Much of the discussion I’ve read on the subject of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture by the CIA has foundered on fundamentally different notions of what constitutes moral action. The basic questino is how do you know what you’re doing is right?

There are really only a few schools of moral thought. There’s deontological ethics which emphasizes adhering to ethical principles. I’m inclined to be a Kantian and, therefore, I agree with this school.

Then there’s the consequentialist school. Consequentialists believe that whether an action is ethical or not depends on the outcome of the action. When defenders of the CIA’s strategy declaim that it was an effective way of obtaining information, they are making a consequentialist argument. As are those who respond that it wasn’t effective. Deontologists look at it differently: it was wrong. That’s all we need to know.

Finally, there’s group ethics. If we’re not the sort of people who do bad things, what we do cannot be bad, can it?

I think that both consequentialists are engaging in sophistry. There is a knowledge problem that they fail to recognize. If they’re right then the same action by the same person may be good or bad depending on its outcome which is something they cannot know until after they’ve acted. Or, in other words, no action is ever unethical because it might have had a good outcome.

And as far as group ethics is concerned, that’s just special pleading.

Much has been made of the failure of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture to include any recommendations. One possibility is that as its critics have charged the report is solely a partisan exercise. I don’t think that’s the case. There is plenty of daylight between “partisan exercise” and “solely a partisan exercise”.

The report is clearly a partisan exercise. Considering its source it could hardly be anything else. However, I think it does contain a kernel of truth and we should heed that.

Shouldn’t there be consequences for crimes on the scale being alleged? IMO the most likely explanations are that the critics are right or social. It would make for pretty uncomfortable cocktail parties and PTA meetings when you’ve put the family members and friends of your neighbors and people you socialize in jail.

Pat Lang has six recommendations. I’ll quote the first three here:

– Brennan has made himself an accomplice in what amounts to a criminal conspiracy to violate federal law. He should be fired and should be prosecuted for that crime.

– The Obama Justice Department should reverse its stated position and re-open investigations that may lead to the indictment of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rodriguez, and all those who participated in this criminal violation of US and international law. For the president and Holder to fail to do this would make them be in violation of their oaths of office. They swore to see that the law of the US would be upheld and enforced.

– All interested readers of SST should press their governments abroad to have their courts indict all those guilty of crimes against the Torture Convention in international law.

There are more.

Without excusing the torture, my greatest concern is the repeated lying under oath to Congress. It is impossible for Congress to exercise its oversight function when officials lie under oath systematically. In a civil system like ours that is rebellion against the civil authorities and it should be dealt with very seriously. Failing to do so makes the Congress complicit in the acts about which they’ve been lied to.

I might add that the very fact that the CIA officials felt that they need to lie suggests that they knew that what they were doing was wrong and illegal.

Update

Something I’d intended to put out in the post was an idea that Pat Lang has promoted from time to time: officials who have clearly perjored themselves in testimony before Congress should be shunned. I’d go a step farther than that and suggest an administrative form of shunning: they should lose their security clearances.

Writing at Bloomberg, Stephen L. Carter has noticed some connections, too. In this case they’re between the report on the CIA’s use of torture and the Rolling Stone’s story of rape at the University of Virginia. Here are his last two paragraphs:

When disputes over facts are misconstrued as disputes over principles, the entire project of Enlightenment democracy it at risk. The liberalism of the Enlightenment rested critically on the supposition that agreement on the facts was a separate process from agreement on the values to be applied to them. The social theorist Karl Mannheim, in “Ideology and Utopia,” argued that we would never be able to separate the two, that we would always wind up seeing the facts through the lens of our preformed ideologies. Thus liberal democracy, in the Enlightenment sense, was bound to fail.

Let me here avoid the false dilemma. As a believer in democracy, I want Mannheim to be wrong. But our increasing elevation of preformed narrative over hard-eyed pursuit of truth suggests that he may turn out to be right.

I think that an increasing number of people have already given up on Enlightenment values, reaching from ISIS camps in Iraq and Syria to Harvard Yard. The sad irony is that those who reject Enlightenment values still depend on them for their very survival.

I’ve heard some hand-wringing about some sort of a constitutional quandary in regard to replacing Judy Baar Topinka, who died yesterday after being re-elected state comptroller in November. There is no puzzle here at all.

Present Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn could appoint a replacement who would serve out the remaining balance of Ms. Topinka’s term. Then incoming Gov. Bruce Rauner could appoint a replacement who would serve out Ms. Topinka’s full term. There is no puzzle.

An even better choice would be to get the legislature to abolish the completely redundant comptroller job, giving the responsilities to the state’s treasurer.

Sean Trende makes a good point. A solid Republican South was the Democrats’ choice, not an inevitability:

What changed? Part of it is attrition: Voters who remembered their family farms going into foreclosure under Herbert Hoover were dying off. Part of it, no doubt, had something to do with the president’s race. But this has received far too much attention. Mary Landrieu and Kay Hagan won elections in 2008 with Barack Obama atop the ticket, while Mark Pryor was seen as so unbeatable that he was unopposed that year. It is difficult to explain change with a constant. If Landrieu had held on to her share of the white vote from 2008, when Obama was atop the ticket, she would have probably won outright in November. The same is true of Hagan.

So while I think Barack Obama’s race mattered, I think there were two more salient features. The first is that the Democrats at the national level increasingly gave up on the South. I don’t mean simply in terms of the issue positions they took, but rather with respect to the entire cultural affect of the party. From 1928 to 2004, nearly every Democratic presidential ticket had a candidate from the South or a border state (the exceptions: 1940, 1968, 1972, and 1984). Three of those four exceptions lost. But in 2008, there wasn’t a real movement to put a Southerner on the ticket.

Moreover, when you look just at the top of the ticket, from Bill Clinton to Al Gore to John Kerry to Barack Obama, you see a steady decline in the appeal such candidates would have to older white Southerners. The candidates become increasingly Northern, urban, and urbane.

While it may be comforting for Democrats to think of the decline in the party’s fortunes in the South as inevitable or even as good riddance, it does make one wonder which state they’ll write off next? Maryland, which elected a Republican governor? Virginia, in which the Democratic incumbent won re-election by a gnat’s eyelash?

Illinois, where a Republican governor will assume office in just a few weeks?

There is a common thread that unites many of the major news stories of the day, from the report on torture from the Senate Intelligence Committee to the sharp decrease in the number of doctors accepting new Medicaid patients to the spike in local government debt in China. It’s an idea that’s familiar to anyone who’s ever taken an introductory economics course: incentives matter.

Even as Medicaid rolls expand by some 9 million people, the number of physicians willing to accept new Medicaid patients is shrinking:

In 2011, 31 percent of doctors said they wouldn’t take new Medicaid patients, compared to 18 percent of doctors who said they weren’t accepting new privately insured patients, according to a Health Affairs study. The study, which was the first to take a state-by-state look at the issue, found lower Medicaid reimbursements rates made doctors less willing to accept new Medicaid patients.

The reason for that is simple: Medicaid reimbursement rates are signficantly lower than either private insurance or Medicare reimbursement rates. And in Illinois at least a physician may need to wait nine months to be paid the state’s portion for services. That’s how far Illinois is behind in its reimbursements.

In the case of China not only were local officials receiving strong encouragement from the central government but given the way business is done in China (or here in Illinois for that matter) a little bit of all of that lovely money inevitably but miraculously made its way into the coffers of those very same local official or their families. What’s not to like?

If the incentives for intelligence officials to torture prisoners and lie to Congress about it are high enough and no punishments are forthcoming for doing either, it is inevitable that both will happen again. The Civil Service Code prohibits most of the obvious punishments, e.g. an across-the-board pay cut, but it doesn’t prohibit intelligence officials who lie to Congress under oath from serving lengthy jail sentences. If Congress is serious, that’s what should happen.

I agree with this statement of Sen. Bob Kerrey’s as far as it goes:

It is important for all of us to not let Congress dodge responsibility. Congressional oversight of intelligence is notoriously weak. The 9/11 Commission recommended a number of changes in the authorities of Congressional committees but the proposal – advanced by Senator McCain – did not come close to gathering a majority of votes in either the Senate or the House.

The worse consequence of a partisan report can be seen in this disturbing fact: It contains no recommendations. This is perhaps the most significant missed opportunity, because no one would claim the program was perfect or without its problems. But equally, no one with real experience would claim it was the completely ineffective and superfluous effort this report alleges.

Of course the Intelligence Committee’s report is a partisan report. It could hardly be anything else. First and foremost senators are politicians it is a bit precious to be shocked, shocked that politics is going on in the Senate.

What bugs me is how can Congress fulfill its oversight function when it is routinely lied to by intelligence officials?

Illinois Comptoller Judy Baar Topinka has died:

Ilinois Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka has died, less than 24 hours after having a stroke.

A statement from her office says the 70-year-old Topinka died early Wednesday morning following complications from the stroke.

Spokesman Brad Hahn told The Associated Press that Topinka reported discomfort Tuesday morning and was admitted to a hospital in Berwyn, Illinois. After undergoing tests she appeared to be doing well overnight before suddenly losing consciousness Wednesday morning, Hahn said. She was pronounced dead shortly after 2 a.m.

Here is Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn’s statement on her death:

CHICAGO – Governor Pat Quinn today released the following statement regarding the passing of Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka:

“Today is a sad day in the state of Illinois. I am heartbroken to hear of the passing of my friend, Judy Baar Topinka.

‪ “As the first female Treasurer of Illinois and a longtime public servant, Judy was a trailblazer in every sense of the word.

‪ “Never without her signature sense of humor, Judy was a force of nature. She left her mark on the state she has called home her entire life. Her leadership improved Illinois and paved the way for countless women in politics.

“My deepest sympathies go out to Judy’s son, Joe, daughter-in-law Christina, granddaughter Alexandra, her family, friends and devoted staff.

‪ “Today the entire state mourns the loss of one of the greats. Judy Baar Topinka will be incredibly missed.”

Ms. Topinka has been a fixture on the Illinois political scene for decades. In November she was just re-elected to a second consecutive term as comptroller. She’d’ve made a much better governor than the man who defeated her when she ran, Rod Blagojevich. She was a straight-shooter and will be missed.

The news story of the day is, of course, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the torture of prisoners from 2001 to 2006. There are as many views of this report as there are individuals remarking on it.

Those who are defending the practice say it saved lives.

Those who condemn it say not only did it not save lives but it injured U. S. interests.

My view is that what was done was torture; torture is wrong, full stop; and even it it were effective and furthered national interests, there are no circumstances whatever under which intelligence officers should lie to the Senate.

I disagree with those who believe that the torturers should receive official pardons. The logic that defends that course of action is flatly wrong and contrary to human nature and I don’t honestly care if the Senate Intelligence Committee has partisan motives.

The forum in which whether the actions of those who did the torturing were legal or not should be a court of law rather than the Bush Justice Department. That goes for perjury before the Congress as well. The perjurors including Gen. Hayden and anyone else who clearly lied to the Senate under oath should be charged with perjury and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.