As of late, the question of torture prosecution has been on everybody's minds.
Over the past few months, guys like Keith Olberman has made very passionate cases for throwing the book at that whole sorry crew of Cheney-esque offenders. Yesterday, in the New York Times, Roger Cohen made a good case for why we should hold back.
We can literally go back and forth and back and forth and there are very solid reasons supporting both arguments.
Personally, I think prosecution would be a distraction from the economic nightmare which is a distraction from the environmental meltdown and, well, remember the glory days when we did one thing at a time—ah the joys of just having to fend off the bursting tech-stock bubble.
It seems those days are behind us, so we must do ten things at once, and if we must multi-task then we need to consider prosecution. But not for any of the reasons being laid out in the media, instead I want to reframe the question.
It seems to me that the real reason we have to consider building cases against Cheney and Co. is to insure nothing like this ever happens again.
And that brings me to evolutionary theory—specifically to how we have solved the question of morality.
In his 1871 The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin began grappling with the question of real sacrifice, which he thought of as a question about where in the biological hierarchy natural selection exerts evolutionary pressure. Was selection a multi-tiered effect or did one tier have prominence? Were individuals favored over groups or visa-versa? Could it work at the level of whole eco-systems? The answer has a real impact on questions of morality.
If selection acts exclusively at the individual level, Darwin reasoned, than altruism can't evolve. "He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature."
But altruism makes a lot of sense at the group level. "Although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe...an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another...[a tribe who] were always ready to give aid to each other and sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over other tribes; and this would be natural selection."
This was the invention of an idea called group selection and it held fast for a century, then toppled in a few short years. In the 1960s, mathematical models were introduced into evolutionary theory and when scientists started modeling altruism, free riders became a problem.
"Even if altruism is advantageous at the group level," says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "within any group altruists are liable to be exploited by selfish ‘free-riders' who refrain from behaving altruistically. These free-riders will have an obvious fitness advantage: they benefit from the altruism of others, but do not incur any of the costs. So even if a group is composed exclusively of altruists, all behaving nicely towards each other, it only takes a single selfish mutant to bring an end to this happy idyll. By virtue of its relative fitness advantage within the group, the selfish mutant will out-reproduce the altruists, hence selfishness will eventually swamp altruism. Since the generation time of individual organisms is likely to be much shorter than that of groups, the probability that a selfish mutant will arise and spread is very high, according to this line of argument."
Group selection was out, individual selection was in. In 1976, in "The Selfish Gene," Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins reduced things further, arguing that it didn't really matter what level evolution occurred, genes were the "fundamental unit of selection" and-since a gene's only function is the inherently selfish self-replication—any selection pressure applied at the group level would be completely negated at the individual level.
Altruism became kin selection—we help those who are closely related to us-or reciprocal altruism—we help those who help us-and the world became a crueler place. "Our genes made us," Dawkin's wrote. "We animals exist for their preservation and are nothing more than throw-away survival machines. The world of the selfish gene is one of savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit."
These days, group selection has returned, the charge being led by Harvard's E.O. Wilson among many others, but for the discussion of torture that may be neither here nor there.
The point is this—if our science now underpins our morality than we should turn to to solve our dilemma.
If our goal is to prevent US government officials from ever torturing people again we have to face facts. If Dawkin's is correct and reciprocal altruism and kin selection are really the underpinnings of good behavior than we have to prosecute for the simple reason that without punishment there is no incentive for the next lunatic to amass enough power to overturn the Geneva Conventions to resist temptation.
But if Dawkin's is wrong and group selection is key than, at least at a glance, we find ourselves in the completely opposite position-torturing would-be terrorists to protect our group against your group appears to argue against prosecution.
Where this falls apart is with Thomas Friedman's flat, earth argument. If he's right and we really are—thanks to the wonders of mass transit and mass telecommunications—one planet, one people please, than the group is actually all of us, the whole tangled mass of humanity.
If everyone is in the "in group" than again we have to prosecute because it's in the best interests of civilization to outlaw these practices forever.
So is Friedman right? The American economy just fell apart and it dragged most of the world with it. That seems a pretty clear yes vote for the flat earth society.
Which means, if we really do believe that scientific fact should drive policy, the facts point towards prosecution.
