tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3712012.post1009277916089090812..comments2023-07-04T10:10:25.205-04:00Comments on Apologia: Hurts So Good: Confronting Transcendance in the Scum of the EarthWilliam Lusehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15928946919078483848noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3712012.post-69443907926044701562009-08-07T17:19:40.964-04:002009-08-07T17:19:40.964-04:00Death. After trial and conviction, of course.Death. After trial and conviction, of course.William Lusehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15928946919078483848noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3712012.post-66352954671109802712009-08-07T09:20:04.353-04:002009-08-07T09:20:04.353-04:00Good post, Bill. I find your formulation of this s...Good post, Bill. I find your formulation of this situation illuminating.<br /><br />I wonder: what sort of punishment might be fit, in terms of justice, for the monstrous crime of withholding material information related to specific terrorist plots already in motion?<br /><br />In other words, how might a Christian legal code deal with punishing a man like KSM who, knowing the character of the horrific plots he initiated, refuses to divulge any information concerning them?Paul Cellahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00976325524080225869noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3712012.post-78118006989508295762009-07-18T02:54:06.801-04:002009-07-18T02:54:06.801-04:00Thanks for reading it.Thanks for reading it.wlnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3712012.post-74581262284721474832009-07-17T23:04:45.763-04:002009-07-17T23:04:45.763-04:00Yeah, that was my idea.
I just now noticed the &...Yeah, that was my idea. <br /><br />I just now noticed the "selling its soul for Wales" phrase in the last paragraph. Good shot.Lydia McGrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00423567323116960820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3712012.post-73604401930252359042009-07-17T00:43:31.870-04:002009-07-17T00:43:31.870-04:00Perhaps that means that your and my intuitions don...<i>Perhaps that means that your and my intuitions don't support the analysis of the wrong of torture in terms of "objectifying the person"?</i><br><br />Maybe, but I'm wary of the term because I'm not sure it's the source of my intuition about the wrongness of torture. As soon as a cop sits down with a suspect in the interrogation room, he begins to "objectify" him. He will manipulate him in various ways - through deceit, intimidation - in an effort to get at the truth. So "objectifying" may be a matter of permissible degrees. By the time we get to torture, it no longer is. I prefer Thielicke's "fundamental category": dehumanization. All dehumanization objectifies, but not all objectification dehumanizes. So my theory (tentatively offered) justifying the use of truth serum would go as follows: anyone who serves evil must build a wall around his conscience against the truth and against justice to his fellow man; he will rationalize the permissibility of any manner of means to his end. He is not the man he was created to be, but a diabolical counterfeit. Maybe we could say that truth serum brings down the stones of that wall (temporarily) so that his soul's God-given inclination to tell the truth, his humanity, can be revealed. Are we "attempting to bypass the sphere of decision altogether," or only that sphere that exists when he is not under the serum? He must be making *some* kind of decision in his drugged state to tell the truth. When he comes out of it, he'll be back to his old self, lying his way into heaven. This differs from torture in its usual sense in that waterboarding is resorted to in the hope that he'll be so terrorized that he won't *want* to back to his old self, or at least that he won't dare even if he'd like to. So a technique that causes no physical or mental agony, that does not involve base humiliation, and that leaves a man in body and soul intact upon completion (all 3 would have to be met) *might* escape the condemnation of torture. This is all assuming that I have an approximate idea of how truth serum works. If it can be shown that its use, in its very *design*, requires of the interrogator a behavior that most certainly will dehumanize according to the criteria mentioned above, then I'd have to let it go. But on the surface it seems to meet the requirement that "very little harm is done." Quite possibly, none at all. Unlike what would happen to those embryos. <br /><br />So, yes, if you're implying that Meilaender's "thingifying" of a person might not be the bottom-line description of torture, I'm inclined to agree, though in an act of torture thingifying will always be present.William Lusehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15928946919078483848noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3712012.post-77146780020028626462009-07-16T21:58:46.295-04:002009-07-16T21:58:46.295-04:00Perhaps that means that your and my intuitions don...Perhaps that means that your and my intuitions don't support the analysis of the wrong of torture in terms of "objectifying the person"? If truth serum is supposed to objectify the person as torture does...then it doesn't seem to me that that is the central reason for the wrongness of torture. I tend to think of truth serum as being something more like knocking a guy out with anesthesia so you can do minor surgery to obtain a secret message on a chip implanted just under his skin.<br /><br />Yeah, the "wrong but very little harm" thing is _crazy_ about killing the three embryos. He can't believe they are full human beings. Unless he would also say that wrong but little harm is done by bumping off a lonely old lady that nobody cares about.Lydia McGrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00423567323116960820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3712012.post-12148137362515961212009-07-16T20:02:56.472-04:002009-07-16T20:02:56.472-04:00The business about truth serum (in one of the quot...<i>The business about truth serum (in one of the quotations from M.) does strike me as an odd comparison to waterboarding. Perhaps it's a common comparison, but to me the two do not seem similar at all.</i><br><br /><br />To me either. I just decided not to get into it right then. M. does say that he would permit the use of truth serum, but the rationale for it sounds the same as for killing those three embryos: "wrong, but very little harm [!!], is done."<br /><br />Since torture is typified by mental and physical cruelty, I think I have a way to justify the use of truth serum, unless there is a harm associated with its use of which I am ignorant.William Lusehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15928946919078483848noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3712012.post-61717025121841190232009-07-16T09:24:08.844-04:002009-07-16T09:24:08.844-04:00M. certainly does seem ambivalent, at least from t...M. certainly does seem ambivalent, at least from those quotations. I haven't had time to read the whole article. I'm astonished, myself, at his feeling ambivalent about destroying only three embryos once in a crisis. What if we made it three three-year-olds? There's something there of a failure really to internalize the full humanity of the embryo.<br /><br />The business about truth serum (in one of the quotations from M.) does strike me as an odd comparison to waterboarding. Perhaps it's a common comparison, but to me the two do not seem similar at all. I don't know if this is just my aversion to the deliberate infliction of severe pain on a helpless person, which truth drugs do not do, but I have no immediate intuition against their use and cannot help thinking them quite different from torture, including waterboarding.Lydia McGrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00423567323116960820noreply@blogger.com