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.

Is evil banal?

This will hopefully be a regular blog. More about me in a later post, but I thought I would hit the ground running. Over at Slate, Clive James has this piece on Terry Gilliam (part of a series about 20th century lives), and his movie Brazil. James argues that contrary to the "bland malevolence" portrayed by Michael Palin's character, who plays a torturer in the movie, real-life torturers are in fact not mere technocrats following orders, but relish their work with great joy. This hearkens back to an age-old debate about the nature of evil, and whether some human beings are naturally evil, or whether they are merely driven by circumstances to do unspeakable things. Hannah Arendt famously argued that Adolf Eichmann was just a bureaucrat in her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem." James takes real-life examples from Argentina, Cambodia, and more recently Iraq, to demonstrate that torturers are in fact not victims of some soulless tyranny, but that any regime that wishes to torture is never short of a healthy supply of volunteers.

Of course, torture is all over television these days, most prominently in "24", where Jack Bauer could be seen torturing his own brother a couple of weeks ago. The creators of 24 seem to be members of a third school of thought, which actually considers torture morally acceptable (maybe even good?) in some circumstances. Using a traditional utilitarian calculus (which is awfully appealing), they follow the lead of the Israeli government in arguing that when millions of lives are at stake, torture may be necessary to elicit important information. It's all part of the new "war on terror." Of course, there is a fourth school, which argues that torture, regardless of its moral acceptability, simply doesn't work, and instead tends to produce false information. Not having the data in front of me, I am still inclined to think that while this may be true at the tactical level in say Iraq where you are interrogating suspects about locations of munitions depots etc., that logic works less well when the cost-benefit analysis weighs so heavily in favor of torture that even the risk of false information seems acceptable (suitcase nukes are a prime example.)

But this raises the interesting question of whether such torture, conducted by agents of the US government, can be analyzed in the same terms as the torture that Clive James is talking about. Does the fact that the torture is being conducted in aid of a goal that many would consider completely morally legitimate foreclose an analysis of the psyche of those who engage in it? This is a classic problem, well-known in the context of riot police who tend to be violent by nature. When we recruit people to our intelligence agencies, armed forces, police, are we going to be attracting those people who cherish torture? If James is right, the fact that we live in a democracy rather than a dictatorship should have no significant impact on the number of people who are willing executioners. If so, the existence of procedural safeguards may curb their disgusting appetites, but aren't they the same people at bottom?