I'm perplexed by Shuggy's reaction to reading Steve de Wijze's article (on my recommendation) in the latest number of Democratiya.
Unless I've misunderstood him, Shuggy (see also here) sets his face against there being any debate about this, any discussion of the issue of torture at all; he'd rather the subject were treated as a taboo. Yet in the post in which he says so, he avails himself of reasoned discussion (arguing that torture has failed Kantian and utilitarian tests) - as if his own injunction didn't apply to him. Or to turn the same thing round: Shuggy says the taboo that he favours can be rationally defended, but he doesn't explain how you rationally defend something without engaging in discussion of it and thereby possibly participating in debate.
That he gets into this tangle isn't surprising given that there isn't much to be said for abjuring reason. It may not be everything, but it's hard to do without it. Shuggy defends the taboo against torture as...
... an inclination, based on moral sentiments not necessarily formulated into abstract thought - something drawn from the wisdom of ages and of nations, rather than men.But moral sentiments are no more reliable than our reasoning capacities (see, for example, racist sentiments, or sentiments, for that matter, in favour of torture) - though moral sentiments are not necesarily less reliable either. And the 'wisdom of nations' hasn't always come out against torture. There's no short cut to making our moral judgements: we need to use reason and sentiment and tradition and criticism, and even then there's no guarantee we'll get it right. We just have to do the best we can with all of the resources we have at our disposal. Shuggy may feel that Steve de Wijze's effort is deficient in certain ways, but to show that it is he'll need to deal with the detail of it - as he does not.
A final point. Anyone reading Shuggy's post but who hasn't read Steve's review article may form the impression that Steve either defends 'torture warrants' or has too soft an attitude to torture (though it surely wasn't Shuggy's intention to give this impression). Neither point is true. Steve writes:
Dershowitz's call for 'torture warrants' to be granted only by judges seeks to provide some protection from the possibility that brutalised case-hardened torturers do not overstep the line... As Luban correctly points out, the nature of bureaucracy and our knowledge of social psychology ought to make us very suspicious of any claims that the legal practice will not be abused...Torture as 'unmitigated evil' entails that it is always wrong, a thesis Steve discusses in the context of the 'dirty hands' problem. This isn't to say that his review is beyond criticism. But it deserves careful consideration by those who engage with it. Shuggy's dismissal is too quick to do it justice. (Thanks: E.)
.....
[I]nstitutionalising torture by legalising it has two very adverse effects: it brutalises the law and it undermines the message that torture is an unmitigated evil that needs to be eradicated everywhere and for all time. In liberal democratic societies the law must not be perceived as cruel or arbitrary, but rather as a guarantee of human dignity for everyone. This must be so even when the state employs violence to enforce legislation or apprehend criminals. The law must uphold human dignity even when the state faces danger and uncertainty since it stands as the central bulwark between civilisation and barbarism. Torture, by contrast, always aims to destroy a person's dignity and sense of self and to this extent it is forever incompatible with just laws. What is more, if torture is legally sanctioned, even if for very rare cases, this becomes an important symbolic setback in the recent worldwide battle to eradicate human rights abuses. In short, legalising torture under any circumstances is folly...