To those who were dismayed, I’ve got worse news: I think it is permissible to talk about murder and rape in amoral terms. To talk about the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and the genocides in Armenia and Cambodia in amoral terms. In fact, it is obligatory to deal with the implications of just about anything in amoral terms, because all important issues have important non-moral implications that warrant inquiry.

This is, in the abstract, a sound and important point.  As social psychologists have taken pains to point out, looking at the Holocaust only as a moral monstrosity can make it seem so alien that we fail to see the role played by ordinary people whose general behavior patterns—if not the particular horrific results—are common across cultures. But this analysis also presumably has a point—preventing similar horror in the future—which involves taking up the moral perspective again. Murray’s original post doesn’t ever really do this, and I think illustrates the weird nihilism that seems to afflict Washingtonians who grow so accustomed to strategic analysis that it crowds out other forms:

They won the election with a candidate who sounded centrist running against an exceptionally weak Republican opponent. But they’ve been in the bubble too long. They really think that the rest of America thinks as they do. Nothing but the Pauline Kael syndrome can explain the political idiocy of letting Attorney General Eric Holder go after the interrogators.

In the specific case, the actual argument to this conclusion is awfully gappy. Murray offers some data to the effect that non-Latino white educated elites have grown significantly more liberal over recent decades, while their counterparts in other classes have grown moderately more conservative. He then supposes that the other classes will share his own feeling that any criminal investigation will entail a conflict between interrogators who seem like heroes and prosecutors who look like wimps, with the general divergent trend explaining why Obama & co. don’t grok this. Now, we’ve actually got polls on this, and some show a significant majority favoring some kind of investigation—with opinion split between criminal inquiry and an independent panel—while others show a smaller majority opposing investigations. There’s certainly some evidence that the course Attorney General Holder is pursuing won’t be popular, then, but not in the wildly lopsided way Murray’s frame seems to assume.

But even if Murray were right about the optics of a prosecution, surely it’s wrong that “nothing” could explain the decision to go ahead. One wacky possibility: The attorney general believes that crimes may have been committed, and if so, those responsible should be held accountable, while the president either shares this belief or at least is reluctant to intervene for political reasons to quash an investigation. And yet a lot of analysts get awfully postmodern when they’re talking about the prospect of investigations, taking it for granted that there simply are no right answers: Any legal reasoning, however specious, simply reflects one more difference of opinion—and you can’t prosecute someone for having different opinions, right? Some conservatives, to be sure, are willing to defend the practices of the interrogators or the opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel on the merits, but others seem to step back and take the meta-view that so long as some  sufficiently politically powerful group was and is willing to mount that defense, it must fall within the realm of reasonable disagreement—and therefore outside the realm of actual legal consequences for wrongdoing. Attempts to establish any kind of real accountability are only intelligible as partisan “witch hunts.”  In this case, the insistence on an amoral perspective undermines the analysis even in purely descriptive terms, since it excludes motivational explanations of the actors’ behavior that don’t reduce to a strategic bid for political advantage. I’m pretty cynical on this front myself, but it seems a bit much to rule it out a priori.

[T]his sort of ban seems extremely unlikely to actually help anyone who’s genuinely in need of help. A woman whose husband and/or other male relations have enough power over her to force her into a burqa against her will is only going to be forced by those same men further underground by this sort of rule. The only kind of person who would be genuinely unveiled by this kind of legal measure would be someone with enough autonomy to be in a position to choose compliance with the law over compliance with tradition.

That reminds me that here, as with most forms of paternalistic legislation, there’s that tricky question of penalties. If the premise is that women who wear the burqa are being robbed of their agency and dignity—and that even those who protest that they wish to wear it are victims false consciousness—how is the ban supposed to be enforced? By fining or detaining or otherwise harassing the very women who, on this theory, are the most oppressed? By barring them access to public places, government buildings, maybe even courts and police stations? I suppose you could direct the penalties toward their male relations, but that hardly seems like a good way to reinforce the concept of the equal agency of women.  The only way this seems to actually work—and by “work” I mean “severely hamper religious freedom without still further harmful consequences”—is if it’s like smoking bans, where you see rapid norm changes and widespread compliance with very limited need for actual sanctions. Except there’s very little historical reason to expect it to go that way. After all, one of the reasons liberal democracies often carve out a special protected space for religous practice—and try to avoid burdening it even with facially neutral laws—is that serious believers often won’t comply even in the face of sever sanctions, and it’s bad for the legitimacy and stability of the secular state to set up an irreconcilable tension between civic and religious obligations. As a little thought experiment, picture the streets of the banlieues after the uploading of the first YouTube clip showing some overzealous official roughly unveiling a woman in violation of the ban.

The contrary argument, of course, is that if Obama or Congress speak out more aggressively, it will endanger the reformists in Iran and give ammunition to Khamenei and his allies.

Khamenei’s speech today pushed me to reexamine this line of thinking. He didn’t need an incendiary line from Obama to stir up anti-U.S. sentiments — he just made one up. “It was said on behalf of the U.S. President that he was waiting for a day that people came out to streets,” he claimed.

It seems my basic question is: Can Obama afford to be slightly more vocal on human rights concerns given that Khamenei’s government is willing to fabricate statements to advance his agenda?

As for the bottom-line question, maybe, if he can effectively distinguish between opposing violent suppression of peaceful protests and supporting one side in the internal leadership struggle. But insofar as the regime is clearly pushing the “protesters are CIA stooges” line pretty hard, presumably because they think it’s their most effective attack, I think it’s all to the good if those protesters can counter with: “You see, they’re so desperate they had to just make this up!” This gets harder the more the flow of information in Iran is restricted, but you’ve still got plenty of people who can say: “No, I saw the video myself; Obama called for respect for free speech, but said it was not for the United States to say who should represent Iranians.” Putting them in a position where they’re backed into statements that can be publicly demonstrated to be false helps undermine their argument against the protesters, and more broadly helps to weaken the credibility of the regime.

You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect in the box with him. You would, however, place a harmless insect in the box. You have orally informed us that you would in fact place a harmless insect such as a caterpillar in the box with him.

George Orwell, 1949:

‘You asked me once,’ said O’Brien, ‘what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.’

The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O’Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.

‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’

He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compart ments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.

‘In your case, said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.’

A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.

‘You can’t do that!’ he cried out in a high cracked voice. ‘You couldn’t, you couldn’t! It’s impossible.’

‘Do you remember,’ said O’Brien, ‘the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.’

‘O’Brien!’ said Winston, making an effort to control his voice. ‘You know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?’

O’Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish manner that he sometimes affected. He looked thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were addressing an audience somewhere behind Winston’s back.

‘By itself,’ he said, ‘pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable — something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand. Even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.

“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” [Rahm] Emanuel said in an interview on Sunday. “They are opportunities to do big things.”

The NRA and the ACLU both can’t buy ad time in the days before an election because doing so, by virtue of the ethical senator’s own philosophy, is manipulating the people and hurting democracy. But when McCain hops a flight with a campaign contributor, it ought to be obvious that he’s maintaining his integrity. Why is it that associations comprised of every day citizens are suspect, but a powerful politician is not?

This is actually a pretty well-established point in social psychology. Recall those famous Milgram experiments in which basically decent people are induced to gradually turn up the voltage (or so they believe) on phony “subjects” when ordered to do so by a scientist in a white coat, even after they are given reason to think the “subject” may have suffered a heart attack. The lesson here, in part, is that precisely when people are convinced that they are good and virtuous, it is not all that hard to induce them to commit immoral acts by small steps. Step one seems innocuous. Step two is just a slight increase, and the virtuous person, knowing himself to be virtuous, infers that he cannot have acted improperly at step one, so step two must be admissible as well. And so on through all the steps. When the progression is gradual, the man who knows he is good will not stop to wonder whether he has crossed some imperceptible line.

And so it is with influence. If—as a politician or, for that matter, a journalist—I know I’m immune to being swayed by free dinners and lavish junkets, I’ll never pause to consider how, over time, such things might be subconsciously affecting my judgment. If I’m more acutely aware of my own fallibility, I may need to stop for a periodic mental inventory.

Looking over the comments to the essay linked in the previous post, I’m reminded of one of the rhetorical problems facing opponents of torture. If you point out that some interrogation method we’ve used at some point is a cruel, abhorrent tactic better suited to Kim Jong Il’s North Korea than the United States, someone will invariably take umbrage on behalf of our interrogators: Are saying American troops are sadists and torturers? Comparing them to PDRK thugs?

But this gets things backwards. Being a soldier means, to a large extent, shutting down your ordinary moral reactions to witnessing or inflicting serious harm on people. We hope there are limits to this, obviously, but a large part of the point of military training is to overcome our natural resistance to causing suffering or death, to prepare them to carry out orders they would ordinarily find repugnant or disturbing without the luxury of agonizing over the morality of what they’re doing on a case-by-case basis. That’s not something that reflects poorly on their characters; it’s part of the terrible price of service. In order to make themselves effective soldiers, they pass much of that responsibility to their superiors, who they trust to issue morally sound orders. In effect, they make a bargain: We will disengage the moral safety mechanisms that apply in civilian life, and expect that you will not take advantage of this by asking us to do anything morally abhorrent. Someone who imagines himself to be “defending” the troops against critics of waterboarding, then, is really just passing the buck, and abusing that trust.

This sort of “defense,” incidentally, looks an awful lot like one of the well-understood mechanisms by which basically good individuals or groups can be induced to do awful things. Precisely because people have a self-image as a basically decent person, if you can get someone to participate in a morally questionable activity—maybe by getting them to move from benign to harmful actions by tiny increments, or by obscuring how harmful it really is, or by requiring only passive or minor complicity at the outset—they will tend, after the fact, to look for reasons why what they did was justified, making their behavior consistent with their self image. This, in turn, makes it easier to commit more extreme and harmful forms of the same action, creating a feedback loop of escalation and justification.

It’s easy to imagine a collective version of the same vicious cycle operating in interrogation policy: The citizen thinks that our good soldiers can’t be guilty of torture, so waterboarding must be Hoyle. The soldiers (of various ranks, at each level of the process from policy to implementation) have faith that America would not have them do anything immoral, so they go ahead and carry out their interrogations without raising doubts about the waterboarding, or to the next slightly-more-severe method of interrogation. And slowly, good people come to do awful things together, precisely because they’re all convinced—correctly!—of each other’s goodness.

He’s actually voicing a certain frustration at the inconsistent kinds of attacks one must face: One opponent will say your view is plainly false, another will regard it as an obvious point that doesn’t actually change anything. But lots theoretical propositions which seem interesting and contentious at first blush actually turn out, on further scrutiny, to be either plainly false or empty tautologies, depending on exactly how you interpret them. In my more cynical moods, I sometimes suspect certain obstinately obscure writers of deliberately exploiting this kind of ambiuity in hopes that readers will split the difference between definitional truth and empirical falsehood and come up with profundity. But sometimes it seems clearly accidental: Psychological egoism is a case like this, where people who find it plausible are often surprised to realize, when you point it out, that they’ve been shifting between a robust and narrow definition of “self -interest” that is meaningful but not all that hard to find counterexamples for, and a vacuous definition where it’s just taken to mean “whatever you wanted to do, as evidenced by the fact that you did it.”

In any event, it’s an apt phrase for a common phenomenon. We’re naturally especially interested in surprising claims that seem like they might be true. But the more we learn about any given subject, the harder it becomes to come up with propositions that are both really shocking and defensible, since this means they’ll have to contradict the expectations generated by an increasingly refined and well-supported antecedent body of theory. The “oh yeah / so what” ambiguity is one way of squaring that circle, so it shouldn’t be surprising if a lot of theories that attract broad (initial) attention turn out to have this character.