This is in response, in particular, to an OS blog:

 norman kelley, in April

Torture is certainly not an exclusively George Bush product.  I was a Freedom Writer for some years for Amnesty International.  We wrote letters to ask redress for many kinds of human rights abuses, not just torture.  Human rights abuses are well nigh worldwide, and torture depressingly widespread.  If your taste runs that way, more or less graphic descriptions of torture experiences can be found in many contexts, both in space and in time.  It figured in Roman law.   The history of the campaigns in the Renaissance against the witches or earlier against the Albighensians is appalling. 

I like norman kelley, and I value his posts to the extent that I've read them (which is only about a dozen or so).  But to remark that someone else besides G.W. Bush's people use torture is hardly a Devil's Advocate position.  The point of the debate before America now, sad to say, is that we, in particular, ought to lay off.  Anyone else's bad habits are not relevant.  Those guys are wrong, too, but we are citizens here, with all that implies.

Point one:  Now hear this well.  It doesn't get you the truth.

Point two:  It's morally reprehensible about six ways.

Let's begin with point one.  Forget 24.  Forget al-Qaida.  Those people who underwent torture, real no-holds-barred torture, to check to see if they were witches were not witches.  And yet, every one of them said they were. Every single thing else they said, according to contemporary witnesses, was ignored anyway.

Q.E.D., but let's not forget that torture was used successfully by, for one example, North Korea.  They made captives say things which parroted the Party line, for propaganda purposes.  It's great for that.  But that is not intelligence information, it is not the truth.

Similarly, witches confessed their witchcraft in detail, and then named other witches. It's great for that.  But, again, not the truth, not real information.

People, some of them, set their jaws and resist, or maybe give misdirection, answers which cause their enemies to chase wild geese.  It's great for that, too, but we don't want that.

Now, point two: torturers are slime.  It matters not what level your spiritual development is at, torture is wrong entirely, but always with one fatal exception: for enemies, torture is okay.  That, and simple perversion, is the sole reason anyone continues to use it.   I'd like to amplify this a little, and talk about the concept of enemies.

 As I see it, we can toss all the logical ethical systems, because they really don't come into play.  We are not like logical ethical systems, we humans.  We are complex, and we contain much more than simply reason.  All animals are like that.  Nature itself is like that.  None of it, none of us was constructed from first principles, worked out logically; consequently, no logical system derived from principles is going to describe us, nor nature, very well.

Remember the platypus?  A perfectly successful animal that's been around, according to the fossil record, about 20 million years, which is a whole lot longer than we have been around.  It doesn't fit very neatly into the 'mammal' category.  But the categories are the problem, not the platypus.  Categories are rational constructs.  They always throw up platypi, because nature is not designed to a rational system; rational and absolute ethical systems are no different than rational classification systems, in this way.

Look here.  Think, one time, with me, about the way in which you make a decision.  Because making a decision is what morality is for, am I right? Each decision is a little different from the next, isn't it?  Let me tell you what I see going on, both in myself and in other people whom I talk to.

Reason is always there, I grant you.  But look what else is always there!  It comes to maybe six things: reason, intuition, imagination, memory, common sense, and morality.  Some decisions are mostly memory and intuition.  Some, imagination and a sense of what's right.  Some, though damn few in my experience, are mostly rational.  Notice I say "mostly." That's important, because all those tools are always present, even if one or two of them seem to have had the largest share in any given decision.

The tools are all there, and they all influence one another.  Wisdom consists in the balance, the equilibrium a person maintains between these factors, as she goes about living and making decisions.  I can go on about this, but what I want to talk about today is morality.

Which is my Point three: morality is not derived from [insert philosopher here],and not from [insert Holy Scripture here].  You don't have time for that, because you need to make hundreds of decisions every day.  Ethics isn't something you haul out and dust off for special occasions, but a living part of decision making all the time.  This includes the time before you have read Rand, or Bentham, or the Sermon on the Mount, or the Gîta, or the Daodejing.  "What is good, and what is not good," Socrates said, "do we need anyone to tell us these things?"

What results is that there are hundreds of millions of different moralities.  Everyone uses their own.  The broad strokes of them result, mostly, from what level any given person has attained, you should pardon the expression, spiritually.

Because morality falls into natural levels.  We are born, I think, utter egoists.  Certainly by the time our decisions can be implemented, this is true.  Once a toddler can walk, she can slide in a zinger, and make her personal decision stick, and this is before she can even use spoken language.  The decisions you can observe reflect a simple egoist structure of right and wrong.

Here is the egoist morality: what's good for Me is good, what's bad for Me is bad.  Actions which result in things good for Me are right actions, and so on.  We move significantly beyond that stage when we adopt a group into the system.  

It can be any group, defined any way.  Let's take nations, though it could be tribes, religions, races, anything.  That's the next stage in the development path I call spiritual.  I use the word because it is there, though I am atheist. 

Okay, here's what I mean by group-centered morals: what's good for Us is good, what's bad for Us is bad, and so on.  Now, this comes as a revelation to a person, when the big step is made to the new level.  As a nationalist, I have a new moral capability, that of noble self-sacrifice.  Mere egoists can't do this, and they always are baffled by it; also, nationalists call on the benighted egoist to move up, to embrace something larger than herself!  They tell people to abjure the selfish for the greater good.  They see egoist morality as childish and inferior.

Neither group sees torture as moral, if it be applied to them.  To an egoist, anyone who tortures Me is swine of the first order, and to a nationalist (or partisan of any other grouping) people who torture My People are morally reprehensible.  That much is clear, at any rate.

A canny appreciation of the everyday aspects of the golden rule informs the intelligent egoist or nationalist that torture is bad applied to the other, outside members of the species, if only to keep them from feeling entitled to torture Us (or Me).

But! Both egoists and group-centered folk can always have enemies.  They have a rule about enemies: to despoil an enemy is not theft, to kill one not murder. Indeed, it is moral to do so, people decorate you, cheer and wave flags. The definition of 'enemy' is bound up with this moral exception that is made for them.

Once you pick an enemy, what's bad for the enemy is good, what's beneficial to the enemy is bad, morally.  That's what it is to have an enemy.  You don't have to hate them, though many do.  You can act dispassionately, without hate, and still kill them and blast their hopes, destroy their children, their food, their crops, their future, and be acting morally, serving the greater good of the nation, or the tribe, the church, the God, the race, whatever it is. 

So, at certain spiritual levels, in general, torture is moral, so long as you do it to the enemy.  Wholesale bombing of cities with fire and destruction is just fine, and utterly moral, in those cases, too.  Much of the evil in the world comes from this, and much from smaller scale egoistic sources, along the same lines.

There is a way beyond this, and it involves further spiritual growth.  Specifically, you have to realize that all the whole race is just the same as you are, morally.  As when you became a partisan of the nation, this, too, is a revelation; this, too, is a higher call; and this, too, renders the one-time nationalist morality puerile and shallow, misguided and inferior.

I sketch it out mechanically, in order to be brief.  There is more to it-- much integration, especially, of the new insight into your life. 

At that level, you start to say things like, oh, for instance, "Love your enemies, love those who hate and persecute you," or "forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven," or "Give him your cloak also."

And you can't even have enemies, any more.  And torture becomes immoral, even to enemies.