J. G. Ballard, in the more recent novels, I think made a living out of a kind of rather virulent reactionary politics: the recurrent thought seems to be that there is no political solution to the problem of violence, that any attempt to solve that problem simply displaces and even excerbates it. The plots take place against a backdrop of vaguely leftist concerns, it's true - the gated communities of a moneyed leisure class - but what is crucial is not that that shapes the members of that class: it rather liberates them, allows them to do what they've always (really: it's the really that gives it away) wanted to, which is experience the visceral thrill of exercising brutal, sadistic power. The insistence that humans are fallen, cannot but revert to bloody type is doubly obssessed with violence; both in that it insists that violence is inevitable, as if peaceful societies have never existed, and in its own self-image, as able to bear truths others dare not face, engaged in a kind of masochistic proof of its strength. As with Houellebecq, there must be a suspicion that there's an explanation in Ballard's personal history: a childhood in the cantonment in Shanghai and an internment camp must mark you in certain ways. What they don't do, as Ballard seems to think judging by his autobiography, is function as adequate models for what societies are generally like: contrary to what all kinds of saloon bar philosophers may think, people aren't really like what they're like under great stress; the whole point of being under great stress is that it's not how you normally are.
Not everyone is a psychopath, whatever Ballard may say: that's how we're able, in the end, to distinguish psychopaths from everyone else. Saying so might even border on the psychopathic itself: if the total failure of empathy is definitional of psychopathy, then an inability to see the motivations of others as other than brute data, as having a lived history which give them content and meaning, could be a kind of psychopathy. There's a kind of liberal piety which plays into this, though, where everything good is morally costless, where political conflict gets erased, and so generates the temptation to bring it back, bubbling up through the gaps all orders must leave somewhere. Regretting, as Obama's appointment to head to C.I.A. does here (via), that a majority of a given public do not believe in a absolutely exceptionless prohibition on torture, totally setting aside any questions about what tradeoffs you are prepared to make, does that. It invites the machismo of ticking bomb cases, when what you want is this (via), notes on the economy of torture, of its politics: thinking that the prohibition exists in a vacuum allows that exceptions to it might to, when our reasons for the prohibition are importantly to do with the fact that torture does not happen in a vacuum; it needs torturers, equipment, places and times for the equipment to be used, information that it confirms and that verifies it, and so on. I suppose then it is that kind of pious liberal that Ballard thought of himself educating in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, who thinks of goodness without a (real) history, as just how people are. Notice, though, that his posturing suffers from exactly the same flaw: it is stripped of its institutional context. People aren't usually evil because that's the way they're doomed to be; they're terrible because they ended up that way. Even Hobbes saw that; Ballard can't.
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In the case of torture, "totally setting aside any questions about what tradeoffs you are prepared to make" may be a naive clean-handed liberal position, but it's also correct. The UN Convention Against Torture (not currently ratified by the US) says, in line with the European Convention on Human Rights, that there are certain things that the state cannot do, whatever the circumstances. I don't at all see that ruling torture out "invites the machismo of ticking bomb cases"; it would be more historically accurate to say that a desire not to rule torture out brought us Dershowitz's ticking-bomb hypotheticals, just as it brought us Gonzales and Bybee's legitimation of torture, and for that matter Guantanamo Bay. And yes, the point is precisely that torture doesn't happen in a vacuum: torture happens in a regime that endorses torture, and which is corrupted by doing so. That much is actually in Panetta's article.
As I said on Jamie's blog, I thought the Hilde i/v was very thin. Read Shue and Steinhoff (I can say that to you as I know you've got academic access).
I suppose another way of making the point is to observe that neither Derschowitz - who I am sure is not the first person to raise ticking bomb cases: ticking bomb cases are a version of the paradox of deontology, that holding that it is impermissible to do x looks strange when individual A refusing to do x will result in individual(s) B doing 100x - or Panetta are talking about the state at all. Panetta, for example, makes some abstract, formal claims about human dignity and assumes that that rules out one particular form of state violence: I wonder what he thinks about war, because if non-lethal violence is absolutely prohibited, it's hard to see what might legitimate lethal violence. As for what the UN Convention says, I don't care. The question is what should it say. Of course, it should say, no state should ever permit torture. But that's not the claim, I think, that either Panetta or Dershowitz are arguing about (in a philosophical sense: obviously, the political context is states permitting torture).
"there must be a suspicion that there's an explanation in Ballard's personal history: a childhood in the cantonment in Shanghai and an internment camp must mark you in certain ways."
I think this is fairly spot on. Indeed I think the same is true of the moral philosophy or R.M. Hare.
Hare was captured by the Japanese and spent several years in a Burmese prison camp. He later went on to become a hard-nosed utilitarian, willing to concede that on his ethical theory it was ok to kill and maim various people so long as that promoted maximal utility.
It's the hardening of the soul, necesary to survive Japanese prison camps during WWII, which then later manifested itself through the endorsement of an excessively rigid and deeply flawed moral outlook.
Ballard in my experience is basically a case of the same, though expressing his inner hardness through literature rather than analytic philosophy.
I think the case with Ballard is much more obvious than with Hare. Particularly the later fiction is just all closed communities rewritten over and over again: it's not just that the moral outlook they embody is plausibly that of an internment camp, but that they conceive of the world as a giant series of internment camps (or Shanghai cantonments: a world of consequence-less evil is not the world of the internment camp, but of a rich white child in the Third World). It's not as if utilitarianism is somehow distinctively connected to the world of the POW camp - which also may have been rather different from Ballard's experience of being interned as a civilian - if anything, it denies the significance of the hardness that Ballard valorises: the idea of the difficult choice where we see that hardness is not something the dessicated calculating machines utilitarians get parodied as are comfortable with. But then I don't really know Hare's moral philosophy.
And of course, on top of all this, one could quite easily say that, for example, much of Primo Levi could be explained by his time in Auschwitz: it would have done him a monstrous injustice to deny that he was marked by it. But Levi was neither a utilitarian nor enamoured of hardness. Although you might think either Hare or Ballard's moral-political outlook was explained by their imprisonment, you wouldn't necessarily think it determined it: you could have had the same experiences and ended up quite different. Another way of putting this is to say that of the six burdens of judgment Rawls mentions, only one is the difference in people's experiences.
Well, Dershowitz is basically doing a three-card trick with 'is' and 'ought': we know that states (philosophically) shouldn't torture, but we also know that they (in the real world) do, so we (philosophically) shouldn't think in terms of banning torture, but should try to minimise it (in the real world) by defining the conditions under which it's allowed.
Steinhoff took this argument apart; let's just say that, given that people are already breaking the law in order to do X, it's not clear why creating conditions in which they can do X legally makes it harder for them to carry on breaking the law when those conditions aren't satisfied.
As for Panetta, he may be a naive liberal, but he's on the money. What distinguishes torture is precisely that it's destructive of human dignity: it sets the power of the state to the task of breaking a selected individual. In Hobbesian terms, it's an assertion by the sovereign of total power over an arbitrarily selected subject. War is a completely different proposition - it's an arrangement where two states agree that their respective groups of people in uniforms can try to kill each other in certain approved ways. It's perfectly arguable that war is less destructive of human dignity than torture; it's certainly less destructive of legal personhood (a humanely-treated POW can still give evidence).
I think 'no state should ever permit torture' is pretty much what UNCAT does say; it's certainly what the ECHR says (the prohibition of torture, and of cruel and inhumane treatment, is one of the rights that can't be derogated from). Panetta, being not only a naive liberal but American, of course says "we don't torture because we are better than that"; his rhetoric is exceptionalist rather than universalist, and you could argue that it would suit him rather well to have other states to point at where torture carries on after it's banned in the US.
Other than that, though, I really don't see the dark side to Panetta's aspirational moralism - especially when we've just lived through a period in which a macho dirty-hands mentality was engendered, not by moralistic prohibitionism, but (less complicatedly) by a sustained effort to suspend prohibitions which had lost their moral force. What Panetta's saying is essentially "Let's be moral again! Let's live up to America's moral vision! Let's have a CIA that doesn't have people tortured!" It's not the language I'd use, but basically it sems like a good idea to me.
I suppose I'm not particularly interested in the details of Dershowitz's position; obviously he's a hack interested in justifying torture because - where that because covers a variety of different causal relationships - it's useful to various actors he'd like to succeed. Since he's a hack, you'd expect it to be a bad argument.
On Panetta, what you're saying seems to me that the paradox of deontology isn't a paradox. We can't remove one of one man's fingernails, but we can terrify millions of civilians with bombing raids night after night for weeks, with the best will in the world - which we will probably lack - killing some of them, slaughter thousands of conscripts or volunteers who voluntered under circumstances which basically conscripted them, damage infrastructure such that civilians will predictably later die, and so on. This seems paradoxical to me. Of course torture strips people of their dignity, but that's not what's distinctive of it. All kinds of things strip you of your dignity: being stuck in a trench, knee-deep in mud, being shelled for days on end, for example. To refuse to ask about which things that strip people of their dignity we should do and how we should trade them off against each other is to refuse to do politics. That refusal is precisely what ends up depriving moral prohibitions of their force and allowing them to be suspended, because they look like unmotivated prohibitions.
I suppose I should say I have reasons entirely unconnected to this debate for holding this position. A lot of contemporary analytical political philosophy is done, I think, by thinking about abstracted, two person cases, rather than about institutions which cover lots of people for a long time. On my account, this has resulted in people thinking some really bizarre things: see luck egalitarianism or that right libertarians are taken seriously or bloody trolley cases. Panetta falls under a more general class of foolishness.
what you're saying seems to me that the paradox of deontology isn't a paradox.
In a sense that's right, because in the specific case of torture there are no documented cases of a "ticking bomb" scenario actually happening. (Dershowitz cited one from Israel - where else - but, when people dug into it, it turned out to be a scenario from an IDF training exercise.) Torture is mainly - as in, somewhere between 90% and 100% - a technique for the state to incapacitate selected individuals mentally and physically, completely outside the law. The question of a trade-off doesn't really arise.
War is actually a much harder case. Should states wage war at will? No (and wars of aggression are in fact illegal). Should states attack one another's civilian population? No (and targeting civilians is in fact illegal). Should no state under any circumstances declare war on another? I think that could be a tough one to argue.
To refuse to ask about which things that strip people of their dignity we should do and how we should trade them off against each other is to refuse to do politics.
But in this case politics is precisely what I'm doing - accepting the possibility of warfare, rejecting torture under any circumstances.
In one sense, we're arguing about nothing: we both agree - I think - that the cases described by the paradox of deontology are irrelevant for practices of torture. You, however, seem to think that's some kind of conceptual claim which is covered by merely formal evocations of dignity. When I point out that merely formal evocations of dignity doesn't decide whose dignity we sacrifice when someone's has to go, you make not a point about dignity but a point which is at least quasi-empirical about the uses to which practices of torture have been put. It seems to me then that the formal point about dignity is not doing any work. What matters is the quasi-empirical point about the uses to which practices of torture have been put. I think some other points about the sociology of torture as an epistemic device should also be made, but we can set that aside for the time being: the point is, the details of the practice are what matters, not pious words about dignity. To put it another way, yes, the trade-off doesn't arise at the level of individual decision, but that's because the institutional costs of being able to make the individual decision are unbearable. And that does involve a trade-off.
As for the war stuff, as I've already said, I don't care what international law - which at least as far as resort to war goes doesn't seem very well respected - says: the question is what should it say. Not every solution to coordination problems is morally equally or even morally acceptable, so the fact that law exists (and is abided by: not obviously the case in the law of war) doesn't answer the question of whether it should exist or not. The implication that torture rules itself out because it is an attack on human dignity is that law should rule out all attacks on human dignity, but that would transparently rule out war.
Another way of putting this is to say that I think we should resolve paradoxes of deontology by allowing people to violate deontological restrictions, but that that has no implications for how we should order our world, because a whole set of different considerations come into play. You seem to agree with that, but think that saying 'torture violates human dignity' covers it, as if there was no question about the human dignity of the people you're (paradoxically) valuing that of the potential torture victim above.
When I point out that merely formal evocations of dignity doesn't decide whose dignity we sacrifice when someone's has to go, you make not a point about dignity but a point which is at least quasi-empirical about the uses to which practices of torture have been put.
No, the 'point about dignity' is that torture destroys people; the quasi-empirical point is that this is generally what it's intended to do, which suggests that any claim to be using torture as a regretful necessity should be scrutinised very, very sceptically. Basically I don't believe that the torture suite is a valid example of situations where someone's [dignity] has to go - and, since it's very widely used as an example of precisely that, this is a point worth making.
We began, after all, with your objection to the notion of an absolutely exceptionless prohibition on torture. Knowing what we know about torture, I just don't see what's problematic about making such a prohibition, or about making it in the name of the state respecting the dignity of individual citizens. And it seems downright perverse to argue that banning torture is a bad thing because it will ultimately lead to the return of the repressed, when the ban follows an eight-year period in which it's been encouraged, justified and practised.
As for war, you seem to be arguing from some higher plane where words like 'combatant', 'battlefield', 'declaration of war' and 'nation state' have no meaning. I can certainly agree that killing people is wrong, but where would that get us?
Part of the problem here seems to be that we're giving very different readings to Panetta's "dignity of the individual" (in context: "We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't"). As far as I'm concerned, what he's talking about is individual autonomy within a society bounded by the state and governed by law. Reducing to the minimum the circumstances in which anyone's dignity in that sense has to go - and ensuring that those circumstances are themselves structured by law - seems like an entirely valid and worthwhile political project.
Not only do we seem to be understanding Panetta's claim in a quite different sense, we seem to be understand 'absolutely exceptionless prohibition' in a quite different sense. You, for one, seem to think that if we should have a law banning torture, there's an absolutely exceptionless prohibition on torture. I, on the other hand, think that showing that we should implement a legal ban on X does not constitute an absolutely exceptionless prohibition, since there are contexts other than those of law. To put it another way, the natural reading of 'killing people is wrong' is 'never act so as to kill people'. This rules out fighting wars. You seem to think 'killing people is wrong' means both that and something like 'never act so as to kill people, except in all those cases where I'm prepared to make exceptions'. Or at least, that's the only way I can make sense of the combination of the affirmation of Panetta-style claims in general, that particular Panetta-style claim, and the claim that fighting wars is permissible. You can't have it both ways: either you don't mean the abstract claim, in which case I want to know about the exceptions and we're doing politics again, or you do, in which case you're subject to the paradox of deontology. And I regard the claim that I don't think we should implement a legal ban on torture as a smear.
Sorry for misrepresenting you.
I won't say much more, as I'm increasingly baffled by your comments and suspect you are by mine. I take your point that "absolutely exceptionless ban" is a more demanding proposition than "law against", but I still believe that an absolutely exceptionless ban on torture is a fairly straightforward proposition - certainly much less problematic than an absolutely exceptionless ban on killing. (Might there be a situation in which we should kill? Certainly. Might there be a situation in which we should systematically use pain and suffering to reduce another person to a state where they'll swear that black is white? I'm not seeing it.)
"Although you might think either Hare or Ballard's moral-political outlook was explained by their imprisonment, you wouldn't necessarily think it determined it: you could have had the same experiences and ended up quite different."
Oh, of course. I never meant to imply otherwise.
Re Hare: Of course not all utilitarians need be of the Hare-sort (though I always find the most consistent ones are, although consistency then becomes a dubious virtue).
I always found Hare's hard-nosed approach to moral issues was telling us more about him than about philosophy, ethics or utilitarianism in particular. But then, I think the same is true of all philosophers: whenever somebody writes about ethics, they tell you about themselves.
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