Torture
The recent sheepishness on the part of the Obama Administration to push for prosecutions for those who authorized and carried out Bush Administration torture policies raises an issue for rational morality: if emotion should not factor into moral considerations, can the harsh treatment detailed in the ‘torture memos’ be considered immoral if, as is claimed in the memos, the treatment left no lasting physical damage?
First, I need to expand on the issue of emotion. I stated earlier that a moral system cannot take emotional results into account, since morality tells us how to act in spite of any emotional state we might be in. Pain, strictly speaking, isn’t an emotion. If I get slapped in the face, it hurts. This response is not emotional, but biological. Pain is no more an emotion than bitter is an emotion. If is a physical sensation that, for all intents and purposes, we can consider to be universal. ‘Emotional pain’ is not in fact pain, but rather a linguistic representation of the feeling we get when suffering from negative emotion. Continue reading…