Torture: Slippery Slopes And Swamps

“It is this animal craving for something simple and, I daresay, edenic that undergirds our hyperaestheticised pornography in /all/ of its post-modern dimensions. One need only read Camille Paglia to realise what a sewer of murder and phantasy and longing underlies Mr Crawford’s oh-so-conscious “intellectual” speculations. He thereby gets to carry the can for us all.”

It prompted me to add some further thoughts on the torture subject as a comment on the site. Not sure if the comment registered, so here it is:

Just to be clear. I do disagree with Slippery Slope arguments in general.

The metaphor itself is so striking that it leads to confusion, giving a sense of momentum and inexorability which are not necessarily there.

Contrast the issue with the metaphor of a swamp. It does not follow that if you enter a dirty smelly swamp and get dirty and smelly you are doomed to stagger on into the middle and sink without trace.

Second, I do think as a lawyer and a diplomat who has operated on the edges of some of the greatest moral issues of our time (Communism and Apartheid) that part of the drama of government is not so much a slippery slope as a continuum. Most issues are like that, one point shading into another and another and so on. Yet although it is impossible to say definitively at what point white turns into black along a colour spectrum, white and black are different.

So there is some sort of continuum between the force used in arresting people and threatening them with the stress and likely violence which comes from many years of prison, and at the far end outright torture. Both may have the same purpose – to extract information using violence or the threat of violence. Yet it does not seem right to say that we should not arrest people and confront them with the prospect of prison because that would put us on the Slippery Slope to torture.

So the operational policy point for decent policy makers and the people who have to implement the ensuing laws and policies – sometimes under ghastly circumstances – is indeed all about drawing distinctions somewhere along these many continuums (continua?) in a way which is morally defensible, all things considered.

And part of that consideration may be that by mistreating X you have good reason to hope to save A and B and C. If you decide not to mistreat X and A/B/C die in a terrorist outrage, you may never know whether information from X would have helped save them. But the relatives of A/B/C may never forgive you, and X (a true killer) may appear smirking on the TV, acquitted on a technicality of some sort.

That maybe is the price we pay for Civilisation. I myself incline to paying it. But I do find it unreasonable to condemn outright as vicious torturers all those citizens (including it seems former President Clinton) who look at these issues carefully and would prefer the enemies of civilisation to pay a bit more of it instead.

What a sewer of murder and phantasy and longing lies under that lot…