These are the words of George Washington:
“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” - George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775
I just want to know when we as a nation, decided that the values put forth by the "father of our country" became in-operative?
There are many people in the US that love to expound on the virtues of our founding fathers, until the rubber meets the road. Then it's a different story, and the argument is made that if Washington was around today, he'd think differently despite the fact that there is no evidence to demonstrate that, and only idle supposition to justify blood-lust. It seems to me that this demonstrates how difficult it is to hold values that are never demonstrable, but at the same time appeal to a higher morality than many are capable of living up to. Republicans, especially conservatives ( is there a difference?) are famous for never compromising the principles that they can't demonstrate as true.
Torture is barbaric and immoral, no matter who is doing it. The problem that civilized people have is that they try to rationally justify something that they know is immoral. So we use consequential morality as the justification for acting immorally rather than catagorical morality that tells us...this is wrong regardless of the conditions. That makes us feel better when we become as barbaric as those who are willing to inflict pain on us.
Consequential morality stems from utilitarianism. It's a criteria that tells us how we should respond to any situation. That's the "basis" that informs us and guides our actions. But a criteria cannot be its own criteria. Even assuming you have a criteria you think is adequate, how did you determine that? Are you responsible for that judgment, or is the criteria responsible? And if it's the criteria, then what is the authority behind it? If we claim a basis gives us morals, we then are making the implicit claim that morals require bases. But then it is plainly obvious our own basis lacks a basis, as it cannot be its own basis. So what is the basis for utilitarianism in the first place, and what demonstrates that as moral let alone true?
The most glaring weakness of utilitarianism, many argue, is that it fails to respect individual rights. By caring only about the sum of satisfactions, it can run roughshod over individual people. For the utilitarian, individuals matter, but only in the sense that each person’s preferences should be counted along with everyone else’s. But this means that the utilitarian logic, if consistently applied, could sanction ways of treating persons that violate what we think of as fundamental norms of decency.
Is torture ever justified?
The question arises in contemporary debates about whether torture is ever justified in the interrogation of suspected terrorists. Consider the ticking time bomb scenario: Imagine that you are the head of the local CIA branch. You capture a terrorist suspect who you believe has information about a nuclear device set to go off in Manhattan later the same day. In fact, you have reason to suspect that he planted the bomb himself. As the clock ticks down, he refuses to admit to being a terrorist or to divulge the bomb’s location. Would it be right to torture him until he tells you where the bomb is and how to disarm it?
The argument for doing so begins with a utilitarian calculation. Torture inflicts pain on the suspect, greatly reducing his happiness or utility. But thousands of innocent lives will be lost if the bomb explodes. So you might argue, on utilitarian grounds, that it’s morally justified to inflict intense pain on one person if doing so will prevent death and suffering on a massive scale. Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s argument that the use of harsh interrogation techniques against suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists helped avert another terrorist attack on the United States rests on this utilitarian logic.
Some people reject torture on principle. They believe that it violates human rights and fails to respect the intrinsic dignity of human beings. Their case against torture does not depend on utilitarian considerations. They argue that human rights and human dignity have a moral basis that lies beyond utility. If they are right, then Bentham’s Utilitarian philosophy is wrong.
On the face of it, the ticking time bomb scenario seems to support Bentham’s side of the argument. Numbers do seem to make a moral difference. So is morality a formula based on some calculus?
What if thousands of innocent lives are at stake, as in the ticking time bomb scenario? What if hundreds of thousands of lives were at risk? The utilitarian would argue that, at a certain point, even the most ardent advocate of human rights would have a hard time insisting it is morally preferable to let vast numbers of innocent people die than to torture a single terrorist suspect who may know where the bomb is hidden.
As a test of utilitarian moral reasoning, however, the ticking time bomb case is misleading. It purports to prove that numbers count, so that if enough lives are at stake, we should be willing to override our scruples about dignity and rights. And if that is true, then morality is about calculating costs and benefits after all. So...morality is determined through calculus. It's all about numbers.
But the torture scenario does not show that the prospect of saving many lives justifes inflicting severe pain on one innocent person. Re-call that the person being tortured to save all those lives is a suspected terrorist, in fact the person we believe may have planted the bomb. The moral force of the case for torturing him depends heavily on the assumption that he is in some way responsible for creating the danger we now seek to avert. Or if he is not responsible for this bomb, we assume he has committed other terrible acts that make him deserving of harsh treatment. The moral intuitions at work in the ticking time bomb case are not only about costs and benefits, but also about the non-utilitarian idea that terrorists are bad people who deserve to be punished.
We can see this more clearly if we alter the scenario to remove any element of presumed guilt. Suppose the only way to induce the terrorist suspect to talk is to torture his young daughter (who has no knowledge of her father’s nefarious activities). Would it be morally permissible to do so? I suspect that even a hardened utilitarian would flinch at the notion. But this version of the torture scenario offers a truer test of the utilitarian principle. It sets aside the intuition that the terrorist deserves to be punished anyhow (regardless of the valuable information we hope to extract), and forces us to assess the utilitarian calculus on its own. If using torture to prevent the bomb from going off is accepted, then who gets tortured is irrelevant. All that matters is that if doing it prevents the bomb from going off and torturing somebody...anybody achieves that end, then it is morally acceptable.
So now rather than torturing a hardened terrorist until he tells us what we want to know, we instead set his 6 year old daughter in front of him and begin to torture her right before his eyes. If torture will produce the results then who gets tortured doesn't matter. The ends justify the means. We stand a much better chance of getting the information we need by torturing his daughter in front of him, then hoping that he'll give in to our "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.
The question now becomes more simple and put into sharper focus. Is torture justified in order to save the lives of thousands? That question is not dependent on who gets tortured. What matters is whether torture is justified in preventing the bomb from going off. And if it is, then Cheney and all the others should be willing to admit publically that they'd knowingly and willingly torture an innocent child if need be to get the results they are after.