Torture follow-up

In connection with yesterday's post about the nature of evil, here is this Times piece about the upcoming HBO documentary about Abu Ghraib:

"The HBO film raises those issues indirectly. It focuses on the way men and women assigned to serve as prison guards at Abu Ghraib so quickly fell into behavior that one soldier describes in the film as “Lord of the Flies.”

The interviews with low-level soldiers who were court-martialed for prisoner abuse are striking because some of the subjects are obviously intelligent, well-meaning people. But sadly, their lapses are not really so difficult to explain. The documentary is framed by clips from Dr. Stanley Milgram’s infamous “obedience” studies in the 1960s, which showed how easily ordinary, law-abiding citizens could be persuaded to inflict pain on strangers with what they were led to believe were high-voltage electric shocks."

So, here we see an endorsement of the view that people are fundamentally well-meaning. This is obviously attractive, since we don't want to think about our troops as being fundamentally rotten. Along the same lines, Scott Horton of the New York Bar Association says that there's "no chance" that these people were "self-actuated," and that everything they were doing was part of "precisely described techniques" used at Abu Graib and brought to Gitmo.

So, there are two distinct issues here. First, are we all "well-meaning"? Second, are we susceptible to manipulation extraordinarily easily? If the answer to both is yes, we have to ask ourselves, why are we so easily persuaded? Surely, if Rumsfeld & co. decided that the army should eat feces, the same officers would be a bit less inclined. There is someting particularly appealing about inflicting pain on others; it appeals to some base desires that people, at least some people if not all, have. If so, let's go back to the first question. Is it plausible that people who only require a slight bit of "conditioning" to turn into willing torturers are fundamentally well-meaning? Doesn't that make some mockery out of what it means to be well-meaning? I would be interested in seeing whether there were dissenters, people who didn't go along with this insanity.

Back to class. More on this later.