For another thing, torture is a form of punishment, and the so-called ‘enemy combatants’ being waterboarded (a modern version of the ‘dunking stool’) aren thus being punished without any judicial proceedings.

So America has in effect demeaned itself to the level of the fundamentalist disciples of Sayyid Qutb, and we’ve lost our position as a moral example for other nations to emulate.

Don’t know what torture is? Here’s what the Supreme Court stated in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), Justice Brennan wrote, “There are, then, four principles by which we may determine whether a particular punishment is ‘cruel and unusual’.”
The “essential predicate” is “that a punishment must not by its severity be degrading to human dignity,” especially torture.
“A severe punishment that is obviously inflicted in wholly arbitrary fashion.”
“A severe punishment that is clearly and totally rejected throughout society.”
“A severe punishment that is patently unnecessary.”
Continuing, he wrote that he expected that no state would pass a law obviously violating any one of these principles, so court decisions regarding the Eighth Amendment would involve a “cumulative” analysis of the implication of each of the four principles.

You know, much less damage is done to an individual being waterboarded than to one running against Obama in an IL senate race or a presidential race.

Oz is saying that the critics of enhanced interrogation techniques are not Kantian idealists–which is their pose–but pseudo-Kantians who are unprincipled in their pursuit of power.

In essence, the defenders of intense interrogation occupy the ethical high ground on both theoretical and practical grounds.

I doubt that Oz was thinking about Hammurabi explicitly. If one had to make the connection, it would probably be through theories of Natural Law. I understand Oz to be operating on the theoretical boundary between natural law and positive law, the Code of Hammurabi being one example of the latter.

Let me just say I hang around in here to learn, even more than to run my mouth.

Kant’s categorical imperative is this: “Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will.”

Consider the space of human actions as a many dimensional plane. The categorical imperative and the maxims that one chooses to use act as a bound to this infinite set of human actions, best visualized by a square or a box. Anything done within the box is moral, anything outside of the box is not. However, there is room for utilitarian optimization based on the choices within the box. Although some critics say that Kant eschews utilitarianism, this interpretation leads us to conclude that utilitarian subsystems can exist inside a Kantian deontological system. The logical conclusion is that to accommodate the variety of human action, the bound must be larger.

Universality of maxims imply that these maxims must work for all people in all cases. However, this means that the maxims cannot be specific. The maxim must be a generality or an abstract command. This leads to some issues in application, since there are many different meanings for any maxim that exists. We are seeing this with our ban on torture, but our definition of torture keeps changing. I think Neo is right to point out that in spirit, waterboarding is nothing like our classic definition of torture. The psychological argument against it is also false unless it studies our servicemen and women who are subjected to it during training, many of whom are very “well-adjusted.”

The maxim by which the interrogators might have been operating could be, “Save as many human lives as possible and harm as few as possible.” Even if I found myself on the other end of an interrogation, I would want this maxim to be a universal law. If by undergoing a temporarily painful experience I could save lives, I would do it. Many of the men and women in the armed forces and the intelligence community would follow this maxim as well.

We should ask those who are critical of enhanced interrogation techniques what their maxims are and why they are universally applicable. We will quickly see that their Kantian resolve against torture is merely pragmatic political bashing rather than principled argument. I showed this to my young Democrat friend, who quickly conceded the point.

If they were also Kantian, they would argue that all of the detained terrorists should be killed. Kant espoused a theory of retributive justice that stated that criminals should be subjected to the crime that they committed. We are much more merciful than Kant.