"Pick-and-Choose" Conservatives

Michael Kinsley, who I thought was fairly defensive and petulant during his brief stay the the LA Times, has a very sharp article up on Slate which really should put to rest this nonsense about the "ticking bomb" scenario a lot of people on the right have been using to justify torture:

What if you knew for sure that the cute little baby burbling and smiling at you from his stroller in the park was going to grow up to be another Hitler, responsible for a global cataclysm and millions of deaths? Would you be justified in picking up a rock and bashing his adorable head in? Wouldn't you be morally depraved if you didn't?

Or what if a mad scientist developed a poison so strong that two drops in the water supply would kill everyone in Chicago? And you could destroy the poison, but only by killing the scientist and 10 innocent family members? Should you do it?

Or what if an international terrorist planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan, set to go off in an hour and kill a million people. You've got him in custody, but he won't say where the bomb is. Is it moral to torture him until he gives up the information?

Questions like these have been pondered and disputed since the invention of the college dorm, but rarely, until the past couple of weeks, unstoned. Now the last of these golden oldies—about the terrorist who knows where the bomb is set to go off—is in the news. Not because it has happened, but because of Sen. John McCain's proposed legislation forbidding the use of torture by the United States government.

These are stupid questions without any basis in reality, which is why they make for such excellent dorm room fodder. The idea of basing international policy around them is completely absurd. The argument is basically "what if something, that never could happen, happened? Then you'd agree with me, right?" Well, maybe, but that doesn't prove anything. It's like saying "You wouldn't tax travel through wormholes, so why tax airline travel?"

Kinsley defines the moral hazard at work with what he calls "salami-slicing," or trying to figure out exactly how many avoided deaths would make torture the responsible choice:

In law school, they call this... point, "salami-slicing." You start with a seemingly solid principle, then start slicing: If you would torture to save a million lives, would you do it for half a million? A thousand? Two dozen? What if there's only a two-out-of-three chance that person you're torturing has the crucial information? A 50-50 chance? One chance in 10? At what point does your moral calculus change, and why? Slice the salami too far, and the formerly solid principle disappears.

The trouble with salami-slicing is that it doesn't stop just because you do. A judicious trade-off of competing considerations is vulnerable to salami-slicing from both directions. You can calibrate the viciousness of the torture as finely as you like to make sure that it matches the urgency of the situation. But you can't calibrate the torture candidate strapped down before you. Once you're in the torture business, what justification is there for banning (as Krauthammer would) the torture of official prisoners of war, no matter how many innocent lives this might cost? If you are willing to torture a "high level" terrorist in order to save innocent lives, why should you spare a low-level terrorist at the same awful cost? What about a minor accomplice?

And then he works himself around to this point, which pro-torture conservatives never seem to understand:

College dorm what-ifs like this one share a flaw: They posit certainty (about what you know and what will happen if you do this or that). And uncertainty is not only much more common in real life: It is the generally unspoken assumption behind civil liberties, rules of criminal procedure, and much else that conservatives find sentimental and irritating.

Sure, if we could know the present and predict the future with certainty, we could torture only people who deserve it. Not just that: We could go door-to-door killing people before they kill others. We could lock up innocent people who would otherwise be involved in fatal traffic accidents. Civil libertarians like to believe that criminals get their Miranda warnings and dissidents enjoy freedom of speech because human rights are universal. But if we knew for sure that a newspaper column by Charles Krauthammer would lead—even by a chain of events he never intended and bore no responsibility for—to World War II, wouldn't we be nuts not to censor it? Universal human rights would make no sense in a world where everything was known and certain.

In addition, I don't remember where I read it first, but it does seem that the genesis for this "ticking bomb" scenario was the Fox show "24," in which a similar moral dilemma was hashed out last season. Which means that conservatives like Charles Krauthammer, the pro-family, anti-Hollywood elite crowd, are now using a TV SHOW as proof for their ideas. Because, you know, it was so unpredictable that whatever Jack Bauer decided to do would work.

I don't remember the school voucher program emanating from "Welcome Back Kotter." I don't remember policies about border control for illegal aliens coming from an episode of "ALF." But because "24" set up a ridiculous, would-never-happen-in-history-with-any-certainty scenario, conservatives inclined to torture swallowed it whole. I call this crew "pick-and-choose" conservatives, who have no real principles or beliefs. You don't just see this with Hollywood, but a thousand other hypocrisies. It's what's behind conservatives demanding that all judicial nominees get an up-or-down vote in the Senate, except of course for Harriet Miers or anyone else that disagrees with us. It's what's behind conservatives saying that you cannot criticize a commander-in-chief in a time of war, except when that commander-in-chief is named Clinton and the war is in Kosovo.

You really can't even argue with such "pick-and-choose" conservatives, because there's no base of beliefs to assail. They constantly shift the debate whenever it's expedient for them to do so. They always look forward to the issue du jour; they never look backward to see if that issue completely negates what they've said over the years.

The only thing to do, actually, is to laugh. Laugh at the hypocrisy, the insanity, the complete lack of coherence.