That’s the title of a paper by Christopher Kutz in Ethics & International Affairs. Kutz argues that that there was a “norm” against torture and assassination in American policy until 9/11. Although these norms were violated from time to time, this was done so surreptitiously, and generally speaking policymakers believed that torture and assassination were off the table as policy options rather than choices that could be subject to moral balancing. (I think he is more likely right about torture than assassination so I will confine myself to torture henceforth.)

Kutz believes that the anti-torture norm is (probably) dead; the best evidence of this is that public opinion polls suggest that most Americans think that torture is now acceptable in limited cases. There is no public pressure to punish the Bush administration torturers. Kutz makes the interesting point that in government the greatest opposition to torture came from the military and FBI where an honor-based ethic prevails. Civilian policymakers overruled or worked around these “professional cadres,” based on a utilitarian approach in a panic atmosphere where the consequences of failing to capture terrorists were thought to be catastrophic.

As I interpret Kutz, the anti-torture norm could prevail as long as there was no major threat to U.S. security. Once this threat materialized, all bets were off. But on this view, the anti-torture norm was not a very strong norm. Torture was just not an issue, it was never thought to be needed, and so anyone who proposed it as a policy would have been regarded as a sadist, and so no one did.

I think Kutz misses another dimension. In the nineteenth century, the Great Powers made a distinction between civilized powers (themselves) and “savages” (the rest of the world). The humanitarian norms that they observed applied only to limited wars among themselves; they were suspended when dealing with tribal groups, which they sought either to wipe our or to subordinate. In the twentieth century, the norms collapsed even among the Great Powers when wars became unlimited.

Thus, as I have argued in various places, what keeps norms in place is a strategy of reciprocity. Great powers fight limited wars with the expectation that peace will return; all sides gain if the war can be kept as a test of strength and a descent into barbarism is avoided. Governments abandon those norms in two cases: (1) when they see themselves as fighting to the death; and (2) when they confront opponents that don’t comply with them themselves. Al Qaeda was a toxic combination of both of these factors.

So another way to see the change in moral psychology that Katz describes is as a recognition that norms thought be universal–at a time (really, only the 1990s) when the United States considered itself fully secure–were in fact restricted to those the United States regarded as “civilized.” (“Terrorist” has become a quasi-synonym for “savage” as that word was used in the nineteenth century: a person who does not follow certain norms that restrict the use of violence.)

Kutz makes another interesting observation; I quote from the abstract:

While democracies surely do better than authoritarian regimes in adopting and internalizing certain kinds of constraints, in part because of a greater sensitivity to public mobilization around normative questions, that same sensitivity makes the long-term survival of these norms precarious. But in a democracy the values and arguments of those cadres [the military, etc.] are susceptible to being undermined by a combination of public panic and the invocation by policymakers of a public interest that can override the claims both of law and pragmatic restraint. Democracy, hence, can be at the same time both fertile and toxic: fertile as a source of humanitarian values and institutions, but toxic to the very institutions it cultivates.

I don’t think this is right. Authoritarian regimes routinely use torture against domestic political opponents; democracies hardly ever do. What the two regimes share is that they place little weight on the interests of people who live beyond their borders.

I explain the legal and normative problems with prosecution in Slate.

My colleague Richard McAdams pointed out to me another law that would frustrate prosecution, one that I missed and has not received much attention in the press. The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 says:

In any … criminal prosecution against an … agent of the United States Government … arising out of the … agent’s engaging in specific operational practices, that involve detention and interrogation of aliens who the President or his designees have determined are believed to be engaged in or associated with international terrorist activity that poses a serious, continuing threat to the United States, … and that were officially authorized and determined to be lawful at the time that they were conducted, it shall be a defense that such … agent did not know that the practices were unlawful and a person of ordinary sense and understanding would not know the practices were unlawful. Good faith reliance on advice of counsel should be an important factor, among others, to consider in assessing whether a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known the practices to be unlawful.

42 U.S.C.A. § 2000dd-1.

Mistake of law provides a defense for all CIA agents acting within the parameters of OLC’s legal advice.

Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, argues in The New York Times that Obama should pardon Bush and all the others involved in the torture program. Not because he thinks they acted rightly. Quite the contrary: pardons

may be the only way to ensure that the American government never tortures again. Pardons would make clear that crimes were committed; that the individuals who authorized and committed torture were indeed criminals; and that future architects and perpetrators of torture should beware.

The logic is faulty; interrogators who use torture in the future will expect to be pardoned just like their predecessors. Whether you call non-prosecution a “pardon” or not, it amounts to the same thing. But what is most odd is that a civil libertarian believes that the president should tar people as criminals without giving them the benefit of a trial.

Romero, like the supporters of torture, do what people always do when Congress or the courts can’t, or won’t, do what they want. They turn to the president and demand executive action.

The following post was co-written with Adrian Vermeule.

In our previous post, we set out some puzzles about how judges should take into account the votes of other judges. Here, we sketch out some tentative answers.

Imagine that each Justice reads the statute and the briefs, and reaches a preliminary conclusion about the meaning of the statue. The Justice also has a level of confidence (high, low, middling) about her own interpretation. For example, a Justice might believe that the meaning is X with a probability of 0.99, 0.9, 0.6, 0.5, or 0.1 (which is the same as saying that she believes the meaning is Y with a probability of 0.01, 0.1, 0.4, 0.5, or 0.9). A Justice with a high confidence level believes that the statute is clear; a Justice with a confidence level in the neighborhood of 0.5 believes that the statute is ambiguous.

A Justice should update her prior in light of the information that she receives from the other Justices. If voting is sequential, then each Justice should update based on the Justices who voted before her. If voting is simultaneous, then such updating is not possible immediately—but let us suppose that Justices can change their votes in a second round of voting. Each Justice should take into account not only the number of votes for each meaning, but the confidence level of the Justices who cast those votes. A Justice who votes for X with confidence level 0.51 is not as informative as a Justice who votes for X with confidence level 0.9. It may, however, be difficult to gauge confidence level—it is certainly more difficult to gauge confidence level than the vote itself. We can imagine that Justices may try to reveal their confidence level when they cast their vote (“I’m really not sure, but for the moment X seems more plausible to me”). This may not always be the case, but let’s assume it is. Now let’s go to the questions from last post.

(1) If the initial vote reveals a 5-4 split in favor of meaning X, and all justices (sincerely) claim to be confident, then they should all certainly update their views. How they update their views is complicated. If you are confident enough, then you should presumptively not update your views; but if enough people are arrayed against you, and they are confident as well, then you should. But in this example, it certainly seems that each Justice should decide that the statute is ambiguous (by which we mean, she believes that the meaning is X with probability only slightly higher than 0.5).

(2) The second case involves a 5-4 split, where the 5 believes that the statute clearly means X, and the 4 say that the statute is ambiguous. Let’s suppose that this means that the 5 attach probability 0.9 that the statute means X, and the 4 attach probability 0.5 that the statute means X. Given these precise numbers, the 4 should update their views and agree with the 5 (while the 5 should update their views only slightly); but different numbers would yield different results.

(3) This case—where 4 Justices believe the statute clearly means X, 4 Justices believe the statutes clearly means Y, and 1 Justice believes that the statute is ambiguous—raises a question about the difference between the “collective” or aggregate meaning of an opinion, on one hand, and the views of the individual Justices on the other. For an even clearer example, suppose that all Justices believe that the statute is ambiguous but incline toward X (say, confidence level 0.55). If they then observe each other’s vote and confidence level, and also believe that each Justice’s view is independently arrived at, then they should update their belief and conclude that the probability that the correct meaning is X is very high (almost certain), in virtue of the Jury Theorem. Should the Justices unanimously vote that the statute is ambiguous or that the statute is clear? We need to work this through.

We have assumed away some types of strategic behavior. A Justice might deliberately overstate her confidence level in order to influence the votes of other Justices. In response, Justices may rationally place less value on such “cheap talk” than otherwise, depending on how honest they think the other Justices are, which is something that they may learn over time through interactions with each other. Of course, strategic behavior by Justices is a more general problem, hardly unique to this setting. Consider the certiorari process, or the possibilities for strategic behavior opened up by the Doctrinal Paradox (the choice between aggregating judicial votes over discrete issues or aggregating votes over bottom-line judgments).

Another complication is that, even if entirely sincere, a Justice may conceal information by allowing herself to be influenced by other Justices. In the famous herd-voting models, if, say, the first three or four Justices happen to vote the same, then subsequent Justices will imitate them, believing that the collective view is more information than their own. A similar problem can arise with simultaneous voting. However, this is not a problem if Justices can and do credibly reveal their confidence level as well as the outcome they believe is correct.

There is much more work to be done, on all these questions. But our tentative judgment is that the potential costs of such a system, while real, do not necessarily and invariably justify throwing away relevant information — the information contained in the votes of other judges.

The following post was co-written with Adrian Vermeule.

An earlier entry on this blog discusses the puzzle of King v. Burwell: given that six out of the nine judges to vote on the merits have ruled in favor of the agency, isn’t it difficult to say that the agency’s view is clearly unreasonable? The issue generalizes. Under what conditions should judges take into account the information contained in the votes of other judges? We are currently working on a paper on the subject, and lay out some very preliminary and tentative thoughts here.

The issue generalizes well beyond judges, of course. It arises whenever a multimember decisionmaking body, or a hierarchy of such bodies, has to decide whether a legal standard is clearly satisfied. Disagreement among the voters is itself informative about whether the standard is met.  Thus a famous puzzle about juries, stemming from James Fitzjames Stephen, is whether majority rule can coherently be combined with the reasonable-doubt rule. The argument that it cannot goes like this: Imagine that the jury votes 7-5 to convict the defendant. Doesn’t the close vote itself suggest the existence of a reasonable doubt? Related literature in positive political theory involves the “swing voter’s curse” and strategic voting on juries under unanimity rule. But we will confine ourselves to the judicial setting for now.

The relationship between Supreme Court and the lower federal courts is fertile terrain for these issues. If N courts of appeal say that a statute clearly means X, and another N courts of appeal say that a statute clearly means Y, doesn’t that tend to show, all else equal, that the statute is ambiguous? Or in cases about qualified immunity, if some appellate courts say that a certain rule counts as “clearly established law,” and some say it doesn’t, does that mean it doesn’t? What if the second group says not merely that the rule isn’t clearly established, but that the opposite rule is clearly established?

But let us focus on the cleanest setting — voting within a multimember group of Justices at the Supreme Court. And we will use Chevron examples, in light of King v. Burwell.

Here are some cases of interest:

(1) At the conference after oral argument, five Justices say that the ordinary meaning of the statute is clearly X, four say that it is clearly Y. Shouldn’t all nine update their views and learn from the aggregate information contained in the votes of colleagues? Shouldn’t all entertain the possibility that the vote reveals the statute to be ambiguous?

(2) A harder case: At the conference after oral argument, five Justices say that the statute clearly means X, four say that it is ambiguous as between X and Y. Should the five obtain some information from the votes of the four, albeit not as much as in case (1)? After all, the four do not agree that the statute clearly means X. And how about vice-versa — should the four update their own views, in light of the views of the five?

(3) Four justices say that the statute clearly means X, four that it clearly means Y. The swing justice thinks the statute is ambiguous, so the agency wins. Two puzzles:

(A) What exactly is the judgment of “the Court,” for purposes of the Brand X rules? Is it that the statute is ambiguous, so that the agency may flip back and forth between interpretation X and interpretation Y as future administrations come and go?

(B) If so, is that a sensible result? After all, eight Justices viewed the statute as unambiguous (although they disagreed on its putatively unambiguous content).

So far we have assumed that all Justices are using a common interpretive theory (in the examples, we have assumed that the Justices are all trying to determine the ordinary meaning of the text). But puzzles also arise at the meta-level of competing approaches to interpretation. In case (1), suppose that the five Justices are purposivists who think that purposive sources clearly suggest X, and the four are textualist who think that the ordinary meaning clearly indicates Y (or vice-versa). Does that undermine the argument for ambiguity? Or should all nine Justices recognize that reasonable minds can disagree about the proper approach to interpretation, and then say that the agency has second-order discretion to choose among reasonable interpretive approaches? On that logic, the agency wins as well, not because the statute is ambiguous within any particular interpretive approach, but because there is second-order ambiguity in the choice of interpretive approaches.

The puzzles are endless. Clearly some sort of analytic framework is needed, and basic decision theory supplies one. We sketch out such a framework in our next post.

Google Trends proves its worth once again.

Beutler and Drum doubt that Obama’s immigration order will set a precedent that a future Republican can exploit for the purpose of economic deregulation, as I argued in TNR. Beutler seems to doubt that (political) precedents can constrain political actors. Drum thinks that precedents can matter but doubts that they will matter in this case because the Obama order will set precedent for immigration law only.

I confess I don’t understand politics well enough to be able to predict whether Obama’s order will have a large effect or a small effect but I believe it will have some effect. Think, for example, of the centralization of power over regulatory agencies in the OMB under Reagan. Reagan took political heat for that decision but pushed it through not only because he was ideologically committed to deregulation but because deregulation at the time was popular among Democrats as well as Republicans. His successors, who maintained the structure Reagan put into place, did not take political heat. That is how precedent works. But, of course, its influence can be overcome by other factors.

It is easy to predict that in 2017, the hypothetical President Paul will argue that he can deregulate by non-enforcement because that is what Obama did, and Democrats who defended Obama are in no position to criticize him. Would such an argument work politically? One question is whether people are capable of making fine-grained distinctions between immigration enforcement and, say, environmental-law enforcement. Another question is just how different environmental-law enforcement really is from immigration enforcement. People who sift through environmental law will find great pockets of executive discretion, both in the statutes and as a matter of practice. But the influence of arguments like these, taking place in the arena of politics rather than a court of law, is hard to predict.

They can use it to deregulate, I argue in TNR.

The Heritage Foundation has appropriated the title of my book with Adrian Vermeule: The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic. So this seems to be a good time to remind readers that Vermeule and I address many of the newly current issues about presidential power in that book, which you should buy as soon as possible, so that you can be an informed consumer of the latest news.

The diet version. You can also read the original, high-caloric version; the caffeine-free version; the cherry-flavored version; and so on.