The Patriot Post® · Moral Vocabulary

Jonah Goldberg: “Killing is worse than torture. Life in prison might be called torture for some people, and yet we consider the death penalty a more severe punishment. Most people would prefer to be waterboarded than killed. All sane and decent people would rather go through what Khalid Sheikh Mohammad went through than see their whole family slaughtered from 10,000 feet by a drone. And yet President Obama routinely sanctions drone strikes while piously outlawing the slapping of prisoners who might have information that would make such strikes less necessary – and, more importantly, would prevent the loss of innocent American lives. It’s odd: Even though killing is a graver moral act, there’s more flexibility to it. America killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in World War II, but few would call that murder because such actions as the firebombing of Dresden were deemed necessary to win the war. In other words, we have the moral vocabulary to talk about kinds of killing – from euthanasia and abortion to capital punishment, involuntary manslaughter and, of course, murder – but we don’t have a similar lexicon when it comes to kinds of torture.”