The question of whether or not torture works is similar to asking whether germ warfare or poison/nerve gas munitions are effective. It's a moot point, since they are all outlawed by the laws of human decency.
Laws of human decency don't seem to have been enforced very well, otherwise, it wouldn't have been necessary to write the report in the first place.
Still, your statement fits well within moral outrage, which is one of the main ways of doing things. The other, of course is looking at facts. This is the basic Hume split of "is"
versus "ought."
I well know moral outrage. If anything, I experience it pretty strongly, I think more than most people. The parts of my brain that get angry and judgmental all the time. That may be the reason I'm so skeptical of them and try so hard not to be controlled by them. There are some serious problems.
I can think about moral outrage and discuss it, and you know that because that is what I am doing. Of course, I've been arguing against using it as a guide, and you or anybody else might not agree. Still, I can consider them.
The first problem is that moral outrage drives out other considerations. We know that this is happening, because you just demonstrated it. You're not arguing that it's
better than looking at whether torture works.
You declare it moot. That is, irrelevant, not for discussion, and so on. It's extremely effective. Moral outrage tends to trump everything else. That's Number 1.
So what doesn't it trump? How about
other moral outrage? You mention chemical warfare. It's just a fact that it got used
a lot during the Great War.
I haven't heard rational arguments as to why this happened, so I don't know what they would be. It seems unlikely that people simply didn't know that things like chlorine and mustard gas were horrific.
What I am sure of is that great efforts to create moral outrage were employed. The men (boys, actually, in many cases, as machine-gun training happened in schools), and Rosie the Riveter hadn't been invented yet. So the women put on these live diorama shows, tableaux, and pantomimes, to work people into a frenzy. A common theme was revenge for what was called "the rape of Belgium." I once had an old poster from that era, showing a silhouette of a man with an appropriately phallic pointy spiked German helmet dragging a silhouette of a small girl by the wrist.
Nothing trumps quite like the use of the term "rape." It affects so many people on a visceral level, and moral outrage just happens. (This should make people doubt facile declarations of "rape culture" as well as it explains why they work.) This moral outrage can be used to trump another moral outrage.
I suppose that there might be some accuracy, or at least I wouldn't declare the idea moot. Maybe there is something eternally and innately wrong with Germans. Great War the Sequel didn't make Germans look so hot. I'd like to think not, as I'm mostly German, and I've managed to go a half century without committing any particularly vile acts. On the other hand, who knows? Tom Lehrer once sang, "Once all the Germans were warlike and mean/but that couldn't happen again./We taught them a lesson in 1918,/and they've hardly bothered us since then!"
Whether that be true or not, the drumbeats hammering for moral outrage certainly pushed armies into the trenches. I think it likely that it was so strong that people went, "well, yeah, these gases are horrible, but on the other hand
THE EVIL HUN! And
RAPE!"
It's about this time that people start saying "by any means necessary" and "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette." That's the result of moral outrage, too.
As it was with Alan Dershowitz who came out saying that sometimes torture was morally justified. I was disappointed with his intelligence, because I had been impressed by his ability in the
Trials of the Century lectures (on CD) to get through a simplistic moral judgment and uncover some interesting reality. Maybe he's only smart about law. Or maybe, like everybody, when moral outrage takes over, he gets stupid.
As it was with the euphemistically named "waterboarding" and all that. OK, it's bad and all, but let's pick a fun-sounding name. Besides,
9/11 TERRORISM MUSLIMS BENGHAZI! AAAAAIIIIEEEEE! Great stuff that moral outrage, and not different from anybody else's in any important way at all.
Of course, moral outrage is
fun! It enables all sorts of exciting social activities. You can get together with a bunch of people who have the same moral outrage. Yeah! Go us! If you meet some others with a different sort of moral outrage, you can get some action like this:
Fun fun fun! Of course, it's the same sort of fun as is enjoyed by torturers. But I'm sure people can come up with a moral justification. But wait a minute, so can the torturers! And when that happens all the morally justified laws, whether they are just made up to justify outrage or exist in toothless international organizations, don't seem to do a lot of good.
But just as I'm suggesting that the purpose of torture isn't actually to get any information, maybe the purpose of harping on moral outrage and principles and "laws" isn't to stop torture. There could be other purposes.
For Americans, there could be partisan politics, which are fun, or even the ritual self-degradation that Americans love so much. For Europeans, there could be the "look how superior and civilized we are" which prevents them from having to think about The Great War or The Sequel: Now with Fewer Jews or even Anders Breivik. For everybody else, it could just be simple revenge. I don't know. But whatever it is, it isn't effective at making torture go away, and it isn't skeptical.
, what percentage do you think would approve an immediate resort to torture in my hypothetical? And, yes, that's an argumentum ad populum, but in questions of morality, the people do effectively determine the answers.
