[Bill,
January 29, 2008]
Torture
One thing I pride myself on (a dangerous state of being) is not being intellectually fooled about general principles. My behavior only intermittently matches my principles, but I usually think I've got the principle right. I credit my Catholic education, which, if you do it right, usually gives you a pretty good nose for spotting intellectual bullshit.
I have to admit, though, that I got intellectually snookered on the waterboarding thing. I let my emotions get the best of me and used my intellect to justify my emotions. Waterboarding is torture, and we can't support torture. End of story. Questions about what kind of interrogation techniques should be allowed and not allowed -- I'll leave those for others. But the fundamental underlying principle -- that we can't torture -- needs to remain inviolable. We can't do evil that good may come.
That said, I wonder what else I'm missing :)
I have to admit, though, that I got intellectually snookered on the waterboarding thing. I let my emotions get the best of me and used my intellect to justify my emotions. Waterboarding is torture, and we can't support torture. End of story. Questions about what kind of interrogation techniques should be allowed and not allowed -- I'll leave those for others. But the fundamental underlying principle -- that we can't torture -- needs to remain inviolable. We can't do evil that good may come.
That said, I wonder what else I'm missing :)
It is OK to be against torture. The high road isn't always the convenient or easy road.
What about this though: we allow capital punishment on those proven to be guilty --- so can we torture people that are proven to be guilty so we might extract useful information? Are there people who are just so heinous that we don't have to have a compulsion against extreme interrogation methods?
Are there people so heinous that we can torture them to get useful info? Unfortunately, the answer is no, we can't. If there are non-torturous methods of accomplishing the same thing, that's all right. Like I said, this is more about the general principle than the specifics.
If this is a general principle, please state that principle precisely.
We punish guilty people all of the time. However, we don't punish innocents on the off-chance they might be guilty.
Tortured people will confess to all sorts of crap --- sort torturing out a confession is not proof of guilt (brings to mind the Inquisition).
Hence my question --- is there any time when you can use legitimately use torture?
How about this: define the crime of not telling us what you know, and the punishment is waterboarding. If the crime ends, then the waterboarding ends. Thus it's not torture, it's simply punishment for a crime. Then everything's cool, right?
More generally, if something is intrinsically evil, it must be evil independent of its end. Thus if spanking a child isn't evil, we should be able to spank terrorists to get information from them. Since the action isn't intrinsically evil, it can't be torture.
And painful electric shocks are sometimes useful as a medical procedure -- so not being intrinsically evil, they can never be torture either, right?
In other words, you're going to have to define your terms better.
(Super G: obviously coercive interrogation only makes sense when the desired result is verifiable intelligence. E.g. "we're going to hit you with this stick until we find the bomb. If you want to tell us anything that will help us find it sooner, feel free to mention it while we're busy hitting you." If you want coercive interrogation to be effective, you structure it such that lying doesn't do the person subjected to it any good.)
SuperG: No, torture is never permissible.
Defining "torture" effectively, however, is a different story. Yes, we need to define the terms.
My point in conflating electric shocks as torture and electric shocks as a medical procedure is that they're distinguished not by anything in the shocks themselves, but by the end to which they're employed. That is, the electrical shocks are not themselves evil, they're evil in so far as the end to which they're employed is evil.
But since you've defined torture as "intrinsically evil" — and electric shocks are clearly not intrinsically evil — electric shocks can't be torture.
That's the problem with saying that "the end don't justify the means". If the ends won't justify the means, what else will justify them? In this world of sin and woe, all action is, after all, violence. Every act of human creation is an act of destruction. If that destruction is not justified by the creation it brings about, what else can justify it? Destruction can't be justified for its own sake.
(Please note that I'm using the term "destruction" very broadly. To mine marble is to destroy a mountain, to carve it into a statue is to destroy the marble block. To get up out of a chair is to destroy the picturesqueness of sitting in it, to say nothing of the occasional microorganism which lives in our skin which was probably ground up by the friction involved in getting up. To speak is to destroy silence. These are, certainly, very minor acts of destruction. But small evils are not made good by virtue of being small, despite the fact that human beings don't really have the energy to worry about them. Theology is about all truth, not just the truth which we happen to like or have the energy for.)
So, electric shocks are quite a good example of showing that it is less the means than the ends. It doesn't matter if you use a match to induce burns, pile stones on them, partially drown them, electrify their nuts, break their feet, cut off their breasts, or simply beat them with your hands. You can't define torture by the means, only the impact.
I've always been on the don't torture side on moral and utilitarian side, but only recently was thinking about whether it was ever justifiable. In part, I think torture is bad policy. It is generally not discriminating. It seems to appeal the basest of human instincts. It dehumanizes both the target and the torturer. It harms us in other broader ways that could be offsetting what ever benefits it gets. It's positive performance can probably be documented, but its opportunity cost may be immense and much harder to document. E.g. there is a moral and physical cost associated with torture that makes it not worthwhile.
Yet - here is a hypothetical example - you see the guy set the code on a bomb and activate it. Only he knows the answer. Innocents will die if he doesn't tell you. In this case, there is not a question of guilt or even whether the fellow has actionable intelligence. It really wouldn't trouble me to see this individual tortured if necessary to rapidly extract information.
This is a very contrived case AND even then, if you could simply arrest the guy and call in the bomb squad, you wouldn't consider ever torturing the guy.