Pragmatism and Morals

from an interview with Penn Jillete in the January Reason Magazine

When I talk about the death penalty to people, there are a zillion pragmatic arguments to make that the death penalty is more expensive, that you could make mistakes with the death penalty. I try to never use them, because I believe that as soon as I use them, I have dropped what matters to me. Because those arguments are disingenuous. To say, “What if we put an innocent person to death?” I am then telling you that if you can promise me we won’t put any innocent people to death that I’m somehow OK with that, and I’m fucking not. Killing people is wrong. Government shouldn’t fucking do it. End of story.

I mean, if you can convince me right now on the phone that you can eliminate all marijuana, eliminate all LSD, eliminate all heroin, keep it out of the country so that people can’t do it, and you can do that without using any violence—if you make that argument, am I then in favor of drug prohibition? I still don’t think I am. If you told me here’s a way we can keep all Muslims out and that will stop the terrorism, I don’t think I can make that deal.

So I don’t think there is a pragmatic argument. There is only the moral argument. I realize that’s an incredibly black-and-white, stupid position that I don’t think anyone agrees with me [on], but I can’t find a way around it. So every issue becomes moral to me. I’ve never smoked marijuana in my life. I don’t want to smoke marijuana. But I can’t find any way that it’s my right to stop you.

HKO

An excellent point. where pragmatism may require suspension of ideologies or principles, it can also require the suspension of moral considerations. This can me more important that whether it works. That is why two different ideologies can both claim to be pragmatists; because they make decisions from different moral frameworks.

Perhaps the best recent consideration of morality vs pragmatism is the debate over waterboarding. The debate over whether it works sidelines the entire moral consideration.

Using Language to Hide Reality

George Will writes in the Washington Post Facing up to what we did in interrogations, 1/11/13.

Excerpts:

“In the end, everybody breaks, bro — it’s biology,” says the CIA man in the movie, tactically but inaccurately, to the detainee undergoing “enhanced interrogation.” This too familiar term has lost its capacity for making us uneasy. America’s Vietnam failure was foretold when U.S. officials began calling air attacks on North Vietnam “protective reaction strikes,” a semantic obfuscation that revealed moral queasiness. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” wrote George Orwell, who warned about governments resorting to “long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

Viewers of “Zero Dark Thirty” can decide whether or which “enhanced interrogation” measures depicted — slaps, sleep deprivation, humiliation, waterboarding — constitute, in plain English, torture. And they can ponder whether any or all of them would be wrong even if effective.

Mukasey says the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” is “so absurdly antiseptic as to imply that it must conceal something unlawful.” Such “harsh techniques” were, he says, used against fewer than one-third of the fewer than 100 “hard-core prisoners” in CIA custody.

The government properly cooperated with the making of this movie because the public needs realism about the world we live in. “We live,” says Col. Jessep, “in a world that has walls. . . . You want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.” Regarding terrorism, the problem is that we live in a world without walls, without ramparts that can be manned for the purpose of repelling an invasion by a massed enemy.

When the CIA woman who drives the pursuit of bin Laden is about to enter, for the first time, the room where “enhanced interrogation” is administered, the CIA man who administers it tells her, “There’s no shame if you want to watch from the monitor.” She, however, knows, and viewers of “Zero Dark Thirty” will understand, it is best to look facts, including choices, in the face.

HKO

We may squirm at the compromised morality and humanity that we deploy in this conflict, and perhaps such actions should be displayed and discussed. But we know that we are fighting an enemy that would not squirm a second at the most barbaric act we could imagine. Political and cultural conflict has become an attraction for the homicidal sociopaths. The mere fact that we are uncomfortable at such actions, and willing to question them intensely in a public debate, belies a world of difference. I agree with George Will that Orwellian sanitizing language should be suspect.

Terrorism Requires a New Legal Framework

The debate over the enhanced interrogation techniques is almost Orwellian. It is torture? Of course it is. So is listening to any number of talking head simplistic moralizers from either end of the spectrum. It is torture and the difference is not one of definition, but one of degrees.

Is it morally justified? Well that seems kind of relevant to the situation it is used in. Combat is filled with moral compromises. We spend a lot of money figuring out how to kill and wound people and we have justified civilian casualties by merely calling them collateral damages. War is a very dirty business no matter how much we try to civilize it.

Water boarding is torture. So is sitting in a cold room in an uncomfortable chair for 12 hours, or being forced to listen to terrible sounds at high volume or sleep deprivation. Interrogations have used all of these methods. These are more humane than severe beatings, broken bones or internet broadcast beheadings. The salient point is a question of degree.

Debating their effectiveness is also somewhat irrelevant. If you even consider effectiveness as an issue then I must assume you have come to grips with the moral compromise involved.

Once we get beyond the moralizing and name calling then we must address the nature of the act, and that is exactly what Judea Pearl calls for in “We Need a New Legal Regime to Fight the War on Terror ” in the Wall Street Journal. Read his excellent article here. Judea Pearl is the father of Daniel Pearl, an American journalist, decapitated by Muslim terrorists for being an American and a Jew.

What Bush faced was the reality that global terrorists groups are a problem that does not fit with the solutions at hand. Bill Clinton tried treating the problems as a criminal act and while it seemed a rational idea at the time, it clearly was ineffective. Yet the groups that threaten us do not fit within the definitions of any army ruled by the Geneva conventions.

We may not like the answers, especially in light of eight years without another successful attack, but Bush did ask the question. He may have approved a level of torture, but it was not without examining legal issues and involving Congress in the debate. While his critics are not known for subtlety, his focus, however misguided it seems now, was to protect the country.

The debate on the degree and appropriateness of torture needs to be held, though it may never be decided. Like any moral compromise it is hard to contain. But our potential prosecution of many involved is damaging to our war effort. And it is a war even if the president prefers to label it an “overseas contingency operation”.

It is easier to blame and prosecute than it is to address the issue that Judea Pearl so clearly says we must. We must clarify and classify global terrorism as a crime distinct from an act of war and a mere criminal act. This is not easy and can open up entirely new areas of abuse, but it is the right course to take.

Those who made and must continue to make the difficult decisions to protect us, morally compromised or not, effective or not, deserve no less.