Friday, August 28, 2009

Do Morals Belong in Government?

I have had some heated discussions with friends and family over the years about the separation of church and state; it has been the foundation of the question of morality mixing with government. If there is to be a wall of separation between a secular government and the many religious institutions free to flourish in this country under our Constitution, how does that jibe with the idea that the decisions our government makes on our behalf -- whether to protect us, tax us, keep us healthy, and spend our tax dollars -- should be rooted in some basic morality? Since for most of us, religion is the cornerstone of any sense of morality, can that wall of separation be porous enough to let government employees be guided by their sense of morality in their work?

Furthermore, it's true that in some ways the government needs to act in ways that are divorced from any sense of morality. We citizens without proper security clearances have little to no idea of the level of shit our various military, intelligence, and diplomatic communities have to deal with on a daily basis. But morality can sometimes make things very cloudy indeed. One hundred people will have one hundred different moral perspectives on any given point. At some point, a question of what to do comes up and we have to divorce ourselves from morality to make sometimes very sober, very difficult decisions.

There's no question that, during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have picked up and detained people with direct knowledge of terrorist activities against the United States and our interests abroad. How do we obtain this information as quickly as possible? How do we factor in the near certainty that some or many of them would resist, perhaps even until death, to avoid disclosing that information? And how reliable would this information be? How much of it would be disinformation intended to throw us off course, chasing the wrong leads?

And how do we get it out of them? Certainly, there are established limits to interrogation, but is there ever a reason to go beyond those limits? Is our safety so critical that we would have to secretly violate our own principles? And of course, someday those secrets would get out; how does that impact us in the future with regard to foreign relations? Do we want to be known in the world as the country that will torture you if we believe you to have information we deem critical to national security? Do we want to be known as the country that pays mere lip service to the rule of law?

Andrew Sullivan today posts some fantastic observations on the role of amorality in government.

[I]t should be possible to debate even torture in amoral terms, in terms of political repercussions, polling, cultural attitudes and so forth. The same can be said of abortion, child abuse, or the death penalty and other horrors. What still stuns me, however, is how supine many on the non-statist right have been in the face of the massive evidence that the US government instituted a systematic, bureaucratized torture-and-abuse program for captured and imprisoned terror suspects (many of whom turned out to be completely innocent). ...

It is not the amoral discussion of torture that appalls me; it's the amoral discussion proffered without any moral discussion ever being offered. (emphasis Andrew)

And to go straight to the amoral argument without dealing with the fact that the government secretly and illegally, walled, froze, beat, contorted, stripped, shaved, near-drowned, near-suffocated, and denied sleep for hundreds of hours to unknown numbers of prisoners and murdered 100 of them that we know of - this befuddles me. It was illegal; it was unethical by any standard of ethics; it was immoral and indecent; it required a conscious subversion of democratic norms to accomplish; and it is a terrifying precedent in a country allegedly founded on the rule of law. I do not understand how a libertarian cannot stand up against this and be counted - for once and for all on the grounds that is remains the greatest violation of individual liberty and dignity and due process in recent times in America.

We cannot be an America that demands laws to ban abortion or gay marriage, while we at the same time dismiss any moral imperatives when torture is the issue. Both abortion and torture of suspects speak to the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Such a dichotomy is schizophrenic -- divorced from reality. We have to have the moral discussion even as we acknowledge that politics can be amoral.

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