Bush

The best thing we can do to help them is let them in

pnrj core principles, current events, development economics, ethics, inequality, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

 

Dec 23 JDN 2458476

This is a Christmas post, but not like most of my other Christmas posts. It’s not going to be an upbeat post about the effects of holidays on the economy, or the psychology of gift-giving, or the game theory that underlies the whole concept of a “holiday”.

No, today is about an urgent moral crisis. This post isn’t about Christmas as a weird but delightful syncretic solstice celebration. This post is about the so-called “spirit of Christmas”, a spirit of compassion and generosity that our country is clearly not living up to.

At the time of writing, the story had just come out: Jakelin Maquin, a 7-year-old girl from Guatemala died in the custody of US border agents.

Even if it’s true that the Border Patrol did everything they could to help her once they found out she was dying (and the reports coming out suggest that this is in fact the case), this death was still entirely preventable.

The first question we should ask is very basic: Why are there little girls in custody of border agents?
The next question is even more fundamental than that: Why are there border agents?

There are now 15,000 children being held by US Border Patrol. There should not be even one. The very concept of imprisoning children for crossing the border, under any circumstances, is a human rights violation. And yes, this is new, and it is specific to Donald Trump: Bush and Obama never separated children from their families this way. And while two-thirds of Americans oppose this policy, a majority of Republicans support it—this child’s blood is on their hands too.

Yet despite the gulf between the two major parties, the majority of Americans do support the idea of restricting immigration in general. And what I want to know is: Why? What gives us that right?

Let’s be absolutely clear about what “restricting immigration” means. It means that when someone decides they want to come to our country, either to escape oppression, work toward a better life, or simply to live with their family who came here before, men with guns come and lock them up.

We don’t politely ask them to leave. We don’t even fine them or tax them for entering. We lock them in detention camps, or force them to return to the country they came from which may be ruled by a dictator or a drug cartel.

Honestly, even the level of border security US citizens are subjected to is appalling: We’ve somehow come to think of it as normal that whenever you get on an airplane, you are first run through a body scanner, while all your belongings are inspected and scanned, and if you are found carrying any contraband—or if you even say the wrong thing—you can be summarily detained. This is literally Orwellian. “Papers, please” is the refrain of a tyrannical regime, not a liberal democracy.

If we truly believe in the spirit of compassion and generosity, we must let these people in. We don’t even have to do anything; we just need to stop violently resisting them. Stop pointing guns at them, stop locking them away. How is “Stop pointing guns at children” controversial?

I could write an entire post about the benefits for Americans of more open immigration. But honestly, we shouldn’t even care. It doesn’t matter whether immigration creates jobs, or destroys jobs, or decreases crime, or increases crime. We should not be locking up children in camps.

If we really believe in the spirit of compassion and generosity, the only thing we should care about is whether immigration is good for the immigrants. And it obviously is, or they wouldn’t be willing to go to such lengths to accomplish it. But I don’t think most people realize just how large the benefits of immigration are.

I’m going to focus on Guatemala, because that’s where Jakelin Maqin was from.

Guatemala’s life expectancy at birth is 73 years. The life expectancy for recent Hispanic immigrants to the US is 82 years. Crossing that border can give you nine years of life.

And what about income? GDP per capita PPP in the US is almost $60,000 per year. In Guatemala? Just over $8,000. Of course, that’s not accounting for the fact that Guatemalans are less educated; but even the exact same worker emigrating from there to here can greatly increase their income. The minimum wage in Guatemala is 90 GTQ per day, which is about $11.64. For a typical 8-hour workday, the US minimum wage of $7.25 per hour comes to $58 per day. That same exact worker can quintuple their income just by getting a job on the other side of the border.

Almost 60 percent of Guatemalans live in poverty. Over 20% live below the UN extreme poverty line. A full 11% of Guatemala’s GDP is remittances: Money that immigrants pay to help their families back home. A further 7% is exports to the US. This means that almost a fifth of Guatemala’s economy is dependent on the United States.

For comparison, less than 0.5% of Americans live in extreme poverty. (The UN recently claimed almost 6%; the Trump administration has claimed only 0.1% which is even more dubious. Both methodologies are deeply flawed; in particular, the UN report looks at income, not consumption—and consumption is what matters.) The overall poverty rate in the US is about 12%.

These figures are still appallingly high for a country as rich as the US; our extreme poverty rate should be strictly zero, a policy decision which could be implemented immediately and permanently in the form of a basic income of $700 per person per year, at a total expenditure of only $224 billion per year—about a third of the military budget. The net cost would in fact be far smaller than that, because we’d immediately turn around and spend that money. In fact, had this been done at the trough of the Great Recession, it would almost certainly have saved the government money.

Making our overall poverty rate strictly zero would be more challenging, but not obviously infeasible; since the poverty line is about $12,000 per person per year, it would take a basic income of that much to eliminate poverty, which would cost about $3.8 trillion per year. This is a huge expenditure, comparable as a proportion of GDP to the First World War (though still less than the Second). On the other hand, it would end poverty in America immediately and forever.

But even as things currently stand, the contrast between Guatemala and the US could hardly be starker: Immigrants are moving from a country with 60% poverty and 20% extreme poverty to one with 12% poverty and 0.5% extreme poverty.

Guatemala is a particularly extreme example; things are not as bad in Mexico or Cuba, for example. But the general pattern is a very consistent one: Immigrants come to the United States because things are very bad where they come from and their chances of living a better life here are much higher.

The best way to help these people, at Christmas and all year round, literally couldn’t be easier:

Let them in.

Why it matters that torture is ineffective

pnrj cognitive science, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457531

Like “longest-ever-serving Speaker of the House sexually abuses teenagers” and “NSA spy program is trying to monitor the entire telephone and email system”, the news that the US government systematically tortures suspects is an egregious violation that goes to the highest levels of our government—that for some reason most Americans don’t particularly seem to care about.

The good news is that President Obama signed an executive order in 2009 banning torture domestically, reversing official policy under the Bush Administration, and then better yet in 2014 expanded the order to apply to all US interests worldwide. If this is properly enforced, perhaps our history of hypocrisy will finally be at its end. (Well, not if Trump wins…)

Yet as often seems to happen, there are two extremes in this debate and I think they’re both wrong.
The really disturbing side is “Torture works and we have to use it!” The preferred mode of argumentation for this is the “ticking time bomb scenario”, in which we have some urgent disaster to prevent (such as a nuclear bomb about to go off) and torture is the only way to stop it from happening. Surely then torture is justified? This argument may sound plausible, but as I’ll get to below, this is a lot like saying, “If aliens were attacking from outer space trying to wipe out humanity, nuclear bombs would probably be justified against them; therefore nuclear bombs are always justified and we can use them whenever we want.” If you can’t wait for my explanation, The Atlantic skewers the argument nicely.

Yet the opponents of torture have brought this sort of argument on themselves, by staking out a position so extreme as “It doesn’t matter if torture works! It’s wrong, wrong, wrong!” This kind of simplistic deontological reasoning is very appealing and intuitive to humans, because it casts the world into simple black-and-white categories. To show that this is not a strawman, here are several different people all making this same basic argument, that since torture is illegal and wrong it doesn’t matter if it works and there should be no further debate.

But the truth is, if it really were true that the only way to stop a nuclear bomb from leveling Los Angeles was to torture someone, it would be entirely justified—indeed obligatory—to torture that suspect and stop that nuclear bomb.

The problem with that argument is not just that this is not our usual scenario (though it certainly isn’t); it goes much deeper than that:

That scenario makes no sense. It wouldn’t happen.

To use the example the late Antonin Scalia used from an episode of 24 (perhaps the most egregious Fictional Evidence Fallacy ever committed), if there ever is a nuclear bomb planted in Los Angeles, that would literally be one of the worst things that ever happened in the history of the human race—literally a Holocaust in the blink of an eye. We should be prepared to cause extreme suffering and death in order to prevent it. But not only is that event (fortunately) very unlikely, torture would not help us.

Why? Because torture just doesn’t work that well.

It would be too strong to say that it doesn’t work at all; it’s possible that it could produce some valuable intelligence—though clear examples of such results are amazingly hard to come by. There are some social scientists who have found empirical results showing some effectiveness of torture, however. We can’t say with any certainty that it is completely useless. (For obvious reasons, a randomized controlled experiment in torture is wildly unethical, so none have ever been attempted.) But to justify torture it isn’t enough that it could work sometimes; it has to work vastly better than any other method we have.

And our empirical data is in fact reliable enough to show that that is not the case. Torture often produces unreliable information, as we would expect from the game theory involved—your incentive is to stop the pain, not provide accurate intel; the psychological trauma that torture causes actually distorts memory and reasoning; and as a matter of fact basically all the useful intelligence obtained in the War on Terror was obtained through humane interrogation methods. As interrogation experts agree, torture just isn’t that effective.

In principle, there are four basic cases to consider:

1. Torture is vastly more effective than the best humane interrogation methods.

2. Torture is slightly more effective than the best humane interrogation methods.

3. Torture is as effective as the best humane interrogation methods.

4. Torture is less effective than the best humane interrogation methods.

The evidence points most strongly to case 4, which would mean that torture is a no-brainer; if it doesn’t even work as well as other methods, it’s absurd to use it. You’re basically kicking puppies at that point—purely sadistic violence that accomplishes nothing. But the data isn’t clear enough for us to rule out case 3 or even case 2. There is only one case we can strictly rule out, and that is case 1.

But it was only in case 1 that torture could ever be justified!

If you’re trying to justify doing something intrinsically horrible, it’s not enough that it has some slight benefit.

People seem to have this bizarre notion that we have only two choices in morality:

Either we are strict deontologists, and wrong actions can never be justified by good outcomes ever, in which case apparently vaccines are morally wrong, because stabbing children with needles is wrong. Tto be fair, some people seem to actually believe this; but then, some people believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old.

Or alternatively we are the bizarre strawman concept most people seem to have of utilitarianism, under which any wrong action can be justified by even the slightest good outcome, in which case all you need to do to justify slavery is show that it would lead to a 1% increase in per-capita GDP. Sadly, there honestly do seem to be economists who believe this sort of thing. Here’s one arguing that US chattel slavery was economically efficient, and some of the more extreme arguments for why sweatshops are good can take on this character. Sweatshops may be a necessary evil for the time being, but they are still an evil.

But what utilitarianism actually says (and I consider myself some form of nuanced rule-utilitarian, though actually I sometimes call it “deontological consequentialism” to emphasize that I mean to synthesize the best parts of the two extremes) is not that the ends always justify the means, but that the ends can justify the means—that it can be morally good or even obligatory to do something intrinsically bad (like stabbing children with needles) if it is the best way to accomplish some greater good (like saving them from measles and polio). But the good actually has to be greater, and it has to be the best way to accomplish that good.

To see why this later proviso is important, consider the real-world ethical issues involved in psychology experiments. The benefits of psychology experiments are already quite large, and poised to grow as the science improves; one day the benefits of cognitive science to humanity may be even larger than the benefits of physics and biology are today. Imagine a world without mood disorders or mental illness of any kind; a world without psychopathy, where everyone is compassionate; a world where everyone is achieving their full potential for happiness and self-actualization. Cognitive science may yet make that world possible—and I haven’t even gotten into its applications in artificial intelligence.

To achieve that world, we will need a great many psychology experiments. But does that mean we can just corral people off the street and throw them into psychology experiments without their consent—or perhaps even their knowledge? That we can do whatever we want in those experiments, as long as it’s scientifically useful? No, it does not. We have ethical standards in psychology experiments for a very good reason, and while those ethical standards do slightly reduce the efficiency of the research process, the reduction is small enough that the moral choice is obviously to retain the ethics committees and accept the slight reduction in research efficiency. Yes, randomly throwing people into psychology experiments might actually be slightly better in purely scientific terms (larger and more random samples)—but it would be terrible in moral terms.

Along similar lines, even if torture works about as well or even slightly better than other methods, that’s simply not enough to justify it morally. Making a successful interrogation take 16 days instead of 17 simply wouldn’t be enough benefit to justify the psychological trauma to the suspect (and perhaps the interrogator!), the risk of harm to the falsely accused, or the violation of international human rights law. And in fact a number of terrorism suspects were waterboarded for months, so even the idea that it could shorten the interrogation is pretty implausible. If anything, torture seems to make interrogations take longer and give less reliable information—case 4.

A lot of people seem to have this impression that torture is amazingly, wildly effective, that a suspect who won’t crack after hours of humane interrogation can be tortured for just a few minutes and give you all the information you need. This is exactly what we do not find empirically; if he didn’t crack after hours of talk, he won’t crack after hours of torture. If you literally only have 30 minutes to find the nuke in Los Angeles, I’m sorry; you’re not going to find the nuke in Los Angeles. No adversarial interrogation is ever going to be completed that quickly, no matter what technique you use. Evacuate as many people to safe distances or underground shelters as you can in the time you have left.

This is why the “ticking time-bomb” scenario is so ridiculous (and so insidious); that’s simply not how interrogation works. The best methods we have for “rapid” interrogation of hostile suspects take hours or even days, and they are humane—building trust and rapport is the most important step. The goal is to get the suspect to want to give you accurate information.

For the purposes of the thought experiment, okay, you can stipulate that it would work (this is what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does). But now all you’ve done is made the thought experiment more distant from the real-world moral question. The closest real-world examples we’ve ever had involved individual crimes, probably too small to justify the torture (as bad as a murdered child is, think about what you’re doing if you let the police torture people). But by the time the terrorism to be prevented is large enough to really be sufficient justification, it (1) hasn’t happened in the real world and (2) surely involves terrorists who are sufficiently ideologically committed that they’ll be able to resist the torture. If such a situation arises, of course we should try to get information from the suspects—but what we try should be our best methods, the ones that work most consistently, not the ones that “feel right” and maybe happen to work on occasion.

Indeed, the best explanation I have for why people use torture at all, given its horrible effects and mediocre effectiveness at best is that it feels right.

When someone does something terrible (such as an act of terrorism), we rightfully reduce our moral valuation of them relative to everyone else. If you are even tempted to deny this, suppose a terrorist and a random civilian are both inside a burning building and you only have time to save one. Of course you save the civilian and not the terrorist. And that’s still true even if you know that once the terrorist was rescued he’d go to prison and never be a threat to anyone else. He’s just not worth as much.

In the most extreme circumstances, a person can be so terrible that their moral valuation should be effectively zero: If the only person in a burning building is Stalin, I’m not sure you should save him even if you easily could. But it is a grave moral mistake to think that a person’s moral valuation should ever go negative, yet I think this is something that people do when confronted with someone they truly hate. The federal agents torturing those terrorists didn’t merely think of them as worthless—they thought of them as having negative worth. They felt it was a positive good to harm them. But this is fundamentally wrong; no sentient being has negative worth. Some may be so terrible as to have essentially zero worth; and we are often justified in causing harm to some in order to save others. It would have been entirely justified to kill Stalin (as a matter of fact he died of heart disease and old age), to remove the continued threat he posed; but to torture him would not have made the world a better place, and actually might well have made it worse.

Yet I can see how psychologically it could be useful to have a mechanism in our brains that makes us hate someone so much we view them as having negative worth. It makes it a lot easier to harm them when necessary, makes us feel a lot better about ourselves when we do. The idea that any act of homicide is a tragedy but some of them are necessary tragedies is a lot harder to deal with than the idea that some people are just so evil that killing or even torturing them is intrinsically good. But some of the worst things human beings have ever done ultimately came from that place in our brains—and torture is one of them.

Why are all our Presidents war criminals?

pnrj core principles, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457443

Today I take on a topic that we really don’t like to talk about. It creates grave cognitive dissonance in our minds, forcing us to deeply question the moral character of our entire nation.

Yet it is undeniably a fact:

Most US Presidents are war criminals.

There is a long tradition of war crimes by US Presidents which includes Obama, Bush, Nixon, and above all Johnson and Truman.

Barack Obama has ordered so-called “double-tap” drone strikes, which kill medics and first responders, in express violation of the Geneva Convention.

George W. Bush orchestrated a global program of torture and indefinite detention.

Bill Clinton ordered “extraordinary renditions” in which suspects were detained without trial and transferred to other countries for interrogation, where we knew they would most likely be tortured.

I actually had trouble finding any credible accusations of war crimes by George H.W. Bush (there are definitely accusations, but none of them are credible—seriously, people are listening to Manuel Noriega?), even as Director of the CIA. He might not be a war criminal.

Ronald Reagan supported a government in Guatemala that was engaged in genocide. He knew this was happening and did not seem to care. This was only one of many tyrannical, murderous regimes supported by Reagan’s administration. In fact, Ronald Reagan was successfully convicted of war crimes by the International Court of Justice. Chomsky isn’t wrong about this one. Ronald Reagan was a convicted war criminal.

Jimmy Carter is a major exception to the rule; not only are there no credible accusations of war crimes against him, he has actively fought to pursue war crimes investigations against Israel and even publicly discussed the war crimes of George W. Bush.

I also wasn’t able to find any credible accusations of war crimes by Gerald Ford, so he might be clean.

But then we get to Richard Nixon, who deployed chemical weapons against civilians in Vietnam. (Calling Agent Orange “herbicide” probably shouldn’t matter morally—but it might legally, as tactical “herbicides” are not always war crimes.) But Nixon does deserve some credit for banning biological weapons.

Indeed, most of the responsibility for war crimes in Vietnam falls upon Johnson. The US deployed something very close to a “total war” strategy involving carpet bombing—more bombs were dropped by the US in Vietnam than by all countries in WW2—as well as napalm and of course chemical weapons; basically it was everything short of nuclear weapons. Kennedy and Johnson also substantially expanded the US biological weapons program.

Speaking of weapons of mass destruction, I’m not sure if it was actually illegal to expand the US nuclear arsenal as dramatically as Kennedy did, but it definitely should have been. Kennedy brought our nuclear arsenal up to its greatest peak, a horrifying 30,000 deployable warheads—more than enough to wipe out human civilization, and possibly enough to destroy the entire human race.

While Eisenhower was accused of the gravest war crime on this list, namely the genocide of over 1 million people in Germany, most historians do not consider this accusation credible. Rather, his war crimes were committed as Supreme Allied Commander, in the form of carpet bombing, especially of Tokyo, which killed as many as 200,000 people, and of Dresden, which had no apparent military significance and even held a number of Allied POWs.

But then we get to Truman, the coup de grace, the only man in history to order the use of nuclear weapons in warfare. Truman gave the order to deploy nuclear weapons against civilians. He was the only person in the history of the world to ever give such an order. It wasn’t Hitler; it wasn’t Stalin. It was Harry S. Truman.

Then of course there’s Roosevelt’s internment of over 100,000 Japanese Americans. It really pales in comparison to Truman’s order to vaporize an equal number of Japanese civilians in the blink of an eye.

I think it will suffice to end the list here, though I could definitely go on. I think Truman is a really good one to focus on, for two reasons that pull quite strongly in opposite directions.

1. The use of nuclear weapons against civilians is among the gravest possible crimes. It may be second to genocide, but then again it may not, as genocide does not risk the destruction of the entire human race. If we only had the option of outlawing one thing in war, and had to allow everything else, we would have no choice but to ban the use of nuclear weapons against civilians.

2. Truman’s decision may have been justified. To this day is still hotly debated whether the atomic bombings were justifiable; mainstream historians have taken both sides. On Debate.org, the vote is almost exactly divided—51% yes, 49% no. Many historians believe that had Truman not deployed nuclear weapons, there would have been an additional 5 million deaths as a result of the continuation of the war.

Perhaps now you can see why this matter makes me so ambivalent.

There is a part of me that wants to take an absolute hard line against war crimes, and say that they must never be tolerated, that even otherwise good Presidents like Clinton and Obama deserve to be tried at the Hague for what they have done. (Truman and Eisenhower are dead, so it’s too late for them.)

But another part of me wonders what would happen if we did this. What if the world really is so dangerous that we have no choice but to allow our leaders to commit horrible atrocities in order to defend us?

There are easy cases—Bush’s torture program didn’t even result in very much useful intelligence, so it was simply a pointless degradation of our national character. The same amount of effort invested in more humane intelligence gathering would very likely have provided more reliable information. And in any case, terrorism is such a minor threat in the scheme of things that the effort would be better spent on improving environmental regulations or auto safety.

Similarly, there’s no reason to engage in “extraordinary rendition” to a country that tortures people when you could simply conduct a legitimate trial in absentia and then arrest the convicted terrorist with special forces and imprison him in a US maximum-security prison until his execution. (Or even carry out the execution directly by the special forces; as long as the trial is legitimate, I see no problem with that.) At that point, the atrocities are being committed simply to avoid inconvenience.

But especially when we come to the WW2 examples, where the United States—nay, the world—was facing a genuine threat of being conquered by genocidal tyrants, I do begin to wonder if “victory by any means necessary” is a legitimate choice.

There is a way to cut the Gordian knot here, and say that yes, these are crimes, and should be punished; but yes, they were morally justified. Then, the moral calculus any President must undergo when contemplating such an atrocity is that he himself will be tried and executed if he goes through with it. If your situation is truly so dire that you are willing to kill 100,000 civilians, perhaps you should be willing to go down with the ship. (Roger Fisher made a similar argument when he suggested implanting the nuclear launch codes inside the body of a US military officer. If you’re not willing to tear one man apart with a knife, why are you willing to vaporize an entire city?)

But if your actions really were morally justified… what sense does it make to punish you for them? And if we hold up this threat of punishment, could it cause a President to flinch when we really need him to take such drastic action?

Another possibility to consider is that perhaps our standards for war crimes really are too strict, and some—not all, but some—of the actions I just listed are in fact morally justifiable and should be made legal under international law. Perhaps the US government is right to fight the UN convention against cluster munitions; maybe we need cluster bombs to successfully defend national security. Perhaps it should not be illegal to kill the combat medics who directly serve under the command of enemy military forces—as opposed to civilian first-responders or Medecins Sans Frontieres. Perhaps our tolerance for civilian casualties is unrealistically low, and it is impossible to fight a war in the real world without killing a large number of civilians.

Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps we are too willing to engage in war in the first place, too accustomed to deploying military force as our primary response to international conflict. Perhaps the prospect of facing a war crimes tribunal in a couple of years should be an extra layer of deterrent against any President ordering yet another war—by some estimates we have been at war 93% of the time since our founding as a nation, and it is a well-documented fact that we have by far the highest military spending in the world. Why is it that so many Americans see diplomacy as foolish, see compromise as weakness?

Perhaps the most terrifying thing is not that so many US Presidents are war criminals; it is that so many Americans don’t seem to have any problem with that.