
Religious belief can provide a foundation for relationships of personal care and concern animated by love. The state does not appear to have the moral resources to build into its provision of welfare services the aspirational commitments needed for a love relationship, but the state should care that the needy are being loved in this way.
