We engage in military operations all the time to kill enemies in which the deaths of innocent civilians are inevitable and predictable. Yet we also refuse to torture those same enemies even if it will save lives. I don’t see how these two concepts can coincide.
When we engage in military operations, our goal is to kill people, and the price we inevitably pay, especially in places like Iraq where our enemies use innocents for cover, is the death of innocent people. While generally inevitable, we conscience it as a matter of course.
When we consider torture, our goal is to get information that might save lives, and the price we pay is some transitory pain done to some rather unsavory characters.
It’s hard to see how we can accept the first price (the death of a lot of children, families, and other incredible heartwrenching and irreperable damages) and not accept the other (finite pain that a person can recover from later), especially when the goal of the first is merely to kill people and the goal of the other is to save innocent people.
There are, of course, other common objections to torture, but in comparison to collateral damage, none of them seem to add up. The information gleaned from torture can often be unreliable, but then so can targeting information for bombing campaigns or missle strikes: we’ve many times simply ended up killing innocent people and missing the enemy. We still accept the overall policy as a matter of course.
Likewise one could argue that we shouldn’t torture because we don’t want to have others torturing our soldiers. But then, one could argue that we wouldn’t want people risking killing civilians when fighting our troops. The “message we send” objection works in both cases, and hence gets us nowhere.
Torture of captured enemy soldiers would be against the Geneva convention and thus illegal. Death of civilians during a military exercize is always to be avoided and is notintentional.
Maybe the factor here is intent. In no way would I ever support the torture of a POW, not even if he had vital military information that would aid the tacticians of ‘my side’.
Warfare is necessary. In warfare, innocents die. Since warfare is necessary (in general, we can argue individual wars are not but throughout human existence history has proven that wars are an unfortunate necessity) and innocents die in warfare, it’s nearly impossible to avoid killing any innocents in warfare.
Torture on the other hand is not necessary and it is avoidable.
It’s one thing to kill someone quickly (e.g. collateral damage by a bomb), and another to slowly torture the person and inflict unimaginable pain for days on end.
Let’s put it this way. If you had a brother or sister, what would be harder on you to hear: that he/she was killed by an errant bomb, or that they were captured by the enemy and tortured for weeks?
Warfare is only ever necessary if you deem it so in order to achieve a certain goal - protecting home and country, for instance.
You could make the same argument for torture.
Oh, and also - collateral damage, while it may be expected and even planned for, is still accidental. The moral conundrum of accidentally killing an innocent person in the process of trying to kill an enemy combatant is different than that of deliberately killing an innocent person. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not too keen on either one, but I do think there is a difference.
Not necessarily. It’s quite conceivable that one could hit the target they are aiming for as well as killing innocents in the process. So it could acheive the objective, even though innocents died in the process. But torture generally doesn’t acheive its objective at all. There is nothing to be gained by its use.
BTW, I’m nipping this in the bud, because I know someone will misconstrue my post. I’m not for carpet-bombing; I’m simply saying that accepting some collateral damage does not necessarily mean that one must accept torture.
This seems to be a largely self-serving objection: that something is a regretable outcome that we WISH wouldn’t happen (and we can call it "accidental if that makes us feel better), doesn’t make it any less a predictable outcome of our choice, and thus part of the price we are willing to pay. The reality is, when we are asked: will you go ahead with the operation even though innocent people might die, we are willing to say yes. Accidental or no, we are willing to conscience it.
We can of course try to minimize the damage: just as we can try to minimize our use of torture. But we know that it is an outcome of our policies as certain as pain is in torture. We can hope that we might avoid it, just as we might hope that the mere threat of torture will be enough and we can avoid actually causing harm. But we know it will happen. Perhaps someday we’ll have more accurate weapons. Perhaps someday we’ll have more effective and less painful truth serums (though, for some reason, despite being more humane, we are apparently dead set against these sorts of methods too).
This is precisely the sort of moral avoidance that concerns me. We know that innocent people will die when we launch a missle. We might say that we don’t want innocent people to die, but the reality is that we know that they often will when we engage in such tactics (not, perhaps every time, but in general), and do it as part of the price of whatever military objective we deem more important (and sometimes we DO deem it not important enough to put those people at risk, just as we might deem some instances torture to not be worth it). It’s simply cowardly to act as if it something we didn’t intend with our actions because it’s something we wish we could avoid, or because we can place full blame on our enemies for their deaths because they made it necessary. Both of those things can be true, but we are still required to face the fact that we are prepared to accept collateral damage for the purpose of a greater objective.
marky33, of course, raised the point I would have (many times, as I said, we bomb an area only to find that our intelligence was faulty and we ONLY killed innocent people, just as we might torture and get useless information).
So I’ll raise an additional one: cite? It’s not that I think you’re wrong, but the reality is a lot less clear cut. It’s true that torture often just makes people tell us what they think we want to hear. But with the threat of verification and more torture if the information proves faulty, that’s generally not as big a problem as it might seem. As disgusting as it might sound, the false information problem is generally because the person we are torturing is innocent or ignorant, and just has to make something up.
The thing, we DO accept torture in specific instances if it is understood to be warranted. Think of the big blockbuster where the hero has to save the heroine tied up next to a bomb and he has to extract info from the baddie asap.
No-one blinks an eye if he resorts to a punch in the face or a gun to the head.
But its tricky to mandate, simply because it is so open to abuse.
I’m surprised that this one slipped through. Without getting into the positives and negatives of toture of partially involved people vs. accidental bombing of civilians, not all of those civilians will be killed outright.
Many will lose arms, legs, eyes etc. and suffer for years, just as many will die but take days to do so.
Quite. There are degrees to everything, including collateral damage.
At one end of the scale would be civilians killed when a mortar position pinning down troops is engaged by precision fire, at the other end is firing missiles at a car on a crowded street and just not caring who is hurt so long as the target is killed.
Two ends of a scale & the question is where to draw the line between acceptable and callousness? As far as I recall the Geneva Conventions lay strict rules on occupying forces in this regard.
Too many people on this board seem to think anything goes so long as there is a target to aim at and this is both immoral and more to the point, counter-productive when you’re trying to win the support of a populance.
I still think that torturing is worse than collateral damage though, so I guess I’ll just try to think of another reason why.
I think that this situation is similar to the ethics conundrum posed in these boards a couple of weeks ago. That is, there are two scenarios:
A train will either kill 5 people or 1 person, depending on how you pull a lever.
Most people have no problem pulling the lever to kill the 1 person,
rather than the 5.
A surgeon can go out onto the street and kill someone and harvest his organs
and save 5 patients who are waiting for organs.
Most people *definitely * have a problem with this, even though in both cases 1 life
is destroyed to save 5 lives.
I think what gets people is the deliberate nature of the killing in scenario #2, and maybe this is what bothers people in the case of torture, because scenario #1 seems more like the collateral damage case, and scenario #2 seems more like the torture case.
Anyway, since I can’t succintly describe why I’m OK with scenario #1, and not OK with scenario #2, I guess I can’t (at the moment) succintly describe why I’d rank torture as worse than collateral damage (although both are very bad).
Collateral damage is an unavoidable consequence of warfare. Civilized nations do everything than can to minimize the deaths of innocence. At times, cowardly enemies that for example put military targets next to schools make this difficult.
Torture, on the other hand, is entirely avoidable. Not only does it not generally yield useful information, it takes you off the moral high ground when you practice it. It also removes any incentives from your enemies not to torture any of your people that they capture. It just isn’t practiced by civilized nations. For many decades, the United States took the high road and refrained from torture. Then Bush decided to blaze a trail along the low road.
I presume you are excluding all members of BOTH Gulf War coalitions and the one that attacked Afghanistan from your list of civilized nations then, since they took part in massive, lengthy bombardments of whole cities to soften up their targets and protect their ground troops, thus NOT doing everything they could to minimize the death of innocents.
I wouldn’t go that far. Innocent people were not the targets. Unfortunately, the terrorists and innocents were interwoven to a degree that one could not kill one without killing the other.
But the fact remains they did not do all in their power to minimise civilian casualties - far from it - which does make one wonder why we’re prepared to kill indisciminently to protect our own professional soldiers but are not prepared to inflict measured pain on an enemy combatant to achieve the same goal - or, for that matter, under any circumstances.