Schoolyard Ethics

Ideally, a childhood is filled with practical lessons in ethics. A perfect example might be a snowfight in a schoolyard. In my childhood, children were banned from throwing snow in the schoolyard. Inevitably this rule was breached. Just as inevitably, a couple of defenses were employed by children caught throwing snow. Either they were not the party to initiate it (eg: Billy started it!) or that someone had engaged in it more harmfully (eg: Peter was throwing ice balls). These defenses may contain entirely true statements. Other children may have been the instigators, and other children may have behaved worse. At the same time, making these claims never worked. Regardless of how the other children acted, one's own actions were still in breach of the rules.

All this brings us to Gitmo. The main defenses of prisoner abuse seem to be built on these two schoolyard models. Someone else is worse (Stalin, al-Zarqawi etc) or someone else started it (bin Laden). What is most interesting about this is that many of the apologists might call themselves conservative (not that all conservatives are Gitmo apologists... I hope). In any other sphere, the one thing that consistently seems to upset conservatives is moral relativism. Yet this is what these old schoolyard apologies amount to. They are, after all, an appeal to the circumstance in which the act took place. Gitmo is okay because someone somewhere else is worse? Gitmo is okay, because America's enemies were behaving badly first?