John Mark Reynolds’ response has helped me to clarify where I think he and I are disagreeing on the torture question.
If you only consider consequentialist principles, you can’t get an absolute prohibition on anything except the principle that we should seek the best consequences. So to get a moral ban on all torture, there better be some deontological principles at stake. The question is whether those deontological principles themselves are absolutist.
I happen to think the only deontological principle that is absolutist is the moral claim that we ought to give due honor to God and follow him in whatever ways are best for doing so. There are many ethical principles beyond that, and most of them apply most of the time. Some of them apply almost all the time and would require crazy hypotheticals to find exceptions (or very weak cases with moral principles about matters that involve vague concepts occurring along a spectrum, such as consent and coercion, harm, or what someone’s motivation and desires are in doing an act).
But to answer your question, I think the deontological principle behind JMR’s opposition to torture is his principle that it’s always wrong to coerce someone, a principle I’ve questioned. He doesn’t think it’s always wrong to cause pain or to cause pain that someone remembers. He doesn’t think it’s always wrong to cause harm, even permanent harm, knowing full well that one is doing so. He does think it’s wrong to cause harm for the sake of causing harm without some higher purpose, but he doesn’t think such a higher purpose can be merely getting information that will lead to better consequences when the causing of harm is done to violate someone’s ability to consent to giving up that information. So it’s mainly an issue of consent to choose to speak when one wants to and to refrain from giving information when one doesn’t.
As I’ve said along the way, I think the problem with that argument is that consent and coercion come along a spectrum, and weaker versions of coercion undermining consent can be morally correct under the right sorts of circumstances. When the consequences increase in their badness, avoiding them might require undermining consent to a stronger degree than is normally moral. That’s why I think torture isn’t in principle wrong. JMR has a more absolutist view about that principle. We both take it to be deontological, because neither of us thinks slightly better consequences for a serious undermining consent are enough to justify it. But he takes it to be absolutist, whereas I think there could be circumstances where undermining someone’s consent via coercion to a great degree can be morally all right, as long as those consequences are extremely serious.
So I’m not sure the disagreement is really meta-ethical. It’s more on the level of normative ethics, I think.
January 11th, 2010 | 4:00 pm | #1
Why is it that this discussion is getting conducted like this:
and so on — but the simple word “justice”, which is the actual Biblical mandate and premise for government, cannot be found or dealt with?
Why do we not see that a government is either conducting itself for the sake of justice, or it is not? Why do we not want to think in terms of these simple categories?
January 11th, 2010 | 7:57 pm | #2
I avoid speaking of justice unless I want to spend a lot of time making clear what I mean. In philosophical circles nowadays, some people mean simple retribution. Others mean some kind of equality or fairness. Still others mean equality in distribution of resources. Some mean equal partnership in all cooperative ventures of society. Others define it in terms of morality, which they base in some kind of rights, either defined by what we would or should want for ourselves or defined in some more basic natural properties (the more rare way nowadays). Some define it in terms of morality but based on responsibilities, where everyone does what they ought.
The biblical terms for justice often translated as righteousness. The concepts are certainly related, which is why I think those who tie justice to morality are in better shape than those who don’t. But I find that most people don’t know what I’m talking about when I speak of justice, especially if it involves any kind of retribution. We’ve lost that concept somehow with the majority of the population.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact