Suicide Bombers
by Jon Shea
16 July 2005
The Guardian reports that Iraqi security forces captured a suicide bomber today before he was able to detonate his explosives. NPR carried a similar story, claiming that the bomber’s detonator failed. Obviously, capturing a suicide bomber is a rather rare occurrence. Iraqi and American forces need to make the most of it.
If the captured terrorist isn’t fully cooperative with investigators, then he should be aggressively tortured.
0) There is no question this man is guilty. He was captured with bombs strapped to his body.
1) He certainly has important intelligence information. In particular, he knows other, more important terrorists, and can likely lead investigators to them.
2) A common, and valid, argument against torture is that it provides unreliable intelligence. In this case, the intelligence is largely verifiable. Either he leads you to a bomb making lab, or he doesn’t. Either he gives you the name of terrorists, or he doesn’t.
3) It seems unlikely that he would resent the death penalty as a punishment. I suspect he wouldn’t consider life in prison much worse. Torture seems like a workable alternative.
I don’t believe torture should be taken lightly. If we allow it, it needs to be with an extreme level of oversight, public transparency, and official accountability. I also don’t believe it should be categorically prohibited. If you do, then answer this questions:
“If you know a man is guilty, and you know that innocent lives could be saved by torturing him, then would you be ethically obligated to torture him?”
That is the situation we have here.
Jul 17, 12:36 PM
“2) A common, and valid, argument against torture is that it provides unreliable intelligence. In this case, the intelligence is largely verifiable. Either he leads you to a bomb making lab, or he doesn’t. Either he gives you the name of terrorists, or he doesn’t.”
I think you might understate this argument. I might argue that the information gleaned from torture is so unlikely to be worthwhile (based upon previous experience) that the opportunity costs of devoting time/money/manpower to torturing the guy and then following up on what he says is just too great.
So the fact that the information is potentially verifiable doesn’t necessarily refute arguments against torture.
This point is certainly debatable, though, and I agree with basically everything else you wrote. The hardest part, of course, is knowing that the person is indeed guilty.
Jul 18, 05:16 AM
What we need is a reliable method of obtaining information from individuals by drugging the hell out of them and then using willy psychological tricks (convincing them they’re in Paradise, or back at their home base, or something similar). It seems this path would be far less objectionable (and probably a lot more efficient) than, say, water boarding or chaining somebody to the floor, or shocking their testicles or whatever. I’d even guess such drugs and techniques exist, but maybe I’m just projected from a scifi standpoint.
Jul 18, 09:43 AM
scarecrow. scaaaaaaaaarecrow.
Jul 18, 09:49 AM
“abuse of power”
Jul 18, 09:51 AM
i mean, “abuse of power”
Jul 18, 09:53 AM
Yes, Bill, that is exactly what I was thinking – it’s as easy as vaporizing the water supply. And, while we are learning from summer blockbusters, should we also discuss what Tim Burton and Johnny Depp can tell us about Michael Jackson.
But on a serious note, I think the way the suicide bomber may prove indispensable is to let us understand the suicide bomber psyche (see NYT Week in Review) and how easy or hard it is to carry out an attack. This kind of information, because it does not put specific people in danger, might be much easier to obtain without extreme torture and may be more important.
Jul 18, 09:55 AM
“abuse of power”
Jul 18, 12:31 PM
I say to myself, “I need some procrastination, and the discussion on my website has been kind of dead. I’m going to get online and insult some of my friends. And what do I find? 7 replies. That’s great!
Joran, you’re right that torture might be categorically worthless. I doubt it, though. Not real torture
And, as for certainty about guilt, I’m willing to go ahead and call everyone who straps bombs too their own body guilty. If that means we torture a few people who just want to wear bombs for the fashion statement, well, I can live with that.
Scott, the chemist expounds the chemical solution. Obviously, I’m in favor of the brain scanner.
Bill, I’m sorry, but I didn’t really follow what you were trying to say. I’ve heard there’s plenty of torture on 24, though. I think I can check that out of Jones.
Kat, nice to see you online. I think you need to listen to “This American Life” Episode 285 again.
Jul 19, 06:31 AM
Joran wrote: “The hardest part, of course, is knowing that the person is indeed guilty.”
Aye, there’s the rub—if we could know, a priori, that somebody was guilty of a particular crime, there wouldn’t be much need for courts, and even the death penalty would become largely unobjectionable, assuming we could agree upon what it should be used for.
Jul 19, 10:07 AM
“And, as for certainty about guilt, I’m willing to go ahead and call everyone who straps bombs too their own body guilty. If that means we torture a few people who just want to wear bombs for the fashion statement, well, I can live with that.”
I can’t. It seems we differ on this substantially, Jon. The possibility of torturing an innocent person disturbs me a lot. Obviously, this is a balancing act, and different people will have different comfort zones. And I recognize that.
However, in the spirit of argument, I have a bunch of questions (as opposed to criticisms!):
0.) How far back in the process of committing a terrorist act are you willing to go? You mentioned someone who presumably tried, but whose detonator failed. Fine. How about if you catch the same guy at home watching Sportcenter that morning, and his bomb-vest is sitting on the couch? How about if you catch the guy after he’s been asked by someone else to do it, and agreed, but no one’s made the bomb yet? Are you ok with equating conspiracy to commit terrorism with actually committing a terrorist act? Are those two crimes equivalent in your mind?
Additionally, what about the guy who has useful info, but isn’t really guilty of a serious crime. Say for instance, I have tea with Bin Laden every Thursday. You know that, but I refuse to tell you where he his. Can you torture me to find out?
1.) In this point, I ask a pointedly non-PC question: “What’s so special about deaths from terrorism, as opposed to deaths from other causes?”
Presumable, the purpose of torturing terrorists is to prevent future acts of terrorism, and hence, deaths from terrorism. If torturing terrorists is ok, why not other people? For example: (in each case, the person being tortured is guilty of an offense no worse than the one we’re trying to prevent, as in the terrorism case)
Is it ok to torture people to glean info about habitual drunk drivers in order to prevent deaths from automobile accidents?
Is it ok to torture someone to get info about a common murderer (i.e. drug dealer, mafia, jilted lover type people. You know, Law and Order sort of stuff…)?
Is it ok to torture corporate execs to force them to rat out their buddies who’ve been poisoning a town’s water supply, causing a bunch of leukemia cases?
If the answer to any of these is “no”, why? Why are the people who die in a terrorist bombing more important than victims of drunk drivers, the mob or polluting corporations? Or is it that you think the terrorist is deserving of lesser treatment than the others? If so, what is it about terrorists that makes torturing them ok, as opposed to other doers of bad things?
Jul 19, 05:49 PM
“Additionally, what about the guy who has useful info, but isn’t really guilty of a serious crime.”
Great question. Relatedly: would you kill a single innocent child to save the entire world?
Some people say no. If we were more pretentious, we’d call these people Kantians. Kantians say you simply can’t punish someone who hasn’t done anything wrong, but rather as a means to prevent someone else’s wrong. (Although we could make the argument that it’s wrong not to disclose really useful information … maybe even wrong enough to warrant torture.)
0) I disagree. We’ll call people like me Benthamites. (Bentham, by the way, wrote a paper making the utilitarian case for torture.) But I’m not even talking about a simple “more good than bad” calculation. I’m talking about an overwhelming imbalance. One dead child is a heavy price in absolute terms, but not when weighed against the entire world. And one “innocent” source tortured, while indisputably horrible, is better than thousands dead.
1) I agree with your implication. There’s nothing special about terrorism when it comes to terrorism.
What’s differentiates terrorism from white collar crime, of course, is the potential for mass murder. As the consequences of the threat increase, we’re naturally more willing to sustain false positives (torturing someone who doesn’t know anything).
You seem to want to design a system in which there are no false positives. That’s simply unrealistic. Under that regime, we could never put anyone in prison; any human justice system capable of holding some people guilty will inevitably, occasionally convict the innocent. Nor could we quarantine a town in which a highly contagious disease has broken out; some of the people imprisoned would not have caught and transmitted the disease, and are therefore falsely imprisoned. Nor could we fight wars; no matter how careful we are, there will always be civilian casualties.
Anyway, that’s why we’re more willing to tolerate torture in the terrorism context than in the ordinary-crime context. The stakes are just higher.
But the same calculation should apply, I think. In some cases, it would be wrong not to torture. Take the “kidnapped child” example. You’re a police officer, and you capture a guy whom you somehow know (100% sure) kidnapped a young child and buried him or her alive. You have no idea where the child is buried. Could be anywhere on earth. But you do know (again, 100% sure) that the child has less than an hour of oxygen remaining. The kidnapper says he refuses to say a word until he speaks with his lawyer.
Now you may let that child die without laying a hand on the kidnapper. But under those circumstances, I think most people would find you at worst wicked, and at best weak, for failing to torture the kidnapper.
Jul 20, 08:06 AM
Great post Mitch – Even though I think I disagree with you almost completely, I think I know why I disagree with you. And that’s the cool part…
Two simple observations before I get to the meat of why we’re disagreeing:
0.) You are still completely ducking the knowledge of someone’s guilt issue. I don’t see how any hypothetical that assumes 100% knowledge of guilt is relevent.
1.) You say that what separates terrorism is the potential for mass murder. But I think that if you look at the actual stats, many more people die as a result of drunk drivers than from terrorism (certainly in the US, and I would bet even world wide). Or even “normal” murder. According to this a little over 3,000 american men ages 20-24 were murdered in just one year. Surely that outstrips the death rate due to terrorism?
Perhaps you mean the possibility for killing a bunch of people all at once? If so, why is one person killing 1,000 people all at once worse than 1,000 people killing one person each over the course of a year?
Ok.
This, I think, is the real source of our disagreement:
– Torture is wrong. Always.
– Sometimes it is necessary to torture people.
I adhere to both of these statements, and I don’t think they are contradictory.
Perhaps we are disagreeing because when I say that torture is wrong, you assume that means I believe no one should ever, under any circumstances be tortured. This is not the case.
I’m going to use an analogy that I heard somewhere…
I think torture should be like civil disobedience.
People who commit acts of civil disobedience do so with the general knowledge that they are doing something wrong and will likely be punished. But they feel strongly enough about their cause (i.e. the greater good or whatever) that they are willing to risk the consequences.
We can’t issue blanket statements condoning civil disobedience: that would lead to anachy! Breaking the law must always remain on some level wrong, even if it is a bad law.
This basic level of wrongness serves as a natural check on civil disobedience. It means people will only commit acts of civil disobedience when they feel really strongly about something, and are willing to take the consequences for their action.
For the same reasons, I don’t think we should try to carve out situations/rationales where torture is not at all wrong. I think torture should always remain on some level wrong, and there should always be consequences (above a guilty conscience) for torturing someone.
But I accept the fact that there may be situations where torturing someone is the best option for the “greater good”. And if someone feels strongly enough about that, and are willing to be punished, then they should torture.
As an observer, I would recognize that their torture was performed for the greater good, but I would still demand that they be punished, because torture is wrong. Indeed, I’ll make this even more personal: I believe that under the right circumstances, I would be willing to torture someone. But, I also believe that I should be punished, even if I saved many thousands of people!
I hope that analogy was clear.
I also freely admit that one of my starting points in this is that all human beings deserve a basic standard of respect/treatment at all times. This is an axiom for me; an article faith. I believe it simply because that’s what feels right.
I hope that helps to explain my position, and perhaps some of our differences. If you think something is still unclear, let me know…I’m always willing to update my posterior base upon new info.
Also, I’d love to hear what Tom has to say about this, given his previous ruminations on various types/amounts of deaths being “worth it”.
Jul 20, 01:42 PM
0) I think Jon gives a good example of someone we know is guilty: they guy who tries to detonate a suicide bomb. Sure, nothing’s really 100%. Maybe he meant for the bomb to fail.
But I think that’s a long shot.
This guy tried to kill as many civilians as he could, and he knows things about people who will continue to do so. If he doesn’t talk, I say we make him talk.
1) You point out our difference on this one:
“Perhaps you mean the possibility for killing a bunch of people all at once? If so, why is one person killing 1,000 people all at once worse than 1,000 people killing one person each over the course of a year?”
More people certainly die from drunk driving, and getting hit by drunk drivers, than from being killed by terrorists. But we could potentially prevent a huge terrorist strike by torturing just one person, whereas we’d probably have to torture lots of people to prevent just one drunk driving death. That’s my distinction.
2) I don’t think the civil disobedience model of torture is proper. I’m uncomfortable—as I believe most people are—with the idea of setting up a system whereby we bind ourselves to punish people for doing things we consider proper, even heroic, in some circumstances.
People who do their job well should be commended, rewarded, or, at the very least, allowed to keep their jobs. That’s just basic fairness. I don’t know how else to put it.
Further, by making toture a “strict liability” offense (perpetrator get punished no matter what, regardless of moral culpability), you’re inevitably creating a system in which people would do the right thing (which, as you’ve admitted, sometimes includes torture) but for the personal consequences. “I would have tortured the kidnapper to save the child, but then I would have gone to prison. I was willing to endure having to torture someone, standing alone. But when coupled with incarceration, I decided against.” In other words, why on earth would we even knowingly create a rule that discourages good behavior. That just doesn’t make sense to me.
In the end, I’m just not a fan of articulating rules that we want people to break from time to time.
Just take our laws against murder. In general, you can’t kill other people. But sometimes you can. In other circumstances, we want you to kill other people. So we write those exceptions into the law. You can kill in self-defense. You can kill to protect others. You should kill if you’re a soldier in war. Now sometimes it’s a little unclear whether the self-defense was reasonable, whether the other person was really in danger, and who, exactly, you’re supposed to kill in combat. For those questions, we have trials.
It’s a better way of making and enforcing rules, I think, than simply throwing our hands up in the air and refusing to try and figure out when a general rule shouldn’t apply (as you acknowledge the torture proscription sometimes shouldn’t).
Here’s an even better idea. (Not mine.) Instead of deciding after-the-fact whether someone did the right thing to torture, let’s decide before hand. And instead of letting grunts decide, let’s make sure that high-level public officials make the decision, so we can hold them both legally and politically accountable for their decisions.
If we just have a blanket prohibition, with no out-clause, it’s going to end up being the cop or the enlisted soldier who decide, spur of the moment, to torture. Since torture is ever and always illegal, their decision to torture is just as wrong as their commanding officer’s go-head, so better the grunt goes before a jury than the president.
But if we have clearly articulated rules and exceptions, it will fall to a more democratically accountable leadership to decide whether a particular instance falls under one of the exceptions. Under this system, if an American wants to torture someone, he has to get permission from as a high a superior as he can (and if there’s more than a couple hours to spare, he has to ask the President). If that person signs off on the torture, a federal judge has to issue a torture warrant.
In this way, torture warrants would diminish, rather than increase, incidents of torture. In ex post adjudication, some guy decides he wants to torture, and we decide afterwards whether he made the right decision. In ex ante decision making, the same guy decides he wants to torture, but now he has to ask a superior, who then has to ask a federal judge. That’s two more obstacles to torture.
Sorry this has rambled on for so long. My point is this: by writing exceptions into the torture prohibition, we do two things. First, we better tailor punishment to wrongdoing. Second, we probably diminish the amount of torture going around, because we’re adding more obstacles to an interrogator’s decision to torture.
If it’s going to happen anyway—and it is going to happen anyway—let’s make sure we know when and why it’s happening, and that we have the power to vote out of office those whom we think are abusing (bad pun) the use of torture as an interrogation technique.
Jul 20, 03:01 PM
First of all, your suggestion of torture warrants is intriguing. It still feels wrong to me, but I’ll have to think about it more carefully.
0.) I think we’ve settled this one.
1.) “But we could potentially prevent a huge terrorist strike by torturing just one person, whereas we’d probably have to torture lots of people to prevent just one drunk driving death. That’s my distinction.”
Ok, this is interesting. You’re saying that torturing terrorists will be more efficient at preventing deaths than torturing drunk drivers. Why? Isn’t it possible that terrorists, hardened criminals that they are, will require much more physical abuse in order to talk? Couldn’t a single drunk driver cause a massive pile-up that kills 20-30 people, about as many people as many suicide bombings? You’re making a claim of efficiency based upon future acts, of which our knowledge is necessarily hazy. Now, that’s fine if you think that, but I suspect you don’t really have any empirical evidence that it’s true.
2.) “People who do their job well should be commended, rewarded, or, at the very least, allowed to keep their jobs. That’s just basic fairness. I don’t know how else to put it. ”
This is also interesting. I feel the same way about it being wrong to torture people. It’s just basic fairness. I don’t know how else to put it.
2a.) “Further, by making toture a “strict liability” offense (perpetrator get punished no matter what, regardless of moral culpability), you’re inevitably creating a system in which people would do the right thing (which, as you’ve admitted, sometimes includes torture) but for the personal consequences.”
First, we should note that in my analogy, the laws people break when engaging in civil disobedience are often rather minor. I’m not saying that the laws against torture should be uniformly strict and draconian. Give the prosecutor/judge relatively wide latitude in sentencing if you like.
I’m simply saying that mistreating humans is wrong, and that we should never back away from reinforcing that value.
2b.) “If we just have a blanket prohibition, with no out-clause, it’s going to end up being the cop or the enlisted soldier who decide, spur of the moment, to torture. Since torture is ever and always illegal, their decision to torture is just as wrong as their commanding officer’s go-head, so better the grunt goes before a jury than the president.”
I draw a different conclusion. If there are significant enough consequences for torturing people, the grunts will refuse to do the higher-ups dirty work. I would picture something like this:
Private: This guy knows stuff, but he won’t talk.
General: Torture him!
Private: No. That’s illegal, and I could go to jail. Indeed, there are actual military codes against it.
General: Please…!?
Private: No. If you feel this strongly about it, do it yourself.
This forces the proverbial shit to flow uphill, as it should. The people in charge, making the decisions, ought to bear the brunt of the responsibility for stuff like this. On this we agree.
Finally, we share the goals you list at the end of your post. I just think that my way might be better than yours at getting there.
Will someone other than Mitch argue with Joran? Will someone else argue with Mitch? Will Joran and Mitch ever agree on anything? Will one of them feel compelled to hunt down the other with a Zippo and an olive fork in retribution for their insolent ignorance? Tune in next week to find out on “Joran vs. Mitch: DeathMatch”!
Jul 20, 07:01 PM
Joran, you’re a utilitarian just like Mitch and I. There are moments in there where you seem a little unsure.
Civil disobedience is for when the laws are fucked up. If the laws were perfect, there would be no civil disobedience.
I have no doubt that torture warrants is the right answer. If it needs to be done, it should be on the books and in the daylight. Furthermore, I want good records kept to be sure nothing got out of hand.
The problem is this, torture is good in one limit and bad in the other, so a line needs to be drawn. I know a fair bit about drawing lines in complex spaces so bear with me for a bit.
I want this function that takes in the entire situation and outputs one bit—Torture or no torture. So how is the warrant judge going to figure that out? Mitch, you have to realize that this is a harder problem than the self-defense problem. It is probably also harder than almost all custody decisions.
What do we need to know to solve the Kid Burried Alive problem? You must admit that is probably about as easy as it gets. First you need goodness values for some pretty intangible things (like the kid dying, torturing an innocent person, torturing the right person but he doesn’t actually know, torturing him and he does know but doesn’t tell you for starters. There could even be some long term social harm caused by torture (a worry of mine with the death penalty)) A lot of the weights could be generated beforehand but not necessarily all of them.
More importantly, you need probabilites—lots of them—associated with pretty much everything that happens. Let’s say that we take away Mitch’s 100% and replace it with a 99.9%. So we’ve got a .001*tortured innocent in our sum. It’s possible that our guy was the kidnapper but had an accomplice do it, or doesn’t remember accurately enough and we torture him to no avail. Another probability another weight. Let’s say we torture him and he lies and tricks us. Let’s say that he knows and he tells us the truth after a certain amount of torture and we go there and the kid is already dead. What if they would have found the kid anyway?
All of those are contributing to the anti-torture part of the sum. On the plus side you’ve got “saved the kid” with a huge positive score but a pretty low probability. I hope you can admit that even your “obvious case” is non-trivial.
And I want some judge to assess all these probabilities on the fly in his head?! I could write a little program to do the math, but it still needs to be supplied with a lot of input that is very poorly known.
Worse still, there is potentially a very substantial time pressure. In our example, the only time when the probabilities are clearly in torture’s favor would be if we were chasing him into the woods and watching him carry the kid up the mountain and then caught him on the way back down. We can save the kid but it is a seconds count game now. A warrant is clearly out of the question. Our rules need to be able to deal with this case.
In the easier time pressure case, we are still requiring a judge to make a decision based on lousy data. The correct decision is going to often be, “let’s wait until we know more”. But that is an even harder probability problem (b/c you need time-varying distributions over distributions).
Thanks for sitting through that.
My point is that while I generally agree with Mitch, he fails to note that the problem is going to be intractible in the general case. The simple fact is that it will very seldom be worthwhile to torture someone and I don’t expect that we will be very good at correctly identifying those times.
The argument that Joran should make would be the one that let’s say that given a system of torture warrants, our expected (i.e. average) torture outcome is negative. What fraction of the time do you think they actually save the kid (and wouldn’t have otherwise)? Suppose it is more negative than the expected torture outcome for torture done without a system of warrants. Based on that alone, I can say that we should in fact have an across the board prohibition because it will “limit the damage” more effectively.
Truth be told, I don’t actually think that because if you make a save on a 10^3 death or greater event, that is going to carry your average for quite some time. I also agree with Mitch in that there will be less torture under a warrant system than with even a very strict prohibition.
Jul 21, 05:56 AM
Mitch wrote: “I think Jon gives a good example of someone we know is guilty: they guy who tries to detonate a suicide bomb. Sure, nothing’s really 100%. Maybe he meant for the bomb to fail.
But I think that’s a long shot. ”
How long a shot is it, really? One day, some Al Qaeda operatives grab you as you’re walking home from work. They tell you your wife and kids will be crippled and tortured for ten years if you refuse to strap on a bomb and kill yourself in the London Underground. So, you agree to do it.
But deep down, you’re thinking, “I’ll go along with this for now, but when I get there, I’ll just slip away into the crowd, and meanwhile my family can escape.” So your minders strap you up with C4 and a couple of detonators in the loo at Euston Station, and you get on the train. Partway down the tube, a couple of undercover police notice your bulging jacket and nick you.
So, here we have a case—admittedly hypothetical—in which a so-called terrorist was arrested “red handed” but with no intention to bomb anyone.
Should you be tortured? You tell them what happened, but of course they’re not going to believe you—they want names, plans, details. You don’t know anything. So they screw you down, pump you full of barbiturates, and grill you for several weeks.
Justified? I don’t really think so.
If we had a magical device like Pullman’s alethiometer that would let us read ground truth, I’d be much more ready to agree that controlled use of torture were reasonable. But I can’t get past the horror of torturing an innocent.
Jul 21, 07:42 AM
Tom wrote: Civil disobedience is for when the laws are fucked up. If the laws were perfect, there would be no civil disobedience.
I think this is wrong. Many people engage in acts of civil disobedience for reasons that have nothing at all to do with the law they are actually breaking. As an easy example: abortion protesters blocking access to a health clinic are not breaking an abortion law. They’re probably being arrested for trespassing, or something like that.
I think your version of civil disobedience is in fact a small subset of civil disobedience.
I think Tom excellently points out just how difficult a system of torture warrants would really be, and he’s right that I think that in that case the expected torture outcome would very likely be negative.
And of course, MIchael does a good job of shooting down any claims of certainty of guilt.
I still like the civil disobedience model. How’s this for the essential contrast:
1.) I prefer my model to torture warrants because I weight the sanctioned torturing of an innocent person very negatively,
whereas
2.) Torture warrant supporters weight the potential risk of terrorist acts very negatively.
So my criticisms of torture warrants would boil down to:
-We’d be giving away the farm on (1)
-Torture is actually very uncertain to reduce future terrorist acts, and any reduction we do see will not outweigh the negative consequences of rejecting (1).
And the positive case consists of a relative (to me) unconcern for (1) combined with the relative (to me) belief that torture will be extremely effective in reducing future terrorist acts.
Is that a passably fair summary?
Jul 21, 08:28 AM
“This guy tried to kill as many civilians as he could, and he knows things about people who will continue to do so. If he doesn’t talk, I say we make him talk.”
I wouldn’t argue about the certainty of his guilt—Michael already did a good job of that, although it does seem like a long shot.
But what I do have a problem with is the jump from certain guilt to certain valuable knowledge of other terrorists intending to kill large of amounts of people. Who says that they all know each other, where they are hiding, and what they are planning? Maybe he has some of this information and maybe he doesn’t. And I think this part ought to be more certain than whether or not he was intending to detonate his bombs. Especially since justification of torture would be based on that valuable knowledge. Knowledge that may or may not exist.
Jul 21, 04:08 PM
I don’t think you have me on the civil disobedience front. Suppose there exists a (not necessarily unique) optimal abortion law. Anyone who breaks a trespassing law while protesting my abortion law is
1) gaining nothing on the abortion front since my law is optimal and
2) trespassing
Since their abortion goal is futile at best, we can ignore it and just punish them for trespassing.
The point of civil disobedience is to express disagreement with the law. It isn’t to try to limit a sometimes bad sometimes good behavior.
But I see where you are coming from. Take speed limits. They are too low. Everybody knows this. The reason they are too low is because the law is a spring in this case and you need to get a ways from the limit before there is any tension. The other reason is that it would be very difficult to make a better law than the shitty one that we have now. I could weazel out by saying that such a law could be created but I won’t.
So if you call speeding “civil disobedience” I’ll let your point stand even though I don’t think you will be able to tailor it to create the sort of pressure that you want.
My problem is your use of the word “sanctioned” with the direct implication that sanctioned torture of an innocent is substantially worse than unsanctioned torture. I disagree. The actual torture itself would be less severe, and potentially more effective (more fear less hope). There would be better grounds for compensation when we screw up.
More importantly under a system of warrants, we would torture fewer people and we would be more selective about who is getting tortured.
Imagine that we create a system of warrants but never issue any. We maybe lie about it a little so people don’t catch on and stop asking for them. I think that could be used cut down on torture pretty effectively. It would also give us people and places to watch for unsanctioned torture.
Michael, if I had an alethiometer, I wouldn’t have to torture people would I. But it looks like the I/O is pretty tedious. I would prefer an alethiometer with a better input device that only answered yes or no questions.
Oh and Michael’s scenario is pretty descent. I imagine that they would have an anti-take-off device like a capacitive sensor glued to the skin in addition to a timer (potentially a remote detonator but that would be challenging underground). Two power supplies going into a very tamper resistant timer/detonator that also has
Jul 22, 07:52 AM
Tom wrote: The point of civil disobedience is to express disagreement with the law.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on this. I stand by my subset claim. Sometimes civil disobedience is meant to protest a specific law, but not always.
Citizens might engage in civil disobedience to protest actions by their government that are legal, but in their opinion wrong.
Easy example: buring draft cards. Hippies weren’t really protesting the draft law, they were protesting against the war.
Another example: Some people think Corporation X treats its employees poorly. Corporation X has broken no laws that we know of. Some people might engage in civil disobedience (blocking access, vandalism, etc.) to bring attention to what they see as a wrong act, mistreating employees.
Finally, I don’t expect us to agree on the “worseness” of sanctioned torture. My position on that does not stem from a rationale or logical thought process. The very idea of it happening makes me feel so shitty inside that I give it essentially infinite negative weight. I understand that it might not bother other people so much.