"Give mutilation a chance: an exciting development for the armchair torture contingent:"

A few months ago, when I unhappily added a "Disgraceful" category, it didn't occur to me that there would be so many torture related posts that I'd need a separate "Torture" category. I didn't think that the use of torture would gain enough (any!) adherents that I'd need to be more specific.

"I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness."

"...I particularly like the involvement of the victims' relatives in the killing of the monster..."

Eugene Volokh teaches law about free speech, copyright, and government and religion at UCLA Law School, and he advocated in his blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, that societies sometimes should use torture, citing an example from Iran, where a serial killer was tortured by victim's families, whipped, then slowly killed.

"...my point is that the punishment is proper because it's cruel...so it may well be unconstitutional. I would therefore endorse amending the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause...I think the Bill of Rights is generally a great idea, but I don't think it's holy writ handed down from on high. Certain amendments to it may well be proper..."

He also aspires to the California Supreme Court.

Volokh dismisses arguments about slippery slopes, the possibility of error, the effects on society, and doesn't notice his own moral relativism (which conservatives like him usually love to hate). But three days after his pro-torture post, he is persuaded by Mark Kleiman's "sensible" argument that even if some monsters deserve torture, "our society's legal system...can't provide it."

I wonder then, what he thinks about the fact that the Bush Administration's policy is to simply and repeatedly ignore or subvert the legal system in order to use torture?

My favorite response is from the Mahablog, viewing torture as evil in terms of both Christianity and Buddhism: "The action that is evil affects all beings...no thing or being is evil...when two heavy hitters like Jesus and the Buddha agree on something, attention must be paid."

Read the rest, plus the source for the title quote and key points from other blogs after the break.

The Mahablog: "Vengeance, retribution, "getting even," etc., were explicitly discouraged by both the Buddha and Jesus (although many Christians like to pretend otherwise). Buddhism, which is more of a habit of mind than an orthodoxy, discourages any thought that separates the world into self-and-other...In Buddhism, the illusion of self-and-other is the root of all suffering, and central to the practice of Buddhism is seeing past this illusion. And there are no exceptions...Put simply: Whenever someone decides that his cruelty is justified, there is the gate of hell...."

 

I realize this sounds like nonsense to most people, but I submit that when two heavy hitters like Jesus and the Buddha agree on something, attention must be paid.

Last time I crabbed about [NYTimes' David Brooks's quote [about liberals not understanding evil], I wrote,                                                      

Fools (i.e., David Brooks) think of evil as an object that can be clearly delineated, like a chair or a cheesecake. He speaks of it as graspable. But Zennies say that evil is no-thing, meaning it is not a thing you can put in a basket and show off to your friends. The action that is evil affects all beings. However -- especially in Buddhism -- no thing or being is evil.

This is an important distinction, because the history of evil reveals that people who create evil hardly ever see themselves or their intentions as evil...

For many centuries saints and philosophers both East and West have noted how easily human pride (what today we call ego) leads us astray. We think, I am a good person. Therefore, my beliefs are good beliefs, and my intentions are good intentions, and actions I choose to take are justified and righteous. People who cause suffering to me are evil, but if I cause suffering to them they deserved it.

This is how evil originates and continues. Jesus understood this, teaching his followers to turn the other cheek, love their enemies, and leave vengeance to God. This is a hard teaching, because vengeance feels good. It is self-indulgent. It is tempting. We want to do it, so it is all too easy to submit to that feeling. For 2000 years Christians have thrown up all kinds of resistance to what Jesus taught. But, in fact, Jesus taught his followers to resist the temptation of vengeance. The Gospels are a little short on detail, but I infer that he considered vengeance to be an impediment to entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

Majikthise: New blog game: Give Mutiliation a Chance: "It's an exciting development for the armchair torture contingent. We've segued from "Could torture ever be an acceptable means to an end?" to "Torture is a morally obligatory punishment that the state should inflict on its own citizens, even if we have to rewrite the Constitution to do it."

Avedon Carol's Sideshow: "You can't help but marvel when you remember that these right-wingers, with their justifications of unnecessary war, mass killing of innocents, and open glorying in brutality, think they are the ones with some kind of monopoly on "morality". Jesus wept."

Digby: "How long has it been since we were talking about torture for the alleged higher purpose of obtaining information a suspect may or may not have? A couple of months? Yesterday? And now the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment has entered the dialog as well."

Roy Edroso: "When critics say that radical professors have "a unique hostility toward Western traditional and commonsense attitudes," and that their "true raison d'etre is in practice nothing other than to destroy utterly whatever allegiance a young person might have to traditional conceptions in morality, religion, politics and culture," are they talking about this guy [Volokh]?"

Matthew Yglesias: "while the desire of crime victims to exact cruel vengeance against perpetrators is perfectly understandable, one of the purposes of a criminal justice system is precisely to not handle things in this manner. Instead, we should be trying to do our best to minimize the incidence of crime rather than, say, maximizing the suffering of the offenders."

Uggabugga: "we're happy to see law professor Volokh out there loudly trumpeting his views. Why? Because he has aspirations for getting on the California Supreme Court. The more Volokh is on the record advocating repulsive policies, the less likely he will ever make it to the bench."