Redstate

With that said, if you excerpt the bits about waterboarding being per se torture, then he's absolutely right; if you include the assertion-without-argument (except for the appeals to authority, which I hope we can all ignore) that waterboarding is torture, he's astray.

Let's be clear about two things here: First: Arguing for torture does indeed constitute a moral illness in itself. Second: As Father Neuhaus has noted, one need not condone the event to note that sometimes men will resort to what they perceive as a lesser evil to avoid a greater one, or even to attempt a good.

My problem, Alex, with your and Joe's position is not that torture is wrong; it is that to call it torture is to expand the definition so wide as to rob the word of real meaning. Torture constitutes horrible things; it encompasses a world of bodily pain inflicted to degrade a human will and a human person from the outside in. Because we define it as such, we are able to hold our social opprobium in place. Once we start expanding the word to include things like waterboarding -- sorry, I know too many people who've been waterboarded to think it's torture, and Lord knows they don't describe it that way -- then we begin to undermine the taboo by robbing the word of its import. Put differently: If "torture" consists of normal or even comprehensible things, then torture will become normal and comprehensible.

I dissent.