Sauce for the Gander

The Texas anti-abortion law enshrines the idea that others' interests legally trump an individual's right to bodily integrity.  Of course, many would question whether a six-week embryo really has morally significant interests yet, but put such worries aside for now.  I'm interested in how broadly this principle should be applied.  For there are many needy individuals out whose moral status is much clearer than that of an embryo.  Just consider any dialysis patient, for example.  If bodily integrity is no longer sacrosanct, should we not pass laws mandating the removal of excess kidneys to help those in need?  Better yet, since most of us (I think) still regard violations of bodily integrity as a serious moral cost, perhaps one could instead mandate just that those who have mandated that others' bodily integrity be violated for another's sake should themselves be subject to mandatory kidney donation.  They've already implicitly consented to the principle at stake, after all.

Against Bad Government [Pandemic Edition]

Libertarians like to rail against "Big Government", but that often comes off as needlessly ideological and indiscriminate.  Governments are capable of doing good things, after all, and it's worth supporting them when they do.  (Granted, there are more sweeping arguments for why, say, a market-based economy is a better idea than communist central-planning, no matter how "good" the communist leaders might be.  But attacks against "big government" tend to have a wider target than just this.)

So I prefer to stake a claim against bad government.  When governments do bad things, it's the badness, not the mere fact of intervention, that I'm opposed to.  Framing it this way may help to make for a more receptive audience, too: few liberals are impressed by sweeping complaints about "big government", but nobody could deny that particular policies might be bad.  And from there we might even be able to identify systematic reasons why certain governments, at certain times, could be expected to generally do more harm than good, and hence why we might reasonably prefer that they had less power over us (at least if we're not able to remedy the deeper problem).

Civility and Politics Beyond the Pale

Michelle Goldberg has an excellent opinion piece in the NYT on the recent 'civility debate':

The norms of our political life require a degree of bipartisan forbearance. But treating members of Donald Trump’s administration as ordinary public officials rather than pariahs does more to normalize bigotry than exercising alongside a white separatist. [...] As long as our rulers wage war on cosmopolitan culture, they shouldn’t feel entitled to its fruits. If they don’t want to hear from the angry citizens they’re supposed to serve, let them eat at Trump Grill.

Ordinarily, my sympathies are all for showing civic respect to our political "opponents" (who ideally we should not think of as opponents at all).  But these aren't ordinary times.  As Goldberg briefly recounts, the Trump administration (and indeed much of the broader Republican party) has abandoned any pretense of abiding by norms of civil democracy in favour of blatant dishonesty, inhumanity, and political corruption.

Do those who insist on continued civility (for moral rather than tactical reasons) deny that Trump and his cronies have gone beyond the pale?  If so, where do they draw the line -- must we tolerate everything short of the gas chamber?

GOP Closes Doors to Newborns

In a nearby possible world, the GOP politicians decrying refugees extended their arguments just a little further.  It went a little something like this...

"Who in their right mind would want to let in tens of thousands of newborn children, when we cannot determine, when the administration cannot determine, who is and isn’t going to grow up to be a terrorist?” Cruz asked.

“Here’s the problem." Rubio expanded. "You allow 10,000 people to be born. And 9,999 of them are innocent people who grow up to be decent, law-abiding citizens. And one of them becomes a terrorist,” he said. “What if we get one of them wrong? Just one of them wrong.”

"My primary responsibility is to keep the people of Texas safe," explained the Governor of Texas, in a video clip. "That means: no more people," he quietly added. "They're just too risky."

"Abortion is murder," one pro-life campaigner clarified. "But if we ship babies off to the Middle-East, whatever happens to them is out of our hands." She paused. "I think it's the right thing to do, to protect our values, and protect our children." A longer pause. "The ones that are already here, I mean."

Questioning Political Dogmas

There's an interesting thread over at Daily Nous asking whether there's a problematic lack of political diversity in academic philosophy.  I don't think this is something that can be answered in a value-neutral way.

In particular, one cannot just assume that the spectrum of views in the general populace is privileged and ought to be reflected proportionally in academia, (or anywhere else, for that matter).  As we know from history, morally abhorrent views can enjoy substantial popular support.  There was once widespread support for slavery, fascism, etc., amongst certain populations. Otherwise decent and "reasonable" people held, and advocated for, these abhorrent views.  That doesn't mean that they were actually reasonable in doing so, or that the views are ones that (ever) merited representation amongst the intelligentsia.

Is There a Moral Duty to Cut Taxes?

So claims David Cameron (ungated version here):

It is morally right that the rich pay their fair share in tax; and right that those who are able to contribute to our public services and safety nets do so.
But what is morally wrong is government spending money as if it grows on trees. Every single pound of public money started as private earning. Every million in the Treasury represents a huge amount of hard work: early morning alarms, long commutes, hours spent on the factory floor, the office, the hospital ward or the classroom. [...]
No one should doubt my position: with every spending commitment we must be mindful of who picks up the bill. It's easy for governments to trumpet what they spend money on - and claim a moral victory for it - but on the other side of the coin are those who work hard, many on low incomes, who would desperately like to spend more money on their family. The government has a moral duty to think of these people in any decisions made on tax and spending.

Cameron is surely right that governments should not waste money (e.g. fighting harmful and unnecessary wars).  I'm also sympathetic to the thought that individual citizens -- especially those with low incomes -- will often be able to make better use of money than the government does. But this is no reason for tax breaks that disproportionately benefit the wealthy.  A better option would be to disburse the wealth as an unconditional basic income or fixed lump sum payment to each citizen.

Force-Feeding and Selective Paternalism

Judge Allows Military to Force-Feed Guantánamo Detainee. The judge insists that "The court simply cannot let Mr. Dhiab die."  This despite the fact that Dhiab has autonomously (and, in the circumstances, I would think entirely rationally) chosen to go on a hunger strike, and obviously does not consent to be violently force-fed by his captors.

This naturally raises the question: Does the U.S. legal system no longer recognize an individual's right to refuse invasive medical treatment? Or is there simply an exception for when their death would be embarrassing to the administration?  After all, there are surely much clearer and stronger reasons for paternalistic intervention in ordinary cases of, e.g., patients refusing life-saving blood transfusions on religious grounds.  Or is a blood transfusion more invasive than violently shoving a feeding tube up a captive's nose and down his throat? Perhaps it's thought that the captive has "more to lose" -- his life of confinement without trial in this famous military resort being so much more desirable than the future that your average Jehovah's Witness could ever hope for? One wonders.

Modest and Immodest Patriotism

In 'Modesty Without Illusion', Jason Brennan argues for the (Adam Smith inspired) Two Standards Account of modesty, according to which:

The wisest person focuses on the ideal. His respect for that ideal combined with his intense self-awareness and self-control drives him progressively more to approximate that ideal. On the other hand, the immodest person focuses his attention primarily on the second, commonplace standard. A person who ranks better than average in moral worth might focus on this standard, and thereby become arrogant and contemptuous of others. The modest wise person attends to the gap between his moral worth and the worth of the ideal. The immodest person attends to the gap between his worth and the worth of others below him. (p.120)

I'm reminded of the contrast between liberal and conservative conceptions of patriotism...

Utilitarian Policy

I think the world would be a much better place if public policy debates were more focused on cost-benefit analysis. Too often, people refuse to acknowledge trade-offs or opportunity costs (health and military spending are obvious candidates here). Other times, people seem more interested in harming out-groups or "looking tough" than in actually securing better outcomes for everyone (think immigration, prisons, torture). And then there are the obvious cases of legislative capture by special interests (farm subsidies, retroactive copyright extensions). It seems like there's a lot of scope for "no brainer" policy improvements that every reasonable person should be able to agree on. But maybe I'm missing something. So let me take a stab at outlining some of the issues where the answer seems to me completely obvious -- and I hope that others will add more suggestions in the comments, and/or explain where you think I'm going wrong.

"Partisan Politics", or Party Policy?

Will Wilkinson seems a bit confused:

The choice to [promote health care reform] instead of focusing narrowly on getting the economy back on its feet and getting the unemployed back to work, amounts to putting partisan politics before the economic welfare of struggling Americans.

This is deeply deceptive rhetoric. "Partisan politics" could mean one of two things. In this context, Will presumably means nothing more than that the substantive policies in question are opposed by Republicans. But there's obviously nothing necessarily wrong with "partisan politics" in this sense. After all, it's possible for an opposition party to oppose good policy proposals -- proposals which may, for all Will has said here, do more to improve the "welfare of struggling Americans" than a narrow focus on improving the economy would. (I take no position here on the actual policy merits. I'm just pointing out that, as a conceptual matter, this objection is inane.)

Alternatively, talk of "putting partisan politics [first]" may be taken as an accusation of bad faith: rather than trying to implement worthwhile policies, one is thought to be merely acting for "partisan gain" -- to increase one's electoral chances, or some such. This would be a very serious accusation.

The first interpretation makes it easy to claim that one's opponents are "putting partisan politics first". The second interpretation makes "putting partisan politics first" sound like serious wrongdoing. One can understand why a partisan hack would thus be tempted to equivocate in this way. What I can't understand is why Will would want to sound like a partisan hack.

Liberaltarians and Inequality

I attended an interesting panel discussion a couple of weeks ago, titled "Liberals and Libertarians: Common Ground or Separate Agendas?" Reason magazine has a good write-up of the discussion here. I especially enjoyed hearing from blog-famous Jacob T. Levy and Will Wilkinson, the latter of whom discussed what he calls the leftist's "Inequality Road to Serfdom" argument:

According to IRS, the wealthy convert their economic resources into political resources deployed to protect their advantages. Past a certain threshold of inequality, the gap in political resources is so vast that the wealthy–by means of insidious think tanks and the Republican Party–basically capture the democratic process and effectively disenfranchise the rest of the population, leaving us with a de facto oligarchy hiding inside a meaningless husk of democratic forms. Serfdom!

Will pointed out that the empirical premise here seems questionable. Plenty of rich people vote Democrat, precisely because they are so materially secure that they prioritize their (typically socially liberal) values instead.

[This doesn't touch on the more serious problem of post-election corruption / regulatory capture. But there I guess the problem is not inequality per se, but the way that flows of money shape the legislative process. So the solution is to reform the political process, not limit wealth inequalities.]

We should of course provide a 'safety net' (e.g. a basic income guarantee). But I don't see such a need for a wealth ceiling.

Guantanamo

This may be old news to some, but if you haven't heard the 'Habeas Schmabeas' episode of This American Life, I highly recommend it. It describes how innocent people were turned over to U.S. authorities as alleged "Al Qaeda agents" in exchange for bounty money. They were transported to Guantanamo, tortured, eventually found to be innocent, and sometimes still not released nonetheless. From the transcript [pdf]:

HITT: As best as we can tell, Badr Zaman Badr and his brother were imprisoned in Guantanamo for three years for telling a joke. Actually, for telling two jokes. They ran a satire magazine in Pakistan that poked fun at corrupt clerics. Sort of the Pashtu edition of “The Onion.” [...] So after hearing the punch line explained 150 times, we finally got the joke, and sent Badr and his brother home. It had been three years since the Pakistani army surrounded their house in Peshawar, came into their living room which is lined with wall-to-wall bookcases, and arrested them. That’s Badr’s version of why we jailed him; here’s President Bush’s:

PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH: These are people that got scooped off a battlefield, attempting to kill U.S. troops. And, uh, I want to make sure before they’re released that they don’t come back to kill again.

Is Guantanamo a campful of terrorists, or a campful of mistakes? In a new study by Seton Hall’s law school, researchers simply went to the trouble of reading the 517 Guantanamo case files released by the Pentagon. Here’s what they found:

Only 5% of our detainees at Guantanamo were “scooped up” by American troops, on the battlefield or anywhere else. Five percent. The rest? We never saw them fighting.

And here’s something else: Only 8% of the detainees in Guantanamo are classified by the Pentagon as Al Qaeda fighters. In fact, Michael Donleavy, head of interrogations at Guantanamo, complained in 2002 that he was receiving too many “Mickey Mouse” prisoners.

In 2004, the New York Times did a huge investigation, interviewing dozens of high level military intelligence and law enforcement officials in the US, Europe and the Middle East. There was a surprising consensus: that out of nearly 600 men at Guantanamo, the number who could give us useful information about Al Qaeda was “only a relative handful.”

On the innocent detainees:

HITT: The government says that they would release Adel and the other Uighurs, if only it could find another country to send them to. I have an idea. Adel could go 90 miles north to Miami where’s there’s an entire city of anti-Communists. Or he could be sent to one of the largest Uighur ex-pat communities: in Washington D.C. So, why aren’t we going to be seeing Adel anytime soon? Here’s Willett [their lawyer]:

WILLETT: I’ll tell you what I think the answer is, although no one from the government would admit this. I think the answer is that if anybody actually met these guys, actually looked at them, and took their pictures and, you know, had them on TV shows or the radio, they’d be shocked. Because they’ve been told for four years that the people at Guantanamo are terrorists, that they’re the worst of the worst. And you take a look at Adel, you’re gonna suddenly realize you’ve been lied to for a long time. He struck me when I first met him like the kind of kid your college age kid would bring home – his roommate, his buddy from college, home for the weekend. People who meet Adel for the first time, they walk out of the meeting and, and, their jaws are a little unsprung. And they don’t say much, because it’s hitting them like a ton of bricks. You know, “This guy’s in Guantanamo?”

HITT: If Willett’s right, this gets to the heart of habeas. The whole point is that the king shouldn’t have the right to just detain somebody because it would be an embarrassment to have the guy free. The Pentagon has an acronym for people like the Uighurs. It’s pronounced “N-LEC”. It means No Longer Enemy Combatant. But, as Willett notes, it should be Never Was Enemy Combatant.

Thank goodness for the Supreme Court.

Sockpuppet Journalism

The dismal ABC debate raises many questions about journalistic ethics and the civic obligations of the media. One thing I want to explore is the use of quotes from "ordinary voters", in light of revelations that Nash McCabe - the woman used by ABC to ask whether Obama "believes in the flag" - has had past media exposure:

Presumably, a researcher for ABC or Gibson saw the piece in the Times, figured, hey, this lady hates Obama and is seriously ginned up about the lapel issue. Let's send a camera crew and film her slamming Obama to his face. It'll be great in the debate.

A TPM reader adds:

In [certain other debates], citizens asked questions that weren't obvious or oriented toward sound bytes. They were the kinds of questions that would not, for whatever reason, be asked by these tv moderators. Moreover, these were their questions. In this case, the producers put the producers' question into the mouth of a voter, because it made the question seem more authentic, as if people care in large numbers about the flag pin question. That is, the woman was used to legitimize the traditional media's focus on these frankly trivial and, yes, distracting issues.

So it's not just bad that they sought out someone to ask the question, but that they did it in order to avoid asking the question themselves because, you know, it's sort of embarrassing. It's not about content; it's about TV content and TV optics. There's no way for Gibson to ask that without looking petty and stupid. So they used this woman.

Let's define journalistic sockpuppetry as the practice of starting with a preconceived statement 'X' in mind, and purposefully searching for someone (anyone) to echo it, so that you can present your desired statement 'X' under the guise of neutrally reporting someone else's words.

I suspect that journalistic sockpuppetry is fairly common. Such gratuitous dishonesty also seems pretty clearly unethical. (Any counterarguments?) Journalists shouldn't use others merely as a mouthpiece. If you've stacked the deck in such a way as to ensure that your final quote matches some preconceived content, the quoted person is no more the author of that content than my keyboard is the author of this post. They're merely a mechanism through which you've expressed yourself, and it's deceitful to pretend otherwise.

Good political blogs?

There are a number of good, thoughtful liberal blogs out there. I'd say hilzoy's Obsidian Wings is far and away the best.

There are a number of good, thoughtful libertarian blogs out there. Here my top vote goes to Will Wilkinson.

Can anyone recommend some comparably good, thoughtful conservative bloggers? (Jeremy Pierce is decent, but only occasionally writes on politics. Russell Arben Fox is also thoughtful, if idiosyncratic -- he certainly doesn't present a mainstream conservative perspective. So neither is quite what I'm looking for here.) Are there any Burkean traditionalists out there, offering wise counsel on the pressing issues of the day?

Consider this an open thread. If you can't recommend any conservatives, feel free to recommend someone else.

Precautions and Moral Responsibility

Is it advisable to take precautions that reduce one's risk of suffering victimization? That seems like an easy question. But in specific cases, people sometimes fear that an affirmative answer risks "blaming the victim", or excusing the actual wrongdoer. Consider the unwillingness of some conservatives to even consider the ways that U.S. foreign policy might raise the causal probability of terrorist attacks. Or, at the other extreme of the political spectrum:

when I suggest to campus sexual assault administrators that they could stop what Koss calls the “rape pandemic” overnight if they persuaded girls to exercise more prudence, I inevitably receive responses like the following (these are my interlocutors’ actual words): “I am uncomfortable with the idea of ‘recommending that female students exercise more modesty and restraint’—this indicates that if they are raped it could be their fault—it is never their fault.” Or: “Yes, modesty would have a certain impact, but who’s responsible?”

There are two possible reasons why the administrators refuse to take the most efficacious, practical action to end campus rape—counseling sexual prudence. Either they know in their heart of hearts that what is happening on campuses is not really rape, but something much more ambiguous and also much less traumatic than real rape. Or—and this possibility is too horrible to contemplate—these self-professed women’s advocates really do believe that a drunken hookup is rape, and yet are withholding from women the simplest, surest way to prevent being raped, simply in order to preserve the principle of male fault. If the latter situation actually prevails, I conclude that the campus rape movement is purely political, interested solely in casting men as the evil perpetrators of the patriarchy rather than in most effectively protecting potential victims of a traumatic crime.

I wonder how many people are consistent across both (terrorist and rapist) examples?

See also: how moral posturing can get in the way of actually achieving the good.

Draft Lessig!

Lessig '08:


You can join the Facebook group to encourage Lessig to run for congress.

Update: Julian Sanchez has more: Lessig wants to build a "creative commons in Congress"

False beliefs are worth upsetting

Goodness. (HT)

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed. It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

Less Sensitivity, please.

Correction: apparently 'some teachers' in this context refers to one teacher. [Thanks David.] Still, the broader issue bears highlighting:

The report concluded: "In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship."

Motivated Incomprehension

Take the following passage, written by a respected academic:

Hillary Clinton suffers from being a Clinton, as well as having one of the most unappealing public personae of a national politician in recent memory. Dick Cheney is creepier and scarier, to be sure, but “fake” is the only word that captures the impression Ms. Clinton makes every time she opens her mouth.

Now, could any competent speaker of the English language reasonably interpret this as RM does?

“unappealing,” meaning–I, Brian Leiter, would not want to sleep with her?

Because that just sounds completely loony to me. When I asked RM to explain how she[?] could possibly interpret the talk of 'appeal', in this context, as referring to sex appeal, RM wrote:

the “context” is the historical characterization of women being evaluated in terms of sexual appeal. This context is always present, regardless if it is explicitly referred to or not.

So apparently it is impossible in our linguistic community to successfully refer to any kind of 'appeal' other than sex appeal, when speaking of a person who is female. That would surprise me. At least, when I read the original quote, the "sex appeal" interpretation did not even occur to me. Yet RM leaped at it as the only possible interpretation. So one of us must be way out of touch with the rest of the speech community. (I assume it's RM who's wrong here, but I'd encourage any readers to report their linguistic intuitions in the comments, just so I can be sure.)

This illustrates one of the things that really bothers me with ideological movements: they seem to impede clear thought (to put it mildly). Paranoia leads ideologues to see threats and insults where none exist. Further, some seem motivated to twist others' statements and read them in the most uncharitable light, willfully misunderstanding them in order to get that dark rush of moralistic pleasure that comes from thinking ill of others. (Cf. Hilzoy's 'Hatred Is A Poison' - possibly the best blog post I've ever read.)

Indeed, RM repeats the debacle later in the very same comments thread. I wrote: "if we are to take sexism seriously, then wrongful accusations of sexism are also pretty serious, to my mind." To which RM responded:

Richlet,

This my last comment. If you feel the need to get the last word in, well, I’ll write that off to your nature.

Have you ever heard of Modus Tollens (it’s related to Transposition)? When we have a conditional statement if A then B, and if not B is shown to be the case, we can conclude not A. This means that B not being the case can, indeed, show that A is false (or as you loosely put it, call A “into doubt”).

In your example, B NOT being the case would be making false accusations of sexism, i.e. if we prove that there are lots of false accusations of sexism then we should not take sexism seriously.

So, my dear boy, given that you think that Leiter has been falsely accused of being sexist, we have at least one instance of not B that could call A (taking sexism seriously) into doubt. Granted, how many more of these “false accusations” are needed before you really begin to question sexism is not clear.

Regardless, I suggest you take a quick look at Modus Tollens. Google it. I teach it in my intro logic class.

Hugs,
RM

Never mind the patronizing false intimacy, or the passive-aggressive posturing re: getting the last word in. Here we have a logic professor suggesting that "if we prove that there are lots of false accusations of sexism then we should not take sexism seriously" is the contrapositive of the previously quoted conditional (apparently misreading the actual consequent, i.e. 'wrongful accusations of sexism are serious', as the very different claim: 'wrongful accusations of sexism don't occur'). The mind boggles.

Less Sensitivity, please

Ophelia Benson offers some apt remarks on hypersensitivity:

'As a Christian I am offended' - there's one of the worst, most repellent formulas in the discourse of complaint we have today - but boy is it popular. Variations of it were all over Nova's 'Judgment Day': one stalwart citizen of Dover after another talking about being offended. I think that was the first thing the awful Bill Buckingham said - 'I am personally offended by evolution because the Bible etc etc etc' - the 'personally' was a nice annoying touch. So you're 'personally' offended by reality, so what! The world doesn't revolve around you, so suck it up...

['Sensitivity' is] another one - it's like the mirror-image of 'offended.' It's what you're supposed to run to the closet and fetch when someone is offended - sensitivity. They're a co-dependent couple, those two words... But all the same, there is something very stomach-turning about the idea that a university is supposed to deploy 'sensitivity' about the organ of offendedness in godbothering students when planning its lectures on academic subjects.

It's so depressing how arbitrary subjective responses are presented in public discourse as though they were legitimate reasons ('Shut up! Shut up! You're making me feel bad! So do as I say!'). We've developed a disastrous social norm according to which anyone can win instant brownie points by claiming to be a "victim" -- and doubly so if their claim is made qua membership in some "community" ('As an X, I'm offended...'). Maybe the thought is that all communities are equal, so if one is feeling a bit hard done by, this must reflect some injustice, and certainly not any shortcoming on their part.

There's no more vicious character trait, we're taught, than being insufficiently "sensitive" to others' feelings. Manipulative liars are hunky dory - nobody cares about intellectual honesty - but the moment you make someone feel bad, social disapproval is sure to follow. Maybe this is legitimate when it comes to personal interactions: as private individuals, we should of course be considerate of others. But the public sphere should not be governed by the same norms.

It's vital for the progress of civilization that there be a space for open debate and unhindered intellectual inquiry into controversial issues. People won't always like what they hear, but that's an inevitable consequence of seeking the truth. A truth-seeking society cannot allow public discourse to be derailed by merely subjective complaints. Feeling offended is not a public reason that has any place in the discourse. It's a purely private fact about yourself (or your faction, if you're angling for the "community" bonus points) that has no claim on society at large.

The underlying problem, I suspect, is that our public culture has become so infected with subjectivist assumptions that people don't realize that there's a difference between desires and reasons. Sentiments are taken as given; no-one ever stops to question whether their reactive attitudes are warranted. Any kind of negative emotion is not just evidence, but constitutive, of suffering injustice. You're offended, therefore they're in the wrong. It's fucked up.

Social norms exert great influence over public behaviour. In recent times, they've been pressing us to become more sensitive to others' arbitrary feelings (and to cultivate our own feelings of victimhood). One gains instant sympathy by playing the victim, and others risk social censure if they don't play along. This is daft. A more sensible society would privilege the truth, placing great weight on intellectual honesty and warranted - rationally defensible - emotions. We have it backwards: unreasoned emotional appeals should lead us to roll our eyes, not roll over -- such coddling simply encourages the blithering idiots!

Of course, if it can be established that you've truly done bad, then that must be taken seriously. But merely making someone feel bad is insufficient. That's a fact about them, not you. If the feeling is unwarranted, then it's their problem, not yours. The quality of public discourse would, like, double overnight if everyone would just remember this. A just society seeks to give each their due -- a matter that calls for measured assessment, not pandering to whingers and whiners.

Moral Sacrifice and Bitter Deserts

Jeremy Pierce suggests that there should be legal loopholes to allow torture in those rare (ticking time bomb) cases where it could be morally justified. (Similarly for genocide, terrorism, and other such evils we would normally treat with a blanket ban.) I think that's a bad idea, as loopholes tend to be widened and abused, so the end result would be more legal cover for immoral torture. A better way to look at it is this: if an end is worth torturing someone for, then it's worth going to prison for. It's actually a good thing that the decision-maker burdens some of this cost, since it provides a much-needed cautionary incentive. They won't engage in illegal torture unless they really, really have to.

For similar reasons, it's important that Civil Disobedience be punished by the law, no matter how sympathetic we may be. Sometimes, right actions ought to be punished. It's unfortunate. But not as unfortunate as the alternatives (excessive torture, general lawbreaking, etc.).