Morality of Water Torture

[coberst]

Morality of Water Torture

The present question regarding the nature and morality of torture offers us an excellent opportunity to advance the level of sophistication of our understanding of morality. We learn best when we are questioning a matter that is meaningful to us.

I was eleven years old when Germany and Japan surrendered and WWII was finally over. One searing memory of this war were the stories I read and the movies I watched during and after the war regarding the torture and general brutality that the German Gestapo inflicted upon the people they conquered. I do not know why this left such a strong impression on me but it certainly did.

Coincidentally I have been studying “Moral Imagination” by Mark Johnson. This is the same Johnson who coauthored the book “Philosophy in the Flesh” with George Lakoff. I have decided to apply the theories Johnson presents in his book as a means to illuminate this matter regarding the morality of water torture used by my country in our struggle with Islamic extremists.

Moral understanding is like any other kind of experience; when we examine a domain of experience that relates to human relationships we must focus our attention on human understanding it self. If we do so we discover that human understanding is fundamentally imaginative in character.

“Many of our most basic concepts have considerable internal structure that cannot be accounted for by the classical theory of concepts as defined by necessary and sufficient features…The primary forms of moral imagination are concepts with prototype structure, semantic frames, conceptual metaphors, and narratives.”

To become morally insightful we must become knowledgeable of these imaginative structures. First, we must give up our illusions about absolute moral codes and also our radical moral subjectivism. Second we must refine our “perception of character traits and situations and of developing empathetic imagination to take up the part of others.”

Empathy is a character trait that can be cultivated by habit and will. Sympathy is somewhat of an automatic response.

When we see a mother weeping over the death of her child caused by a suicide bomber we feel immediate sympathy. Often we will come to tears. But we do not feel anything like that for the mother who may be weeping over the death of her child who was the bomber.

To understand the bomber we must use empathy. We attempt through imagination and reason to create a situation that will allow us to understand why this was done. This is a rational means to understand someone who acts different than we would.

“Empathy is the idea that the vital properties which we experience in or attribute to any person or object outside ourselves are the projections of our own feelings and thoughts.”

The subject viewing an object of art experiences emotional attitudes leading to feelings that are attributes of qualities in the art object thus aesthetic pleasure may be considered as “objectified self-enjoyment in which the subject and object are fused.”

The social sciences adopt a similar concept called ‘empathic understanding’, which refers to the deliberate attempt to identify with another person and accounting for that persons actions by “our own immediate experience of our motivations and attitudes in similar circumstances as we remember or imagine them”. This idea refers to a personal resonance between two people.

“What is crucial is that our moral reasoning can be constrained by the metaphoric and other imaginative structures shared within our culture and moral tradition, yet it can also be creative in transforming our moral understanding, our identity, and the course of our lives. Without this kind of imaginative reasoning we would lead dreadfully impoverished lives. We would be reduced to repeating habitual actions, driven by forces and contingencies beyond our control.”

Can you imagine an individual who is a hard headed realist and very accomplished at empathy sanctioning the use of water torture on anyone, friend or enemy?

[vits3k]

Good Friday is a time when some of us commemorate the day 2000 years ago, when a cadre of local tribesmen persuaded an occupying imperial power to kill one of their number against whom they had a grudge.

Last night, I was reading a review in the New Yorker of the film "Taxi to the Dark Side", about this man:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilawar_(human_rights_victim)

"Interrogated" as a suspect in a car bombing, it later developed that his accuser was the actual mastermind. It also seems that some of the "suspects" turned in by local tribesmen are simply those against whom they have a grudge.

I keep hearing Peter O'Toole's voice from the film "Masada", observing a human-rights outrage, saying "that's not Rome... that's not Rome..."

Come on, guys. We can do better than this.

Is someone PURPOSELY wanting us to erode the very principles we claim to stand for?

[Trogdor]

Good Friday is a time when some of us commemorate the day 2000 years ago, when a cadre of local tribesmen persuaded an occupying imperial power to kill one of their number against whom they had a grudge.

First of all, as a Jew (not particularly religious, but that's besides the point) I have to point out that you are quite wrong there. The classic story of Jesus' crucifixion has almost no historical validity, because the gospels in which it is found were written about a hundred years after his death. There are also numerous inconsistancies in the gospel narrative (like the fact that it would be against Jewish law to execute someone on Passover, and the fact that the various gospel narratives do not necessarily agree with each other), which combined with the fact that the classical story has many elements in common with Hellenistic myths of the death and subsequent rebirth of the god/hero of the story means that the "sunday school" version of Jesus' life and death has almost no basis in factual history.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to offend your faith. The fact that a story is not factual (which I freely admit is the case for most of the stories in the Torah as well) usually means that it has more, not less, meaning in the spiritual realm. Stories of this kind contain within them the hopes and dreams of the entire generation which created them, and provide powerful alleghories to aid the faith of those in subsequent generations. The moral lesson of the story of Jesus' crucifixion is a powerful one: torturing people is evil. Even those who you consider heretics (as we assuredly view Islamic terrorists) deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. I just want to point out that this myth- that the Jews convinced the Romans to kill Jesus- has no basis in fact (after all, the Romans needed absolutely no encouragement to torture political dissenters) and has been used as justification for the persecution and, yes, torture, of Jews for two thousand years.

Returning to waterboarding:

Torture of anybody with any method whatsoever is completely immoral. And what is more, it is not even justifiable on purely practical grounds. After all, if you torture someone they will tell you what you want to hear, not the truth. Also, the war on terror is more than anything else a war of ideas, so if we want to win we have to take the moral high ground- otherwise for every one terrorist we torture into insanity ten more will take his place.

But forget all this. There is one single argument for why we should not be waterboarding people:

In World War II, the Japanese were notoriously cruel to their prisoners of war. Under the Bushido code they believed that anyone who surrendered had dishonered himself, and they therefore viewed any American soldiers they had captured as cowards without any rights at all. As a result, they frequently tortured their prisoners using a variety of methods, including waterboarding. (Before this, the American military had never heard of waterboarding). When the war was over and we won, we tracked down the Japanese guards who had waterboarded our troops and the generals who had ordered them to do so, and put them on trial for war crimes.

Enough said.

[thewrll]

I think anyone who condones water torture should be water tortured for even just 50 seconds.

[Trogdor]

I think anyone who condones water torture should be water tortured for even just 50 seconds.

I agree completely