The Radical Secularist

Amidst the controversy over President Obama’s decision to declassify Justice Department memos pertaining to CIA interrogative tactics, MSNBC  ’Countdown’ host, Keith Olberman criticized the president for excusing the actions of those involved in the alleged torture of al Qaeda suspects, on the ground that they were made to believe that their actions were consistent with the law.  Video. Although I’m not one to bestow praises upon journalists whose only claim to political pundicy is a stellar career in sports journalism, Olberman, dare I say, is right.  Not only is he right but he presents an articulate and fairly well-reasoned justification for why the President should reconsider his previously stated decision not to further investigate and, where evidence of wrongdoing, prosecute those responsible for the licensing, encouraging, and enacting of torture.  Olbermann rightly contends that we not only have moral reasons for doing so, but also prudential one’s.  If we limit ourselves to the moral condemnation of those responsible for the licensing and/or enacting of torture, we are liable to send the wrong message: it may be morally wrong, but it is for all intents and purposes permissable.  Unfortunately, neither the pangs of conscience nor the threat of moral shame inspires fear sufficient to deter people from moral wrongdoing.  This is a major reason why we have laws.  Failing to punish not just the moral but the legal wrongdoings of those responsible for torture, as Oblermann rightly implies, will send the wrong message, by making a mockery of the law.  If the President is as committed as he oft says he is to doing not only the morally right thing (putting a stop to torture) but also the prudential thing (helping to prevent the repetition of past wrongs), he must have  investigated and, where demanded, prosecuted suspected wrongdoing.

JPM

In an interview with Fox News (Sunday, April 19 2009), Former CIA director Michael Hayden criticized President Obama’s decision to release selected Bush-era memos concerning CIA interrogation tactics.  Click Here For Video. “What we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al Qaeda terrorist. That’s very valuable information,” stated Hayden. What Mr. Hayden conveniently failed to mention is that the U.S. “described” these limits the moment it signed onto the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions.  Whether specific interrogative practices encouraged by the top brass of the Bush administration and practiced by CIA agents are in and of themselves acts of torture is perhaps open to debate.  What isn’t open for debate is whether subjecting a person to waterboarding 183 times constitutes their being tortured.  Choosing to call it and who knows how many similar actions “enhanced interrogation” is purely semantic:  ’Torture’ by any other name is still torture.  Moreover, engaging in a semantic debate over whether the interrogative practices, which by the former administration’s own lights are at the “outer limits” of law are sufficiently enhansive to constitute torture is to be complicit in if not their overt endorsement then certainly in their being enacted.  Indeed, engaging in a debate–as must have occurred among White House advisors–about what practices can be brought to the threshold of torture–which is what we are to hear in a phrase like “the outer limits” of law–without crossing it, seems more diabolical than naively believing that torture is permissible under certain circumstances. 

In his and the Bush administration’s defense of torture,  former General Hayden also rhetorically stated,  ”The honorable position has to be: Even though these techniques worked, I don’t want you to do that. That takes courage.” What’s especially remarkable about this ‘defense’ is not that it is contrary to studies that have been conducted on the effectiveness of torture and other forms of coercive interrogation methods, nor that it is indicative of the deaf ear the Bush administration repeatedly turned to the voices of Americans who vociferously opposed the use of torture on any grounds. Rather, it is the implicit suggestion that torture is something that should be put to a referendum.  However called, the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the CIA and encouraged by the Bush administration are not just the outer limits of law!  They are the violation of law: Moral, International, and yes, US law!  The reason why there are national and international laws against torture is not only to forestall the need for a referendum on whether or not specific practices constitute torture whenever some doubt should happen to arise, but also to dissuade individuals and governments from licensing torture under the excuse of extraordinary circumstances.  Hayden is right: it often takes courage to do the morally right thing; unfortunately the moral cowards here were not by and large the American people, but Hayden and his superiors.  Torture is immoral, and it’s also against the law.

JPM

So Mr. Santorum is back and here we have his opinion piece from the Philadellphia Inquirer finally shedding a light on America’s true enemmy: the president and presumably all those who elected him.

Washington Diary: Cryng on Cable by Matt Frei was published today on the BBC website on the current state of American Journalism and the bad habit of confesional public speech and crying in public.

The Obama administration has repealed a federal rule instituted by the Bush administration permiting medical professionals to refuse procedures to patients on the grounds of their moral (read religious) commitments. As CNN reports, Christian physicians are protesting the measure.

So this gentleman, who has no clear credentials or authority, has for some reason decided to honor us by soiling the pages of the NYT with what can only be called absolute garbage. David Brooks, who probably wanted to be an academic but was too lazy to read went instead into journalism where he only had to talk. After all that is what by the dim lights of his, Socrates was engaged in doing. Today this generous soul, decided to give us his take on philosophy and its future.

Brooks’ approach to basic questions in metaethics is simply ominous. Why? Because it amounts to a disingenuously reductive presentation of a problem as a solution, which people like himself and his readers can find to be “nice”, as he say. In this guise, we end up condoning third rate populism which uses, in this case, Humean sentimentalism and its aftermath to support low grade forms of political discourse. There is a serious metaethical question and intuitionism or sentimentalism are questions within that debate, not “nice” answers.

The two most interesting features of this piece? 1) What a great example of begging the question it is. 2. Journalists should be asked to produce credentials to write about the topics they decide to write about. Anything less than that, is just an act of betrayal of the public trusts and intellectual dishonesty.

In reference to this completely idiotic approach to ethics, I would very much like to ask Mr. Brooks if he is willing to say that the proscription of genocide is just a matter of taste. And on what grounds is that we will condemn the inclination of people who happen to quite enjoy genocide if we decide to do so.

MJG

Op-Ed Columnist
The End of Philosophy
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 6, 2009

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.
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One problem with this kind of approach to morality, as Michael Gazzaniga writes in his 2008 book, “Human,” is that “it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found.”

Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.

As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, “Our brain is computing value at every fraction of a second. Everything that we look at, we form an implicit preference. Some of those make it into our awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but … what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment.”

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and … moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

The question then becomes: What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there’s an increasing appreciation that evolution isn’t just about competition. It’s also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

The first nice thing about this evolutionary approach to morality is that it emphasizes the social nature of moral intuition. People are not discrete units coolly formulating moral arguments. They link themselves together into communities and networks of mutual influence.

The second nice thing is that it entails a warmer view of human nature. Evolution is always about competition, but for humans, as Darwin speculated, competition among groups has turned us into pretty cooperative, empathetic and altruistic creatures — at least within our families, groups and sometimes nations.

The third nice thing is that it explains the haphazard way most of us lead our lives without destroying dignity and choice. Moral intuitions have primacy, Haidt argues, but they are not dictators. There are times, often the most important moments in our lives, when in fact we do use reason to override moral intuitions, and often those reasons — along with new intuitions — come from our friends.

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.

Bob Herbert is off today.