Why is it that if this person...says the words “I surrender” that it suddenly becomes wrong to punch him in the face hard enough to make him bleed? Not prudentially foolish, but morally wrong?G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, spoke about how it is easy to argue for something if you partially believe it, but almost impossible if you fully believe it. His example was that, since he fully believed in Christianity, when someone asked him why it was right he said something like, "the rocks and the trees and the sky", because all these things--because everything--was evidence to him of the reality of God.
I'm feeling similarly these days. I just don't even know how to respond to this. I don't understand what first principles Manzi is operating from. I just don't know how to engage this sort of argument. Everything in my being knows that this sort of statement is dead wrong. I'm just dumbfounded. I think that Larison makes a pretty good argument here--that when surrendering the soldier becomes a noncombatant, and that just killing noncombatants isn't something that civilized countries do. Manzi says that this doesn't matter because the soldier can escape, which is irrelevant as the soldier isn't a risk until they do that, at which point they become combatants again.
I also agree with John Cole's assessment: "[T]hey are mobilizing and going balls to the wall in defense of sadism. It is really quite amazing, and a testament to just how sick and detestable and rotten to the core the Republican party has become." And it's not going to pay dividends. The Obama Administration is going to release pictures of the torture detainees. There's going to be art on this shit. There's no way they're going to be able to huff and puff against pictures of bloody faces that our government made. Right now it's an abstraction, but it won't be. It didn't have to be like this: the Republicans could have said that the Bush era is done, that investigations were proper--in essence, they could have cut Dubya loose. They didn't, though, cause the libruls hated him, and you can't let the libruls win. Just my opinion, but I don't see anyone else with a better one.
But, really, if you think that hurting or killing somebody who poses no threat to you isn't obviously wrong--even if they could potentially be a threat to you (or not) at some point in the distant future--then our moral principles are so far apart that I don't even know how to engage you.
