ReduxMatters

Torture Considered 

One important thing to get straight right off...

There is no absolute morality.  Universals, categorical imperatives, non-negotiables all have an important place in the cesspool of philosophic reclamation centers.  Context matters.  Interestingly enough, context matters most to those who battle with nauseating sincerity and vigor that context matters not at all, the so-called idealists.  This is because these misguided idealists tend almost always to be the most emotionally unstable and prone to histrionics among the crowd of thinkers.  Often, their emotional and pedantic protestations against fundamental injustice is only a tattered burka meant to cloak an ironic and entirely pathetic insecurity.  To these thinkers, we say, relax, sit way back in your seat and get over yourself.  Cease with your desperation and surrender to context.  If you will not surrender, perhaps because the very word offends you and your "never surrender" ethos, pray tell, could you at least open your mind to the possiblity that moral determinations SHOULD BE MADE WITH CONTEXT IN MIND.  If your answer is no, context is an excuse for evil, then you are more of an information zealot than you know.  Remember, ReduxMatters exalts knowledge and thinking, not mimickry.  Here we go.

To Board or Not to Board, That is the Question.

1. You do not know Abu Zubaydah. 

2. You accept his existence and that he is somehow a "bad guy." 

But again, to be clear, you have no personal knowledge or independently secured information as to either Abu Zubaydah's existence or his disposition.

So, Other-Things-Equal, what does a state (in this case the United States of America) owe to MORALITY and ABU ZUBAYDAH as it attempts to protect INNOCENTS?  Please remember that the OLC interpretations and subsequent or consequent boardings or "insect boxings" come down in the historical moments after September 11, 2001.  Please, this is important.  If you lived through those moments, days, and months, you can, right this very second, see the Towers descending in your mind's eye.  For those of you who understand that day as exclusively an image or merely a video on YouTube, alright, the horror stands.

ONE

MORALITY, unto itself, is owed absolutely nothing.  To be in debt presupposes some real thing to be in debt to.  Obviously, Morality exists as an idea, but not as a creditor.

TWO

Abu Zubaydah, unto himself, (granting he exists) is owed absolutely nothing.  This claim is tricky and will be fully developed in the next post. 

THREE

Innocents, under all circumstances, are to be protected and secured in their liberty to act in all manner not intentionally directed to the self-conscious harm of other innocents.

THEREFORE

If (this is a critical if) Abu Zubaydah had as his intent the harming of innocents, no moral imperartive justly can be devised to absolutely prevent either his boarding or his boxing.  The outlawing or prosecution of such techniques would constitute, at best, some purely subjective and normative morality.  A society can not last long where right and wrong is soley the province of subjective and normative moralities.  This is obvious because that society would necessarily have to conform to whatever power predominated.  Stated differently, the society at hand would be wholly controlled by naked and very likely exploitative power institutions, by ABSOLUTISTS.  Regrettably, in the modern propaganda schematic in play, by absolutists in idealists clothes.                      

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