Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

As I’ve noted over and over again, torture seems to have an especially exalted place as being a real morally wrong, or at least used to, as opposed to, say, starting wars or killing civilians in them. It’s interesting just powerful this moral sentiment is, despite not being the product of real abstract moral reasoning. It seems that most of horror that the revelation of torture, and the entire  legal and political apparatus built up around it, has come from a very deep place, a place where even the question of whether or not torture is right or wrong is considered to be something of a category error or simple nonsense, like asking if 2+2 is equal to five.

I think that the most insightful piece written on our collective morality and the question of torture This point was made much more elegantly in a Times op-ed by Slavoj Zizek written when it was first revealed that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was waterboarded. In that piece he made the argument that the occurrence of any debate over torture was a sign of a collective moral coarsening, that we were slipping back on a consensus made hundreds of years ago that torture was always wrong. The discussion of torture, the weighing of costs and benefits was the horrible result of  “those in power…literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably our civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.”

So, we have a glass half-full situation. Our particular sentiment against torture is somewhat random and is the result of contingent historical facts and processes, but it’s a moral sensitivity that we have (or, sadly, had). So, we have to be a bit ironic in our condemnations of torture. By that, I mean not that we don’t actually think torture is wrong, but more that our utter and total revulsion against it, the bafflement we face when we see a public debate over its merits comes from the contingent and ultimately shallow (in the sense that they don’t reflect some great Platonic  truth) mores and values of the society that we happen to be born into. We should feel lucky that at least, at least, we have some collective moral sensitivity to torture. Some of us, like Shepard Smith, will have no need for irony, but for the rest of us, we’ll have to last keep this question in the back of our minds.

Also, everyone should check out Jamelle’s thoughts on the reprehensible Mike Goldfarb. Note the title of the post.