I don't think that he is unaware of the danger of torturing innocent people. The point is that his argument does not take that into consideration. His viewpoint appears to closely correspond with the one Shue described himself as holding in the 70's.
Having looked at your entry of a year ago, Specifically, I asked whether the fact that torturers are readily available around the world for those willing to import them or export prisoners to them changes this moral balance. A state like the United States could easily gain the ‘benefits’ of torture, without risking whatever dangers exist from a domestic torture agency. This misses the point, although Shue also adverted to the dangers of a domestically sanctioned school of torture, any non-domestic source of training amounts to a sanctioning of the regieme of torture the training is provided under. The US or any other nation cannot simultaneously condemn and act against human rights abuses by other states or violations by guerilla groups, drugs cartels ets, and recruit their agents, or agents honed practicing in these arenas.
The accidental torture of innocents (not always the pure but often those innocent of anything ehich may be used to justify the use of torture) within the stricly regulated conditions where torture 'may be allowable' is inevitable but could not be said to ever come within the range of justifying conditions discussed. Their innocence could only ever be confirmed by hindsight.
The question is not whether we are prepared to compromise our moral and human values to obtain good information from the guilty by an abhorrent and illegal practice, but whether we are prepared to condone the same deliberately concious infliction of harm on the innocent civilian who has no such knowlege to give up to hasten the end of their agonies. Approving a ny practice of torture would be a betrayal of our aspirations for human enlightenment and towards globally accepted minimum standards of behaviour in the knowledge that much information gained from those desperately trying to stop their torture (innocent or not) may misdirect or delay timely action by our forces: losing lives not saving them, or be directed against more innocents whose names have merely been provided to in an attempt to satisfy the torturers' demands.
The French revolution, Salem witch trials, gestapo, various secret police forces in the soviet and other despotic regiemes and even the McCarthy era communist hunting showed how often humans under pressure condemn their neighbours to escape intolerable pressures.
As a UK citizen who abhorrs the irreversibility (and inefficacious costliness) of the death penalty, I would rather bear the cst however painful. However, in the context of the death penalty, I have heard US citizens swear that they would rather several innocents died to ensure that the guilty met their end than that the guilty escaped. In that context, the idea that in the afterlife the innocent would do well is a comfort even believers cannot apply to surviving torture victims.
...states like America that have values fundamentally opposed to such obscene violations of human beings. While many citizens are in accordwith this, post- Guantanamo, (in a nation with the capital punishment) where nearly half their forces deployed in their most high-profile operation support the use of torture, the assertion that the fundamental values of the nation are the same as the ideals of its founders seems questionable.
woe is me for I did not copy the lengthy reaction into Word to proof-read it and now it is published still full of orphaned articles and other grammatical muddles (not to mention probable spelling errors) but too late to amend. (She says, providing a further multiclausal, underpunctuated, unwieldy, paragraph-in-itself sentence)
Having looked at your entry of a year ago, Specifically, I asked whether the fact that torturers are readily available around the world for those willing to import them or export prisoners to them changes this moral balance. A state like the United States could easily gain the ‘benefits’ of torture, without risking whatever dangers exist from a domestic torture agency.
This misses the point, although Shue also adverted to the dangers of a domestically sanctioned school of torture, any non-domestic source of training amounts to a sanctioning of the regieme of torture the training is provided under. The US or any other nation cannot simultaneously condemn and act against human rights abuses by other states or violations by guerilla groups, drugs cartels ets, and recruit their agents, or agents honed practicing in these arenas.
The accidental torture of innocents (not always the pure but often those innocent of anything ehich may be used to justify the use of torture) within the stricly regulated conditions where torture 'may be allowable' is inevitable but could not be said to ever come within the range of justifying conditions discussed. Their innocence could only ever be confirmed by hindsight.
The question is not whether we are prepared to compromise our moral and human values to obtain good information from the guilty by an abhorrent and illegal practice, but whether we are prepared to condone the same deliberately concious infliction of harm on the innocent civilian who has no such knowlege to give up to hasten the end of their agonies. Approving a ny practice of torture would be a betrayal of our aspirations for human enlightenment and towards globally accepted minimum standards of behaviour in the knowledge that much information gained from those desperately trying to stop their torture (innocent or not) may misdirect or delay timely action by our forces: losing lives not saving them, or be directed against more innocents whose names have merely been provided to in an attempt to satisfy the torturers' demands.
The French revolution, Salem witch trials, gestapo, various secret police forces in the soviet and other despotic regiemes and even the McCarthy era communist hunting showed how often humans under pressure condemn their neighbours to escape intolerable pressures.
As a UK citizen who abhorrs the irreversibility (and inefficacious costliness) of the death penalty, I would rather bear the cst however painful. However, in the context of the death penalty, I have heard US citizens swear that they would rather several innocents died to ensure that the guilty met their end than that the guilty escaped. In that context, the idea that in the afterlife the innocent would do well is a comfort even believers cannot apply to surviving torture victims.
...states like America that have values fundamentally opposed to such obscene violations of human beings.
While many citizens are in accordwith this, post- Guantanamo, (in a nation with the capital punishment) where nearly half their forces deployed in their most high-profile operation support the use of torture, the assertion that the fundamental values of the nation are the same as the ideals of its founders seems questionable.
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woe is me for I did not copy the lengthy reaction into Word to proof-read it and now it is published still full of orphaned articles and other grammatical muddles (not to mention probable spelling errors) but too late to amend. (She says, providing a further multiclausal, underpunctuated, unwieldy, paragraph-in-itself sentence)
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