The Ethics of Torture.

Great Debates
1

I’ve just got done finishing this article by Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith) and he makes what I consider to be a very novel and persuasive point about the ethics of torture. His argument, in a nutshell, is:

“There are extreme circumstances in which I believe that practices like “water-boarding” may not only be ethically justifiable, but ethically necessary. This is not the same as saying that they should be legal (e.g. crimes like trespassing or theft may sometimes be ethically necessary, while remaining illegal).”

He goes on to say:

“My argument for the limited use of coercive interrogation (“torture” by another name) is essentially this: if you think it is ever justifiable to drop bombs in an attempt to kill a man like Osama bin Laden (and thereby risk killing and maiming innocent men, women, and children), you should think it may sometimes be justifiable to “water-board” a man like Osama bin Laden (and risk abusing someone who just happens to look like Osama bin Laden). It seems to me that however one compares the practices of “water-boarding” high-level terrorists and dropping bombs, dropping bombs always comes out looking worse in ethical terms. And yet, most people tacitly accept the practice of modern warfare, while considering it taboo to even speak about the possibility of practicing torture.”

I think this is a very good point. We have a marked tendency to consider the ethics of torture in isolation, without taking into account the context in which acts of torture are performed. This context, at least when it comes to Western Governments, is, it seems, always the bloody context of a “Hot” war, against terrorist insurgents. Harris argues that, if we’re prepared to drop bombs on civilian population centres and military installations to neutralise these people, we should also be prepared to inflict torture if we believe it will further our goals. Which brings me to the next point.

A lot of people may object to Harris’s reasoning on the grounds that torture doesn’t work anyway. Harris argues that this is an unfalsifiable claim. One cannot argue in principle that torture never works, because that depends on the person being tortured. Indeed, Harris cites this case, in which the mere threat of torture successfully elicited a full and accurate confession from a previously recalcitrant suspect.

So, have a look at Harris’s article, and tell me what you think? Does Harris make a persuasive case? Are his arguments strong enough to change your opinion of the use of torture in certain situations? Personally, I found the article surprisingly persuasive. Whereas before, I believed that torture was inexcusable in all situations, I now feel that, if the stakes are high enough, if we’ve otherwise run out of options, and especially if we’re bombing innocent civilians anyway, the judicious use of torture may be ethically permissable.

2

One key difference is that you drop bombs on someone when you have no reasonable alternative of deterring them. If you have someone in custody, there are alternatives to torture for getting information.

But one can always argue that those are artificial lines drawn in the sand, that in reality you do have alternatives to dropping bombs (you just don’t want to use them) and that alternatives to torture won’t necessarily work.

I’m not one of those who believes torture doesn’t work (imagine someone breaks into your home and threatens to torture you if you don’t give him the combination to your safe). But, you need to be able to verify that the information gotten is correct, and usually people are talking about the “ticking time bomb” scenario when torture is justified, and then you usually don’t have the time to determine if the info obtained is correct.

3

Just reading his prelude about a nuclear attack against a Muslim is evidence enough of his boneheadedness.

And while it can’t be proven that torture never works, it equally can’t be proven that torture is ever necessary. But there is a great deal of evidence that is not necessary in many cases. And there is a good deal of evidence that torture does not always work. And there is a vast amount of evidence that torture elicits far more false confessions than it does true ones.

And there is no way to determine in advance whether torture will be effective. If it is formally legitimized in any way, it will ultimately be used as a rather routine escalation of technique against anyone who refuses to provide the expected answers. Mohammad Atta was waterboarded… was it fify-ish or a hundred and fifty-ish times, I can’t recall – and by official reports, never provided any actionable intelligence.

4

I don’t think people are seriously arguing that torture never works; the argument is that the information gained through torture is unreliable. Or more importantly is less reliable than information gained through less extreme interrogation methods.

If one is trying to obtain actionable information (and in extreme situations the action may be ‘drop a bomb’ or ‘send in Seal Team 6’) then one wants to use the best possible information gathering method to avoid wasted resources or collateral damage.

5

He’s using the old trick of using wholly unrealistic scenarios to justify behavior that in the real world works out entirely differently. In the real world, torture isn’t committed by people trying to stop bombs from going off; it’s committed by sadists and fanatics. They aren’t going to care if the person “just looks like Osama bin Laden”; after enough torture he’ll admit to being bin Laden anyway. Nor will they care if they get the actual lcoation of any bombs, or even if there are any bombs. This is after all exactly what we have seen in the real world; not the idealized version of torture that its proponents keep pushing.

Torturers are monsters and will act like monsters, not like the imaginary dispassionate professionals pro-torture people always bring up in these arguments.

A threat isn’t the same as the real thing. And all potential victims have something in common; they are human.

And even then that argument fails by trying to pretend each case can be taken in isolation. There’s the fact that torture dries up other intelligence sources (people typically don’t willingly talk to torturers, or turn in criminals to them), it creates more enemies where there weren’t any, destroys any moral high ground you had*, ruins the victim as an intelligence source, and buries any genuine information you get under a mountain of falsehood.

  • In other words why should I care if it works? By engaging in torture, you’ve just demonstrated that your side is composed of monsters and deserves to be slaughtered.
6

An extreme scenario can be imagined to justify any activity. This is a remarkably low burden to meet.

7

Yes. “Aliens show up and say that if you don’t rape a six year old child they’ll blow up Earth. Wouldn’t then be ethical to rape the child to preserve humanity, sacrificing one person for billions? Is it therefore ethical to molest children under certain circumstances?”

Basing them on extreme contrived hypotheticals makes for bad moral principles.

8

But, Jack Bauer always seemed to use it very effectively?

9

What if the only way to succeed in his nuclear first strike against the Muslim world required water-boarding a few of them first? I’d not heard of him before, but Sam Harris has got to be one of the most morally bankrupt people on the planet.

10

He’s a monster and he’s a popular character because America is a nation full of monsters. A nation full of sadists and murderers and fanatics.

11

Actually, the answer is still no - any creature evil enough to murder seven billion people if you refuse to rape a child is evil enough to lie and murder them anyway.

12

I think he’s half-wizard too.

13

Come to think of it, if your society agrees to torture an innocent child in order to save itself, that would be pretty good evidence it didn’t deserve to continue to exist. :wink:

14

Or, it’s a test to see how eff’d up a species we are. Besides, look at the date — Tricksy aliens!

15

Dropping bombs is legal. Torture is not legal.

He shouldn’t justify torture because some collateral damage is justified. Just take a stance on torture. Or against collateral damage. I don’t see the need to argue both like they are related to each other. One is related to taking someone out of combat, the other is about gathering intelligence.

16

I wouldn’t say it’s ethical to do otherwise unethical acts under certain circumstances, but rather that it is necessary to do unethical acts under certain circumstances.

17

But you can’t be certain it’s necessary. The only certainty is that you’re bring told it’s necessary. As cymk suggested, what if it’s some kind of weird test? And as I mentioned earlier, there is absolutely no way you can tell in advance whether torture would be necessary to elicit information, and no guarantee it would work.

18

I’m not sure if you’re serious here, but… this is obviously a fairly silly tangent, because how is an entire society going to end up in a situation in which it has to choose between torturing an innocent child and ceasing to exist? I think it’s reasonable to say “a society which convinces itself that it’s necessary to torture an innocent child when in fact it’s just convenient to torture an innocent child doesn’t deserve to continue to exist”, but that’s really not quite the same thing. Not-torturing-a-single-innocent-child-to-death has a LOT of value, but it doesn’t have infinite value. It’s not, for instance, more valuable than not-torturing-two-inncoent-children-to-death. And our-entire-society-continues-to-exist has a lot of value also.

19

As for the original point, I think that there’s an interesting gray area of actions that are not legal, and people agree should not be legal, but which are also not necessarily immoral. Stealing bread to save your starving child is not legal. And it should not be legal, because how could you possibly write that law in a fashion that wouldn’t be infinitely abusable? Torture is not legal, and it should not be legal, both because of issues of difficultly of defining the precise situations in which it would be “ok”, and because of the fundamental ethical issue that legalizing torture would make us, as a society, worse. That said, there are situations I can imagine in which I would not view torture as an unnaceptable choice. The key question for me is whether they are very very rare, or whether they are so preposterously rare as to be effectively never. Frankly, I’m not sure. But fortunately I’m not a law enforcement officer or anti-terrorist person or what have you, so my moderate indecisiveness on the topic is unlikely to be relevant.

20

Actually it IS relevant, since you have the choice of electing people who support torture or not. America chose to re-elect Bush, and therefore has branded itself as a pro-torture nation. And by doing so identified itself as collectively and willfully evil.