Speak for Yourself: Letters
JACK BAUER VS. RIGHTS?
I found Robert’s article on Jack Bauer [“The Gospel According to Jack,” April 2007] and Walter Donway’s letter of disagreement [June] to be very interesting—the ethics of emergencies on the one hand, and the proper role and limits of government on the other. At minimum, the exchange illustrates what sets The Atlas Society apart: the amenability to open, robust, and civil discourse about the thorny ethical issues that we face in the real world. Because we come from a common philosophy, we frequently can evaluate the facts and “reason together” to reach a common answer.
In this case, we are not there yet.
What we are talking about is the tension that will always exist in the arena of individual rights: here, the right of individuals to be free from violence from the people who have been delegated the legal monopoly on force, versus the right of individuals to be defended by the same people from the initiation of violence by others. The state has the obligation to defend each individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property, and it should not trample on the rights of some to defend the rights of others.
Is this a conundrum? How logically can we resolve this apparent conflict of individual interests?
First, by scrutinizing closely the context in which the claim to individual rights is to be recognized. Does a thief who sells stolen property have a right to keep the cash proceeds—i.e., is it really his property? Does a rapist have a right to be free from a jail sentence? or a murderer a right to his life? Is our government obligated to protect the life of an armed enemy combatant? Does a terrorist who just triggered a nuclear time bomb have a right to due process? And just what process is due in the circumstances?
These questions are important to the survival of individuals, their rights, and a civilized society.
Of course, there should be no government policy endorsing or teaching state-sponsored torture. And it is not a good idea to glorify torture or put it in a positive light. But recognizing that in today’s world our protectors are forced to test ethical extremes in circumstances where they are trained to “kill people and break things” reveals how difficult operating in the real world is. And it demonstrates the importance of a continuing and widespread public focus on individual rights, government policy, and the ethics of the people acting on behalf of the government. It also shows the importance of the government’s taking an official stand on what is meant by torture and what interrogation techniques are acceptable.
Let me add a complicating thought. The American soldier’s stock in trade is his integrity. He is a promise-keeper, to the death if need be. Whether he made his promise to support and defend the Constitution in order to get a free education, or to get out of the ghetto, or because he read The Federalist Papers when he was in the eighth grade and loves our political ideals, in his mind he promised to defend us—and he will do so even at the expense of his own well-being.
That is the soldier’s code of integrity that he calls “duty.” Not self-sacrifice, but integrity—an undertaking in pursuit of his own highest values. And for the professional soldier, that integrity is ingrained to the point of reflex. Run through that mine field. Charge up that hill. Fall on that grenade. Fulfill the mission. Save the nation. He made his value judgments long ago. Now he acts, automatically. Sometimes he gets injured and sometimes he dies . . . and sometimes he just gets into trouble.
Regardless of the rules, when faced with a Jack Bauer situation—in extremis—the professional soldier (and, likewise, the professional CIA field agent) is as likely as not to blow off a kneecap if, in his judgment, it is the last effective alternative he has to save those he is bound to protect from a ticking nuclear time bomb. (He most certainly will regret not doing so if, in his mind, fifty percent of
The question of ethics then becomes: Do we punish the soldier if he broke the rules?
Many years ago, after I studied The Case of the Spelunkean Explorers in law school, I read an English case in which two men had been charged with murder. They had been lost at sea on a lifeboat and had killed and eaten a third individual in order to survive. They demonstrated that their survival depended on the horrific act and pled emergency, self defense, and all sorts of cogent justifications; yet, they were convicted and their appeal was denied.
Even though they advanced no higher cause by their crime, they were subsequently pardoned by the Queen. The law had its say and the Queen had hers.
We cannot countenance torture or lawlessness, and government agents should be made to understand that the law will prevail. But if someone elects to take the fall in order to save us from being nuked, when we nod favorably in the direction of the law, we should also nod gratefully in the direction of the person who, in the pursuit of his own values, chose to protect us.
Eugene C. Holloway
Director of Operations and Development
The Atlas Society,
BOURGEOIS VS. ROMANTIC VIRTUE?
At the end of Roger Donway’s otherwise informative and interesting [June] article “Bobos, Libertarians, and Hippies of the Right,” I was shocked to find his unqualified attack on Romanticism.
If Howard Roark in The Fountainhead is an example of bourgeois prudence and productivity, I’ll eat my house. Yet he’s a central figure in Ayn Rand’s universe of rational individualists, passionately pursuing his personal idea of self-actualization (architecture, his way).
Even works in the Enlightenment era auger against Donway’s view:
I think Mr. Donway forgets that the Western idea of how an individual lives a free life emerges as much from the passionate individualism of Goethe, Beethoven, and Hugo, as it does from Locke, Franklin, and Pope.
I’ll take Hugo over Pope any day.
Marsha Familaro Enright
Reason, Individualism, Freedom Institute
Roger Donway replies: Well, today’s idea of how an individual lives a free life certainly emerges much more from Goethe, Beethoven, and Hugo than it does from Johnson, Mozart, and Austen. But I don’t consider that a recommendation for Romanticism.