Moral relativism
Category rants
<disclaimer>
If you're hoping for technical content, please come back later (or browse the archives). In the meantime, I just want to get something off my chest.
</disclaimer>
I often joke that the main reason I'm a liberal is that I don't want to feel like a jackass in 20 or 30 years. It's generally us crazy liberals who spout nonsense like, "women should be allowed to vote"... "black people should be able to use the same drinking fountains as white people"... "the earth orbits the sun". You know, nonsense. The conservatives remind us that this is the way it's always been, some things just can't change, anything else is foolish if not downright heretical. And a future generation looks back at those people and shakes their collective head, wondering how they could have been so stubborn and so ignorant. What the history books tend to overlook is that, at the time, each of those ideas did sound bizarre. Hundreds of years later, it's the geocentrists who seem crazy, but when that's all you've ever known, heliocentrism is crazy. But (as we eventually learned) that doesn't make it wrong.
So, as a liberal, I've grown accustomed to hearing fellow liberals accused by conservative pundits and commentators of moral relativism based on the assumption that a progressive approach to society and government implies a fundamental lack of unwavering guiding principles (say, for example, equality and liberty). While any given departure from conventional wisdom may eventually be proven to have been visionary, I can understand why it may appear to reflect an absence of belief in a solid distinction between "right" and "wrong". Of late, however, I've seen far more relativism from the conservative camp than from the liberals - particularly this gruesome example, from none other than US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:
I was sick to my stomach when I read that. So... it's "wrong" unless it works? It's "wrong" unless we're in danger? Coward. The implication is that, the greater (or closer) the threat, the greater the pain threshold before we consider our actions to be torture. That is the very mindset that allows totalitarian governments to come to power: it's okay for a government to do bad things to prevent a worse thing. Once the populace is willing to swallow that argument, all a despot must do is produce an enemy, and the government's actions - no matter how vile - are tolerated, even venerated... until it's overthrown and future generations shake their heads in disbelief.
I'm definitely not in the "Blame America First" camp (whatever that is), but if we're not careful, history will be in the "Blame America Eventually" camp. We've been told that "the United States does not torture". End of story. But the CIA has now admitted that waterboarding has been used to interrogate suspects. Waterboarding is torture. It was one of the techniques used by the Spanish Inquisition... oh, and we've tried and even executed others for using the technique... so, yeah, I'm pretty sure it's torture. But our new Attorney General can't admit it's torture, because we don't torture. So if we don't torture, but we've waterboarded detainees, then, logically, waterboarding isn't torture.
Bullshit.
Truth is, we're a country that's watched too many movies, and too many episodes of "24". How many times have you seen a movie where the protagonist behaves like a total prick, but you're still rooting for him anyway, because in the context and presentation of the plot, he's the "good guy"? What makes somebody the "good guy" anyway? Moral absolutism would dictate that the "good guy" is the one who does good things; the "bad guy" does bad things (Jesus said our "neighbor" is anyone who treats us like a neighbor). Moral relativism, on the other hand, allows for the possibility that the good guy can do bad things and remain the good guy because there's some circumstance that justifies the bad behavior. Moral relativism combined with patriotism suggests that any citizen is the good guy simply because he's one of ours, no matter his actions. Moral relativism combined with patriotism leads to nationalism, where citizens surrender their individual liberties and turn a blind eye to atrocities out of some narrow sense of duty to country and abdicate their duty to humanity. At some point the "good guy" becomes the "bad guy", and future generations shake their heads in disgust.
<disclaimer>
If you're hoping for technical content, please come back later (or browse the archives). In the meantime, I just want to get something off my chest.
</disclaimer>
I often joke that the main reason I'm a liberal is that I don't want to feel like a jackass in 20 or 30 years. It's generally us crazy liberals who spout nonsense like, "women should be allowed to vote"... "black people should be able to use the same drinking fountains as white people"... "the earth orbits the sun". You know, nonsense. The conservatives remind us that this is the way it's always been, some things just can't change, anything else is foolish if not downright heretical. And a future generation looks back at those people and shakes their collective head, wondering how they could have been so stubborn and so ignorant. What the history books tend to overlook is that, at the time, each of those ideas did sound bizarre. Hundreds of years later, it's the geocentrists who seem crazy, but when that's all you've ever known, heliocentrism is crazy. But (as we eventually learned) that doesn't make it wrong.
So, as a liberal, I've grown accustomed to hearing fellow liberals accused by conservative pundits and commentators of moral relativism based on the assumption that a progressive approach to society and government implies a fundamental lack of unwavering guiding principles (say, for example, equality and liberty). While any given departure from conventional wisdom may eventually be proven to have been visionary, I can understand why it may appear to reflect an absence of belief in a solid distinction between "right" and "wrong". Of late, however, I've seen far more relativism from the conservative camp than from the liberals - particularly this gruesome example, from none other than US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:
You can't come in smugly and with great self satisfaction and say 'Oh it's torture, and therefore it's no good'... Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution? It would be absurd to say you couldn't do that. And once you acknowledge that, we're into a different game. How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be?
I was sick to my stomach when I read that. So... it's "wrong" unless it works? It's "wrong" unless we're in danger? Coward. The implication is that, the greater (or closer) the threat, the greater the pain threshold before we consider our actions to be torture. That is the very mindset that allows totalitarian governments to come to power: it's okay for a government to do bad things to prevent a worse thing. Once the populace is willing to swallow that argument, all a despot must do is produce an enemy, and the government's actions - no matter how vile - are tolerated, even venerated... until it's overthrown and future generations shake their heads in disbelief.
I'm definitely not in the "Blame America First" camp (whatever that is), but if we're not careful, history will be in the "Blame America Eventually" camp. We've been told that "the United States does not torture". End of story. But the CIA has now admitted that waterboarding has been used to interrogate suspects. Waterboarding is torture. It was one of the techniques used by the Spanish Inquisition... oh, and we've tried and even executed others for using the technique... so, yeah, I'm pretty sure it's torture. But our new Attorney General can't admit it's torture, because we don't torture. So if we don't torture, but we've waterboarded detainees, then, logically, waterboarding isn't torture.
Bullshit.
Truth is, we're a country that's watched too many movies, and too many episodes of "24". How many times have you seen a movie where the protagonist behaves like a total prick, but you're still rooting for him anyway, because in the context and presentation of the plot, he's the "good guy"? What makes somebody the "good guy" anyway? Moral absolutism would dictate that the "good guy" is the one who does good things; the "bad guy" does bad things (Jesus said our "neighbor" is anyone who treats us like a neighbor). Moral relativism, on the other hand, allows for the possibility that the good guy can do bad things and remain the good guy because there's some circumstance that justifies the bad behavior. Moral relativism combined with patriotism suggests that any citizen is the good guy simply because he's one of ours, no matter his actions. Moral relativism combined with patriotism leads to nationalism, where citizens surrender their individual liberties and turn a blind eye to atrocities out of some narrow sense of duty to country and abdicate their duty to humanity. At some point the "good guy" becomes the "bad guy", and future generations shake their heads in disgust.
Comments
Posted by mark hughes At 12:05:53 PM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
As for Iraq, that's a whole different matter, which sadly has now clumped Afghanistan and Iraq into the same war in people's heads, when in fact they are two different things.
Posted by Carl Tyler At 07:22:44 AM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
Nathan, smacking someone in the face to find out who their dope dealer is, is a far cry from evoking a death response to get information. Following your logic perhaps we should allow our intelligence and military agencies to adopt the motto of the Khmer Rouge: "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss." They're already behaving according to it.
Posted by Charles Robinson At 11:04:46 AM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
It is society that decides what is right and what is wrong and what all the grey bits in between. Nathan makes the point that tax is pain, on the same continuum as a slap in the face. You can extend that continuum in both directions with anything you don't want to do and one end through having to work, tax, slavery, beatings, torture and killing at the other.
Society needs to make moral judgements about what it does and does not accept. Western Europe has decided that the death sentence is not acceptable, the US thinks differently. If the US wants to decide as a society that torture is an acceptable form of interrogation then it should do so. It could even decide what forms of torture are acceptable and under what conditions. What it shouldn't do is decide that torture is not acceptable, do it anyway and then monkey about with the definition to get itself off the hook.
There is also no contradiction in deeming large chunks of behaviour unacceptable, even in a relativistic moral landscape. I believe that capital punishment is not acceptable in any circumstance. I think that torture is wrong in any circumstance. But absolutist points like these help us figure out what the rest of the moral landscape should look like.
@Nathan, you have an interesting point, re the pain of taxes, however you are missing one small piece. You don't volunteer to pay tax as an individual, but you do collectively, as a society. Often that means people will vote for other people to pay more, but that's by the by. Very few people think that no one should pay any tax, and the concept is as much fantasy as a communist idyll.
Posted by Kerr At 02:46:23 PM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Charles Robinson At 02:58:09 PM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
Oh, but I most certainly *do* see it as that. Which is why I experience both sadness and rage when I see some politician thumping his or her chest and talking about a "right to affordable health care" or "leaving no child behind." My head is filled with visions of Al Pacino at the end of Scarface...
Are joo ready? Here comes de PAIN!!!
@25 - Ah, yes, Plato. Advocate of a society that went beyond waterboarding all the way to simply forcing a man to drink poison. Truly a moral pillar to be admired.
And I have read the classical philosophers, Rich. May I recommend Bastiat, Paine, von Mises and Nozick in return?
@26 - There is a substantial and dramatic difference between Legislation and The Law. Aren't you from the UK -- a nation with a case study history in the difference between evolutionary common law and legislative fiat?
"Any system of government is just the least worst solution that anyone can get enough people to accept."
What a lofty goal, sir! If that is indeed the truth, then whatever we have at the moment is the least worst solution available, and this conversation is moot. Government is like the tides: it merely is.
"What are you trying to get at?"
That acting all shocked and outraged because someone inflicted pain on a prisoner in the name of saving lives is logically inconsistent with advocating other legislative programs. If you think it's wrong to waterboard a terror suspect, why don't you think it's wrong to compel a mother to send her child into the local version of Guantanamo everyday and pay for it, too!
Human beings are not telepathic. They are not even empathic. It is impossible to determine from external empiricism whether the cost/benefit of any particular action is of net good or net bad for a particular person. The only thing we can know is that if the person chooses the thing for themselves, then THEY BELIEVE at the time that it's a net good. And if they didn't choose it, then THEY BELIEVED at the time that it was a net bad.
So whenever you force someone to do something that they would not have freely chosen on their own, you are inflicting upon them something that THEY BELIEVE is a net bad.
This is the nature of all government: if you assume that the legislative actions of a government are not born out of simple evil, then they must be born out of the premise that the government knows what is good for you better than you do. And when you advocate the use of government to force people to do something, you are saying "they don't know what's good for them, but I do. So I'll make them do it."
It doesn't matter if what you think is good for other people is prayer in schools or free abortions on demand -- your premise is that some people are incapable of choosing what's best for them, and therefore you get to make them do what YOU think is right instead.
I am of the belief that anyone who holds to that premise is already wrong. So they sure as hell can't justify telling me what's right for me.
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 07:22:22 AM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
The reason taxes are not purchases is not because they are imposed on us, but rather because we pay them collectively, since no one person could afford a military or a road construction or whatever.
@Mark - Your statistics are crap. If the top 1% have 27% more relative wealth than they did, the fact that they pay 2% more in taxes is hardly something to feel sorry for them about.
Posted by Ben Langhinrichs At 05:38:00 PM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
Please explain to me how this "society" volunteers for things. I'm interested in your explanation on how collective decision making is achieved.
"Often that means people will vote for other people to pay more, but that's by the by."
So you just wave that off? Well, some people vote for other people to pay more. Some people vote for other people to not be allowed to get married. Some people vote to be allowed to own other people. It's all by the by, I guess.
"Very few people think that no one should pay any tax, and the concept is as much fantasy as a communist idyll."
Very few people once believed the earth was round. So thank you for that extremely useful observation.
@18 - Tim didn't JUST say waterboarding was wrong. He said it was wrong for Scalia to apply a standard of how much pain is caused vs. how much good is achieved to decide whether something is moral.
The implication is that, the greater (or closer) the threat, the greater the pain threshold before we consider our actions to be torture. That is the very mindset that allows totalitarian governments to come to power: it's okay for a government to do bad things to prevent a worse thing.
That is the very mindset that allows ANY government to come to power. All a government does is decide whether a given threat is important enough to inflict pain to achieve it. All government actions are paid for by taxes and enforced by threat of incarceration or injury -- and these things inflict pain. Whether the threat is terrorists, child pornographers, inadequate clean water supply, an uneducated public, the erosion of family values, or a lack of affordable health care -- these are all "threats" that are addressed by inflicting pain on some group of people.
Just because they don't do it in a dark room in a basement at Langley doesn't mean it isn't painful.
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 04:44:45 PM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
of course we should punish them, how dare they make that much money, they must be evil and awful people! I hate them, i loath them, i want thier money taken from them and given to me or poor people! Who cares how hard they worked, what they overcame, this is America and it is just not right to be successfull and for others not to be.
How about we stop keeping score in football games, its not fair that people have to loose. Maybe the Patriots should be made to give opponents a 21 point lead.
How long do you think the top 25 percent of tax payers are going to continue to bust thier ass to succeed if thier reward is taken from them? How many doctors would we have if they made a school teachers salary?
Posted by mark hughes At 06:03:13 PM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
We will never reform the tax system, ie. Fair tax, 10% accros the board, no deductions because the tax code is congreses way to redistribute wealth and have power in america. They will never give us the choice, just like term limits
Also as soon as more people do not pay taxes than people who pay taxes things will never change.
86% of all income taxes are paid by the top 25 percent of income earners.
the top 50% pay 97% of all income taxes.
the top 1% pay 39% of all income taxes, up two percent from when Bush took office, i thought only the rich got tax breaks, yet they are paying more.
Posted by Mark HUghes At 05:23:22 PM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
Even if a person would take the three minutes of waterboarding over losing his or her job (and from what I have heard, they might take that deal once but only because they don't know what it is really like), how is that possibly relevant? Do you think that the three cases of waterboarding that have been admitted to brought jobs? Of course not. Might the Kyoto Accords lose jobs? Maybe, although that is an open question, but democratic governments have to make decisions that attempt to maximize the overall benefits to the majority without tromping on the rights of the minority all the time. Moral rules help in that process, they don't hurt. A belief that anything is allowed if it might be justifiable in some circumstance is a fairly sure path to dictatorship and lawlessness, as it is easy to pose the "But what if there were a nuclear bomb about to go off and destroy New York and raping that small child would prevent it?" kind of question. The answer is, the behavior is still wrong.
Posted by Ben Langhinrichs At 11:08:18 AM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
Jeez, Ben. No one person could afford MS Windows. No one person could afford a Boeing 777. No one person could afford Disney World. I very much doubt anyone person could afford Whole Foods -- and yet it thrives as a means of national distribution of high quality food items. Still, there are no laws forcing me to shop there.
We make collective purchases all the time. It's called a "market." Collecting individual contributions for a group outcome is what every successful business on the planet does.
Okay, perhaps you want to qualify "but with taxes there's no profit motive." Fine. The American Cancer Society has no profit motive. The Sierra Club, The United Way, The Salvation Army, The Red Cross -- all do enormous amounts of good work every day, with a massive collective contribution to ensure their future success.
And yet, I don't get arrested if I fail to put money in the jar at the convenience store.
Imagine that... millions of people making a collective choice to do something, BY CHOICE!
Sure does clear up that moral gray area, doesn't it?
"I don't have a problem paying taxes. I vote for them regularly in school levies and so forth."
Why do you have to vote for someone to impose them on you? If you're so eager, why don't you just go down to the school and write a check?
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 10:32:27 PM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
I don't think accepting torture into the legislative framework is inconsistent with any other legislative program. That doesn't mean that I think it is right. I don't think capital punishment is right, but it is a part of the US legal framework and is so because society in the US believes it should be.
"If you think it's wrong to waterboard a terror suspect, why don't you think it's wrong to compel a mother to send her child into the local version of Guantanamo everyday and pay for it, too!"
It's about balancing the rights of an individual against the rights of others. I should have the right do do anything I want to do. You should have the right to do anything you want to do. I might want to punch you in the face, but your right not to be punched in the face outweighs that. In my opinion my right to be free of torture outweighs *any* right of another individual or society at large. Assuming "local version of Guantanamo" is school, then it comes down to a fairly complex set of interdependent rights of individuals and society at large, that ends up with that being ok.
"So whenever you force someone to do something that they would not have freely chosen on their own, you are inflicting upon them something that THEY BELIEVE is a net bad."
This is true.
"if you assume that the legislative actions of a government are not born out of simple evil, then they must be born out of the premise that the government knows what is good for you better than you do."
This is a false dilemma. I believe that societies implement governments as a mechanism to enforce the will of the society as best as possible. This is far from perfect. Government does not "know better" what is better for the individual. It doesn't even try. I woud be better off individualy if I didn't pay tax. However if no one paid tax, that would be a problem. It tries to make society at large better, which is often not good for certain individuals.
"It doesn't matter if what you think is good for other people is prayer in schools or free abortions on demand -- your premise is that some people are incapable of choosing what's best for them, and therefore you get to make them do what YOU think is right instead."
That's not my premise. Society at large and by extension the governments are extremely powerful and as such need to be careful not to throw their weight around too much. When they do they the society brakes apart and the government becomes corrupt. Again this comes down to balancing the rights of an individual against the rights of society, not about what is best for an individual.
Posted by Kerr At 12:22:37 PM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
The implication is that, the greater (or closer) the threat, the greater the pain threshold before we consider our actions to be torture. -- Tim
The former is an example of the latter. QED.
@29 - Nonsense. Tim's claim is that it's wrong to consider inflicting pain okay if it's done in the name of some common good. My claim is that inflicting pain in the name of some common good is all government ever does. That's not jumping the shark. That's getting to the point.
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 10:58:44 AM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
Nathan, I'd like to hear more about your anarchist viewpoint. It's interesting. I'd like to ask you a question about this though:
All a government does is decide whether a given threat is important enough to inflict pain to achieve it. ...Whether the threat is terrorists, child pornographers, inadequate clean water supply, an uneducated public, the erosion of family values, or a lack of affordable health care -- these are all "threats" that are addressed by inflicting pain on some group of people.
...so my (admittedly rhetorical) question is, is the pain "inflicted" by collecting taxes in a different "category" than the pain inflicted by one human being torturing another?
You have to see it as one human being doing a horrible thing to another. You can't say "it's the government," because when you do that, you've made the *people* doing the torturing faceless, and therefore not responsible. You've turned them into machines, mere agents of the state. And at that point the whole game is lost.
I think about that scene at the end of Brazil, where the protagonist is being tortured, and he's lost his mind and so on. You see his friend, the man who has been torturing him, is right there, so close to him, so intimate with him, hovering over him like a dentist in his white lab coat. And you know it is wrong, just plain and simple. It is wrong because a *person* is doing it to another *person*. This isn't the matrix, where "the machines have you".
The same logic applies when you think about child molestation. There are laws that are very clear and that no one questions that exist to help protect children and to punish molesters, as there should be. This is the difference between a lawful society and one that breaks the law, even when times get tough. These questions of basic moral decency, if we cannot solve these, then we are in real trouble.
I think Tim's point about moral relativism is pretty darn good. He's talking about the fact that people have stopped thinking. Thinking involves being able to look at paradox. It involves being able to see irony. To hold two contraposing viewpoints in your mind at the same time without getting confused. He's found the paradox inherent in rigid thinking, a paradox that today's "conservative" thinkers cannot see, because they are blind. Unfortunately this blindness afflicts our entire country. A country that was really seeing, was really observing, would never have fallen for the lies that led up to us being in Iraq right now. A country that was seeing would never have allowed the things that are going on in Guantanamo to continue.
Also, Scalia is one scary idiot. Sheesh that guy gives me the fucking creeps.
Posted by jonvon At 11:06:28 PM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 11:59:07 AM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
"Please explain to me how this "society" volunteers for things. I'm interested in your explanation on how collective decision making is achieved."
It is emergent from how people live their lives. Over time this has been codified into law. When codified law is at odds with what people believe to be the way things should be, direct action is taken to change that situation. Any system of government is just the least worst solution that anyone can get enough people to accept.
Come on Nathan, your a smart guy. What are you trying to get at?
"Very few people once believed the earth was round. So thank you for that extremely useful observation."
The topology of the earth can be determined by empirical observation. It doesn't matter if people vote for a flat earth or believe in a flat earth. It is independent of society.
A system of government is a product of society, and so is a system of taxation.
So thank you for that extremely useful observation.
Posted by Kerr At 05:53:04 AM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
I guess the real question for everyone here is what should the job of the government be? What should they take care of and what should they let individuals take care of?
i think the constitution is the single greatest document in the world written by man. Some where along the way we started social programs. I do think some are good as long as they help people improve,(insert hand up not hand out, teach a man to fish etc.) Where does the responsibilty of the society end and the responsibility of the individual begin? This is the question i strugle with. I wish to see more people take responsibility for thier lives and stop feeling entitled of others to take care of them, because they deserve it. Dont get me wrong, some poeple do genually need help, and i want them to get it. I give to my Church and to charities to help them. I think they are better siuted to help them than the government.
What do you all think is the role of the government? Where does personal responsibilty begin and the societies end?
i know this post was about torture which i am not a fan of, though we live in a world where might equals right whether we like it or not. I personally belive this needs to be defined by congress in great detail what is right and wrong, so that everyone can debate this and there is a vote.
Posted by Mark Hughes At 08:54:44 AM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
no, it's deeper than that. it is simply about the inability of our leaders to see the simple truth, that techniques like water boarding are morally reprehensible and should never, ever be done in any circumstance. period.
you can talk about "pain" all you like, but there is a vast difference in quality between torture and paying taxes. that is just a simple fact. my paying taxes will not cause my daughter to seek out therapy because her father was a shattered, wrecked soul. i might be a wreck because of other things, but taxataion? no, that is the least of my worries. it might cause YOU to lose sleep at night, it might cause you to, i don't know, hole up in the bathroom night after night while you bite your nails. it might cause you to roam the woods with a gun, looking for enemies. who knows? but paying taxes doesn't do me that way. not even a little bit.
i do care what happens with the money. i don't want it spent on illegal wars, for instance. and i sure as hell don't want the government *borrowing* the money to go to an illegal, immoral war. that's just plain nuts. it's almost as nuts as engaging in acts of torture. but i do think roads and schools and prisons and police and firefighters are public goods that should be paid for by the public.
Posted by jonvon At 10:08:39 AM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
Nathan, you don't have to ask us. Just ask a few renowned philosophers. For example, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. See { Link }
Posted by Richard Schwartz At 11:57:48 PM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
Tim, good job for bringing this up.
Posted by Charles Robinson At 09:36:56 AM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
My first comment is about the "only 3 cases of torture" statements. The government certainly has options and methods which should not be tried until lesser methods have been exhausted. That does not necessarily mean that those methods should never be used, just that they are not appropriate for most situations. Invading a county should not be done until other economic and political tools have been employed. Extreme interrogation methods should not be employed until other options have been pursued.
Now let me say that I'm hoping that most everyone agrees that torture should not be sanctioned and that the US government should take the high road to clearly state what we believe and then acting by what we say. Evidently there is still some debate about whether waterboarding would be defined as "torture" and thus whether it is right or wrong. Today's headlines indicate some clarification has finally been provided.
{ Link }
- "senior Justice Department official said laws and other restrictions to interrogation methods limits have eliminated waterboarding from what is now legally allowed" -
I think that it is good that this extreme method has been removed from the official US methods and that this has been communicated to the world. I don't know how well this matches Geneva Convention definitions. /Sorry another rabbit that I don't have time to chase./
Every law relies on some concept of moral authority. That authority may be the Constitution, the Bible, or something as hard to pin down as a society's consensus of what is right and what is wrong. General definitions of "conservative" and "liberal" rest on the degree to which one wishes to preserve or change the status quo. An individual's position is largely shaped by whether they believe that retaining existing standards is better than changing things. Another big thing that will influence your conservative/liberal position include whether you trust the people proposing the changes. Is "the establishment" a stick in the mud or are those rallying for change "radicals"? Ever heard "never trust anyone over 30"? Obviously there are extremes to both positions. Some people are willing to experiment, throwing out everything with the hope that anything must be better than what we currently have. Others are unwilling to change anything fearing the sky falling. Generally both extremes is wrong, but that doesn't mean that right in the middle is necessarily best either.
Posted by ConservativeDJ At 01:26:57 PM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Pops At 05:09:13 PM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
but, though i *think* i find some merit in what you are saying, i find your argument to be overly intellectual. not enough visceral in there for me. your image of al pacino is, well, thin. i don't find your balls or your guts there. i don't see you backed against the wall in an alley, defending your very life, against the forces of Universal Healthcare.
your ultimate conclusion seems to be, throw out all government, throw out all law. am i reading that correctly? your contention seems to rest on some high bar of, hm, i'm not sure, there is some kind of ethic or ideal you are reaching toward - pure laissez-faire capitalism perhaps? again, i don't have my head fully around what you mean by anarchism. whatever that ethic IS, it seems to point to the existence of some higher law. like the point above Foucault's pendulum (did you ever read Eco's novel? i'll have to see if i can find the relevant quote).
the irony here is that what we are talking about is that the country has lost its ability to adhere to the rule of law which it had, supposedly, held to until now. we have indeed descended into an anarchy of the worst kind, where those who have the most power are no longer using it, or even pretending to use it, in the context of justice.
the mystical? rational? point around which your anarchy revolves is, i think, the same spring from which the rule of law is born.
Posted by jonvon At 04:24:02 PM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
nathan! you are a one man tour de force of ideas and ideals, a whirling dervish, a firestorm! i am constantly amazed at the things you have spent time carefully and passionately thinking about. and in this thread i have seen a depth in you that frankly, i didn't know was there, because i suppose, i don't know you as well as i'd like to.
Posted by jonvon At 09:35:07 AM On 02/15/2008 | - Website - |
"I believe that societies implement governments as a mechanism to enforce the will of the society as best as possible."
You believe that there's such a thing as a will of society. It really would jump the shark to have a conversation on epistemology here. Suffice to say that you think that "social will" and "social choice" are valid concepts. I think they less real than unicorns and fairy dust.
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 03:13:10 PM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
Who cares what this supreme court says... We should start working on teaching our kids what to put in the next constitution, so when in a few generations when the revolution starts they do it better... not that they will get it right either.
Posted by Steve R At 12:22:55 PM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
LOL
Well, I'm sure my unicorns will be happy in your anarchist utopia
Posted by Kerr At 04:47:01 PM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
You've taken the discussion on a completely unrelated tangent. You have a point. I get it. I (and apparently many others) just don't think it applies to the original topic. In your mind it may be the same, but I think everyone else has made it clear they disagree. Therefore, I think this jumped the shark. Now it's just funny to watch.
Posted by Charles Robinson At 11:28:50 AM On 02/14/2008 | - Website - |
I think it's slightly more accurate to put it this way: That our elected and appointed leaders in the executive branch have, after months and months of obstructions, obfuscations and false denials, finally been forced to admit three cases of waterboarding because our representatives in the legislature, the press, and public opinion wouldn't let them off the hook. And more importantly, because the military commission trials will apparently be moving forward before elections, and because electoral strategy dictates that it's better for it to come out now -- before the trials inevitably expose the administration for the torturing liars that they are.
But, oh yeah... They're lying torturers for us, right? For our protection.
If just doing it three times for our protection makes it all ok, then why haven't they done it 50 times? Or 500? Surely, there are lots of threats out there. They never did it to Saddam. Why not? He was such a threat we needed to launch a massive multi-year military operation to get him. Surely we need all the protection we can get, right?
And if just doing it three times makes it all ok, then why has the administration fought tooth and nail against revealing that we did it at all? If it's all perfectly legal and obviously a good thing, then why weren't they proudly proclaiming it from the rooftops?
Maybe because it is wrong, immoral and un-American, and they know it.
Posted by Richard Schwartz At 12:27:13 AM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
@Nathan - we already did. We just haven't ratified it yet. I can see advantages and disadvantages in doing so. At the moment, the primary argument against is an economic one, and I suspect that investing in "greener" energy could provide Kyoto compliance in a way that actually grows the economy... but as you know, economics isn't my strong suit.
Posted by Tim Tripcony At 11:08:50 PM On 02/12/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Ben Langhinrichs At 11:12:17 PM On 02/12/2008 | - Website - |
When people believe their actions will be judged by "the creator" or some other power greater than themselves, and they they believe that greater good will agree with what they did, people can do terrible things. I do not make claim that one religion is better than another, that one person is better than another and that someone who does not believe is any weaker spiritually than another. For Christians I think the saying is What would Jesus do? I wonder if Jesus would have stood their happily watching someone being water boarded? What happened to the teachings of turning the other cheek?
Even if there have only been 3 instances of water boarding, the point is I was raised in a country, and I believed I lived in a country where people were considered innocent until proven guilty. Have any of these people that were tortured been to trial?
In Britain's history we have many instances where we moved away from this belief and it took a while for us to again find our moral compass, and sadly it looks like recently we've also lost it.
Posted by Carl Tyler At 10:11:23 PM On 02/12/2008 | - Website - |
Am I the only one reading what Justice Scalia actually said? He said "Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution?"
There's no "hell yeah, let's waterboard anyone who's not a white, land-owning male!" He's saying that there is no specific prohibition against inflicting pain in pursue of some greater good.
Governments do this ALL THE TIME. What do you think progressive income tax is? It's an attempt to *inflict equivalent amounts of pain* across a group of citizens, in the name of social justice. Governments are, at best, zero-sum operations. In order to deliver some good with the right hand, they have to inflict some pain with the left.
Why did I ask Tim about the Kyoto Protocol? Because mandated carbon emission plans WILL cause people to lose jobs. It WILL cause prices on some goods to rise. It WILL increase process costs at the margin. If it didn't, it wouldn't need to be mandated -- people would just do it already voluntarily because it was the most profitable option.
So even if you accept that there's net new jobs and net lower prices out of greener technology (and I don't for the aforementioned reason,) it still doesn't change the fact that SOME plants are going to close, and some guy in the Rust Belt is going to have to go home to his family and tell them that after 25 years at the plant, they had to close the doors. And he doesn't know what he's going to do to put food on the table.
Ask that guy whether he'd rather get punched in the face but keep his job? Ask him whether he'd rather be waterboarded for 3 minutes but keep his job?
Before anyone claims I'm somehow in favor of protecting that guy's job at all costs -- I'm not. He might lose his job simply because he works for Enron and it turns out that he got screwed by some greedy SOB.
The point is that every decision a government makes must be enFORCEd in some way, and that means applying force to achieve it. And that means inflicting pain. Even if you have the best of intentions in your efforts, someone will be on the losing end of the deal and suffer for it. If someone WASN'T going to suffer -- if everyone would be better off -- then government wouldn't have to be involved!
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 07:19:34 AM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
Remember it was the liberal democrat party that opposed the civil rights era and did not want to pass those laws, Senator byrd was a grand master in the KKK for goodness sakes, so don't say conservatives are the racist, bigot, homophobes. It was southern democrats who wanted segregation!!
Aren't liberal cartoon artists making racist cartoons about Condelezza Rice and Clarence Thomas? Are there not articles from liberals asking if Obama is black enough?
the bottom line is we tend to put people in groups, and not all people in a group think or feel the same way about things.
Not all conservatives are racist the same way that all liberals aren't racist.
Not all Liberals despise Christianity, just like all conservatives are Christians,
but most importantly Not all Christians are good ones
I know you do not mean to say that all conservatives are bad and we don't want to help people and feed the poor and clothe the homeless, we probably have more in common than most people would have us believe. I think we have the same goals and believe the course to get there is different.
About the enviromental stuff, DDT was banned because it supposedly hurt some animals, but since millions in Africa have died of Malaria. A very delicate balance every action has a reaction..
Posted by Mark Hughes At 10:01:39 AM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
Apart from the current US Administrations attempts to justify their use of torture in dealing with the threat of terrorism,
I also ask what legal rights does the US and their allies have to invade two foreign countries (Afghanistan & Iraq), capture foreign nationals (both combatants and non-combatants), unlawfully transport these “suspected combatants” to other countries (e.g. Egypt), under CIA direction use foreign intelligence staff to extract information from these detainees under (real) torture, again unlawfully transport them to a legally ambiguous location (Guantánamo Bay) and to other secret prisons located in Europe, hold them without trial or charge for several years in military detainment camps, deny them their normal legal rights of appeal, deny them the legal protection of the US Constitution (if they are truly held on US soil), ignore the direction of a US Supreme court to charge them or release them for several years, introduce retrospective legislation to enable a US military court to be able to charge and convict these detainees for a crime that didn't exist at the time that their so-called crime was alleged to have been committed in a jurisdiction that the US has no legal right to impose laws within......
The question that all people need to ask themselves is, if this happened to you or one of your immediate family members, would it be right or wrong?
Regardless of your political leanings, this should not be a difficult question to answer.
So in my opinion, this wasn’t a fuzzy line that someone stepped over. This was a nuclear bomb that was set off in the back yard to clear away some ants. Sure the ant problem might go away, but we now have to deal with the big, ugly, glow-in-the-dark hole in our backyard!!!
Posted by Ian Randall At 01:30:45 AM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
Yes. But Scalia's point was that it's a difference in DEGREE, not in CATEGORY. You echo that by describing it as a "far cry" rather than "completely different."
@Ben - "so there couldn't possibly be different moral rules saying that one type of pain I might cause him is any different than another, right?"
Of course there is. A very crucial one. Your employer *CHOOSES* to pay you. He does not *CHOOSE* to have his car stolen. (By definition -- if it was voluntary, he'd merely be loaning you the car.)
I agree 100% that inflicting pain involuntarily is a moral wrong. That's categorical. And the fact that it's categorical is why I'm an anarchist instead of a liberal. Inflicting involuntary pain is ALL GOVERNMENTS DO.
You don't pay taxes because you think you're getting equivalent value in exchange. If you did, they wouldn't be taxes. They would just be purchases, like food in the grocery store (or paying an employee for the value they create.) You pay taxes because if you don't, you'll be subjected to pain, whether emotional (stress of an investigation,) financial (seizure of assets) or physical (jailed and subject to the rape penalty.)
I'm not excusing torture. Far from it. I think it's wrong. But Tim's point is about moral relativism. So my question is: if it's so obviously morally wrong to subject someone to waterboarding, why not come out in favor of, say, mandatory public schooling? Or drug prohibition? There's WAY MORE involuntary pain caused by those policies than ever has been at Gitmo.
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 12:47:26 PM On 02/13/2008 | - Website - |
We're in a messy situation here - especially since on top of 9/11 the Administration has inherited Bush 41's kow-towing to the UN in not proceeding to Baghdad to depose Hussein (heck, even Ron Paul admits this failure!) as well as inheriting an already-established Iraq Policy by Clinton: { Link }
@Carl - why focus on just a couple of specific examples of so-called Christians completely getting their faith wrong and doing things that are completely foreign to the gospel of love that Christ brought. I'm sure you can come up with some other historical examples.
(By the way, anyone who thinks that Evangelicals want a Theocracy is completely misinformed and, IMHO, has some other type of agenda.)
Posted by Chris Whisonant At 09:25:07 PM On 02/12/2008 | - Website - |
No.
Brilliantly said.
Posted by Richard Schwartz At 08:24:47 PM On 02/12/2008 | - Website - |
Pretty soon we will have a test to see if someone is a terrorist. We will throw them in water, if they drown, then in fact they were not a terrorist but we are all better off knowing that for sure. If they should survive then they are indeed a terrorist, so we should hang them, torture them, whatever we need to do.
We like to think we've come along way since the crusades, Salem Witch hunts and other terrible times in history, but really we haven't.
Posted by Carl Tyler At 08:27:25 PM On 02/12/2008 | - Website - |
Obviously, you disagree with this position. So here's a question: do you think the US should sign the Kyoto Protocol?
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 10:49:57 PM On 02/12/2008 | - Website - |