The News and Observer, our local paper here at the Parr Center for Ethics, published an opinion piece on torture by Mark Bowden.

It seems his position is that torture should not be made legal, although sometimes it may be justified to torture.

The use of any coercive tactics against prisoners ought to expose those responsible to prosecution...

He says torture should be illegal because it's heinous and to legalize it would remove us from "ethical purity." However...

... few fair-minded people would weigh that ethical purity more heavily than preventing further attacks like those that killed thousands in September 2001.

The real damage done by Bush administration torture policies was the effort to codify coercion.

... all forms of torture, broadly defined, ought to be banned. What does such a ban mean? It means that anyone who gets rough with a prisoner is crossing the line and placing himself at risk. This, history makes clear, is the only way to curb the universal tendency of men to abuse those over whom they wield complete control.

Bowden is saying that it should remain illegal, although on some rare occasions a moral person would break the law and justifiably conduct torture.

Making it illegal...

does not mean that there can be no circumstance in which torture is justified, at least to those who would not adhere blindly to principle. Life presents moral dilemmas, and combat in particular produces them. To obtain life-saving intelligence when no alternative means are at hand, a moral person might reluctantly accept the responsibility for crossing that line. Those who investigate his actions later can determine whether they were justified, but the moral person accepts that he or she may suffer for making that choice.

So that's his position.

But he goes on to suggest that if he were among the "investigators" of those who tortured KSM and Zubaydah he'd be sympathetic with their motivation.

I [...] respect the decision in 2002 to take whatever steps were necessary to pry information from Sheikh Muhammad and Zubaydah. An inquiry may reveal that their questioners were motivated primarily by a desire to inflict suffering and that they achieved nothing, but I doubt it. I believe they were urgently motivated to thwart attacks on al-Qaeda's drawing boards, and probably did so.

Unfortunately, there is reason to believe that the torture we are talking about was conducted not in any kind of ticking time bomb scenario. But rather it was used to find a link between al Qaeda and Iraq. A link we now know did not exist.

Lawrence Wilkerson, republican, retired Army colonel, and former chief of staff for Colin Powel, wrote in the Washington Note:

"Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda,"

CNN reports on it here. From CNN:

Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.

At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.

"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."

More from CNN:

"This is my opinion," Maj. Paul Burney told the inspector-general's office. "Even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Burney's account was included in a Senate Armed Services Committee report released in April.

NPR interviews Duke Professor Dan Ariely on Money, Morality and Decision-Making

Professor Ariely's new book about human fallibility in decision-making is called "Predictably Irrational."

NPR has made a transcript of the interview available and an mp3 file so you can listen to it online.

NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman recently sat down with behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who studies irrationality in economic decision making, to discuss why people cheat, the media's influence on markets and whether the public needs to see remorse on Wall Street.

Ariely: "In the media, there's this slogan that says, 'If it bleeds, it leads,' with the idea that if something is emotionally capturing, then we want to emphasize that. And because of this there's a bias both in the media and in ourselves as human beings to overemphasize things that are emotionally grabbing." [...]

Ariely: "So if you think to yourself: What's more important? To have a report about one unfortunate individual who lost their job and has very difficult life circumstances, or something that helps us understand more generally what is going on in AIG, how is the bailout going, what is the future of this company?" [...]

Ariely: "So it's the news feeding our psychology of caring more about emotional things, and because of that much of the news is not really that educational and informative in terms of helping us understand what is going on, instead of just kind of tapping our emotion over and over and over. And I think because of that people also get more fearful. If all the news is focusing on these terrible pieces of information about how frightening this is, and this is, and gloom here, and gloom there, we're going to be much more fearful."

Which Class of Society in America Gives Most Generously to Charity?

America's poor donate more, in percentage terms, than higher-income groups do, surveys of charitable giving show. What's more, their generosity declines less in hard times than the generosity of richer givers does.

"The lowest-income fifth (of the population) always give at more than their capacity," said Virginia Hodgkinson, former vice president for research at Independent Sector, a Washington-based association of major nonprofit agencies. "The next two-fifths give at capacity, and those above that are capable of giving two or three times more than they give."

Indeed, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest survey of consumer expenditure found that the poorest fifth of America's households contributed an average of 4.3 percent of their incomes to charitable organizations in 2007. The richest fifth gave at less than half that rate, 2.1 percent. [...]

The working poor, disproportionate numbers of which are recent immigrants, are America's most generous group, according to Arthur Brooks, the author of the book "Who Really Cares," an analysis of U.S. generosity. [...]

"When you have just a little, you're thankful for what you have," Pastor Coletta Jones said, "but with every step you take up the ladder of success, the money clouds your mind and gets you into a state of never being satisfied."

Brooks offered this statistic as supportive evidence: Fifty-eight percent of noncontributors with above-median incomes say they don't have enough money to give any away. [...]

What makes poor people's generosity even more impressive is that their giving generally isn't tax-deductible, because they don't earn enough to justify itemizing their charitable tax deductions. In effect, giving a dollar to charity costs poor people a dollar while it costs deduction itemizers 65 cents.

Read the story here.

Parr Center Fellow Pens Op-Ed at the News & Observer Protesting Mukasey Commencement Speech

Joseph E. Kennedy, an associate professor of law at UNC School of Law and a fellow here at the Parr Center for Ethics wrote a column explaining his decision to wear a orange arm band to protest former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey's commencement speech at the Law School.

In the Bybee memo of August 2002, a memorandum that Mukasey characterizes as a mistake, the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel essentially defined torture as an interrogation technique that causes the equivalent of organ failure. He got that definition not from any legal authority defining torture but from a definition of "severe pain" found in an obscure medical benefits statute.
Such reasoning would receive an F grade if offered by a first-year law student. When offered by the head of the elite Office of Legal Counsel it must be seen for what it was: a lie about the meaning of the law, not a mistake.

Read the whole column here.

More on the Science of Morality

There have been lots of articles reporting recent work in the science of moral judgments and most of them use a catchy headline based on an intuition that finding out about why we act morally will mean the end of morality. Lots of people have that intuition apparently, but is the claim true? Please talk about it in the comments.

Anyway, here's another article on the science of morality and its title is "So Much For Morality". But of course nothing in the article suggests that the research reported therein spells the end of morality.

When we think of temporally distant events, we think more abstractly, which makes us focus on superordinate aspects and the main purport of the event. But if we think of events that are close to us in time, we think more concretely, which means that subordinate, peripheral aspects take on more importance. For example, if we imagine that we will be asked to donate blood in the future, what dominates is the superordinate moral value of helping other people, but if the time perspective is telescoped, concrete subordinate selfish motives take over, such as the fact that it will be unpleasant to be stuck by a needle.

The article ought to have been headlined with a remark about temporal distance or abstraction in relation to moral judgments, right?

Eyewitness to the Dalai Lama Talking about Religion and Morality

A pair of bloggers at Huffingtonpost have reported on their first hand experience with the Dalai Lama in Costa Rica. They were impressed by this religious man's insistence that morality can exist without a divine power. Popular culture seems to have it that morality depends on God's laws. But in academic philosophy and in the great thinkers of the past we read in philosophy departments the possibility of secular morality is basic.

He said that only a very small percentage of people, despite their membership in one kind of religion or other, are actually taking their religion very seriously. Most so-called "religious" people are only very superficially involved with the particular faith, in which they happen to have been brought up. To that he added something even more daring and maybe even shocking to many of his academic but still nominally Catholic listeners, when saying, "most people are really only money-worshippers," implying that their religious pretensions are, at rock bottom, only hypocritical.

... in addressing his student audience at the University of Costa Rica, the Dalai Lama affirmed specifically that ethics and morality need not be based on religion or belief in "God." He frankly admitted that, in this respect, he did have a strong disagreement with the Pope, in their recent, private meeting. The latter insisted, of course, that morality had to be based on religious faith. In contrast, the Dalai Lama declared that ethics and morality can arise simply out of recognition of our mutual interdependency, leading in turn to such secular virtues as respect, caring, and compassion for others.

Read their whole post here

"Big Finance is Prowling the Limbic System"

N.E. Marsden, an "educator specializing in media research" who blogs at the Huffingtonpost has written a post about recent brain science and how banking has changed since the 80s. The financial sector used to facilitate investment in companies, like buying "a piece of the rock," she says. But now money is made on transactions more and more, and by being able to predict how people will react to certain situations, because the market's reaction sets price.

Gone are the days when investors bought "a piece of the rock" and kept the certificates locked in bank vaults. Today, the fast money bets on moment-to-moment fluctuations, and traders profit on both the dips and spikes. In this casino-like atmosphere, profit often derives from winning transactions, not brick and mortar valuation and growth.

Bloomberg reported in 2004 that Arrowstreet, a $4.4 billion investment firm, had developed quantitative models to "identify and exploit" incidents when investors 1) overreact to news, 2) follow the herd, or 3) fail to account for new information.

Now, Big Finance is prowling the limbic system, a primitive slab of gray matter linked to emotions like pleasure, greed, fear, and cravings -- which begs the question, why?

The 2008 bestseller, Buyology provides an explanation:

"Finance and economic research has hit the wall," explains Andrew Lo, who runs AlphaSimplex Group, a Cambridge, Massachusetts hedge fund firm. "We need to get inside the brain to understand why people make decisions."

Neuromarketing guru Martin Lindstrom, the author of Buyology, goes a step further:

...economic modeling is based on the premise that people behave in predictably rational ways. But...what's beginning to show up in the fledgling world of brain scanning is the enormous influence our emotions have on every decision we make.