ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

For the past two months I’ve been thinking and praying about what school would be looking like for me in the relatively near future. In talking with some close friends and also family, I’m rather seriously considering the possibility of doing a research masters degree in the UK and moving directly from there in to MPhil & PhD studies. Canadians have a couple funding options that US students don’t have and I’m hoping to be able to take advantage of them.

At this point, its still a potential possibility, but slow things are beginning to take shape. I have at least two different ideas for research topics that would definitely work. And I’ve contacted professors at schools where I’d enjoy studying. Right now, I’ll just give you the hint that I’m interested in studying Greek & linguistics.

At this point where things are so tentative, I don’t want to say who I’ve contacted or what schools I’m looking at, but in the coming months/year if things solidify, I’ll definitely share more information – just don’t tell my missions recruiters, they’re trying to get my wife and I to the field as quickly as they can.

Where will this go? I’m not sure at this point. But the possibility and the idea are exciting and if the doors open to make it happen. I’ll definitely be walking through.

In my previous post, John Hobbins helpfully pointed to an old post where the subject was discussed. David Luban of the Georgetown University Law Center, in the article I linked to previously, discussed what he terms the “classic paper on torture” by Henry Shue from 1978. Shue essentially held Hobbin’s view that there is a circumstance where torture is acceptable, an exception in that worse of circumstances, i.e. the ticking bomb scenario where torturing the enemy will gain information and save many, many more lives. He has since changed his mind. In what follows, I’m going to discuss and summarize Luban’s essay because, well, let’s face it, very few of you are actually going to sit down and read all of its excellent 36 pages.

There is a problem with arguing on the basis of scenarios where torture is okay as long as it saves lives — one that Shue himself states in his original paper: “there is a saying in jurisprudence that hard cases make bad law, and there might well be one in philosophy that artificial cases make bad ethics” (Shue, “Torture,” 141; my emphasis). But what exactly does Shue’s adage mean?

Luban writes that it could either of the following:

(1) By focusing on improbable artificial cases, theorists misdirect readers’ attention from genuine issues in the real world to specious issues.  They illicitly change the subject from important and authentic questions about the limits of legitimate interrogation in non-TBS cases to intuition-mongering about a tendentious hypothetical.

Or it might mean (emphasizing the “hard cases make bad law” trope):

(2) Policies have to do with rules, procedures, protocols, and laws.  Lawmakers
should build policies and rules around typical cases and ignore the rare hard
cases; and moralists should ignore the weird ones.  Thus, even if there were rare
cases of morally justifiable torture, procedures and laws should not accommodate
them by making exceptions for them (Luban, 23).

Luban has already approached the issue from the perspective of #1 (HERE – which is also worth reading and its shorter). But in his paper quoted above, he argued in both directions. Perspective #1, according to Luban, says nothing about the validity of torture in the sort of scenario that Hobbins would allow. And regarding Shue, he writes,

In the 1978 paper, Shue argues that very little follows from [perspective #1], because all he has conceded is “the permissibility of torture in a case just like this” – that is, a case in which all the conditions in the TBS [ticking bomb scenario] are satisfied.

I am not so sure.  The problem is that once one has conceded the permissibility of torture in a TBS case, one has apparently admitted that the prohibition on torture is not moral bedrock.

. . .

What if one knows only that the captive is a high-ranking terrorist who might know something useful, but maybe nothing that prevents any particular ticking bomb – but, on the other hand, the mistreatment is “only” sleep deprivation?  This, after all, is very likely the reality of U.S. torture. After making the initial concession, any prohibition on torture faces significant dialectical pressure toward balancing tests and the unwelcome consequentialist conclusion that interrogational torture can be justified whenever the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs (25).

And according to Luban, this is exactly the sort of situation (and its where the US seems to be right now) where perspective #2 becomes very important and he illustrates it using the Israeli Supreme Court:

Some who agree that the ban on torture must stand may still object to the idea of punishing someone who has, in the rare case of a TBS, done the right thing by violating the ban.  That is why most proponents of (2) advocate leaving the anti-torture rule in place but permitting accused torturers to plead necessity in the rare authentic TBS, or, alternatively, to receive a sentencing discount or even a pardon if they are convicted of the crime of torture.  The first of these was the strategy adopted by the Israeli Supreme Court in its momentous 1999 decision banning torture.  The Court allowed that under Israeli law an accused torturer could plead necessity; but when the Israeli security services argued that in that case the court should create an ex ante permission to torture in ticking bomb cases, the Court refused.  An ex ante permission is a “general administrative power” – a rule, not an exception – whereas the necessity defense concerns “an individual reacting to a given set of facts; it is an ad hoc endeavour, inreaction to a event. It is the result of an improvisation given the unpredictable character of the events” and is not to be turned into a rule.43 [Note 43: Israel Supreme Court, Judgment Concerning the Legality of the General Security Service’s Interrogation Methods, 38 I.L.M. 1471 (1999), para. 36.  Oren Gross has offered a similar argument.] The Court perceived the trap it would fall into if it turned the possibility of an ex post defense into an ex ante permission: the ex ante permission would be a rule, not an exception.  With or without the necessity defense, interpretation (2) allows us to acknowledge the justifiability of torture in the TBS while maintaining rigid prohibitions against torture and CID (26-27).

I think that this perspective is one that John Hobbins would agree with this based on what I’ve read in his single post from last May (though I may be wrong…I don’t know)

But at the same time, both Luban and Shue argue that it is possible to go beyond both perspectives #1 & #2:

In his 2005 paper, Shue goes beyond (1) and (2) and renounces his earlier concession that torture would be justifiable even in a genuine TBS case. His reason is that he now believes that the true TBS is not merely improbable, it is actually impossible. That is because, among the key conditions defining the TBS, are the requirement that it is an exceptional emergency measure and not an institutionalized practice, and the related point that the torturer is a conscientious, reluctant interrogator who uses torture only in the rare cases where all the TBS conditions are met. But a torturer must be competent; he must have training and the opportunity to practice; his training requires teachers, and his equipment must have been acquired in advance. There will be a doctor present, to insure that the subject of interrogation does not die. The torturer is not Jack Bauer but an apparatchik in a torture bureaucracy. A TBS without a torture bureaucracy is impossible.

To try to leave a constrained loophole for the competent “conscientious offender” is in fact to leave an expanding loophole for a bureaucracy of routinized torture, as I misguidedly did in the 1978 article.44 [Note 44: Shue, “Torture in Dreamland,” p. 238.  I offer similar arguments in “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb,” pp. 47-51.]

The “moderate” position on torture represented by (2) is, in Shue’s words, torture in dreamland. “So I now take the most moderate position on torture, the position nearest to
the middle of the road, feasible in the real world: never again.  Never, ever, exactly as
international law indisputably requires”(page 28, my emphasis).

There is much, much more, but this is getting extremely long and my point was to condense the length, not extend it. Much of it deals with deontological ethics in relation to consequentialism. And in my view, I find it very, very difficult to justify a Christian holding to anything other than deontological ethics.

Bibliography:

David Luban, “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb,” in Karen J. Greenberg, ed., The Torture Debate in America (Cambridge UP, 2006), pp. 55-68.

Luban, “Torture, American-Style,” Washington Post, Nov. 27, 2005, p. B1, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/25/AR2005112501552.html.

Luban, “Unthinking the Ticking Bomb” (July 1, 2008). Georgetown Law. Georgetown Law Faculty Working Papers. Paper 68. http://lsr.nellco.org/georgetown/fwps/papers/683939

Henry Shue, “Torture,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 7 (1978): 124-43.

Shue, “Torture in Dreamland: Disposing of the Ticking Bomb,” Case Western Reserve
Journal of International Law 37 (2006): 231-39.

I don’t have a television. I don’t watch TV. So I only recently learned of the TV show 24, where hero Jack Bauer saves America on a weekly basis from terrorists.

It was actually in a blog conversation that I won’t link to.

Now, I know that such discussions are not typically the subject on Biblical Studies blogs or Linguistics blogs or both. But ethics and morality are always important – as every Christian should agree.

But how often do we, as Christians, develop a well thought out philosophy or theology of Ethics?

What impact does such as 24 a show have on our views of morality, torture, and national security?

As I understand it, the concept of the show preys on the Ticking Bomb Senario, where it is argued, “enhanced interrogation” is the only way to save America from certain destruction. From what I’ve read online about the show, our hero Jack Bauer is the ultimate consequentialist. He’d rape one woman to prevent ten from being raped, commit a small genocide to prevent a larger one, throw one fat man in front of a train to save a dozen thin men, club a baby to stop a nuclear detonation in New York City.

I am seriously curious about what others think about these issues:

1. The show 24
2. The validity of torture for national security
3. This article challenging the very concept of the Ticking Bomb Scenario (TBS) as a defense of the use torture (incidentally, the article was shared to me by a friend of mine in the military who has experienced waterboarding first hand and afterward, “would have stolen a baby and given it to them [i.e. the people administering the waterboarding]“).

For the record, I’m against torture, whether “lite” or “hard” for any reason. Its both legally and morally dubious.

And so I open the floor to you. What do you think of these issues and why? I’m particularly interested in the views of those who would defend even torture-lite in situations of national security. I want to understand your view.

If a world famous violinist, arguably the greatest musician in America, played his violin in rush hour traffic at a metro station, would anyone notice?

Pearls for Breakfast

This article is two years old. I read it back when it was first published. Its definitely worth another read though, as a profound discussion of what is beauty.

My wife had a vocabulary quiz this afternoon.

She hates them.

And its not because she doesn’t know the words. She’s the best in her class – it helps that she’s already done Classical Greek. No, she hates them because vocabulary quizzes rip words from their contexts. How often are you going to see συνέρχομαι all by itself in isolation with no words surrounding it.

The question, then, is this. How can we teach and test on vocabulary in a more natural manner?

Now, I’ve never taught Greek grammar before. I’ve only TA’ed NT exegesis, so I don’t know how feasible this is, but here is my idea. Its sort of a blend of avoiding vocab quizzes as well as translation exercises all at the same time.

What if instead of working through the vocabulary that appears 50 times or more, students were to work through the vocabulary of a narrative – say Mark (over the course of a year). Mark is relatively short and its Greek is not difficult. Use the words from a sentence or two at a time for the required vocabulary. But instead of simply requiring them to translate the sentences or have them spew out the words they know onto a piece of paper, simply have them read the text, and then answer questions about its content. As they go through the narrative, their vocabulary would grow and there be fewer new words in the following sentences, which means one could then deal with larger chunks of the story at one time.

What do you think?

Would this work?

Perhaps in conjunction with Buth’s materials?

Between preparing for BibleTech:2009 and working on various other required projects, my various continuing blogging series have lost their way. So here are a few things I plan on doing relatively soon.

• Discontinuous Phrases/Hyperbaton
• Matthew & Mark in my NIV/TNIV comparison

I think that at the end of March (i.e. after BibleTech), I would like to pick  up my series on Discontinuous Phrases/Hyperbaton again. I was just about complete and ready to post on chapter four when my computer died and I lost a good eight pages of work. That was extremely unfortunate and for several weeks I simply haven’t had the heart to try and redo all that work until just recently. I plan on getting it redone in early April.

As for my NIV/TNIV comparisons. I plan on doing Matthew & Mark this weekend if I can – someone should hold me to that.

Finally, there’s one more bit that I hope to do while preparing for BibleTech. I’ve realize that I have way too much that I would like to say in my 30-35 minutes of fame. So I’m going to be doing some posting on Greek morphological databases more broadly speaking over the next two weeks. This is something I’ve been planning on doing for a while and hopefully, it will all turn into a decent article.

So that’s where we’re headed right now.

Please, do stick around.

The majority of my blog posts are not incredibly well written. I don’t put too much effort into them beyond the content and I typically don’t bother to do any proof reading—much to the chagrin of a number of my readers.

But I do value writing well and I put significant effort into papers and articles.

Anyway, here is easily my favorite quote about writing from Annie Dillard, probably one of the greatest writers alive today.

It takes years to write a book—between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. One American writer has written a dozen major books over six decades. He wrote one of those books, a perfect novel, in three months. He speaks of it, still, with awe, almost whispering. Who wants to offend the spirit that hands out such books?

Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in child birth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, 13-14.

I went out for coffee with my wife last week. She studied for class, I think reading about clitics and morphology, while I worked on my project in 4 Maccabees. With my computer presently out of action, I’ve been writing out the entire Greek text by hand and translating it underneath. Its actually been a fantastic excercise and I’m greatly improving my Greek. As I write it, I say the words out loud and then I go back and translate. When I’m out of the house and away from extra resources, I only bring my copy of BAGD. Yes the second edition. My copy of the third is digital.

Anyway, we were sitting there in the coffee shop and I was working on a set of verses where I knew the vast majority of the vocabulary so I wasn’t using the lexicon. Across the way was a couple who had just come in. The wife was reading the paper and the husband was just sitting there. To my utter surprise, he turned to me and asked if he could read my lexicon, that he just needed something, anything, to read.

I debated the question in my head for a moment. After all, it is a big, important book. But in the end I handed it to him. I was between him and the door anyway. He flipped through it for about ten minutes or so. I don’t know how much he actually read or whether he understood any Greek. And I didn’t get a chance to ask. Right after he handed it back, he and his wife left the coffee shop.

Strange…

Here’s my big dream:

I would love to see a debate between Roger Olson and John Piper on Calvinism and Arminianism.

I would also love to see a debate between Wayne Grudem and Gordon Fee on Complementarianism and Egalitarianism.

But in these two debates, I’d want Olson arguing for Calvinism and Piper arguing for Arminianism. Likewise, I’d want to see Grudem arguing for Egalitarianism and Fee arguing for Complementarianis.

Not only would it be incredibly entertaining. I think it would be helpful beneficial for everyone. My experience has shown that generally, we don’t understand the other side as well as we think we do. I know for a fact that Calvinists don’t understand Arminians or visa versa. And I often think the same thing about the Gender debate. I’ve said a few times, rather tongue in cheek, that if you understood my perspective on men & women’s roles, you’d agree with me. In both cases, I think that the sides of these issues don’t tend to examine themselves critically. Some do, but they are often the exceptions, not the rule.

If such debates ever occurred, I think that Grudem, Fee, Olson and Piper would all walk away with a greater understanding of their own view and the other side that they didn’t have before.

One thing I learned during my senior year of college was that you cannot understand the other side completely until you’re on it. We held debates on issues in Biblical Theology for my senior seminar class. In every instance where the people who didn’t agree with the side they were defending, that side won the debates. Hands down. They knew both sides.

[Update] If there are any complementarians reading this post who would be interested in participating in such a debate, please do leave a comment!

By the way, I’ve arrived in B.C. We’re in a small, but comfortable one bedroom apartment and are enjoying the area so far. We’ve got most of our stuff unpacked, though we’re not sure where to put all of our books at present. We’ve got them in some rather creative places in the mean time.

Right now, I’ll be working as my wife begins classes first. She’s earned it. She worked for my school last time. Even still, I’ll be taking classes on and off as time and money permits. Hopefully we’ll be able to squish two, two year programs into three years without hurting our bank accounts too much and without a lot of debt – hopefully none.