Because It Is Wrong–Six Questions for Charles and Gregory Fried

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by Scott Horton

January 21, 2011



Beginning with the disclosures of Abu Ghraib and continuing over a period of several years, Reagan Administration Solicitor General and Harvard law professor Charles Fried discussed the Bush Administration’s policy choices with his son, philosophy professor Gregory Fried—forging a consensus on many issues while disagreeing on others. Now they have transformed that dialogue into a book, which presents powerful arguments against torture, accepts that the Bush Administration violated the prohibition on torture, and proceeds to a nuanced discussion of what America can do about it. I put six questions to Charles and Gregory Fried about Because It Is Wrong—Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror:

1. Your book opens with a discussion of Leon Golub’s Interrogation 1 and continues with references to a number of other masterworks of graphic art. How did you pick the art, and how does it help you address the ethics issues covered in your book?

CHARLES FRIED: To treat works of art as mere illustrations, or substitutes for arguments, demeans them as art, as works that speak for themselves and raise questions of their own. In working on this book, one thing we hoped to achieve was to write for an audience broader than merely academic scholars; we felt that the questions we were addressing go to the heart of what our nation stands for, and so we tried to make articulate what our moral intuitions on these issues are. Formal arguments are not very good at evoking deeply held moral intuitions. This is why we turned to art as well as to religious stories and to history: we wanted to appeal to images and to tales that we believed many, if not most, of our readers would find familiar. We hoped to make an argument that would find resonance with deep traditions the American people would understand. Art, stories, and intuition cannot substitute for reason, but they are an introduction and accompaniment to reason, helping to overcome objections where reason alone may not persuade.

GREGORY FRIED: Some readers have told us that they were put off by our use of biblical stories and religious concepts, such as the notion of human beings as created in the image of God. I think we should underline that in a book addressed to the general American public, we endeavored to find cultural reference points to the core moral intuitions we wanted to emphasize. It is striking that the response of some to any biblical reference would be so allergic and reactive. That may say something about the passions surrounding the debates over religion today; however, we do not think one must be religious to understand the ethical point of the imagery or stories. That would be narrow-minded indeed. Although perhaps one serious question here is whether the idea that there is something sacred about the dignity of the human person is ultimately a religious notion, whatever a secularist or atheist might believe about that dignity as grounded in purely humanistic values.

in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/01/hbc-90007924

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1. awesome good stuff. nt