The Ticking Blog
I had a great conversation with Jason Kuznicki of Positive Liberty last night at the Reason happy hour about All Things Ticking Bomb. He said something that really struck me, and I urged him to blog it. So he did, marbling it overmuch with kind words about me, so I excerpt it here to save your delicate stomachs:
Aside from its implications for government, a further problem with torture is that it is epistemologically bankrupt. Torture makes pain the standard for evaluating truth. Pain, and not evidence.
That’s really good, and it follows up on similar points he made last year.
Something else occurred to me about the subject too. I’ve written before about the commendable but flawed opposition to torture from some of the Iraq War’s more idealistic supporters, arguing that the epistemelogical assumptions supporting the ticking bomb scenario are so similar to those undergirding the case for preventive war that supporters of the latter are almost doomed to fall for the former. That time I talked about the assumption of perfect knowledge and perfect foresight common to both phenomena.
But there’s another congruence between the Ticking Bomb Scenario and the “humanitarian” case for interventions like Iraq and all the Iraqs the dead-enders would still like to have, that hit me sometime last week, when one of American Footprints’ more bloodthirsty commenters argued, basically, that if we cared about the poor suffering Iranians we just had to bomb the bastards.
In each case, the argument wants to force you to put your empathy in the service of HURTING OTHER PEOPLE.
“Don’t you care about the New Yorkers or Angelinos or whoever that will be blown to bits? THEN YOU GOTTA HURT SOMEONE!” “Don’t you care about the poor suffering Iraqis / Iranians / Sudanese / Dornishmen? THEN YOU GOTTA HURT SOMEONE!”
A willingness to approve violence to someone becomes the test of compassion.
Now, this could be right or wrong in either case. But right or wrong, the impulse runs through both ideas.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
October 25, 2006 @ 8:57 pm
I think this is a good argument when it’s tempered. But it’s too easy to slide into the stance that any bad part of a response to a nasty situation is what the advocate actually intends. Now there are, of course, people who genuinely do get off on the the thought of STICKING IT TO THE BAD MAN…but I’ve run into those among advocates of all kinds of view. The question then is whether there’s anyone left worth talking to after you factor out that sort, and the “doing it to piss off my Mom” types, and so on.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
October 25, 2006 @ 8:57 pm
Just to add, by the way, I’ve become pretty thoroughly convinced of the merits of another anti-intervention argument, the “it just doesn’t end” one.
Comment by Avram —
October 25, 2006 @ 9:05 pm
It might be Al Qaeda,
Or it might be your mom,
But you know you’ve got to hurt somebody.
Comment by Alex —
October 25, 2006 @ 11:39 pm
1) The part about pain being the standard rather than evidence is 100% dead on.
2) “it just doesn’t end” is probably the best argument against intervention. Or, as others have said, “You break it you buy it.” Can anybody count the number of times we’ve gotten involved in Haiti in the past couple centuries?
Comment by dirge —
October 26, 2006 @ 4:05 am
It’s a brilliant Aspect for a FATE character: “morally inverted”. Get the GM’s approval with some tortured explaination, and you can make any of your other Aspects mean the exact opposite of their obvious meaning! Even better, you could take an Aspect that lets you do it to others…
Obviously not so fun in real life…
Comment by Jim Henley —
October 26, 2006 @ 6:37 am
Yeah, but in FATE 3.0 you still have to spend points . . .
Comment by Trent —
October 26, 2006 @ 9:13 am
Whoah! Someone’s been reading a little too much Martin lately….
Comment by Eric Martin —
October 26, 2006 @ 9:48 am
Way too much I would say…
Comment by Eric Martin —
October 26, 2006 @ 9:50 am
[pssst Jim, "LAT" changed its name a while ago. cough. blogroll. cough.]
Comment by Jim Henley —
October 26, 2006 @ 10:10 am
Right. It’s “Blog of Ice and Fire” now, correct?
Comment by lemuel pitkin —
October 26, 2006 @ 10:40 am
Yes yes oh yes.
Sorry. But this really nails something I’ve thought for a while — that there is no one more contemptible than the people who are filled with sympathy for residents of poor countries only when it’s an occasion for dropping bombs on them.
Yes, it’s terrible that people were killed by Saddam, or the government of Sudan, or Milosevic, or whoever. It really is bad.
But it’s also bad that people are dying of water-borne illnesses, malaria, and many other problems that can be dealt with much more cheaply and reliably and without killing anybody Someone whose empathy for the poor expresses itself only through advocacy for violence is much worse than someone with no empathy at all, who at least will leave them alone.
Comment by Doug T —
October 26, 2006 @ 11:18 am
A simlar dynamic can be seen in the standard framing of national security positions, in which the dichotomy has beceom tough/not tough as opposed to effective/not effective. Brutality and violence are considered a priori goods, and positions are then evaluated according to how much violence they advocate, rather than what their practical effects are likely to be.
Comment by Eric Martin —
October 26, 2006 @ 12:17 pm
that’ll do…
Comment by Barry —
October 26, 2006 @ 1:43 pm
Extending lemuel’s remarks:
That’s a really good test of sincerity; if somebody is willing to spend $XXX billion and 1,000’s of lives on a possibly good thing, are they willing to spend $X billion and 0 lives on a virtually guarranteed good thing?
As for the original ‘compassion through killing’ argument, it’s really just the latest variation on an old one: ‘if you’re not willing to risk your life and kill whom I want, when I want and how I want, then you’re evil/you war against (the) God(s)/you’re a traitor to the clan/tribe/nation/state/crown/race, etc.
Comment by Donald Johnson —
October 26, 2006 @ 1:55 pm
Great post and great comments. Lemuel made the point I would have made and Barry extended it the way I would have if I’d thought about further.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
October 26, 2006 @ 7:23 pm
Lemuel and Barry, right non.