Resolved: Our Moral Intuitions Regarding Torture Make No Sense.

Great Debates
1

Before I get to the meat of this (long) OP, I’d like to propose a thought experiment.

Many of you have probably heard of the famous ‘Trolley problem’. If you haven’t, the gist is this: Five guys are working on one set of train tracks and one guy is working on another. A runaway train is heading straight for the 5 guys but you, if you choose, can flip a switch and send the train onto the second track, thereby saving 5 guys but killing the one.

How many of you would choose to flip the switch? Odds are, the vast majority of you would. I know this because this problem has been used in psychological studies and, indeed, the vast majority of respondents do choose to flip the switch.

Here’s a variation of that problem posed by Yale Psychology professor Paul Bloom: If (for reasons I’ll leave you to make up for yourselves), you could somehow save the five guys on track 1 by water boarding the guy on track 2, would you do it?

Odds are, the vast majority of you would answer with a firm ‘No!’. I know this because, according to Bloom, when he poses this question to his students they nearly all refuse. They would rather the train kill the five guys on the first track than water board the guy on the second.

Why is that? After all, how on earth can it be more moral to flip a switch and kill a man to save five others than to torture that same man to save those same five? In the second hypothetical, no-one dies. Everyone goes home at the end of the day. How can that possibly be worse than just flipping a switch and killing the guy on track 2? I mean, if you were to ask the guy “Would you rather be water boarded or flattened by a runaway train?” he himself would doubtless beg for the water board. I know I would. Odds are you all would, too.

So why, in practise, do people give such seemingly incoherent answers to these two questions? My answer, and the subject of this debate, is simply this: Our moral intuitions on the subject of torture simply make no damn sense. With that in mind, I’m going to try to make a case for the moral permissibility of torture under certain very specific circumstances.

Now, there are a couple of important points that it’s necessary to get out of the way before continuing.

The first is that no-one is entirely opposed to torture as a matter of philosophical principle. It’s easy to conjure up hypotheticals that would awaken the Grand Inquisitor in all of us. The classic example is the ‘Ticking Time Bomb’ case. A terrorist is in your custody having planted a bomb in a public place that is going to go off in one hour. All conventional interrogation techniques have failed. Given that, at this point, you have nothing to lose, do you break out the water board?

If you say no, pretend it’s a nuclear bomb. If that’s not enough, pretend it’s ten nuclear bombs. If that still doesn’t sway you, pretend it’s a thousand. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you raise the stakes high enough everyone eventually says “Fuck it. Torture the guy.” Indeed, for most people, the stakes don’t need to be anywhere near that high. Ask a person if they would torture the terrorist if he’d kidnapped their kid and locked him in a basement with a dwindling air supply and, assuming conventional interrogation techniques had been tried without success, most people would say yes, torture him.

So yeah. As a matter of philosophical principle, nobody is 100% opposed to torture. It’s important that participants in this thread recognise that about themselves.

The send point is that it’s false to say that torture never works. There are well documented cases of it working. A good one can be found on the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy page here. It’s a long page so I’ll briefly summarise:

There was a case in New Zealand where a woman went into a garage to pay for her petrol, leaving her infant son in the back seat. While she was inside, a man stole her car. When he noticed the kid, he ditched the car and the kid. The cops caught the guy very shortly afterward. They knew they had the right guy. He had items from the car in his pockets, and he was caught on the garage’s CCTV (he was a 300lb Samoan with a huge blonde afro, so he was easy to recognise). They could not possibly have had a stronger case.

Here’s the catch. It was a scorching hot day, and that car was like an oven. The cops knew they had a very limited time to find the kid before he cooked. They tried everything; appeals to reason, to decency, threats of a harsh prison sentence, and he just kept telling them to fuck off. Eventually, the cops just beat the piss out of the guy and within a minute he told them everything. They got to the kid just in time. Torture worked.

In other instances, the mere threat of torture has worked. There was a case in Germany where a guy kidnapped a kid and held him to ransom. The cops found the guy, but not the kid. Unfortunately, the psycho had already killed the kid but the cops didn’t know that. For all they knew, the kid was trapped and starving. So they interrogated this guy for like two whole days, to absolutely no avail whatsoever. They threw everything but the kitchen sink at this asshole and he just kept denying everything. Eventually, in desperation, the chief investigator threatened to beat the shit out of the guy unless he told them what he knew. He immediately confessed. The mere threat of torture worked.

I go to the trouble of recounting these unpleasant stories to pre-empt those people (and I’ve encountered plenty elsewhere online) who just continually and obstinately state outright that torture never, ever works. For those people, here are two explicit cases where it has, so you can’t make that argument.

Anyway, onto the moral case for torture in certain very limited situations. Specifically, water boarding, since that seems to be how it’s done nowadays. Now, remember, what I’m arguing is that water boarding is morally permissible in CERTAIN SITUATIONS. Those situations, in my opinion, must fulfil the following criteria:
[ul]
[li] It must be during a time of war in which we have already decided to resort to aerial bombardment of populated areas in order to achieve our military aims, like in Iraq and Afghanistan.[/li][li] It must be when all other interrogation techniques have failed.[/li][li] It must be when we have a reasonable expectation that the successful extraction of useful information via water boarding can prevent a planned military operation (i.e. a bombing raid or ground assault) that is certain to result in a loss of civilian life.[/li][/ul]

You may think these are very stringent criteria for the use of water boarding, and you’re right. They are. To reiterate, I’m only advocating for the moral permissibility of water boarding in extremely limited situations. I know that torture has a very low success rate (although, as I’ve proven, that rate is greater than zero). I know that other techniques are much more successful (which is why I’ve included point 2 in the list above). And I also know that the potential consequences of water boarding the wrong person are disastrous, both ethically and militarily (in terms of the wrong information we might receive). That is why I’ve included point 3, above.

Point 3 is the most important for a very simple reason. I defy any of you to state a single metric by which a single act of water boarding does more harm than a single 2000 lb bomb dropped on a populated area. I’ve anticipated some of these potential metrics and I would like to pre-emptively rebut them now: [ul]

[li] Water boarding hurts innocent people? Well, bombing kills and maims innocent people, including children and babies.[/li][li] Water boarding turns people against us? Well, so does bombing hospitals, water treatment plants, apartment complexes and weddings, all of which we’ve done at one time or another during our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.[/li][li] Water boarding elicits false information? Well, bombing is not an exact science and sometimes we bomb the wrong places altogether. Indeed, during a prolonged bombing campaign, such disastrous mistakes are a mathematical certainty. As it turns out, our ‘smart bombs’ aren’t really all that smart.[/li][li] Collateral damage during bombing raids is accidental? So what? That’s small consolation to the people our bombs maim and kill. Besides, when we water board the wrong person, that’s an accident as well.[/li][li] Water boarding makes our entire nation look bad. Again, so does bombing civilians. However, unlike bombing, there is an easy fix. Water boarding can be declared “officially illegal”, and can be a punishable offence, but with the unwritten understanding that torturers will only be prosecuted if their acts become public knowledge.[/li][li] Water boarding is mentally scarring? Not as mentally scarring as losing your family because we dropped a bomb on your house.[/li][li] Water boarding is physically scarring? Actually, no. Water boarding leaves no permanent physical injuries. The shrapnel from our bombs, however, does.[/li][li] Water boarding is just fucking WRONG, damn it! Yeah. I agree. It is. But however you slice it, bombing is just fucking worse. So if you have reason to believe that, by water boarding someone, you can extract information that would render a bombing raid unnecessary, the moral thing to do is break out the water board. Remember, the likelihood of success is greater than zero, and (as per my 3 point list above) other, more reliable techniques will have already been tried to no avail.[/ul][/li]
As Paul Bloom has noted:

”Again, which is worse, water boarding a terrorist, or killing/maiming him? Which is worse, water boarding an innocent person or killing/maiming him? There are journalists who have volunteered to be water boarded. Where are all the journalists who have volunteered to have a 5,000 lb bomb dropped on their homes with their families inside?”

The fact that so many people seem to find this argument abhorrent can mean only one of two things:

  1. My contention, that our moral intuitions regarding torture make no damn sense, is correct.

  2. There’s a flaw in the argument. In which case, I would be genuinely indebted to anyone who could point it out. Believe it or not, I don’t like making this argument. I’d be happier opposing water boarding in all instances, even times of war, and even when we’re dropping bombs on people. I just don’t see how such a stance makes moral sense.

2

One shouldn’t confuse moral with legal opposition to torture.

I was convinced years ago, based on essentially the same argument, that torture is morally permissible in some situations. However, I think that it should in all situations be illegal.

If I am utterly convinced that torturing someone will prevent a nuke from going off, and I’m in a situation to do so, I’m not going to let some silly thing like the threat of lifetime imprisonment stop me. I’m just going to do it. Same goes for torturing the kidnapper of my kid.

Maybe, if and when my actions are judged in court, I will be given leniency because of the situation. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter, because it was still worth it, as far as I was concerned.

I think it’s critical that the threat is still there. The situation has to be dire enough that you’re willing to put your own freedom on the line to save the others. Anything less and, well, maybe the moral cost of the torture is not actually worth it. Or maybe you aren’t really convinced of the likelihood that the torture will be useful. If the situation doesn’t meet this standard, torture probably isn’t warranted.

3

As you state your criteria are very stringent. The number of cases where all three maybe quite small, but the number of cases in which the last two can be verified at the time of the torture is non-existent. I also find it interesting that the examples you gave where torture worked failed to satisfy your first criterion.

My general feeling is that if you are in a situation where the clear moral imperative to get information is so strong that you would be willing to torture for it, then you are in a situation in which the moral imperative is so strong that you should be willing to suffer the legal consequences of committing torture. Presumably this was the case in the example you gave from New Zealand.

ETA: what Dr. Strangelove said

4

I think the seeming contradiction comes in where some people who are opposed to water boarding are also opposed to indiscriminate bombing. You have two groups of opposition, that somewhat overlap.

But in the larger sense, what are the purposes of bombing vs water boarding? We no longer engage in strategic bombing (WWII area bombardment), but when we did, it wasn’t to elicit the location of a kidnapped child. It was to kill the enemy and destroy their means to wage war. There are those even in WWII who opposed area bombardment as inhumane. The debate still exists in questions such as was bombing Dresden a war crime.

Current bombing is supposed to be targeted. Only the “bad guys” get killed. Of course, that isn’t the truth. Personally, I wish we would be more careful about who we bomb.

But what is water boarding for? Does the information gained (if any useful info is gained) help? Or is it just “payback”? Bullies doing what bullies do. Instilling fear in our “enemies”? There aren’t that many ticking bomb scenarios that “require” torture.

My moral complaints about torture aren’t just that it is immoral (it is), but that the cost is too high. You don’t get enough wheat for all the chaff you generate. People just love to torture others. You give people the mandate to do it, and they’ll do it all the time.

5

I agree with you both. Torture may be morally permissible in certain situations, but it should always be illegal.

6

Should the Nazis have been allowed to torture prisoners? Let them stick hot needles under the fingernails of suspected resistance members? Should we have just accepted that, let it go? They were trying to protect their way of life, after all.

Should we have just let the NVA beat and brutalize American prisoners? Keep them in tiger cages?

Should it have been accepted US policy to drop suspected VC out of helicopters? It’s more humane to kill one than napalm an entire village.

If not, then why is water boarding acceptable?

7

Yes, this. When we make an act illegal, we put a high cost on committing the act. And that high cost means that people have to think seriously about doing the act before they do it.

For each and every law on the books, we can come up with any number of scenarios where it might be moral to break the law, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the law itself is bad.

And in our legal system, we have a number of ways to offer leniency after the fact (such as an executive pardon). If someone thinks that they had to torture in order to accomplish a greater good, then let them make an argument for leniency. But, I’m not inclined to support legal carve-outs for torture.

8

It can be argued that since the dead don’t suffer, torturing people is worse than killing them. But I’m not sure how far I want to push that argument, since it may lead to some pretty disturbing conclusions.

I would also echo what others have said about the distinction between moral and legal permissibility. Even if there are some cases in which torture is morally acceptable, if you give someone the license to torture, can you trust them to use it only in those cases? I believe that most torture is done simply as punishment or revenge. Our moral intuitions can take that into account.

9

“If you somehow can save them by waterboarding”? The problem is just there, the world is filled with many examples of governments that claimed that they indeed had to save people and therefore torture was needed.

Unfortunately I have not seen any example of a government that got things right or that did not use the **false **information gathered by torture to convince their followers or citizens that what the government was doing was justifiable.

What this justification of torture also misses is that it assumes that criminals and terrorists will never give their henchmen a misleading history to tell their captors and lead the authorities to an even worse fate.

It is very likely that this took place when we tortured guys with an interest to lead the US and England into invading Iraq.

10

Why wait until war is declared / underway? If we’d waterboarded some Iraqis before invading and learned that their WMD program was fictional, we might have been able to avoid the whole war, saving thousands of American lives and tens / hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives (and a LOT of $$$).

In other words, I think your criteria are too strict, and I think waterboarding is a fairly mild form of “torture”.

11

Why shouldn’t the police waterboard suspects?

I don’t see the relevance of comparing torture to bombing. I’m not aware of many people calling for less torture and more bombing. About the only overlap is they can both be used as collective punishment, but nowadays bombing by most Western nations usually has a more concrete goal (inb4 Israel).

As for the trolley problem, I agree people have dumb morality, but usually because they don’t want to admit to wanting to do bad things. What’s usually the case is people will admit to doing impersonal bad things (pressing a button), but not to more direct action, such as pushing someone onto the tracks or raping someone. Even though it’s obviously the correct answer. I usually go for the cold, logical answer, which I guess makes me a sociopath or something. It’s silly though, because absent a genie or trickster god in a fantasy setting these are incredibly contrived scenarios that can’t happen.

EDIT:

Unlikely. We would have tortured until they told us what we wanted to know, which is that Iraq had or was reconstituting its WMD program.

12

Cite? I’m genuinely curious to learn about torture that lead us to invade Iraq.

13

The problem with your comparison (bombing/waterboarding) is that it fails to take into account that torture is always done on a prisoner, without trial. If you want to compare killing to torturing, the comparison should be with executing a prisoner without trial.

14
15

You assume too much.

The way I heard the problem, its a choice of active or passive death that you’re responsible for.

Most people would flip a switch to divert a train from a track with 2 people onto a track with one. Most people, however, would NOT push a single person onto the track to save two. And I’m not convinced most people would rather be tortured for years than have a quick death. That’s why many detainees in Guantanamo try to kill themselves, because death is preferable to torture. You need to get it into your head that we cannot let anyone torture for any reason, and if they do torture and somehow get actionable intelligence that’s valid and only obtainable from torture, then those responsible for the torture must stand trial so that the American people can judge whether or not that was worth breaking our own laws, international treaties we’re a part of, and our own morality.

16

But this is the whole reason that people don’t answer the “would you rape your grandma to keep the nuclear bomb from going off?” in a so-called logical way. And this is because our moral instincts are useful in normal everyday situations. In real life, there is never a case where if you sodomize a four year old to death you get to prevent a nuclear bomb from going off. It just doesn’t happen, outside of convoluted scenarios created to deliberately conflict with our natural moral senses.

In real life, the people who want to rape children to death do so because that’s the sort of thing they enjoy doing, not because it will save New York City from a nuclear bomb. In real life, the people who torture prisoners are people who enjoy torture, otherwise why would they be the guy who tortures the prisoners? They’d let crazy Frank over in Sector 7 handle it, because torture makes regular people sick, but not Frank.

In fiction the torture scenario always posits certain constraints that in real life are almost always absent. In fiction, the prisoner to be tortured is known for sure to be a really evil person who, even if the torture doesn’t work, certainly deserves torture. In real life the prisoner to be tortured might be anybody, or might be a loved one of the person you’re trying to extract information from, or you might not even know who the person is, but they’ve ended up in the torture chamber, so that means they get tortured, if they didn’t deserve to be here then why are they here? In fiction, it is always known for sure that the person to be tortured has the information you need, you just need to get it from them somehow. In real life you never know if the prisoner has the information, but you torture them anyhow because maybe they do, anyway, your boss told you that someone told him that they might know something, so torture away. In fiction the prisoner is a badass hardened militant who doesn’t respond to conventional interrogation techniques, yet is also a coward who will break under mild “torture-lite” techniques that aren’t even torture anyway, like sleep deprivation, waterboarding, hypothermia, and so on. In real life prisoners are a mixed bag, but the cowards who will spill their secrets in seconds when threatened with a water boarding are also the sort who would spill their secrets to a sympathetic authority figure. In fiction, the torture takes place in a few minutes, and the authorities race to act on the information before it’s too late. In reality the torture continues for weeks and months and the authorities never know whether the information given is true or false. In fiction, the prisoner is tortured for important information. In real life the usual goal of torture is to force the prisoner to confess to various crimes and implicate their friends and family in crimes, and that confession is used to retroactively justify the torture of the prisoner, and to arrest their associates so that the associates can be tortured in turn. In fiction, conventional interrogation like acting sympathetic to the prisoner and chatting with them about their crimes is useless. In real life it is extremely effective. In fiction, torture is done dispassionately by tough-minded realists who love their country and are willing to get their hands dirty to protect innocent people. In real life torture is done by sadists who enjoy torture for its own sake, otherwise they wouldn’t volunteer to be the guy who gets to torture the prisoners. In fiction torturers are professionals who know what it takes to get the information they need. In real life torturers are amateurs who wing it, because there is almost never a formal torture school that teaches scientifically verified techniques, instead it all has to be done on the down-low by people who make it up as they go along. In fiction the goal is always information. In real life the goal is punishment of the prisoner, and gratifying the sadistic impulses of the torturer.

And on and on. It turns out that these convoluted scenarios where torture, and only torture, is the correct moral decision are convoluted for a reason, and they give the person asked certain knowledge that in real life would be impossible to know for certain.

So if you ever do find yourself in a situation where it seems like sodomizing a four year old to death is the only correct moral decision, maybe you should check your premises, and ask yourself if you’re as sure of your premises as you think you are. Maybe you’ll find that you’ve ignored some factors that you really, in real life, shouldn’t ignore.

17

Firstly, don’t bother me with hypotheticals. They are essentially meaningless if they are unrealistic (example 1: torturing someone to stop a runaway trolley; example 2: stopping the detonation of a thousand nuclear bombs by torturing one person. Utter nonsense, both scenarios.)

Here’s the flaw, as I see it.

  1. In real-world cases, most of the time you simply don’t know for sure, before the torture, whether a given person has the information you are looking for or not. It’s almost guaranteed that you’ll need to torture one or more innocent people to maybe find one who knows what you want. Please tell me what ratio of innocent to guilty would be acceptable to you.

  2. As someone else mentioned, certain people really, really like the idea of punishing people they suspect of doing harm, without all the messiness and red tape of a trial. Torture provides an excellent outlet for those urges, and the people that enjoy torturing others will game the system to make sure they get plenty of chances to do so.

  3. Who says that dropping bombs on people, some of whom are guaranteed innocent, is any more moral than torturing people? I certainly don’t. In my view, you are posing a false dichotomy. Indiscriminate bombing, I think we all can agree, is very, very bad. That doesn’t magically make torture more moral.

  4. Since you like hypotheticals, maybe you’ll consider this one: try and imagine a close relative, let’s say your 17 year-old son, being tortured just because he happened to be on a street corner at the same time as a couple of other people the authorities rounded up because of suspected terrorism. Would you tell him after the fact, “hey, it was only a mild form of torture, and they got the bad guys anyway, so man up?”

Hey, I’m sure torture does indeed work in a few circumstances. Given how often it is used as a back-door punishment, however, I am simply unconvinced that it is worth the cost of all the collateral ruined lives.

18

It’s illegal to steal. We don’t write loopholes into theft laws making it legal to steal if stealing would avert some greater evil. Instead if someone steals to avert some greater evil, then those extenuating circumstances are taken into account. The prosecutor may decline to press charges. The jury may refuse to convict. The judge may suspend the sentence. The governor may issue a pardon.

It should be the same with torture. Yes, occasionally torture might be the lesser of two evils. But instead of trying to write loopholes into the law to anticipate those rare situations, we should make torture illegal and take extenuating circumstances into account when it comes time to try or punish the torturers.

19

Many people consider killing to be *less *squeamish than torture. Especially if it’s detached, remote, emotionally distant killing - i.e., dropping a bomb on an enemy from 25,000 feet.

20

Merely killing someone is nowhere near as abhorrent as subjecting someone to torture. (My inclination is to append “Duh!” here)