Comments Elsewhere

Gary:

You made a definitive statement on the matter. I think you are wrong.

That’s fine. I made a statement which was over-broad or underqualified. Point taken. But I think that you do the same if you mean what you seem to mean when you say:

As I wrote, its a rather subjective judgment as to which is worse.

If you just mean that there are some cases of torture for which it is a matter of subjective judgment whether or not death would be preferable to them, I agree; but if you mean to apply “it’s a rather subjective judgment” to the statement “Being killed is worse than being torture,” that seems to suggest something stronger. If, for example, you mean that it’s a subjective judgment as to death is worse than any given instance of torture, I think that’s got to be false. There are clear cases where death is worse than torture. That’s not to say that torture is OK or even bearable; it is to say that there are at least some cases—indeed, a lot of them—in the face of which people would—indeed, did—do what they could to survive, and they would be quite right to do so.

If you mean something like: it’s a rather subjective judgment whether killing is a worse sort of thing to do to a person than torturing—well, maybe, but what reasons would you give for saying that? If it’s something like, “it’s subjective because there are cases in extremis where it’s not clear that death is worse”, then I’d just say that cases in extremis often don’t prove any point about the comparison of sorts. (I don’t think the badness of killing as a sort of thing to do to a person is determined by the worst conceivable sorts of deaths, either.) I think there are pretty good reasons to hold fast to the intuition that killing is the worst kind of thing you can do to a person—as a claim about the character of sorts, not a universal claim about their instances—even if there are individual instances in which killing Jones may not be as bad as something else you could do to her.

There’s an underlying point to all of this quibbling that applies to the article and the forgoing argument. It’s this: there is a class of punishments—even if it’s debatable just how deep into Hell that class extends—that most people recognize as plainly barbaric, but which they do not consider worse than having your throat cut. These include flogging, rubbing wounds with brine, severe beating, branding with hot irons, chopping off fingers or hands, raping, stabbing with the intent to maim or just to make you hurt like hell, at least some forms of systematic torture, and so on. You might say that there are other forms of systematic torture that are worse than death. Fine; but as long as there’s a number of instances greater than zero that are not as bad as death, that means that doing anything in that class to a prisoner, in the name of achieving a particular purpose, is fair game as long as killing the prisoner in the name of that purpose is also permissible.

Most people aren’t willing to say that those kind of punishments are fair game. So they shouldn’t be willing to say that killing the prisoner for punishment is fair game, either.

Brian:

Whereas Mark Kleiman laid out a pretty good argument why societies & governments ought not condone torture and the intentional infliction of pain and suffering on prisoners.

Are there any reasons Kleiman gives against condoning torture or corporal punishment that are specific to torture or corporal punishment? Any that cut against only those and not also against condoning slaughter?