Defining Torture, Part XXXVIII

In the comments below Tommy writes:

What I found most interesting in the [Christopher O. Tollefsen] quote, though, is the suggestion that what is at the heart of torture is psychological disintegration.

We've discussed that before, though I couldn't possibly come up with a reference to exactly where offhand.

I'm very sympathetic to it as a point of view, though it isn't without issues.

For one thing, I think there are clear cases of particularly tough characters where someone was tortured yet in fact the torture did not result in psychological disintegration. We might think of this as analogous to contraceptive failure, though; so it isn't fatal to the proposal.

For another, I expect there are cases of torture where the torturer couldn't care less about the psychological disintegration of the victim: pure sadism, for example, might have no goal other than suffering-qua-suffering. Since this references the intentions of the torturer rather than the objective nature of his chosen act (the object), though, that also isn't dispositive against.

So there is some merit to the approach. Comparing it to murder, we might provisionally call an instance of torture which fails to produce psychological disintegration attempted torture. That deals with the obviously ludicrous objection that because the victim didn't in fact die/psychologically disintegrate, what was done was not murder/torture: there isn't anything about attempted murder which makes it morally acceptable as distinguished from a successful murder. And since torture refers to behaviors the objective nature of which is to produce psychological disintegration in the victim, there is no such thing as "attempted torture": torture just is the choice of such behaviors, whether or not they produce psychological disintegration in the particular case. So we can drop the "provisional attempted" and just refer to such behaviors as torture, full stop. Like "attempted contraception," the fact of failure in a particular instance doesn't change the objective nature of the act.

Where that gets us is that if behavior X is objectively a kind of behavior which inherently (though not in every case) produces psychological disintegration in the victim - much as a sexual act with a condom is a kind of behavior which alters a sexual act to be 'completed' yet infertile, even though in some signate cases fertility is not blocked - behavior X is torture. Furthermore, any behavior carried out with the intention of producing psychological disintegration in the victim is torture, under the rubric of formal cooperation.

That is as close to a clear definition of torture as we've had, I think.

It won't satisfy the waterboarding crowd, of course, because waterboarding precisely as described in Courting Disaster, carried out deliberately and repeatedly until the hardened terrorist capitulates, fits like a glove. And SERE training, deliberately limited such that it introduces the trainee to the procedure as a training exercise but carefully does not take it to the point of actual psychological disintegration, does not - though there could be cases, in effect the "involuntary manslaughter" of torture, where psychological disintegration occurs by accident. This adds some strength to the prudential argument against SERE training, though it is not dispositive: an actual case of psychological disintegration in SERE training would be analogous to a fatal training accident.

Perhaps an incoherent and inarticulate awareness of this is what is motivating the notion that waterboarding is a positive good for the victim, a faux-baptism providing absolution from the sin of betrayal on the part of the talkative post-waterboard terrorist, because it gives him a reason to do the right thing with a clear conscience. This is the same basic motivation, in fact, which appears to have applied to medieval Inquisitors; though at least in the case of the Inquisitors it was primarily the victim's own good, not the good of others, which fueled the activity.

The problem again is that that approach proves too much, because if waterboarding is salutary in this manner, and that salutary or medicinal effect is precisely what makes it "not torture", then why not the rack?

Does preventative dissent from the Magisterium fall under the just war doctrine?

In the comments at CAEI, Tom wrote:

The great thing about the appeal to finer detail is that, the moment the finer detail is given, it can be rejected as outside the competency of the authority.

Then, as if conjured from the ectoplasm by his words, the New York Times reports on its interview with Marc Thiessen:

But what if the church specifically prohibited waterboarding?

“On what competence would they do that?” Mr. Thiessen said. “I don’t think the church would be competent to judge whether the way we did it was torture.”

“Perhaps,” he added, “they should clarify it. We were in the middle of a war, and there was no teaching on that. But the church only gives general moral guidance, and people of good faith have to interpret that guidance.”

We also learn that:

“I didn’t get into the Catholic theological stuff of it until I sat down to write the book,” Mr. Thiessen said in a phone interview.

Well, there is a shock.

Bonus points for putting numbers on the long dead zombie arguments Thiessen deploys in the rest of his interview.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

A great story of pro-life courage and forgiveness posted by Donald R. McClarey over at American Catholic.

Why "it works" means "it is torture"

In any event, the upshot of my discussion is this: if, as the double effect defense presupposes, waterboarding or some other interrogation technique is done in a way that is expected to cause harm to the suspect, then that harm is most likely intended as a means by the interrogator and double effect will not justify it. And if such techniques are performed with the intention to cause pain, but not either direct physical harm, or psychological disintegration, then they are likely to be ineffective. Either way, it is, in my view, a good thing that United States’ policy has moved (as it did in the second Bush term) beyond the grim, if understandable, policies of the first few years after 9/11. - Christopher O. Tollefsen

Let's play "spot the false premise"

1. The original 9-11 plot involved plans to crash planes into West Coast buildings too. This was cancelled by al Qaeda leadership because deemed too ambitious.
2. Waterboarding KSM gained intelligence which led to the capture of much of the original cell which had planned to hit the West Coast, including the Library Tower in LA.
3. Surprise had nothing to do with the success of al Qaeda's attacks on 9-11. A bunch of Islamic terrorists hijacking airliners and crashing them into buildings was every bit as feasible after 9-11 as before.

... from which it follows that waterboarding KSM foiled the Library Tower plot.

Bonus non-sequitur:

... from which it obviously follows that waterboarding prisoners for information is not torture.

Since when did "war criminal" start to mean "honored guest of the realm?"

There are three classes of persons we must consider in warfare.

First, there are innocents. Innocents are those who are not in any way engaged in any attacking behaviors, where "attacking behaviors", for the sake of argument at least, include any activity proximately supporting the war. We must never kill innocents deliberately, no matter what consequences flow from not doing so. Accidents do happen, and are expected to happen, on the interstate highway system and in wartime. Proper care must be taken to avoid signate accidents, but in both venues - highway system and wartime - they are generally unavoidable.

Second, there are enemy soldiers. Soldiers fight in uniform under the laws of war or provide supplies, etc to the war effort. It is licit to kill them on the battlefield, when necessary, and yes, the battlefield includes the supply lines. When we capture them we owe them - to the extent of our ability to reasonably provide it - medical care, three hots, a cot, and (always) POW status. Name, rank, and serial number are all we are entitled to from them. If they attempt to escape, they are thereby deliberately making themselves active combatants again: a POW in the process of attempting escape becomes, qua escape attempt in process, an active combatant. As always, killing legitimate soldiers and support personnel is only licit when it is necessary in order to stop an attack. POW's must be released when hostilities cease.

Third, there are criminals acting outside the laws of war. (Thus the term "war criminal"). Criminals may be killed in the process of committing a crime, if necessary. They may be captured, killed while attempting to escape capture (if necessary), interrogated, put on trial (military or civilian), and even executed if doing so is necessary to protect the common good. Interrogation may (or may not) involve plea bargaining with respect to their criminal status and sentencing.

Complicity of leadership in war crimes makes them war criminals also.

It is not permissible to torture, rape, abuse, or perform other intrinsically immoral acts on criminals.

There is no other kind of person: there is no subhuman "illegal enemy combatant" distinct from a war criminal.

This post brought to you by the surreality of this comment thread and hundreds of others like it.

Night of the Living Dead Arguments

One meta-feature of the torture debates is the constant repetition of the unsound arguments discussed in the previous series, even after they have been demonstrated to be unsound.

In a comment box I called it the Zombie Apocalypse of Rhetoric: the corpses of long-dead arguments are re-animated over and over again in the hope that they will eat our brains.

Waterboarding series summary

This series has covered why I believe waterboarding prisoners is torture and why you should too. Three kinds of reasons were given: reasons from history and law, reasons from intuition, and reasons from argument. The part on reasons from argument includes a pair of "live documents" that I'll update over time. Here are the posts:

• Why I believe waterboarding prisoners is torture, and you should too
• Showdown at High Noon
• Rough Ride Ahead, or why waterboarding is important
• The Gasping Grimoire, or pathologies of failed arguments
• A catalog of failed arguments
• Abortion is more important than torture

I know we've had lots of esoteric arguments about moral theology in the past. In this series I've tried specifically to frame things such that those particular and highly nuanced disputes do not come into it: hopefully the series doesn't depend on anything too complicated or deep.

We've also had lots of disputes over elections, voting, political action, and such. This series doesn't address those questions. We can pound a stake into the heart of the contention that waterboarding prisoners for information is not torture without resolving every other dispute about all of those things.

''For true and false will in no better way be revealed and uncovered than in resistance to a contradiction.'' -- St. Thomas Aquinas

Abortion is more important than torture

Given the foregoing series of posts, one might get the impression that I think torture, and specifically waterboarding, is a more grave issue than abortion.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For the person actually doing it, and for any persons formally cooperating with it, appeals to the greater gravity of abortion carry no water. Tu quoque or "less evil than the competing brand" isn't recognized as sound moral reasoning in any serious ethical theory of which I am aware, let alone in Catholic moral theology. When an act is evil we ought not do it, and we ought not formally cooperate with it, by the nature of what is meant by "evil"; no matter how venially evil it happens to be, and no matter what consequences follow from not doing it. That is what "evil" means.

Nevertheless different evil acts, though evil as pertains to category, do differ in their moral gravity. We should never perform an evil act; but some evil acts are worse than others.

Still we are comparing apples to oranges, because the pro-choice position is that abortion should be legal, not that it is not immoral. Lets stipulate.

The problem though for Catholics who approach it that way is a little document called Evangelium Vitae. Evangelium Vitae makes it astonishingly clear that it is also gravely wrong to support the legality of abortion; and furthermore, that there is a grave positive duty to oppose its legality as enshrined in a legal pseudo-right.

Failing to oppose the legality of abortion, in the will and intentions if not always in particular acts, is also gravely wrong. Our day to day behavior will inevitably reflect whether our will and intentions are where they should be on the matter.

As stated above, there is a difference between whether an act is wrong and how gravely wrong it is. Furthermore, the abortion holocaust and the torture regime are not individual acts, but whole ensembles of vast numbers of acts and social implications: what Pope John Paul II referred to as "structures of sin". As I mentioned recently in a previous post, and in many places in times past, the gravity of the abortion holocaust as a structure of sin is immediate and vastly larger than the gravity of the torture regime. As tacticians or strategists looking from the outside in, opposed to both, it is clear which is the higher priority.

Suppose there are two switches on the wall, on opposite sides of the room. One switch will permanently end the "right to abortion". The other will permanently end state-sanctioned waterboarding of prisoners. The switches are only active for the next fifteen seconds, you are standing in the middle of the room, and you've gotta start moving right now.

The priority is manifest.

We do have to be a little careful with the word "priority". Each of us as individuals has a vocation or vocations, and just because opposing the "right" to abortion is a vastly higher priority in general than torture, because of our circumstances, that doesn't imply that every individual must make abortion his highest priority. Not at all. It is really a false choice. And it also would be easy to underestimate the gravity of the torture regime because, unlike the abortion regime, it is in its infancy.

But when Horatio stands on the bridge of legal abortion, it is one thing to oppose the torture regime because it is evil in itself and because of the harm it is doing to him; it is another to use it to knife him in the back.

(Series summary)

A catalog of failed arguments

''For true and false will in no better way be revealed and uncovered than in resistance to a contradiction.'' -- St. Thomas Aquinas

This is going to be a live document listing failed arguments which contend that waterboarding prisoners for information is not torture. It is the fifth article in a series of seven, which starts here.

An old story: the Knights of Columbus got so used to telling the same jokes to each other over and over again that they started referring to them by number. During a meeting, Sam called out "number seven!" and the whole room roared with laughter. Ted called out "number twelve!" Dead silence. The Knight sitting next to him whispered "Sorry Ted, you just aren't as good at telling a joke as Sam".

This will start out sparsely filled and I'll just edit and publish as I go. Linked posts will contain the refutation, though they may not necessarily be about the refutation or only the refutation. I might (reluctantly -- I'd rather work with existing material) write new posts focused specifically on a given refutation if I see a need; but this document will be the index, for now, unless I become convinced that it has to be done in another format (in which case I'll link from here). (How is that for a run-on sentence?)

For any given argument there are probably tens or hundreds of discussions out there in the ether where it was demolished, so if you think there is a better already-existing refutation let me know. Some of them may be difficult to find, especially the ones in comboxes given the alteration of comment systems over the years. Feel free to make suggestions in the combox, including suggestions about the nosology (the categorization of the errors). I plan to finish up the series and publish a top-level post for it, and then this can be filled in at leisure, over time.

The kinds of errors, again, are catalogued in the previous post, which is also a "live document". Where the argument in question is simply based on a false premise I'll say "false premise". Where it is based on a commonplace fallacy I may also name the fallacy. These are some of the actual erroneous arguments themselves.

It would seem that waterboarding prisoners for information is not torture because ...

1. ... CCC 2297 doesn't list "to extract life-saving information".
   Consequentialism, appeal to finer detail


2. ... executing the guilty is not intrinsically immoral.
   Omitting facts in an analogy, appeal to an incomplete definition


3. ... we waterboarded SERE trainees.
   Omitting facts in an analogy, equivocation. Furthermore, our own government has expressly said that "the SERE waterboard experience is so different from the subsequent Agency usage as to make it almost irrelevant."


4. ... it gives Islamic prisoners an excuse to tell us what they know, under their religion.
   Appeal to an incomplete definition


5. ... Catholics are free to disagree about it.
   See no evil.


6. ... the Magisterium has not said so specifically.
   Appeal to finer detail, see no evil


7. ... ticking time bombs have really bad consequences if we don't defuse them.
   Consequentialism, appeal to an incomplete definition.


8. ... you would do it if your own family was threatened.
   Consequentialism, ad hominem


9. ... the terrorist captive is an attacker, so waterboarding him is an act of self-defense
   False premise


10. ... it is justified under the principle of double-effect
    Consequentialism


11. ... spanking children is not torture
    Appeal to an incomplete definition, omitting facts in an analogy


12. ... we don't have a single, authoritative, precise, and complete definition of torture.
    Appeal to an incomplete definition, appeal to finer detail, see no evil


13. ... it falls under the just war doctrine.
    Consequentialism


14. ... it does not cause permanent harm.
    Appeal to an incomplete definition


15. ... the CIA men who did it are brave, professional men protecting American lives.
    Ad hominem, begging the question


16. ... it works.
    Consequentialism, raving non-sequitur


17. ... to oppose it you have to be a radical pacifist.
    Raving nonsequitur, reverse ad-hominem


18. ... the only kind of people who think that are people who hate actual anti-abortion groups.
    Raving nonsequitur, reverse ad-hominem


19. ... modern waterboarding does not include some of the elaborations used by medieval waterboarders.
    Raving nonsequitur, appeal to an incomplete definition


20. ... because Christopher Hitchens agreed to be waterboarded, but did not agree to have his teeth pulled out with pliers.
    Raving nonsequitur, appeal to an incomplete definition
    See also the argument from SERE training.


21. ... we only did it three times to three high value targets.
    Raving nonsequitur. Also see here.


22. ... people who think so are insisting that we treat our enemies better than our own soldiers.
    This is just the old SERE argument already addressed above combined with an extra dash of raving nonsequitur and reverse ad-hominem.


23. ... you are damned if you do, damned if you don't.
    Consequentialism, Matthew 16:26 gambit


24. ... Bob is a good Catholic and a daily communicant, and he doesn't think waterboarding a prisoner for information is torture.
    Ad hominem


25. ... I'm a good Catholic and I don't think waterboarding a prisoner for information is torture. How dare you suggest that I support something evil?
    Ad hominem


26. ... if you don't waterboard, that's revealing in that you don't trust that you and God can come to a reconciliation. You'd rather maintain your spotless moral record than actually help people.
    Matthew 16:26 gambit, raving non-sequitur


27. ... it isn't torture if you do it to illegal combatants.
    False premise, raving non-sequitur


28. ... waterboarding KSM stopped an attack on the Library Tower in LA.
    False premise, raving non-sequitur


29. ... a captured terrorist is an unjust aggressor who retains the power to kill many thousands by withholding information about planned attacks. Therefore waterboarding him for information falls under self-defense.
    False premise


30. ... it is only objected to by morally vain gentry liberals.
    Raving non-sequitur, reverse ad hominem


31. ... not doing mild stuff means we'll have to let the Pakistanis do the real bad stuff.
    Raving non-sequitur, argument from dishonor


32. ... complaining about treatment of prisoners makes U.S. troops kill enemies rather than accept their surrender.
    Raving non-sequitur, argument from dishonor


33. ... if waterboarding is torture that must mean we can't do anything but give milk and warm cookies to terrorists.
    Raving non-sequitur


34. ... the Church hasn't absolutely prohibited mutilating the guilty, so mutilation isn't inhumane treatment. Furthermore all mutilation is worse than waterboarding. Therefore waterboarding is not inhumane treatment, and cannot be torture.
    Appeal to an incomplete definition, appeal to finer detail, mutilated analogy


35. ... Saints have engaged in self-flagellation as penance.
    Raving non-sequitur, omitting facts in an analogy


36. ... the argument.
    Link to refutation.

(Next in the series)

The Gasping Grimoire

And so. The reasons from history and law lead to the conclusion that waterboarding prisoners for information[1] is torture. The reasons from intuition lead to the conclusion that waterboarding prisoners for information is torture. I think these in themselves are quite conclusive, and further demonstration is not necessary. But still we are often presented arguments that waterboarding prisoners for information is not torture.

I can't possibly estimate how many of these not-T arguments have presented themselves over more than half a decade. It has been quite a few. These arguments have been presented by highly motivated and intelligent interlocutors. I have yet to see a single one which held up to scrutiny. (Sometimes they even conflict with each other; but the sheer volume of fallacy at work here already puts that beyond the scope of the current series of posts).

If half a decade of highly motivated disputation cannot produce a single valid argument with true premises that waterboarding is not torture, contrary to the verdict of law, history, and intuition - if there is no respectable argument that despite all the quacking and waddling and the right genetic sequence what we have is not, as it turns out, a duck - then we simply must conclude that waterboarding prisoners for information is torture. In the abstract, yes, it is possible that the Lost Argument is out there somewhere, just as it is possible that the duck is a robot sent by the betazoids to spy on us. But it isn't one, trust me: it's a duck.

These arguments fall into many different categories or modes. These modes of error are often combined into a single argument: this makes the argument doubly invalid, since it fails on both modes.

Consequentialism, or an appeal to the reasons why the prisoner is waterboarded, may be the most common. The canonical example is the argument that while waterboarding for punishment (say) might be torture, waterboarding for information to save lives is not. This is consequentialism because no intrinsically immoral act can become a not-intrinsically-immoral act simply by changing the reason why you do it. A sub-genre is the classic ad hominem, to wit, would you really let your own family die screaming in pain rather than waterboard a hardened terrorist? Needless to say, this challenge performs no work in terms of assigning moral categories.

The Matthew 16:26 gambit takes this a step further. The consequences of failing to waterboard the prisoner are proposed to be enormously large; the certainty that doing so will save the day complete. Those who maintain the claim that it is still torture and therefore still wrong are often said to be obsessed with the strict letter of the law, at the (putative) expense of permitting a terrible event to unfold, in order to maintain a psychological sense of purity. Sometimes it is argued that one simply must waterboard the prisoner in such a case, and trust in God's forgiveness.

One problem with this argument is that it proves too much: it applies just as much to methodical evisceration as to waterboarding. Another is that the certainties involved are purely hypothetical. But in any event it boils down to consequentialism with large doses of drama to help it go down.

A brief note about ad hominem, even though it is a standard fallacy covered elsewhere: An argument of the form "Q because Bob is a good guy and he believes Q" is just as much an ad hominem as the more common "not Q because Bob is a bad guy and he believes Q." What ad hominem represents is an attempt to redirect attention onto various personalities and away from the substantive matter at hand. While that may often lead to colorful discussion, it performs no work in terms of demonstrating that waterboarding prisoners for information is not torture.

Appeals to an incomplete definition are an interesting variation. For all these years it has supposedly been a weakness of the anti-torture position that there is no single, authoritative, precise and complete definition of torture. In point of fact this works against the pro-waterboarding arguments, not in their favor, now that we are discussing a concrete act. Shoe, meet other foot. In casting this spell, the person arguing that waterboarding prisoners for information is not torture commits (implicitly or explicitly, because his argument depends on this commitment whether he realizes it or not) to some particular definition and then proposes that waterboarding a prisoner for information does not meet that definition. But unless the definition he proposes can distinguish between torture and not-torture in every case, the move is vacuous. All that needs to be done to falsify it is to provide a single example where his definition fails to distinguish between torture and not-torture.

Taking a typical example, the notion seems to be that by adding "because there is a ticking time bomb" as a fact about the act, what would otherwise be defined as torture becomes not-torture. But it is obvious that this change in circumstances cannot make an act of torture into not-torture: surely the fact that it is done while a bomb is ticking cannot change crucifixion from torture into not-torture.

Maybe another example will help, since this one is a bit subtle. Marc Thiessen argues that waterboarding Islamic prisoners gives them an excuse to cooperate. (In fact this extends the irony of waterboarding-as-baptism-parody: Islamic prisoners receive absolution for betraying their consciences through the anti-sacrament). But surely the fact that it gives them an excuse to sing like canaries wouldn't justify crucifying them: crucifixion doesn't go from torture to not-torture by mixing in a little "it gives him an excuse to talk". The distinction in question is clearly incapable of conjuring the desired category change.

Omitting facts in an analogy is common, often combined with an equivocation. Two factually different acts are given the same label, setting up a supposed if-then relation. If "waterboarding" troops to train them to resist torture is not torture, then "waterboarding" prisoners for information is not torture: even though (just as some examples of factual distinctions) trainees are volunteers in friendly hands who can end the session at any time through a special signal; while prisoners are captives in hostile hands upon whom the procedure is repeated until they break down and start singing. Under this form of argument asserting the same label somehow magically transforms two very distinct kinds of acts into the same thing, despite clear factual differences.

Another canonical example is the notion that because execution of a tried and convicted criminal meets the requirement for humane treatment, waterboarding must also be humane treatment, and therefore not torture. Yet clearly the analogy to execution doesn't work. As Tom of Disputations has pointed out, the idea seems to be that because we can chop off a particular man's head, therefore we can chop off his toes; we can electrocute a man's heart, so why not his genitals? Responses to pointing out the failure in the analogy tend to be very verbose forms of "my thoughts exactly: if we can execute him, why can't we do any of these other things to him?" Since this analogy, if valid, would permit many specific acts which clearly are torture, "waterboarding is not torture" isn't a valid conclusion from it. An inadequate analogy is every bit as incapable of distinguishing torture from not-torture as an incomplete definition.

When the analogy and its putative concomitants are pressed to the point of elaborate confusion, we might call it a mutilated analogy[2]. For example, there are those who would claim that some forms of mutilation are licit punishment, and that therefore (!) waterboarding is not torture. Lets grant the premise for the sake of argument: stipulate that there exists some form of mutilation which is a licit punishment. (Presumably the person making this argument would not say that all forms of mutilation are licit punishment). The problem with the analogy to this specific form of mutilation, whatever it happens to be (I haven't seen a specific form of mutilation proposed to fill in this place in the argument), is basically the same as the problem with the analogy to execution in the previous paragraph. Even if we could say "X is a licit form of mutilation for punishment", it doesn't follow from this that it is impossible to torture through something other than mutilation, or that waterboarding prisoners for information is not torture. Shocking a man's genitals with electricity until he tells us what we want to know is torture, even if we do it in such a way as to cause no mutilation of his body. The presumption seems to be that if some unspecified mutilation X is licit as punishment, anything "less than" X cannot be inhumane treatment; that waterboarding is "less than" X, and therefore not torture. The best one can say of this argument is that it is grossly incomplete: it gives us no reason to believe that there is some number line (?) of "badness" (?) of acts upon which we can place all forms of mutilation, with waterboarding on that same number line, where waterboarding is "less than" all forms of mutilation, and torture is defined as such by the position of the act on that number line, etc. It probably goes without saying at this point, but "waterboarding is not torture" doesn't follow from an incomplete jumble of analogies and assertions which we have clear reasons to disbelieve.

A classic in the history of the St. Blogs torture wars is the see no evil: the contention that torture doesn't signify anything definite other than the disapproval of the person making the accusation of torture. Yes, this argument was actually made at one point. A more subtle variation is the claim that Catholics are free to disagree, as if that automatically ends every discussion over what is true. Er, ok. Just realize that "free to disagree" is indistinguishable from "I'm shutting up now, and I wish you would too". And "I'm shutting up now, and I wish you would too" does not have the capacity to make waterboarding prisoners not-torture.

Another fallacious mode of argument is Magisterial positivism, or more colloquially an appeal to finer detail. Waterboarding prisoners for information is not torture because the Magisterium has not specifically said that it is. But of course the Magisterium has not said that suction aspiration of a living fetus is an abortion either. On the one hand, the Magisterium imposes latae sententiae excommunication on anyone who procures or performs an abortion. On the other hand, how can we know that the person procured an abortion if the Magisterium hasn't defined suction aspiration as abortion? The appeal to finer detail is one of those gifts that keep on giving: like a small child saying "why" over and over again, there is no answering it. Even if the Pope himself declared ex cathedra that waterboarding is torture, some Catholic would claim -- indeed some Catholic has already claimed -- that, you see, there is waterboarding, and then there is waterboarding. (Er, ok).

The argument from dishonor suggests that if we don't waterboard prisoners our troops will respond by violating rules of engagement and summarily executing combatants in the field who try to surrender, and further that we will render prisoners to others (like Pakistan) who are willing to perform worse tortures on them than we would. Obviously this argument is incapable of making waterboarding not-torture. In addition it represents a kind of extortion to evil: if you don't let us do this mildly evil thing, you are going to "force" us to do this much worse thing. Apparently the folks who advance this argument are capable of simultaneously holding in their heads a genuine support for our troops intermingled with contempt for them.

Then we have, for lack of a better term, the raving non-sequitur. A premise is followed by a putative conclusion which does not follow from the premise. Often this is stated in the form of a reverse ad-hominem, where it is suggested not that the conclusion is ludicrous because of the man but the man is ludicrous because of the conclusion. The problem, of course, is that the conclusion doesn't in fact follow from the premise. The suggestion that anyone who thinks waterboarding is torture is thereby a radical pacifist is a canonical example.

I am going to make an "open post" of this: that is, I'll add modes of error to it over time, if it makes sense to do that, and tweak existing ones. The next post will also be an open post: in it I'll catalogue some of the more interesting arguments by summarizing the argument and either briefly stating or linking to what makes it invalid; and I'll add to the list as more come up or (as is more likely) old ones rear their heads again.

My bottom line motivation, as usual, is laziness. The next time someone asks me why he should believe that waterboarding prisoners for information is torture, and why it matters, I'll just have to pass on a link.

---

[1] I state it that way because some of the arguments that it is not torture depend on the "for information" part, so it is only fair to include that fact in the description.

[2] I considered "assuming a single dimension and transitivity" as the name of this invalid argument form; but part of the goal here is to make the arguments as easy to understand as possible, and most people respond "huh?" when I say things like that.

(Next in the series)

Rough Ride Ahead

There are many fallacious arguments which contend that waterboarding prisoners is not torture. Before we begin crafting a nosology of those arguments, I am going to reiterate and expand a little on why waterboarding is the San Juan Hill of the torture debates.

It isn't because the problem of torture can be reduced to "just three guys waterboarded," at all. There are many other battlefields which are just as important or even more important. Broken down very generally, there are alleged cases where prisoners died under officially sanctioned torture. There are allegations of renditions. (Links provided just as examples: fully documenting all this is beside the point, as we'll see in a moment). There are the allegations of forced nudity in front of women, and the sexual stuff. Beyond that, there is the issue of alleged abuses occurring in a kind of "gray area", where currently-illegal things were done to prisoners with the approval of superiors, before the officially sanctioned "enhanced interrogation techniques" were put into place. Beyond that still lies illegal abuses putatively brought about by the "climate of abuse" that all this entailed, and still further along the chain of Being are the "Jack Bauer" culture and the formal cooperation of millions of individuals with torture. It is important to keep all of these distinct, and there may be other distinctions as well: it isn't my intention here to provide a comprehensive or even particularly coherent account of all of it, let alone to pass particular judgments, in this paragraph.

Because when we focus in specifically on waterboarding prisoners as a moral issue for Catholics, the word "alleged" goes away. One thing that everyone now agrees on is the background facts: we waterboarded those three prisoners until they broke and they started singing. And we did it with full authorization from the top down.

If by doing that we are guilty of torturing prisoners, this implies that we must repent, we must turn back, we must forsake the direction which took us to that point. Once you plant a seed, it grows: there is no standing still. Griswold vs Connecticut led directly to Roe vs Wade. If what we did was torture that means that there is no way further forward: that the way forward leads to Hell, and we must turn back from it.

Waterboarding isn't the whole battle, by any means. It is a very small part of it, in truth. But it is the tip of the spear in the torture debates.

(Next in the series)

Showdown at High Noon

Well, technically it was 12:40.

Before I continue my series on the pathologies of the "waterboarding is not torture" idea and why it is (and is not) significant, a brief mention of another matter. My new friend Austin Ruse and I had lunch yesterday in Washington, DC. (It was just lunch. The following are impressions from lunch. This does not imply that I have done comprehensive due diligence on everything Mr. Ruse has ever said and everyone with whom he has ever associated, or that I am interested in debating his character, or in rehashing the details of the combox encounter, or anything of the sort. You know who you are. Stow it.)

Austin and I first "met" in the comboxes of this shootout at The American Catholic. As the transcript reveals, we decided to meet in person.

Mr. Ruse is a gentleman: warm, genuine, and smart, one of those guys who is really interested in people, their organization into formal institutions, and the activities of those institutions; the kind of guy who will wander around with you and introduce you to everyone he knows with handshakes and smiles and talk about all the various groups and programs and things going on in the community. A very likeable man, with a great love of the Church and a passionate devotion to protecting the unborn.

The whole debate - the substantive part of it - is new to him. His impression of anti-torture Catholics was formed, prior to this recent encounter, almost entirely by interactions with Catholics of a certain sort: the kind of Catholics who will see marchers at a protest of Roe vs Wade and snarl under their breath "Pro-life! If you were really pro-life you'd be out there helping get the Obama health plan passed!"; as opposed to, say, "Bless them. I really should be doing more myself." You know the type I mean.

It was just a nice lunch between two Catholic guys with rather different personality traits and personal interests. But there is one substantive matter relating to the earlier thread which I should address. Tom summarizes the concern thus:

I suppose there are three possibilities:

1. He's mistaken; decrying torture will not hurt his interests.

2. He's correct that decrying torture will hurt his interests, because he has accidentally scoped his interests too narrowly (I think in particular of his implications that voting Republican is a necessary good, which may simply be a means he's become accustomed to seeking uncritically).

3. He's correct that decrying torture will hurt his interests, because his interests are not wholly directed to the common good. (This is essentially the Vox Nova position, that organizations like C-FAM are merely Republican or called-conservative-but-as-liberal-as-they-come shops.)

Before reading his own words, I would have dismissed possibility #3 out of hand.

I think the real answer is a variant of (1):

When you are deeply committed to protecting the unborn, the holocaust of whom is possibly a worse stain on humanity than even the large-scale atrocities of the last century, and one of your personal passions is organizing people into formal institutions to engage in political action; and when you further see nothing but unprincipled political hatchet jobs coming from people who literally hate anything resembling an existing actual formally organized anti-abortion group; and when a principal weapon employed in these hatchet jobs is this particular issue -- when all of that is true, you can't help but have a particular impression of this whole debate.

Until, that is, you encounter orthodox Catholics who are also deeply passionate about protecting the unborn on that same side, the side forming the edge of the hatchet, under the "stopped clock" theory, of this particular issue.

In fact, being the sort who does the organization think-tank policy dance every day, he was enthusiastic about orthodox activist-anti-torture Catholics getting involved at that level and in that manner. A great idea; though probably a job for someone other than myself.

Well met, Austin.

(Next in the series)

Why I believe waterboarding prisoners is torture, and you should too

This is the first in a series of posts on the subject. The other posts are:

• Showdown at High Noon (a bit OT but part of the context)
• Rough Ride Ahead, or why waterboarding is important
• The Gasping Grimoire, or pathologies of failed arguments
• A catalog of failed arguments
• Abortion is more important than torture
• Waterboarding series summary

The Church has been extremely clear that torture is always and everywhere intrinsically immoral, no matter why one chooses to do it. For a long time, when it wasn't clear what exactly the US had done as official policy authorized from the top down, that led to endless debate among Catholics over torture definitions and what had and had not been done.

It is no longer necessary to carry on that endless quagmire of a debate in order to establish that we in fact tortured prisoners, because now we know the particular techniques which were used. Thus the current focus on waterboarding: not as an exhaustive list, but as a proof-by-counterexample. If it is proposed that the US did not torture prisoners, a single counterexample is enough to falsify that proposal.

There are (at least) three general kinds of reasons why you should believe that waterboarding prisoners is torture: I'll call them reasons grounded in history and law, reasons grounded in intuition, and reasons grounded in argument.

The reasons grounded in history and law are summarized by Mark Shea:

[T]he fact that the Vatican, the UN, all our western allies, international law, and every administration since at least the Spanish-American war has classified waterboarding [prisoners] as torture (till the Bush Administration acted unilaterally to pretend it is not) make it pretty clear that the thing is torture.

While it is true that the Bush Administration crafted a number of memos in order to try to change this status quo, to invoke that as part of the pertinent body of law and history is special pleading. Whatever 9-11 did change, one thing it did not change is what is and is not torture. If it was torture before 9-11, it remains torture today. So the verdict of history and law is that waterboarding prisoners is torture.

The reasons grounded in intuition are often dismissed as matters of personal taste or revulsion, and as therefore carrying no explanatory water. But surely that is entirely too coy. If I know I am peeing on a cat for kicks, it is ridiculous to suppose that we can't conclude that it is "animal abuse" (with or without quotes) without appealing to a legal brief or moral theology treatise. The natural law is written in our hearts, built into our nature. When we strap a helpless prisoner to a board and bring him near to the point of death by drowning repeatedly, until he breaks down and tells us what we want to hear, in the process betraying his co-conspirators and his conscience, we can see that it is torture without any words at all running interference for us. It is very clear.

Still, some may find even those two in combination unconvincing. And that is where our third class of reasons come in, the reasons grounded in argument.

If waterboarding prisoners for information is not torture, given the above there must be some clear argument that it isn't torture. The presumption of history, law, and intuition is that it is torture, and in any event if it is not torture then there must be at least one and probably many compelling - or at least valid with true premises - arguments that it is not. We can probably provide quite a few good arguments why a cat is not a fish, after all: we could probably do so even if we weren't intensely motivated or particularly bright.

This is where the experience of the last six years of debate comes into focus. Many of us know most of the arguments by now. There are probably hundreds of them. We've discussed them all, and even invented some ourselves when the paucity of valid ones thrown at us by our highly motivated interlocutors became clear. In six or more years, I have yet to see a single one which holds up to scrutiny. That will be the subject of a follow-up post.

(Next in the series)

An argument against SERE torture resistance training

I haven't taken a position on whether waterboard resistance training as done by SERE is or is not immoral. That there are factual, objective, morally pertinent differences between waterboard resistance training and waterboarding prisoners to gather intelligence is obvious: the trainee enters into the procedure voluntarily, he knows it is a finite training exercise and will not be continued indefinitely, he knows it isn't being done in order to make him betray his conscience or his comerades, etc. None of that makes it the case that waterboard resistance training is definitely morally acceptable, mind you. It does establish that even when we stipulate the moral liciety of waterboard resistance training, that doesn't imply anything in particular about the morality of waterboarding prisoners.

But one reasonable prudential argument against treating our own troops to even a simulated dehumanization in training - and of course it is only morally licit if it is in fact a simulated dehumanization, not an actual one - is that such a program encourages the actual dehumanization of prisoners. So much rhetorical hay is made of the claim "we did waterboard resistance training on our troops, therefore waterboarding prisoners for intelligence is OK" that it may be immoral simply as a matter of imprudence to do this to our troops.

It is one of many ironies in the torture debates that training to resist dehumanization of our troops is being used as rhetorical cover for actual dehumanization of prisoners.

Feel the pain -- within limits

A punishment, even a punishment of life imprisonment or death, is necessarily and in principle limited. The suffering inflicted through torture is deliberately not limited: as far as the victim knows it could go on forever, and he has no notion -- even if there are formal rules in place limiting it -- to what extent it is limited. Indeed, letting him know its limits devalues it tremendously, as those who objected to release of that information will be quick to tell you.

Torturing someone to death as distinct from licit execution might seem to pose a special problem here. But on reflection I don't think so, since the behaviors chosen in torturing someone to death are objectively suffering-maximization behaviors, distinct from licit killing-the-guilty-as-representative-of-the-common-good behaviors. If the punishment is death, then torture is by definition a means disproportionate to that end, so it fails both on intrinsic immorality and as disproportionate means.

Thoughts?

Quote of the day

"It is the peculiar doom of the Catholic torture defender that he winds up twisting himself into a pretzel defending something that is a blasphemous parody of baptism." - Mark Shea

What is in a name?

I've decided to change my online handle. The handle "Zippy"[*] was chosen on a lark one day many years ago in the comboxes of Mark Shea's blog, with the intention of using it and throwing it away; but I became kind of stuck with it. It was possibly a vague reference to the Bill Griffith clown or the British sock puppet of the same name, but really to pretend even that much implies more thought than actually went into selecting the name. People started interacting with me as "Zippy" in longer ongoing conversations than I had originally intended, so the name stuck.

Zippy has a number of virtues as a name. Upon encountering a commenter named "Zippy", one is not immediately struck "here is an authority I must follow", so it encourages people to do their own thinking. This extends to citation: there is an understandable reluctance to cite a clown named "Zippy" in any serious publication, even on the occasion that I manage to say something smart, which again keeps perspective on the extent to which I am not an authority. I'm just some guy. Really.

Another great thing about "Zippy" is that in a long comment thread, it is really simple to spot my own comments and where others are responding to me by name. "Zippy" is a great visual cue for a skimmer like me. Underneath many of my decisions lies the vice of sloth, and Zippy fits right into that mold.

On the other hand, there are some ways in which the handle Zippy is unfair to people who encounter me for the first time on the Internet. They don't realize that I've been around the Internet since the 1980's, any number of things about my personal background and history, things which, if they knew them, might alter how - might alter the care with which - they approach interaction with me. Sometimes I inform people of these facts about my background and personal history in the midst of a discussion. It is hard to say what motivates me to do this -- there is little doubt that my conscupiscient tendency to show a little mane to a dialectical adversary sometimes plays a role. But also part of it is that I see people stepping into a situation they do not fully understand, and that seems unfair. So the nom-de-plume has its disadvantages too.

But I'm just kidding. About the name change, that is.

[*] (I am not "Zippy Catholic", by the way. "Zippy Catholic" is the blog, a blog by Zippy who happens to be a Catholic).

Post deleted

I call. Time to show your hand

In this comment thread, Austin Ruse makes the following proposition:

Three men waterboarded vs 50 million murders of unborn children. This is a waste of time and I reiterate, an attempt by a small group who want to divert attention from a truly horrific situation.

OK, if this is what you really believe, it is time to lay down your cards. If we all can just agree that the torture perpetrated by the Bush administration was despicable and must be unequivocally repudiated by all Catholics as completely unacceptable, the whole issue can go away.

(Oh, and just so you know, here is my basic take on legal abortion).

Courting Inanity

From Courting Disaster:

If this principle [of double-effect] applies to taking human life, it must certainly apply to coercive interrogation as well. A captured terrorist is an unjust aggressor who retains the power to kill many thousands by withholding information about planned attacks. The intent of the interrogator is not to cause harm to the detainee; rather, it is to render the aggressor unable to cause harm to society. The act of coercive interrogation can have a double effect (to protect society and to cause harm to the terrorist), but one is intended, the other is not.

Well, just where does one begin?

First, the principle of double-effect does not apply to the taking of innocent human life. Thiessen, like a newbie combox critter, is simply wrong that the fifth commandment forbids all killing, and that the principle of double-effect creates exceptions to the rule. The fifth commandment forbids killing the innocent, that is, those who are not and have not engaged in attacking behaviors. Nevertheless, the terrorist in question is not innocent, so it is true that killing the terrorist - say in a licit execution after trial and conviction - is not absolutely prohibited by the moral law. (That doesn't make it automatically licit independent of intentions and circumstances; but it is not intrinsically evil to kill the guilty).

Second, the argument that because it is not absolutely prohibited to kill a terrorist it therefore must be licit to torture that same terrorist is nonsensical on its face. Just because it is (stipulated) morally licit to execute a particular man, it does not follow that it is morally licit to do anything to him at all. For example, I think even Thiessen might agree (though who knows?) that it is not morally licit to sodomize terrorist captives even if that is the only means available to get them to disclose information to save (say) thousands of lives.

Third, the argument that a captured terrorist is capable of launching attacks "by withholding information about planned attacks" is nonsense on stilts. A simple rule of thumb can demonstrate: if killing captured Terrorist Bob right now will not in any way prevent X, then we are not doing what we are doing to Bob because he is capable of doing X. A helpless captive, whatever information he may know, is not capable of carrying out any attacks. Indeed, the fact that we don't kill Bob immediately to stop the putative attacks is proof that it isn't what he is capable of doing, but rather what we want to coerce him to do, that is at issue.

I could go on. And on, and on. There is so much ignorance packed into such a tight little package here that responding to it all could take ten or a hundred times the space it took to say it in the first place. But the arguments are so bad, so manifestly ignorant, so locked into a little hermetic bubble of cluelessness, that this may be one of those cases where maximal airing of those bad arguments in public is the best response to them.

As a Catholic moral theologian, Marc Thiessen makes a great Republican speechwriter

In Chapter 6 of his book Courting Disaster, former G. W. Bush speechwriter and professional torture apologist Marc Thiessen describes the foundation for the moral reasoning he uses to justify the positions he has been publicly promoting for his paycheck:

Casuistry is much misunderstood, so I asked one of America's great moral theologians, University of Chicago Divinity School Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain, to explain casuistry and how it applies. She says casuistry is "the form of moral reasoning within which the just war tradition is rightly located. In casuistry one reasons from norms. There are times when one finds an exception to the norm, but the norm remains. The exception must be justified. And that justification can take on consequentialist grounds within casuistry. This is what 'protecting and saving the innocent' would be."

I'd quote more - I may well quote more - but suffice to say, it goes downhill from there. The average St. Blogs combox critter has a more rigorous grasp of the rudiments of Catholic moral theology than Mr. Thiessen, who would do well to refer himself, not to Protestant political philosophers, but to the saints and martyrs of the Church, as well as her authoritative Magisterium:

The unacceptability of "teleological", "consequentialist" and "proportionalist" ethical theories, which deny the existence of negative moral norms regarding specific kinds of behaviour, norms which are valid without exception, is confirmed in a particularly eloquent way by Christian martyrdom, which has always accompanied and continues to accompany the life of the Church even today.

[ ... ]

Such theories however are not faithful to the Church's teaching, when they believe they can justify, as morally good, deliberate choices of kinds of behaviour contrary to the commandments of the divine and natural law. These theories cannot claim to be grounded in the Catholic moral tradition. Although the latter did witness the development of a casuistry which tried to assess the best ways to achieve the good in certain concrete situations, it is nonetheless true that this casuistry concerned only cases in which the law was uncertain, and thus the absolute validity of negative moral precepts, which oblige without exception, was not called into question.

Reading Thiessen on moral theology is like reading Richard Dawkins on religion: the absolute, nakedly clueless holding forth on the subject matter in question is embarrassing to behold.

Moral Theology is a Piece of Cake

Every human act, because it is the act of an incarnate human subject, has both its objective elements and its subjective elements. The objective part of an act - the behavior chosen - is referred to as the object of the act. An intrinsically evil act is evil in its object, in the behavior which is chosen, independent of the reasons why the person chooses it, how he feels about choosing it, whether he enjoys choosing it or not, or any other subjective factors.

Now, folks often seem to find moral theology very confusing, because moral evaluation is fundamentally about the subject, not the object: it is about the person who chose to act in such-and-such a way. But it isn't really as confusing as it seems. The fact that he chooses that thing says something about the person. This in no way changes that thing into something subjective or fungible, something which can be altered in its basic character by subjective factors.

Suppose that the thing the person chooses is not a behavior, but a piece of cake. Nothing subjective, inside the person, can change the piece of cake into something it is not. It is what it is, and that a person chooses it says something about the person: that he is the kind of person who chooses a piece of cake. It doesn't tell us why he chose it, what he likes about the cake, or even if he likes it at all: he might have chosen it to please the person who baked it, for example, even if he doesn't really like cake. But fundamentally, no matter what subjective factors obtain, he demonstrates in his choice that he is the kind of person who will choose a piece of cake.

The person might be mistaken in a matter of fact: he might not know that the plastic replica in front of him is not really a piece of cake, for example. He might have impaired taste buds, or he might be color blind. To understand what he is choosing morally, strictly speaking, we have to see things from his perspective. We have to understand the objective facts as he understands them: not his attitudes, likes, dislikes, or intentions; not what he wishes was the case but knows is not the case; but the objective facts. Furthermore, as reiterated on this blog many times, many objective facts are non-physical. So, as Veritatis Splendour points out, criticism of this understanding as physicalism or biologism is straightforwardly mistaken.

(Note that in those cases where the acting subject has the facts wrong, the correct approach is not to conclude "therefore, it is OK for the ignorant to act in this manner". Rather, it is a calling to the faithful to be generous in a particular one of the spiritual alms, that is, instructing the ignorant).

As a semantic point, it would be perfectly legitimate to refer to the piece of cake as "the good that he is choosing". But it is important to understand what that does, and especially does not, mean. It does not mean, for example, that the fact that he really likes chocolate (or really hates it) in any way alters the objective character of the cake. Nor does it alter the fact that he chose the cake, and is thus at a fundamental level the kind of person who chose a piece of cake, however enthusiastically or reluctantly.

No aggregation of subjective factors can change a piece of cake into a turnip. Even if a psychotic person perceived a piece of cake as a turnip, and thus his choice of it told us that (in addition to being psychotic) he is the kind of person who chooses turnips rather than cake, the piece of cake remains, in reality, a piece of cake.

(Note: post updated)

In which Zippy objects yet again...

Tom quotes the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults:

Another important foundation of Christian morality is the understanding of moral acts. Every moral act consists of three parts: the objective act (what we do), the subjective goal or intention (why we do the act), and the concrete situation or circumstances in which we perform the act (where, when, how, with whom, the consequences, etc.)

For an individual act to be morally good, the object, or what we are doing, must be objectively good. Some acts, apart from the intention or reason for doing them, are always wrong because they go against a fundamental or basic human good that ought never to be compromised. Direct killing of the innocent, torture, and rape are examples of acts that are always wrong. Such acts are referred to as intrinsically evil acts, meaning that they are wrong in themselves, apart from the reason they are done or the circumstances surrounding them.

...

All three aspects must be good -- the objective act, the subjective intention, and the circumstances -- in order to have a morally good act.

Notice that the object of the act is objective. When a moral theologian correctly uses the term "object" in reference to a human act, the thing he is referring to is the objective part of the act. Intentions - whether proximate, remote, or otherwise - are not objective. Intentions are subjective, and are not part of the object of a human act. Any "story" one tells about the principle of double effect or the object of an act, if that story attempts to sneak any kind of subjective intention into the act's object, is a false and misleading story.

An issue which seems to arise again and again is that when someone says "objective", we often hear "physical". But objective and physical do not mean the same thing, at all.

A commenter in the Disputations thread writes:

I think we are generally agreed that the objectum (Thomas' word) of the moral act is not merely a physical thing but the rationale (objective) of the actor.

I don't agree with that characterization at all. I don't think the object of the act can be accurately described as either "a physical thing" or a "rationale". It isn't either of those things: it is the conduct or behavior (following JPII) that the acting subject chooses. The choosing part means that it isn't merely physical, that in order to "see" what behavior was chosen we have to "see" through the eyes and with the knowledge of the acting subject; and in any event many of the pertinent facts are non-physical facts (e.g. "she is my wife", "that is not my gold", etc). On the other hand, it has nothing to do with whatever subjective rationale the acting subject might give for it: paraphrasing Anscombe, it has nothing to do with little speeches we tell ourselves about what we are trying to accomplish and why.

Part of the problem may be in thinking that "physical thing" and "rationale" exhaustively describe the possibilities. The object of a human act is not either one of those things though: it isn't a physical thing and it isn't a rationale. It is the conduct or behavior that the acting subject chose.

Of course another possibility is that there is substantive agreement over these things but we disagree on terminology because we are all trying to head off various errors at the pass, if you will. But that is precisely why I object to the false dichotomy of "physical thing" versus "rationale", since conduct - conduct chosen by an acting subject - is not either of those things. And the object of a human act is the conduct chosen.

What was the object of Flingel Bunt's act, anyway?

I've been involved in some recent moral theology discussions at Disputations here, here, and here.

Good Will Shunting

We want to believe -- I want to believe -- that it is possible for men of good will to disagree over whether a given act is intrinsically immoral. But unfortunately -- frighteningly, even -- it seems that at least strictly speaking, this is not possible.

"The negative precepts of the natural law are universally valid. They oblige each and every individual, always and in every circumstance. It is a matter of prohibitions which forbid a given action semper et pro semper, without exception, because the choice of this kind of behaviour is in no case compatible with the goodness of the will of the acting person, with his vocation to life with God and to communion with his neighbour." - Veritatis Splendour (emphasis mine)

It seems that intrinsically immoral acts are the kinds of behavior or conduct which it is literally impossible to choose with a good will. So in the strictest sense, one cannot -- literally cannot, meaning it is impossible -- assent to an intrinsically immoral act with a good will.

Perhaps at bottom this is where the acrimony comes from in so much Internet discussion. We know (we can't help but know) that no matter what social nicieties accompany our discussion, so much of what we discuss is incompatible with a good will on the part of all discussion participants.