I recently sent my extended family a Kevin Drum post explaining that civilized societies do not torture. Well, several family members disagreed and were offering arguments rationalizing their positions. After batting down the insidious ticking time bomb scenario, I then provided them with Reagan’s definition of torture when he signed the UN Convention Against Torture: “…severe pain or suffering…” This really pissed them off.
My Aunt’s response went full monty. Jumping in with both feet, she challenges the very idea that torture can even be defined:
Reagan’s definition is actually legalese meant to appease — and only that…
One person’s torture is another’s discomfort, and it really means nothing. Is sleep deprivation torture? Loud music? Where is that line? Do we have to adjust our definition based on regional or religious beliefs?…
When you talk about morals, whose moral high ground do we use? Yours or mine? What does “civilized” really mean? Are the Iranians barbaric because they stone and behead? In their world, that is the moral thing to do, but are they less civilized than you? And who are we to judge?…
I have a strong set of beliefs, but sometimes I change my mind. Life is not black and white, but many, many shades of gray, and it’s constantly changing.
Wow. When did Republican’s become moral relativists??? This seems like a serious political shift. For years we were told that the Republicans were the party of morals, that Republicans knew right from wrong. Now all of a sudden there’s gray area?
Trust me, it only gets better… here is my response. (OK, so I may have played a small role in stirring this thing up.):
I have a hard time with the argument that one person’s torture is another person’s discomfort. I don’t think it is so ambivalent or relative. Torture is “severe pain or suffering…” — and discomfort is, well, just discomfort. I sometimes have to remind myself that these words actually mean something – they have agreed-upon definitions, so that you and I have a similar understanding of what “severe pain or suffering” means… and it doesn’t mean discomfort.
Can sleep deprivation be employed as torture? Absolutely — after all, the CIA’s own KUBARK manual describes how sleep and sensory deprivation (and a number of other techniques) can be used to induce intense mental and physical suffering that if not controlled can lead to psychosis or even schizophrenia. (We can all thank those liberal university professors for teaching the CIA about psychological torture… you know, the kind that doesn’t leave marks.) Of course, I do not consider all sleep deprivation to be torture, just when it is the method used to induce “severe pain or suffering…”.
Similarly, the definition of torture doesn’t change depending on who is being tortured — “severe pain and suffering” doesn’t change depending on one’s ethnicity, or gender, or age, or religious views, or political persuasions. There’s not one definition of “severe pain and suffering” for Jews and another definition of “severe pain and suffering” for Muslims. It is universal. It is absolute. And it applies to the act, not the participants.
It can feel weird for me, as a progressive, to take the ‘politically incorrect’ position of saying that not all value systems are equally valid. But I am not a moral relativist. So yes, I can say without flinching that cultures which condone honor killings (or hate crimes) are barbaric. Just as I can say that cultures that condone torture are barbaric. I’m free to judge because I don’t believe in moral relativism — my experiences as an anthropologist (and human), working and living in little villages all over the world, has led me to believe there are certain elements of morality that are basic to humanity across time, place, and culture. (To be clear, the vast majority of Iranians condemn honor killings… it’s hardly “the moral thing to do”.)
