Torture and Walzer's Sliding Scale

So here's a thought that occurred to me recently. Chapter sixteen of Michael Walzer's excellent Just and Unjust Wars offers the argument that violations of just conduct in war (jus in bello) have been justified in some historical circumstances where the moral emergency of losing was sufficiently great.

His first example of this is the bombing of Dresden. In this case, because the threat of Nazism's victory constituted a supreme moral catastrophe, and because the British seemed genuinely in danger of losing the war at that moment, the British bomber command was justified in destroying Dresden in spite of the fact that the attack's intent was to terrorize the civilian population and restore British war morale. Walzer suggests that this justification is not absolute, but that there is a "sliding scale" that can justify normally prohibited actions (bombing civilians) when the moral emergency represented by losing the war is sufficiently high.

Walzer's contrast case is Hiroshima. At that point in the war, Japan's navy was essentially non-existent and her ground forces had been beaten back to their home islands. Walzer argues that dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima was not justified in the way that bombing Dresden was because America was in no danger of losing the war at that moment. (I realize that there are lots of reasons why we dropped atomic weapons on Hiroshima, and I think the most compelling ones are utilitarian arguments based on casualties to the Japanese had we invaded their mainland. However, I wish to bracket these other reasons, and for the purposes of this essay assume that civilian non-combatant immunity is sufficient to overrule them.) Walzer claims that we owed the Japanese an experiment in diplomacy given our position in the war in 1945, and that dropping the bomb was not the right thing to do.

Now we come to an interesting question. Suppose that Walzer's right. If the test case is not bombing civilians in wartime, but torturing terrorists who know the location of a weapon of mass destruction, can Walzer's sliding scale be used to justify such actions? Both are thought to be violations of jus in bello, and I can imagine cases in which there might be imminent threat and supreme moral emergency. Suppose that we knew there was a nuclear device disguised as a vending machine somewhere in Washington D.C., and that we had a man in custody who knew its location. If the weapon goes off, then all at once we lose the White House, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institute, effectively decapitating our country. (This is not an exhaustive list of what would be lost, and we might have the upside of losing a few special interest lobbies, but let this case stand as a sufficient example of moral emergency.) In this case, can we make the claim from this Walzerian argument that torturing the prisoner is morally justified?

I can think of at least two objections. The first is that this is a veiled utilitarian argument, and so just losing the lives of a few people would be enough for Walzer's argument, but not enough for our intuitions about torture. Against this charge, I suggest that the aggregate value of life is problematic to policy-making mainly because to the extent that it's an absolute value, it can stall any policy making that has that value on each side of the equation, and simply aggregating that value can justify policies of majority tyranny that we historically reject. In other words, one need not be utilitarian to take the view that it may be the right thing to do to perform a little evil to prevent a lot of evil.

The second objection is that we might reject the reasoning in the last objection and take a strong Kantian line: we say that the value of life is absolute, and that moral responsibility for the chaos that ensues following the destruction of our government in the above example attaches exclusively to those who perpetrated the act. We should not engage in further wrongdoing. Against this objection I suggest that the objection seems less intuitively plausible the greater the degree of moral emergency one stacks on the other side. One's imagination can run wild here, but I won't turn this post into a Stephen King story; I simply reject the intuition as an intuition when the moral stakes are high enough.

So what say you all? Shall we torture to prevent moral catastrophe?

It has been silent here...

so what have you all been observing? Let's liven things up!

Reasons and Justification

I'm working on a paper and would like some input on an argument I'm putting together.

The thought is basically this:
If reasons (for action) are supposed to be the kinds of things that can/do justify actions, and we adopt an instrumental model of reasons that grounds all of our reasons in our desires/interests/ends/what-have-you, then do we need to craft an argument for why our desires/interests/ends/what-have-you are themselves justified? I'm working from an analogy from epistemology. If we take a foundationalist approach to knowledge, then the "foundation" needs itself to be justified in order to confer justification on anything built upon it. The concept of "the given" (or variations thereof) is usually invoked to this end. If we're going to preserve the justificatory force (assuming we want to - I'm just assuming this for the moment) of our reasons for action, then, do we need to make a similar case for the justification of our desires if we're going to preserve the thought that instrumental reasons are justifying reasons?

Here's a nice 'diagram' of the question:

Simplified Model of Instrumental Reasons:
Desires (taken as basic) for X -----> Instrumental reasoning says Y is a good/efficient/whatever way to achieve X ----> Reason for agent to Y

Simplified Model of Foundationalism:
"The given" (whatever it is) -----> "Good" reasoning says "the given" entails a particular proposition P ----> Reason for agent to believe P.

The typical problem for foundationalist epistemology is that "the given" stands itself in need of justification, or stands in need of an argument saying why "the given" (whatever it is) is justified if its really going to give justifying reasons for the agent to believe P. What I'm wondering is whether or not we need a similar argument in the case of instrumental reasons is even needed (whether or not we think such an argument is possible - I happen to think it might not be, but thats not the issue at hand) if we're going to consider reasons for action as being justifying reasons. In the end my worry is this: if we do need such an argument to preserve the justificatory force of reasons for action, AND if one cannot be given - say, for instance, that desires are just not the kinds of things that can be justified or unjustified, or are not the kinds of things that can be apt or inapt - then are we just left in the position of being unable to say that our actions are ever justified/unjustified at all? Just as with the epistemological problem, if the "foundation" is not justified (whether that is taken to mean unjustified or just a-justified), then is the Reason at the end also not possessed of any justificatory force too?

Thanks for your help!

A Serious Ethical Dilemma that Needs Everyone's Attention IMMEDIATELY

Just kidding, Merry Christmas, everyone.

Andrew Napolitano Interview

Here is the excerpted interview we did with Andrew Napolitano.

Visit our website for more. Or check out our ITunes feed. (And subscribe!)

the distinction between ethics and aesthetics

I'm writing a paper on attempts to make the distinction between ethical judgments and aesthetics judgments and would be interested to hear why people think there is a distinction and how they make that distinction.

Though this might sound simple its actually a lot harder than you might think.

edited to say I should have said ethical JUDGMENTS and moral JUDGMENTS not just ethics v art

Abortion

As most of you know, Miles, Terrence, and I do a weekly radio show on 88.1 FM. We talk politics, and often veer into more philosophical subjects. For instance, last week we chatted about abortion for a while. David (Faraci) called in and carried the conversation further, and Brandon tried to join in but we ran out of time. I think we will be talking abortion next week, so be sure to listen in and call in for that.

Here's the podcast. The abortion chat doesn't happen until about halfway through Hour 2.