Yesterday I tossed a little firecracker into the pool with a small post at Outside the Beltway intended to provoke discussion of the nature and morality of torture. As I guess should have been expected some took a very narrow, consequentialist view in support of torture under some circumstances. I honestly don’t see how the same line of reasoning couldn’t be used to justify anything under any circumstances—not as a slippery slope but in simple coherence. Others interpreted any form of coercive interrogation as torture, also an extreme and, ultimately, incoherent argument.
What dismayed me the most about the discussion is that virtually no one had any vocabulary or context for discussing moral action. It was mostly just feces flinging, appeals to emotion, and exchanging anecdotes.
Thomas Jefferson may never have attended Sunday School but he owned an enviable library on ethics and morality and he actually read and understood the books he owned.
“It was mostly just feces flinging, appeals to emotion, and exchanging anecdotes.”
This could as easily describe a college classroom debate or a TV talking heads news show as it does a blogospheric comment section.
It’s very depressing but so few people have ever learned to properly frame a rigorously logical and coherent argument that such a thing is almost unrecognizable to them.
There are a lot of people who do not appreciate the contribution of the Greeks, nor of those who built on their work, but the fact remains that studying Greek philosophy and ethics and Roman law and political structure are the keys to enlightenment (both big and small ‘e’). I think that our schools’ neglect of this body of work is the cause of many modern political and social ills: we have forgotten as a culture what we once knew as a culture, and it is hurting us.
I continue to be thankful that both Latin and Greek (as well as a modern foreign language, in my case Russian) were required at my high school. That enables me to puzzle out Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus,Augustine, Aquinas and so on in the original.
I was not so lucky. We are having to learn just ahead of our kids.
Odd, isn’t it, that after 18 years of school, it was more than 10 years after that before I began to get educated.
Dave,
Does your alma mater still teach that curriculum ?
Jeff – you might like this:
http://classicalschool.blogspot.com/
Actually, I just posted an article on torture on my religion blog (http://boinkie.blogspot.com), (Cross posted to BNN http://www.bloggernews.net/110958).
John Allen of Nat’l Cath Reporter brings up the incident where Filipine police discovered a terrorist cell that was planning to kill the Pope in the early 1990’s…they found out the details via torture, and saved many lives…
The essay is about the need for torture in extreme cases to save lives but ends with the point that if there is a God, then maybe torture should be a no no…