Religion & Law

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?