March 5, 2013 at 12:47 P.M. I experienced great difficulties accessing these blogs yesterday. I continue to emphasize that I am never certain of being able to write from one day to the next. I will struggle to write on-line every day.
Senator Menendez has noted that a single "prostitute" in the Dominican Republic has recanted her testimony claiming that she was paid to testify against N.J.'s junior senator. Presumably, the other nine women (or is it 11?) maintain the allegations against Mr. Menendez and have not been discredited. There are those who suggest that the recanted testimony is what was paid-for.
In any event, the crux of the disturbing case against Mr. Menendez concerns his selling of influence and conflicts of interest as well as gains by possible overt kickbacks to him as well as "rewards" paid, indirectly, to persons in his office or close to the senator. Please give my regards to Dr. Melgen, Mr. Menendez.
I wonder whether Dr. Melgen knows Dr. Jocelyn Estevez? Whatever happened to that check from my office that disappeared for a year in Union City, Bob?
I can certainly appreciate the "behind-the-back" nature of these charges and loathsome "Gremlin-like" methods in the senator's office. Despicable tactics -- aren't they, Mr. Menendez? ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
Bob Brecher, Torture and the Ticking Bomb (London: Blackwell, 2007).
Charles Fried, Right and Wrong (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1978). (Explanation of deontological ethics.)
http://hrw.org/reports/1992/israel
Samuel G. Freedman, "'Zero Dark Thirty,' Through a Theological Lens," in The New York Times, February 23, 2013, at p. A12.
Michael Wood, "At The Movies," in The London Review of Books, 21 February, 2013, at p. 19. (Reviewing Zero Dark Thirty.)
Donald L. Niewyk, The Holocaust (Boston & New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2007), pp. 62-75.
Sanford Levinson, ed., Torture: A Collection (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2004).
John Wilson, What Philosophy Can Do (New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1986), pp. 41-60, pp. 60-81.
Discussions of the torture crisis and of America's recently tainted role in the struggle for human rights in the world have become difficult for policy makers and media "wiz kids" -- Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, Melissa Harris-Perry as well as the Bill O'Reilly-types -- because debators' philosophical assumptions and concepts are rarely made explicit and often conflict, even in the mind of a single writer, to say nothing of the social debate on these matters. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
All ethical and philosophical concepts entail logical implications just as actions have consequences. Americans tend to think of the ethics of policy decisions and government actions in strictly instrumentalist or utilitarian terms:
How do we bring about the best results (ends) through the most efficient and effective techniques (means)?
With regard to torture, however, there is more than instrumental reasoning involved in the calculus necessary for a sound judgment.
Deontological arguments focusing on the rights of persons and duties that are universal concerning respect for human beings render any "means-and-ends" analysis problematic or irrelevant to the ultimate issue in the discussion. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli.")
It is very difficult for lawyers and military people to think in deontological rather than teleological/consequentialist and/or utilitarian terms that are concerned with maximizing the "good result" -- in terms of self-interest -- as distinct from ensuring that the "right actions" are always taken.
Persons merit a level of moral concern or attention, respect, that is unique, not reductive or quantifiable necessarily. (Compare "Ronald Dworkin's Jurisprudence of Interpretation" with "Richard A. Posner On Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
One of the profound confusions common even to well-educated and -intentioned Americans is the assumption that the "right action," by definition, is the action that brings about the optimum result for the agent. Regrettably, ethics is not only about doing what is best for us, but also what is right for all. (Again: "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "How censorship works in America.")
Many philosophers and theologians caution officials: We cannot do good through evil. We cannot do good without being good persons. ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System" and "So Black and So Blue in Prison.")
If an evil action prevents great harm, then that evil action may be undertaken by a public official, knowingly, accepting full responsibility for the action and its reasonably foreseeable consequences, without lying (even through silence) about having taken the action. ("Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?" and "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" then "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and New Jersey Corruption.")
Such a public official will then be responsible for the heinous consequences produced by a disastrously failed action, especially if the action taken -- say, torture -- makes things much worse for everyone. ("Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?" and "American Doctors and Torture" then "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
Where an evil action is "successful," in the sense that the desired outcome is achieved, the evil action remains an evil to be acknowledged. Responsibility must belong to the public official or officials endorsing that action independently of its results. ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System" and "Justice For Mumia Abu-Jamal.")
This requirement of public responsibility is most important and explicit in the case of actions such as torture or assassination outside the boundaries of law, especially where the victim is deemed "collateral damage," an innocent but foreseeable casualty of lethal or devastating action. ("Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?" and "Is Senator Menendez 'For' Human Rights?")
These distinctions have been found useful and even crucial by philosophers debating the torture and drone issues as well as secret assassinations of non-combatants which have traditionally been held to be unethical and illegal under well-established principles of international law together with "conventional understandings of the morality of war."
To lie about what we are doing as a nation or as an individual political figure, by commission or ommission, compounds the wrong or evil in torturing or killing persons not charged with or convicted of any criminal wrongdoing -- nor accused of any other offense -- including persons who are, clearly, non-combatants (like children and old people). ("America's Drone Murders" and "Decline in Humanities and Humanity.")
We have made the pain of others a matter of bureaucratic decision-making, indifference, and utterly impersonal, a subject of convenience in terms of our self-interest. We have forgotten the momentous importance of causing pain or loss of life to others, especially innocent others.
These drastic actions -- hurting others -- are not best thought of as mere instrumental calculations of costs/benefits leading to the good result in terms of our rational interest.
These actions (like torture and murder) can only be seen as evils whose commission -- while, arguably, necessary in very few extreme and life-threatening emergencies -- change us, as individuals and as a society, if we commit them, even at the order of superiors. We are becoming a less noble or admirable society as a result of our torture, murder, and spying policies after 9/11.
Please notice the pronoun being used in this foregoing paragraph: We -- myself very much included -- are becoming less good through our complicity in the terrible actions of our ostensibly democratically-elected government. ("Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution.")
Evil actions have the curious effect of altering the ethical merits of our objectives, the things that we wish to accomplish by doing evil -- the good result -- which becomes less good or desirable, because it is tarnished by our methods:
"In 2007, as opinion was shifting [on the torture issue,] Professor Gurshel of Mercer University helped to write 'An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture.' While condeming Al Qaeda's attacks on the United States, and while affirming the nation's right to self-defense, the Declaration stated near its end:
'When torture is employed by a state, that act communicates to the world and to one's own people that human lives are not sacred, that they are not reflective of the Creator, that they are expendable, and disposable, and that their intrinsic value can be overriden by utilitarian arguments that trump [human] value. These are claims that no one who confesses Christ as Lord can accept.' ..."
The values underlying human rights law were derived from post-Nazi Nuremberg proceedings rejecting the objectification of human beings in concentration camps. ("Dehumanization" and "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
The value of personal dignity is celebrated by Jewish thinkers, like Martin Buber, who would be horrified, equally, by Guantanamo and Gaza policies of the Israeli state. Islamic values also focus on the dignity of persons. All of these traditions have secular counterparts. It is not only Christians who see human dignity as foundational in moral life. ("Martin Buber and Diet Judaism" then "John Rawls and Justice" and "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
Films -- like the recently popular Zero Dark Thirty -- that seem to rationalize or justify torture, or extra-judicial killings, open a dangerous door that will eventually be used by others to usher Americans through it. ("Another American Tortured On Video.")
Human beings are not chips on a gambling table, not "things" to move around without being consulted, not "toys" to play with as part of a game among the powerful -- unless you are willing to see yourself and your family members treated in the same way by others playing with their lives and welfare (or your own) while displaying identical disdain for their integrity or value as persons:
"What you see in the relationship between torturer and tortured is the absolute darkness of totalitarianism. You see one individual granted the most complete power he can hold over another. Not just confinement of his [the victim's] mobility -- [but] the abolition of his very agency. Torture uses a person's body to remove from his control, his conscience, his thoughts, his faith, his selfhood."
Andrew Sullivan, "The Abolition of Torture," in Torture: A Collection, at p. 319.
