Cosma Shalizi, 11/4/2007: "The object of torture is torture":
The point of this torture is not to extract information; there are better ways to do that, which we have long used. The point of this torture is not to extract confessions; there are no show trials of terrorists or auto-de-fes in the offing. The point of this torture is to exercise unlimited, unaccountable power over other human beings; to negate the very point of our country, to our profound and lasting national shame.
This, it must be emphasized, is all that torture has ever been good for. Torture did not lead us to Osama bin Laden, and while WMD claims obtained due to torture did lead us into an invasion of Iraq, torture did not actually help the occupying force locate the alleged weapons. And, of course, the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and in Abu Ghraib did immeasurable harm to American troops in the field, and to Iraqi civilians killed by their enraged neighbors. Torture doesn't work, and that may well be the least of its problems. Even if it did work, it'd be wrong: a violation of law precisely because it's a violation of very basic moral codes.
Torture doesn't work because someone being tortured has every incentive not to tell the truth, but to tell the torturer what the torturer wants to hear. As Christopher Hitchens describes his own, voluntary, experience with torture:
The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer.
By "any answer," he doesn't just mean "any true answer." He means "any answer that would end the torture." He explains:
It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. [A counterterrorism expert] told me that he had heard of someone's being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite.
Similarly, I recall a story I read in the Chicago Reader as a student in the '90s. Around this time, 14 men on Illinois' death row had been exonerated and released, meaning that more people had been exonerated than executed. And many of the people falsely convicted and sent to be executed were convicted based on confessions obtained through torture. Chicago Reader reporter John Conroy bird-dogged that story, uncovering the long history of torture in Chicago's police stations, the history of false confessions which resulted, and of criminals never brought to justice because the wrong man was convicted of the crime.
Here's his account of one such incident:
It was a bond hearing--a session in which a judge is merely supposed to set bail for the accused, not make any determination of guilt or innocence. ... Nonetheless Patterson persisted, trying to interrupt the proceedings and finally getting a nod from the judge that he could say something. Without hesitation, he claimed to have been suffocated with a plastic bag.
Two years later, on March 30, 1988, he told his story at some length at a hearing on a motion to suppress his confession. He described his arrest and interrogation as an ordeal that lasted 25 hours. He claimed that upon his arrival at Area Two, he asked for an attorney. None was provided. He claimed that when his interrogators grew tired of his unwillingness to confess to a crime he had not committed, they cuffed his hands behind his back, turned off the lights in the interview room, covered his face with a gray typewriter cover so that he could not breathe, and began beating him about the chest. When the lights were turned back on, the detectives were sitting and standing about the room as they had been before, as if nothing had happened. Patterson says he again asked for an attorney, to no avail, and the detectives said they would repeat the treatment until he cooperated. When he continued in his refusal, he says, the lights went off and the typewriter cover again was placed over his face. "I was trying to find an outlet where I could breathe and they was saying, 'Well, hold his nose and his mouth.' And they did that for a minute or two. And they kept on saying, 'Answer me. Answer me,' you know. And I wouldn't say nothing. And then after a while they kept on doing it and they was punching me and stuff and I said, 'OK, anything you say.'" The lights then went back on and the Apache Ranger saw the detectives as they had been before.
At that point, faced with the prospect of going through the suffocation and beating routine repeatedly, Patterson says he stopped resisting. "So I more or like just said, 'Whatever you say,' you know. Everything they said I would like, 'OK, whatever you say.' They was more or less telling me what was supposed to have transpired at that house, you know, what their theory was about what happened."
Seemingly assured that their quarry was under their control, the detectives removed his handcuffs, Patterson says, and left him alone for about an hour while they rounded up a state's attorney. According to Patterson, assistant state's attorney Kip Owen entered the room with a plainclothes policeman whom Patterson later identified as Jon Burge. Patterson says he asked to speak to Owen alone, and after Burge left asked for an attorney and declined to make a statement. Owen allegedly walked out. Burge walked in, Patterson says, sat down, took out his gun, and put it on the table. Patterson claims that Burge said "you are fucking up," that things would get worse for him, that if he told of what he'd been through it would be "your word against our word. And who are they going to believe, you or us?" (In a recent interview with the Reader, Owen called this account "absolute nonsense....I don't know that I have ever met Jon Burge, ever in my entire life.")
In Patterson's account, Burge left the room again and the Apache Ranger found a paper clip on the floor. He used it to scratch two messages into the bench and one into the door frame indicating that he had been tortured and prevented from calling for help. Those messages were later discovered intact by Isaac Carothers, an investigator with the public defender's office and now 29th Ward alderman. According to an affidavit filed by Carothers, one etching read as follows:
Aaron 4-30-86
I lied about murders
Police threatened me with
violence, slapped and
suffocated me with plastic
(no phone)
(no lawyer)
(no Dad)
In another from his series of articles, Conroy describes another instance of torture, this time of a man granted re-trial because of police torture, and who was re-convicted without the forced confession (I quote these at length so we know what we're talking about):
Wilson went on to relate the events of February 14, 1982, from his point of view. He claimed that upon leaving the apartment where the arrest had taken place, Burge told his men not to assault the prisoner, adding "We'll get him at the station." When they got to Area 2 headquarters, Wilson said, he was taken into a small room, thrown to the floor, and beaten; then he was kicked in the eye--the kick tore his retina, he said--and someone took a plastic bag out of the garbage can and put it over his head, causing him to suffocate until he bit a hole in the bag. That session ended, Wilson said, when Burge walked in and told the assembled cops that "he wouldn't have messed my face up, he wouldn't have messed me up"--in other words, that Wilson's assailants had screwed up, that they should not have left any marks.
Wilson testified that he was then taken to Interview Room Number 2, and that Burge said something on the order of "My reputation is at stake and you are going to make a statement." According to Wilson, Detective Yucaitis entered the room a short time later carrying a brown paper bag from which he extracted a black box. Yucaitis allegedly pulled two wires out of the box, attached them with clamps to Wilson's right ear and nostril, and then turned a crank on the side of the box. "I really can't explain it," Wilson said. "The first time he did it, it just hurt. I can't explain it. When Burge was doing it I can explain more because he did it more. . . . It hurts, but it stays in your head, OK? It stays in your head and it grinds your teeth. . . . It grinds, constantly grinds, constantly. . . . The pain just stays in your head. . . . It's just like this light here like when it flickers, it flickers . . . and your teeth constantly grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds. All my bottom teeth was loose behind that, these four or five of them, and I tried to get the doctor to pull them. He said he wouldn't pull them because they would tighten back up."
"I kept hollering when he [Yucaitis] kept cranking," Wilson said, "but he stopped because somebody come to the door, so he went to the door and see what they wanted." When Yucaitis came back, Wilson said, he put the device back in the bag and left. Wilson testified that Burge returned with the black box about an hour later.
Q: What, if anything, did Commander Burge say when he came into the room?
A: He said "fun time."
According to Wilson, Burge put one clip on each of his suspect's ears and started cranking. Although he was handcuffed to a ring in the wall, he said, he could move his shoulders, and so was able to rub the clamps off his ears. "So they got tired of me rubbing the wire off my ear. So he unhandcuffed one of my hands, unhandcuffed the left hand, and he tried to stretch me across the room and the radiator was right there, so he was trying to stretch me across, across the room, and I wasn't going. So the officer, the other officer was there, he helped him, and they both stretched me across . . . they hooked me onto the other ring over there."
Wilson said that he was now unable to rub the clamps off his ears; each of his outstretched arms was handcuffed to a ring in the wall, and between the rings was a radiator that his chest sometimes touched.
A: . . . So I don't know if he put it back on my ears or what, but it didn't last long because he put it on my fingers, my baby fingers, one on one finger and one on the other finger and then he kept cranking it and kept cranking it, and I was hollering and screaming. I was calling for help and stuff. My teeth was grinding, flickering in my head, pain and all that stuff . . .
Q: While you were stretched across in this fashion, were you aware of whether or not the radiator was hot?
A: I wasn't paying no attention, but it burned me still. But I didn't even feel it. . . . That radiator . . . it wouldn't have mattered. That box . . . took over. That's what was happening. The heat radiator didn't even exist then. The box existed.
Q: . . . After Commander Burge stopped with the crank machine, what happened next?
A: He got the other one out. It's black and it's round and it had a wire sticking out of it and it had a cord on it. He plugged it into the wall. . . . He took it and he ran it up between my legs, my groin area, just ran it up there very gently . . . up and down, up and down, you know, right between my legs, up and down like this, real gentle with it, but you can feel it, still feel it. Then he jabbed me with the thing and it slammed me . . . into the grille on the window. Then I fell back down, and I think that's when I started spitting up the blood and stuff. Then he stopped.
Twice in the course of his testimony about the electrical devices, Wilson came close to breaking down. The first time came after Stainthorp asked, "And when he brought the brown paper bag back, what did he do with it?" Wilson's reply was, "I want to leave," and the judge declared a short recess. The second time came a few minutes later, when Wilson said that somehow, during the course of the electroshock, the alligator clip had come loose and he had gotten it in his hand, but the maneuver had done him no good, as he was simply shocked there as well. He lost his ability to continue the story, and was urged by Stainthorp to take a minute and compose himself.
Wilson said that later, after the electroshock was finished, he was taken to another police station for a lineup, and that there he got a mouthful of the lieutenant's gun. Burge, he said, "was playing with his gun . . . he was sticking it in my mouth and . . . he kept doing it, he kept clicking it and he had it in my mouth and stuff. So he finally pulled it out."
At 6:05 PM, after 13 hours in the custody of Area 2 police, Wilson gave a statement in which he confessed to the murders of officers Fahey and O'Brien. The statement was taken by Assistant State's Attorney Larry Hyman in the presence of Detective O'Hara and a court reporter. After their departure, Wilson was left alone with another detective and Mario Ferro and William Mulvaney, the two officers assigned to the paddy wagon that was to transport the prisoner to the lockup at 11th and State. On the stand Wilson claimed that he was beaten again at this point, and that his penis was grabbed and squeezed by one of the officers, the same one who would later club him on the head with a gun. Wilson said the detective told Ferro and Mulvaney that when they got to the lockup they should have Wilson put in an occupied cell, so it could be said later that other prisoners had caused his injuries....
The following morning, Wilson was taken to 26th and California for arraignment and admission to Cook County Jail. Ordinarily jail authorities take only a mug shot of an arriving prisoner. In Andrew Wilson's case they took pictures of his whole body so as not to be blamed for his injuries. The following day, Dale Coventry, the public defender appointed to defend Wilson, arranged to have more pictures taken of the prisoner, paying particular attention to Wilson's ears, chest, and thigh.
Blowups of the Coventry photos were the most troubling evidence against Commander Burge. The chest shots showed marks where Andrew Wilson said he had been burned against the radiator. A picture of his thigh showed a very large burn mark as well. The shots of the ears, however, were the most curious: they showed a pattern of U-shaped scabs that seemed inexplicable unless one believed that alligator clips had indeed been attached to Wilson's ears.
Conroy's meditation on how torture was allowed to persist for so long is also important, as is today's long piece in the New York Times about efforts to treat Iraqis who were tortured by the current and former Iraqi regimes.
Torture's defenders will be nonplussed by these accounts. Sure, they'll say, some people will sign false confessions under torture, but what about the scenarios popularized by 24, in which torture is necessary to speedily extract information to stop a bomb.
To my eye, these would be by far the worst cases to use torture, precisely because torture is not guaranteed to get accurate information. A smart terrorist would stop the torture by giving a false location, forcing police to waste time chasing false leads. How many such false leads would a terrorist have to plant in order to prevent the police from finding the real bomb? And if you have the bomb and need the terrorist's help disarming it, would you really trust disarming instructions obtained under torture? Wouldn't the terrorist's smartest move be to insist that you have to cut the blue wire to disarm the device, precisely because he knows doing so will detonate it?
But this is not why I think torture is wrong. Just because something benefits me doesn't mean it's morally right. Let us assume that the logic of torture were sound. What, then, if the only way to convince a terrorist to reveal the ticking bomb's location was not simply to waterboard him, or to tear off his fingernails, or to electrocute him. In this day and age, many bombers have no qualms about sacrificing their own lives, so even extreme torture might not induce them to talk, might only validate their martyrdom complexes.
Maybe dragging in their children would work. And if a little torture might help, then a lot of torture might be better. Maybe if you force the terrorist to watch his children be brutally raped and murdered before his eyes, that would break his spirit and force him to tell you everything.
That doesn't make rape or murder ethical, any more than it makes torture ethical. Indeed, I'd argue that the willingness to do what's right even when it's hard is exactly the measure of a person's morality.
And by that standard, torture's defenders fail consistently. So, via Ed Brayton, we find Sam Harris lazily repeating ticking bomb scenario, and arguing (in the context of his claim that morality is scientifically testable), that torture isn't always immoral. Indeed, he suggests he might even think of a willingness to countenance torture would be more politically important than a political candidate's willingness to accept basic science:
I'm a liberal through and through, but the idea that we could get to a moment in history where only our crazy demagogues can seem to recognise when there's a threat - I don't want to wake up for an election in the US thinking only this crazy conservative who I disagree with in every other point and who denies the truth of evolution, only he would be strong enough to defend civilisation against its genuine enemies. But there's something about liberal discourse which allows for that possibility.
Except, no. Part of what it means to be civilized is that you don't torture. If the only way to save civilization is to go around torturing people, then civilization is already lost.
And saying that doesn't make me a moral relativist (Harris's complaint against liberals). Saying that makes me not just an advocate of objective morality, but an absolutist on this issue.
Harris is certainly entitled to take a different view, to believe that torture is sometimes immoral and sometimes moral, and to pursue a vision of morality (and of torture) which allows different people to take different moral stances on the matter. But I find it untenable for him to hold himself up as the great defender of objective morality, and the arbiter of a new scientifically based morality, and to simultaneously argue for this wishy-washy attitude towards torture. Indeed, if this is where Harris's approach to morality leads us, then that's one more reason not to take him seriously as a moral philosopher.
And, indeed, it's another reason not to take Jerry Coyne seriously on moral and philosophical matters, since he's launched a defense of Harris's position on torture. He quotes extensively from Harris's writings, (including Harris's insistence that torture "may not only be ethically justifiable, but ethically necessary"), and concludes:
I think Sam has a point here. I'm not yet sure where I come down on torture in circumstances like the above, but I surely think the issue is worth discussing rather than reflexively dismissing. And yes, much of the dismissal has been reflexive--almost an excuse to simply reject all of Harris's views, just as Hitchens's stand on Iraq has been used to discredit his opinions on everything, including faith. I can't help but believe that some of the opposition to Harris's discussion of torture involves willful misunderstanding of his position, perhaps as an excuse to punish him for his strong critiques of religion.
Now Coyne is not exactly in a position to complain about people using a person's controversial views on one topic as grounds for dismissing everything else they said. Remember this? In any event, Harris's latest book is about morality, so it's hardly irrelevant to press him on his dubious ethical stands. Sure, many religious groups have declared their opposition to torture, but so have many non-religious groups, as have leading atheists like Chris Hitchens. Hitchens was wrong on Iraq but is, perhaps belatedly, right on torture. Harris and Coyne are wrong on torture. Wrong factually, and wrong morally. Coyne lives in Chicago, a city where torture was regularly practiced by police for decades. If he's been paying attention, he knows the cost it's imposed on innocent citizens, on the Chicago PD as an institution, and on society as a whole. And if he's not paying attention, why is he issuing grand proclamations about the motives of torture opponents?
People's reactions to moral questions are usually reflexive precisely because morality isn't just about cost-benefit analysis. It's like the classic Winston Churchill story:
At a dinner party Churchill says to his dinner companion, "Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?"
The woman responds, "My goodness, Mr. Churchill. I suppose I would."
Churchill replies, "Would you sleep with me for five pounds?"
She answers, "Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?"
Churchill answers, "Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price."
If the only thing holding you back from committing an atrocity like torture is the size of the payday, then we've established what sort of person you are, and everything else is just accounting.
So Harris argues, and Coyne "think[s] Harris has a point":
There is absolutely nothing in Luban's argument [against torture] that rules out the following law:
We will not torture anyone under any circumstances unless we are certain, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the person in our custody has operational knowledge of an imminent act of nuclear terrorism.
It seems to me that unless one can produce an ethical argument against torturing such a person, one does not have an argument against the use of torture in principle. Of course, my discussion of torture in The End of Faith (and on this page) only addresses the ethics of torture, not the practical difficulties of implementing a policy based on the ethics.
He's aiming to set aside practical details, so we'll ignore the fact that proof "beyond reasonable doubt" (in US law, which is the issue at hand) means a courtroom trial, with all the delay, access to witnesses, and public exposure that entails. We'll also set aside that if you can convict someone in court against such a stringent standard, and do so in a timely manner, you probably don't need the testimony anyway; you probably have so much evidence at hand that you can figure out those details on your own, and probably had to figure them out in order to make your legal case (through wiretaps, non-torture interrogations, and a host of other means all practically superior to torture). And, of course, you couldn't pass such a law because it would go against constitutional protections, not least a right against self-incrimination and a right against cruel and unusual punishment (and this would be punishment, since it requires the equivalent of a criminal conviction first). We'll ignore the fact that the police in the cases above, and the WMD hunters who employed torture, all believed they had the right person before them, and because they were misled by their own confidence they tortured confessions out of innocent men and women. We'll even set aside the question of why this is restricted to nuclear terrorism, and not biological or chemical weapons, or a conventional bomb in a sensitive site, or threats against critical infrastructure. The slippery slope is fairly obvious, and regularly traveled once torture is normalized (for instance, John Burge, the officer at the center of the Chicago torture scandal described above, learned his trade as an Army interrogator in Vietnam).
But Harris wants a reply in principle, as if Constitutional protections weren't established by men who had seen the horrors of state torture, and had just fought a revolution to be free of such abuses. As if, that is, these legal and constitutional protections were not themselves built on long-standing principled arguments. As if the possibility, that one might be wrong (however unreasonable the doubt) was not part of the ethical calculus in such a heinous undertaking. As if that host of practical problems is not symptomatic of a fundamental, principled incoherence.
Making the ethical case against torture is easy. It violates the Golden Rule (I would not want to be tortured, therefore I should not torture others; this is especially relevant for soldiers in the field). It violates the Categorical Imperative (torture must, by its nature, treat a person as a means to an end, not an end unto himself or herself). From a Rawlsian angle, I cannot imagine that torture is something "everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position," such as from behind the "veil of ignorance" where "everyone is impartially situated as equals." Indeed, it seems to run against Harris's own cod-utilitarianism, which is built on the principle that increasing human suffering is a moral wrong, and torture increases suffering.
Whatever angle you take, it's wrong. If someone's moral compass can't point that out, he's simply lost in the moral landscape.
Image via Back to a Routine of Torture: Torture and Ill-treatment of Palestinian Detainees during Arrest, Detention and Interrogation, by the Public Committee against Torture in Israel (2003). It shows a widely-used torture method called "bending," which the report explains:
The "bending" method is usually carried out through forcing the interrogee, who is tied to a chair with no backrest (or placed such that the backrest is not behind him), leaning him backward at an angle of 45 degrees or more, for a half hour or more each time. This is often done by applying pressure to the chin or body of the interrogee, in combination with beating, stepping on shackles, etc.
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Questions of the utility of torture always involve the question of utility of human beings, of turning people into means towards ends.
Eventually a view of human beings that reduces them to have a status equivalent to objects will tend to disregard questions such as rights. The extent to which someone views people as objects will determine the extent to which their rights will be disregarded if not denied. Something other than peoples material status has to be acknowledged as at least a possibility in order to believe that they have a status higher than an object. I don't see any way to believe in rights if there isn't at least a sense that people have an inherent status that is higher than inert materials. If that isn't believed then people can be treated with as much callousness as most people treat animals or plants. I think that's one of the more obvious conclusions that can be reached from observing the massive crimes of the 20th century. It's a lesson that Harris and Coyne don't learn, clearly.
Utilitarianism inevitably revolves around issues of analyses of use. I think it tends to corrupt the interactions between people through the habit of viewing the world through the context of availability for use. The observance of rights places living beings outside of that analysis of utility so utilitarian analysis either is entirely irrelevant to or it is actively destructive of the analysis of interactions based on the assumption of rights. I don't think that science is of any use because rights fall entirely outside of the subject matter of science, a scientistic view of the universe will also tend to erode the observation of rights. I think that's observable in history though it's a subtle thing in most cases.
Lest you think I'm blaming all of torture on disbelief, that would also be a mistake of ignoring the history of the use of torture. Religions as easily as other beliefs can assign a subhuman status to people can do the same thing as ideological materialism, deny inherent rights to people either individually or in groups.
Torture is a violation of inherent rights, whether of people or animals. It is wrong. That's not an idea that you can get from science or from an exercise of pure reason, at its very base it has to be believed, it has to be felt.
Even conceding for the sake of argument that torture may be "necessary" in extremely rare cases (as in the usual contrived examples involving a ticking bomb), it _still_ does not justify making special legal exemptions to torture.
There is already a provision in place for those things: the pardon. If an interrogator had unambiguous proof that millions of lives were at stake, there isn't a governor or president who wouldn't pardon him. Pardons were made for strange once-in-a-lifetime special cases like those.
I'm about as anti-torture as they come but I think we all need to be honest about this. We can imagine situations in which torture is unreliable: people saying anything just to get the pain to stop. We can also imagine that sometimes, those people aren't actually lying. They just want the pain to stop.
If torture helped us find bin Laden then it's a fact that it's helped us. Whether it was the only way is irrelevant at that point; it's what we did and it worked. The question becomes whether or not it was worth it. Torture might work, but is it worth it?
What harms our national pride and identity more, letting bin Laden continue to live, or sacrificing our most precious values - those of basic human rights - just to catch him?
I don't believe we can call him an exception. If you can make an exception to your principles, ever, then they are not principles. If Osama does not have rights, no one does.
We got him, and there is no doubt in my mind that the bastard deserved what he got and worse. I do think that the cost was too high. I do think that our reaction to 9/11 did far more damage to our nation than the loss of those two towers.
We are still in Iraq. We are still in Afghanistan. We still lack a goal to attain. We still detain people without trial and without cause. We still do things to people that THEY define as torture, whether we do or not.
Who are we?
Sorry, but the claim that there is always another way of obtaining information than torture simply isn't justified. There may be situations in which torture is the only thing that will work, the classic example being the ticking time bomb. If conventional interrogation techniques have been tried and have not been successful, and time is running out, the use of torture to try and discover the location of the bomb may be justified.
Josh Rosenau:
The slippery slope is fairly obvious, and regularly traveled once torture is normalized
Harris isn't arguing that torture should be "normalized." He's arguing that there may be rare cases in which torture is ethical.
Making the ethical case against torture is easy. It violates the Golden Rule (I would not want to be tortured, therefore I should not torture others; this is especially relevant for soldiers in the field).
Huh? I assume you don't want to go to prison or be killed, either. Do you therefore believe it is always unethical for us to put people in prison or kill them? I think your argument here is absurd.
It violates the Categorical Imperative (torture must, by its nature, treat a person as a means to an end, not an end unto himself or herself).
So does lying. Kant famously claimed that lying is always wrong, regardless of circumstances. Do you agree with him?
Torture is wrong because it's violence used against someone with no immediate justification based in their present dangerousness.
JohnQ, one of the more obvious reason people are tortured is because the torturer and observers are gratified by it. And if there is something that people can do, it's cook up excuses to do it. Your ticking bomb scenario is made for that, as the popularity of "24" shows. It's easy for a hack writer for FOX shows promoting the use of torture to invent those scenarios where the bomb is "real". In real life it would be as easy for a sadist to find some excuse to justify their sick pleasures with no bomb or any other real justification. For the last two days members of the Bush regime have been using the bin Laden killing as a justification for their use of torture so many years ago that it's almost certainly not what led to finding him. When the CIA chief said that the information they got was from the period after the torture stopped, the torturers are saying that they softened them up for them. You can always invent an excuse to do something immoral.
The use of torture is common enough, even used in places where it is officially illegal, as Josh documents in his post. It's even more popular in places where the authorities are a law unto themselves. If torture was legalized here, its use would be extended, it would always be possible for the police who use it now to come up with an excuse for it.
Harris, with his bizarre notions of morality, strikes me as exactly the kind of person who would think up excuses to extend its use well past the "ticking bomb" scenario. Extending his assertions about the morality of nuking cities in Muslim countries as a preemptive strike to prevent them getting us first, the same justification could be made for them nuking any city he happened to be in. It would certainly justify the torture of captured American or NATO troops in any place where they were dropping bombs. Who knows what kind of information prisoners of war might have?
The real question isn't whether or not you could cook up some psedo-moralistic reason to torture someone, it's a question of its being legally allowed and unpunished and relative risks. I doubt that a jury would ever convict someone if it could be proven that their justification was a REAL ticking bomb scenario, even when it's illegal to use torture. I am far more willing to take a chance that someone would be convicted and imprisoned for using torture even when "justified" than I would taking the risk of allowing the torture of people who have no information of the kind supporters of torture invent in their fictitious scenarios. Not to mention people tortured for other invented reasons.
The risk from allowing torture is far greater than the risks from disallowing it, the rarely prosecuted use of torture by police now is used for clearly "unjustifiable" reasons.
Sometimes we do things that are wrong when it seems we have no other choice. We may hope that , after the fact, some good will come out of our actions that would assuage our feelings, but that doesn't change the fact that we recognized that something was wrong but did it anyway.
So no speculation about possible scenarios where some good might result from an action considered wrong is going to change how we feel about that action morally. In that context, the idea of justification for the speculated action is useless to me. I don't need TV-fiction hypotheticals, I want some actual, real-life examples.
In the instance that's prompted this debate, we know know that
1) There was no ticking time bomb, or there was one but it had a 10-year fuse; and
2) We did have other choices, specifically the better choice of sophisticated interrogation techniques that didn't involve torture and that have been proven to produce reliable, actionable intelligence. And did so in this real, life example.
If there is a hypothetical where torture can be validated and justified - and I'm not saying there is, whatever it is doesn't apply in the least to this situation.
JasonQ: I addressed the "ticking bomb" scenario above. That's a scenario where torture is the least likely to help, as the time element means a detainee knows how long he needs to hold out, and can escape excess torture by simply giving false information, chewing up investigative resources and time better spent on techniques with clear track records.
JohnQ: Harris is arguing for a law permitting torture in some circumstances, which is an act of normalization.
I think that the Golden Rule is imperfect, as is the Categorical Imperative, but both are useful guides. I prefer the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and think it resolves many of the issues you raise.
That said, while I don't want to be imprisoned in general, I would want to be punished if I broke the law, and (from behind the veil of ignorance) a proportional prison sentence would be appropriate punishment. Torture, however, is not punishment, is not proportional, and is an invasion of someone's autonomy. And I wouldn't want that, no matter what I'd done (or was suspected of having done).
As to the categorical imperative, various people have devised ways around the prohibition on lying to murderers/the Gestapo/etc. (e.g.). I'd think the most general objection would be that lying to someone whose intent is to violate the Categorical Imperative (with respect to some third party) might be the only way for the liar not to also violate the categorical imperative with respect to that third party. i haven't seen people address this tradeoff between two potential violations, and there may already be philosophical replies to it. I can envision no similar justification for torture.
Josh Rosenau:
JasonQ: I addressed the "ticking bomb" scenario above. That's a scenario where torture is the least likely to help, as the time element means a detainee knows how long he needs to hold out, and can escape excess torture by simply giving false information, chewing up investigative resources and time better spent on techniques with clear track records.
In the kind of scenario Harris is discussing, conventional interrogation techniques have been tried and failed. Time is running out. So torture is used as a last resort. The information provided by the prisoner is subject to immediate verification. Helicopter SWAT teams have been positioned around the city and are ready to fly to the location where the bomb has been planted as soon as the prisoner provides it. So the prisoner cannot stop the torture by giving false information. He has an overwhelming incentive to give his interrogators the true location of the bomb in order to stop the torture. Under these circumstances, what alternative strategy for finding the bomb do you claim is more likely to work than torture, and how do you know it is more likely to work?
Josh Rosenau:
That said, while I don't want to be imprisoned in general, I would want to be punished if I broke the law, and (from behind the veil of ignorance) a proportional prison sentence would be appropriate punishment. Torture, however, is not punishment, is not proportional, and is an invasion of someone's autonomy. And I wouldn't want that, no matter what I'd done (or was suspected of having done).
But this isn't an argument for your claim torture is never ethical. You are simply assuming as your premise that torture, unlike imprisonment, is never ethical and arguing from that premise that you would therefore never want torture to be used on yourself, and that it should therefore never be used on others. You're assuming your conclusion.
As to the categorical imperative, various people have devised ways around the prohibition on lying to murderers/the Gestapo/etc. (e.g.). I'd think the most general objection would be that lying to someone whose intent is to violate the Categorical Imperative (with respect to some third party) might be the only way for the liar not to also violate the categorical imperative with respect to that third party.
Then why doesn't that apply to torture also? What is the relevant difference between torture and all acts you would not absolutely prohibit that justifies an absolute prohibition on torture but not on any of those other acts?
JasonQ: Why, in this scenario, has the torturee any incentive to give the true location of the bomb? He can say it's in a location that's difficult to access, thus chewing up time while the clock ticks. If the bomb is found, he can lie about how to disarm it, thus prematurely detonating it.
The alternative is standard police work, the sort of interrogation techniques and forensics and investigative tools that we use to crack every other crime.
JasonQ: Why, in this scenario, has the torturee any incentive to give the true location of the bomb? He can say it's in a location that's difficult to access, thus chewing up time while the clock ticks.
As I said, helicopter teams have been positioned around the city and are ready to retrieve the bomb as soon as the prisoner reveals its location. Any building in the city can be reached within minutes by one or more of the teams. The torture will continue until the prisoner provides the location of the bomb and it has been confirmed by one of the teams. This gives the prisoner a rather large incentive to reveal the true location of the bomb. The longer he refuses to do so, the more he will suffer.
If the bomb is found, he can lie about how to disarm it, thus prematurely detonating it.
The bomb squad does not need additional information to disarm the bomb. Or they can transport it out of the city to an uninhabited location before it detonates.
The alternative is standard police work, the sort of interrogation techniques and forensics and investigative tools that we use to crack every other crime.
The standard police work has already been done, for days or weeks. Conventional interrogation techniques have been tried and have not been successful. We're running out of time. The bomb is set to detonate in a few hours. I don't know why you think a few more hours of standard police work would be more likely to discover the location of the bomb than torturing the prisoner. But the police could continue their investigation while the prisoner was being tortured, anyway. The more things we try to discover the location of the bomb, the more likely we are to find it.
JasonQ, as TB pointed out, this is a theoretical. One thing about theoretical scenarios is that they are made up and you can make up stuff to suit your own ends. Where are your real life examples so we can see what your ideas mean in reality, not what they mean when you spin them to meet your ends.
JasonQ, as TB pointed out, this is a theoretical. One thing about theoretical scenarios is that they are made up and you can make up stuff to suit your own ends.
Josh Rosenau claims that torture is never ethical under any circumstances. None at all. So whether the scenario I am describing has ever actually occurred or is merely "theoretical" at this point is irrelevant to his claim. The 9/11 scenario was "theoretical" until the day it happened.
JasonQ: "The bomb squad does not need additional information to disarm the bomb. Or they can transport it out of the city to an uninhabited location before it detonates."
The whole point of a ticking time bomb scenario is that time is short, yet somehow there is time to transport the bomb to a safe place? You've also been assuming that the torturers have time to try again if the one being tortured has given false information.
In short, for your contrived scenario to work, you have to have a situation where on the one hand, time is so critical that desperate measures are supposedly warranted. On the other hand, though, you need the clock to run long enough for these desperate measures to even have an opportunity to work.
If you have that kind of resources available, wouldn't you have found the bomb already?
The whole point of a ticking time bomb scenario is that time is short, yet somehow there is time to transport the bomb to a safe place?
That's right. Aircraft can travel at hundreds of miles an hour. A bomb planted in New York City could be flown out over the Atlantic and dropped into the ocean in a few minutes. Even transporting a bomb just a few miles from a city center before it detonates could save hundreds of thousands of lives.
You've also been assuming that the torturers have time to try again if the one being tortured has given false information.
No I haven't. The prisoner may reveal the location of the bomb as soon as the torture starts. He may reveal the location merely under the threat of torture. But given the conditions I described above, the helicopter teams would have time to visit many locations before the bomb detonated, anyway.
If you have that kind of resources available, wouldn't you have found the bomb already?
Probably not, no. A large city has thousands of buildings in which a bomb could be planted.
JasonQ: "A large city has thousands of buildings in which a bomb could be planted. "
And a terrorist could falsely claim that the bomb is in any of those, or each of them sequentially until the bomb goes off.
And a terrorist could falsely claim that the bomb is in any of those, or each of them sequentially until the bomb goes off.
I responded to this point about false information the first time you made it. The prisoner will continue to be tortured until he provides the location of the bomb and the information is confirmed. That gives him a rather large incentive to provide true information. There is of course no guarantee that he will reveal the bomb's true location in time. Just as there's no guarantee that a convicted criminal is guilty or that a military action that kills innocent civilians will achieve its objective.
I still don't understand what valid argument you think there is for the proposition that torture is always unethical, but not lying, killing, imprisoning, inflicting lesser degrees of pain than torture, or any other harmful act that you would not categorically prohibit. For the reasons I explained above, I don't think your "Golden Rule" or "Categorical Imperative" claims make any sense.
Josh Rosenau claims that torture is never ethical under any circumstances. None at all. So whether the scenario I am describing has ever actually occurred or is merely "theoretical" at this point is irrelevant to his claim. The 9/11 scenario was "theoretical" until the day it happened. JasonQ
The problem with arguing solely from theoretical situations is that they are not real and there is no way to test assertions about them in reality. I've noticed that the pro-torture position just about always argues out of these convenient fictions instead of the actual cases in which torture was used, such as Josh presented in his post. I suspect that is a sign of the logical as well as ethical weakness of the position. Where are the real life "ticking bomb" scenarios that can be looked at to see them in all their reality? Obviously the real situations when torture prevented a huge catastrophe or even an isolated crimes are either non-existent or they are so rare as to constitute outliers from which little to nothing can be learned about the far commoner uses of torture. Though I say "use" I really suspect most of it is actually done by cowards for the sadistic pleasure of inflicting pain on people without the power to retaliate.
Harris, that self-described champion of reality, shows himself to be awfully reliant on these kinds of made up stories to defend his morally atrocious positions.
I think your description of 9-11 is rather unlike the popular "ticking bomb" scenario in a number of important aspects. Since there were warnings that something like 9-11 was being planned and there was sufficient evidence that there was a capacity to carry it out that security officials were frantically trying to get the entirely incompetent Condi Rice to wake up the equally incompetent George W. Bush to tell him about it to take preemptive measures, it was far more than a fictitious story. If it hadn't happened you might be able to make a case that the warnings were merely fictions, as your theoretical scenarios are until you can look at real cases. Ten years after the fact, it's usefulness to you as a fiction is lost.
As I said, the real issue isn't whether or not you are going to put an end to all torture, it's whether you are going to make it illegal in order to prevent much of it and to punish it when it happens. That makes the equation something far different. If your so rare it might never happen "ticking bomb" scenario happens, it would be possible for the torturer to appeal to the jury and judge to let them off because their morally ambiguous act saved lives. And if, somehow, an honest defense of that isolated instance of torture didn't result in an acquittal, there would always be the possibility to appeal to executives and appeals courts for clemency or other possible means of escaping punishment. Those mechanisms wouldn't be available to the victims of torture if, as in far too many places and instances, people can be tortured with impunity.
That is the real life calculation that we're talking about, not the cooked up excuse for the pro-torture side. The reality today is that it is routinely employed for quite different purposes.
It's especially bizarre that it's Harris who is willing to play at the top of a slippery slope of the routine use of torture, so slippery that in case after case societies and countries have fallen to the bottom, when he's so worried about the possibilities that Unitarians and the Peace Churches make the nest that produces suicide bombers. But, as is usual with Harris, consistency is something he exempts himself from. Yet he thinks his made up, heroic torturer won't result in presenting an excuse for torture as it's already far more commonly practiced.
Me: "The whole point of a ticking time bomb scenario is that time is short, yet somehow there is time to transport the bomb to a safe place?"
JasonQ: "Aircraft can travel at hundreds of miles an hour."
When cruising, yes. Takeoff and landing aren't so fast. Also, there's the time taken to find and carry the bomb to the transport aircraft.
Me: "You've also been assuming that the torturers have time to try again if the one being tortured has given false information."
JasonQ: "No I haven't.... But given the conditions I described above, the helicopter teams would have time to visit many locations before the bomb detonated, anyway."
Wrong. The time the teams have to visit locations is dependent on how long the bomb has to go off. If the bomb goes off in a matter of minutes, then in the real world, there would only be time to visit one location. In your fantasy world, you can invent more contrivances, of course.
Jason Q. -
I won't waste time fencing with your ludicrous contrived scenarios, as you desperately contort yourself into knots in an effort to justify torture.
I'll just note the obvious.
Not being quite smart enough to see beyond your self-serving biases, you instinctively imagine that torture will always be used against some out-group that you dislike. This titillates the sadistic side or your nature, so you justify it.
Of course, torture can be used against anyone, and if it were being used against you or some group you identify with, you'd be howling against it.
Your "morality" consists of making excuses for your own indulgences in sado-porn fantasies.
Anthony McCarthy, you're simply not addressing Harris's argument. The fact that the ticking time bomb scenario is unlikely, "contrived," "theoretical" or "untestable" is irrelevant. The claim that torture is unethical under all circumstances requires an argument that works UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES, whether they are unlikely, "contrived," etc. or not. I haven't seen any such argument from you or anyone else.
J.J.Ramsey, your quibbling about the speed of aircraft and so on is similarly irrelevant. Unless you can somehow prove that the kind of scenarios I have been describing are impossible, that they simply could not arise in the real world, then you must produce an argument showing that torture is unethical even in those scenarios, and in all other possible scenarios involving the use of torture. Simply declaring that torture is always wrong is not an argument.
Andrew McCarthy,
As I said, the real issue isn't whether or not you are going to put an end to all torture, it's whether you are going to make it illegal in order to prevent much of it and to punish it when it happens.
If a ticking time bomb situation arose and torture was used successfully to thwart the bombing, I think it is extremely unlikely that the people involved in the torture would be punished. More likely, they would be celebrated as national heroes.
While the rest of the country was thanking them, you and Josh Rosenau would apparently be condemning them for the "atrocity" (inflicting a few minutes of severe pain on a terrorist who was trying to commit mass murder) that saved a million people from dying in a nuclear fireball. I think this just shows how moral absolutism causes you to lose all perspective on what really matters.
JasonQ: What about the Rawlsian argument?
You ask why torture is unethical but not "lying, killing, imprisoning, inflicting lesser degrees of pain than torture," etc. First, how would you distinguish those "lesser degrees of pain"? Second, what makes you think I'd approve murder as an investigative technique if I don't approve of torture? Heck, why would I use rape and murder as reductio ad absurdum examples against the ticking bomb scenario if I thought those were OK?
Imprisonment (temporarily) is appropriate and necessary to allow a suspect to be questioned, and once a suspect is convicted, as a means of punishment. With a judicially issued arrest warrant, it is appropriate to imprison someone to prevent them from tampering with evidence, fleeing before trial, or committing more crimes. Provided the prison or jail is well-maintained, it is a minimal and proportionate response to those legitimate interests.
And this is the issue. Torture, homicide, imprisonment, etc. are all immoral in general, in that it would be immoral to inflict any of them on someone grabbed at random off the street. Given that, I think the key is not to find a reason why torture is immoral in special circumstance X, but to justify why it should be moral in the special case, when it would not be moral in general. I can see ways to do that for imprisonment, for killing in self-defense, for lying to the Gestapo, but I can't see ways to do that for torture, and you haven't offered anything compelling.
Torture is not proportionate. It is a violation of an individual's free will. Even if you concoct an absurd scenario in which torture would work, it would still be unethical. If efficacy were a moral justification, why wouldn't efficacy also justify rape and murder of a third party as an investigative tool (as I laid out in the OP)? And if rape and murder of an innocent third party isn't justified, how do you distinguish torture?
Finally, you suggest that investigators continue torturing an interogee after he/she breaks and tells them information, at least until the information is verified. This strikes me as profoundly unethical, as the best moral justification would be that torture is necessary to compell someone to tell the truth, but this scenario calls for torturing someone after they told the truth.
For a good account of the moral issues around torture, check out the Stanford Encyclopedia's entry: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture It argues that there's an incoherence to saying torture is absolutely morally wrong, but I find its argument circuitous and unconvincing. In any event, the entry seems to lean towards the idea that prohibiting torture is a "practical moral absolute:
I can certainly endorse that, and I'm not averse to a stronger formulation. To argue against that, you need to provide some plausible counterexample. For reasons I've described, the ticking bomb doesn't work: torture is slow and inaccurate, while standard interrogation techniques are often quite speedy and accurate. In the case of nuclear terrorism (which is where Harris sees torture bing justified), where helicopters are deployed throughout the target zone to allow rapid checking of the interogee's claims (as you specified), why not simply deploy radiation detectors on those helicopters to locate the bomb?
If torture does not produce reliable information (and it doesn't, or you wouldn't have to keep torturing after the prisoner starts talking) then what's the justification for using it?
JasonQ, how do you know that there was a real "ticking time bomb" and that wasn't just an excuse given for some common sadism in your story? At least if there was a trial that might be discovered. You would take the torturers' word for it.
One of the major reasons that torture was outlawed in the Constitution of the United States is its enormous usefulness to despotic governments. I don't think democracy is compatible with a government that legally sanctions torture, its use would increase, over time, as new and innovative excuses for it were cooked up.
Your reliance on convenient fictions instead of an actual case would lead a rational person to conclude that a defense of torture based in reality is unavailable to you. For that, you're willing to risk countless people being tortured, perhaps to death, turning those countries that adopt the Harris model into the thing he and his admirers claim to be against. Which is sheer insanity.
Josh Rosenau
You still haven't identified a difference between torture and other harmful acts that you would not categorically prohibit. You say that imprisonment is sometimes "appropriate" and "necessary," while torture never is, but you offer no argument to support this claim. Why isn't torture sometimes "appropriate?" How do you know it isn't sometimes "necessary?" You say that torture "is a violation of an individual's free will." But all use of force is the violation of an individual's free will. You say that torture is "not proportionate." I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean exactly. "Not proportionate" to what? In the case of the ticking time bomb, it's hard to see how the harm inflicted by torture (a temporary period of severe pain) is somehow excessive compared to the harm it is being used to try and prevent (mass murder and serious injury).
You ask "how would you distinguish those 'lesser degrees of pain?" from torture. It seems obvious to me that it is possible to distinguish different degrees of pain. A light slap on the face causes less pain than an intense beating. The legal definition of torture rests on the distinction between "severe pain" and lesser degrees of pain. Are you saying that you consider the infliction of any pain, no matter how mild, to be torture?
You ask, "what makes you think I'd approve murder as an investigative technique if I don't approve of torture?" But I don't think you'd approve murder as an investigative technique. I wrote "killing," not "murder," and I didn't say anything about using killing as an investigative technique. I was referring to acts of killing that are generally regarded as justifiable, at least sometimes: killing in self-defense, killing combatants in battle, and the killing of civilians as "collateral damage" to airstrikes.
I don't understand your point about continuing the torture until the information has been verified. You say that this involves torturing the prisoner after he has told the truth, but we don't know that he has told the truth until after the information has been verified.
I have no idea how you can read the entry on torture in the Stanford encyclopedia as "leaning towards" an absolute prohibition of torture. The text you quote is a paraphrase of the position of a particular writer, and the entry goes on to describe three objections to the argument.
Finally, you ask "if torture does not produce reliable information (and it doesn't, or you wouldn't have to keep torturing after the prisoner starts talking) then what's the justification for using it?" I don't know why you're asking this question when I have already been over this: Sam Harris agrees that torture is not reliable. I agree that torture is not reliable. It is not necessary for torture to be reliable for it to be the only method that will provide the location of the ticking time bomb before it explodes.
While the rest of the country was thanking them, you and Josh Rosenau would apparently be condemning them for the "atrocity" (inflicting a few minutes of severe pain on a terrorist who was trying to commit mass murder) that saved a million people from dying in a nuclear fireball. I think this just shows how moral absolutism causes you to lose all perspective on what really matters. JasonQ
You should avoid practicing precognition about the results of fictitious scenarios that have almost no chance of happening, there isn't any way to evaluate the accuracy of such a prediction.
Unless I was on the jury, your pretend hero would be in no danger from my reservations about his heroic torture and the assertions he and his lawyer made about the motives of your torturer.
How about your hero being arrested for torturing someone who was falsely identified as being the guy who knew where the bomb is hidden? How about your hero torturing someone with the excuse of a "ticking bomb", who doesn't get any information and no bomb goes off? How about your heroic torturer torturing someone and cooking up an entirely phony "ticking bomb" scenario? What if your torturer looks like Kiefer Sutherland who some, for reasons I can't fathom, find to be quite a dish and who uses his looks to get away with torture even an enthusiast like you would find unacceptable?
You want us to legalize an extremely dangerous, extremely immoral act on the basis of a scenario that you can't cite in a single case. I don't see anything that will really be gained by that, though I can see all kinds of evil that will come from it.
Anthony McCarthy
One of the major reasons that torture was outlawed in the Constitution of the United States
Huh? Where is torture outlawed in the Constitution of the United States?
The rest of your comment is just stuff you've said before and that I have already responded to. You still don't seem to get the point that the claim that torture is wrong UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES must be supported with an argument that applies to all circumstances, including circumstances that you refer to as "convenient fictions."
Jason, try the Eighth Amendment.
You still don't seem to get the point that the claim that torture is wrong UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES must be supported with an argument that applies to all circumstances, including circumstances that you refer to as "convenient fictions."
You haven't produced a real case, your story isn't a "circumstance" unless it has happened. I could cook up a story about torturing someone on the basis of collaboration with alien invaders but it's just a story unless that invasion happens. How about a really scary one about the necessity of torturing someone on the basis of their practicing malignant magic on behalf of Satan. Only that wouldn't be entirely unknown to history, nor, unfortunately, in the present day, in some locations.
You should avoid practicing precognition about the results of fictitious scenarios that have almost no chance of happening, there isn't any way to evaluate the accuracy of such a prediction.
It follows from your own writings. Josh Rosenau called torture an "atrocity." You described Sam Harris's position as "morally atrocious." So you think any use of torture (defined in law as the infliction of severe pain, even for just a few minutes, or even the mere THREAT of such pain) to save the lives of a million people is "atrocious" or an "atrocity." This is where I think you just go completely off the deep end.
Jason, try the Eighth Amendment.
The 8th Amendment forbids the government from inflicting cruel and unusual punishments. It doesn't say anything about torture. It doesn't say anything about interrogation techniques. And it doesn't outlaw anything by private citizens. That's done by statute.
Jason: "It is not necessary for torture to be reliable for it to be the only method that will provide the location of the ticking time bomb before it explodes."
Actually, wouldn't reliability be rather crucial to the claim that torture "will provide the location" of whatever?
JasonQ, so now you want to change the meaning of the word "cruel" so that it doesn't include torture. Seeing that it's Sam Harris you are defending, that shouldn't surprise me. Despite attempts by the Bush II regime to do what you're doing in order to torture people, even when your ticking bomb isn't even pretended to be there, the history is that the Eighth Amendment does ban the use of torture in the United States.
In Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 , 135 Mr. Justice CLIFFORD, in delivering the opinion of the court, referring to Blackstone, said: 'Difficulty would attend the effort to define with exactness the extent of the constitutional provision which provides that cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted; but it is safe to affirm that punishments of torture, such as those mentioned by the commentator referred to, and all others in the same line of unnecessary cruelty, are forbidden by that amendment to the constitution.'
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=136&invol…
That the present day court, packed with some of the worst members in the court's history, might, eventually, alter the meaning of words to allow a Republican president to torture people wouldn't surprise me. It's the kind of thing that happens when exceptions are made with excuses such as you are inventing.
Of course, as Josh demonstrates, some police and other authorities have tortured people, quite often black people and members of other minority groups and people too poor to hire big name lawyers, and gone unpunished far too frequently. Imagine what they might do if they had a legal leaf to cover their use of torture. Why, I'll bet you that one of the groups that would experience the malicious flowering of torture would be atheists, especially in areas of the country where they are especially unpopular.
"...Despite attempts by the Bush II regime to do what you're doing in order to torture people, even when your ticking bomb isn't even pretended to be there..."
Foe heaven's sake, neither JasonQ or Sam Harris is making an argument for the general use of torture, which is what Bush, Yoo et al did to their everlasting disgrace. What Sam Harris, and I feel JasonQ are doing, are limning a special circumstances exception to the general use of torture, not trying to justify general torture as a policy.
And they are both right about this. In the ticking bomb scenario, the use of torture would not only be justified but it would be immoral *not* apply temporary pain to a guilty party, who no doubt accepted such a risk, in order to save the lives of thousands if not millions of people. That you can not see ethics of this clearly leads me to conclude that you are thinking too dogmatically. You brought up the Constitution. Can you name any Constitutional protection which does not have exceptions?
What Sam Harris, and, I feel, JasonQ are doing is limning a special circumstances exception to the general use of torture, not trying to justify general torture as a policy.
If that's what they're doing and they're talking about abstract ethical theory then that's absolutely right. You can to come up with unlikely but possible scenarios where torture is justifiable, and the more unlikely they are the more justifiable it becomes. If there is a network of bombs placed around the Earth's mantle that when triggered will cause apocalyptic devastation and wipe out most of humanity, and the only guy who knows how to stop it is a wimp and a coward who really loves his wife and three vulnerable children, then how could you not torture them and him? What if malevolant aliens kidnap all of humanity and say that unless you simply torture and rape one single five year old girl for a mere twenty minutes they will systematically torture and rape all of humanity to death over six months? Is there more than one choice there?
I think what I would argue is not that there is no concievable situation where torture could be the moral choice, but that given what we know about reality, the world, people, torture, evidence, etc all of these examples are fantastically unlikely, and in the incredible event that one of them happens then that's what Pardons are for.
Josh also pointed out that if you think that torture is morally justifiable in these situations then where do you draw the line? If it's a nuke in New York will you torture his wife? His children?
If he doesn't think you will kill his children, will you gut one in front of him so he knows you're serious? Intelligence suggests that if you leave his favourite Johnny till last he will crumble. Where's the line?
I'd be interested to know what people willing to torture in the ticking bomb scenario think.
I know that if I was willing to torture for Good Ends then guilt and innocence wouldn't be a factor in my moral calculation only whether the Good Ends resulted, so I would extend whatever torture was needed to whoever was needed. But you may have a different take on it.
I think what I would argue is not that there is no concievable situation where torture could be the moral choice, but that given what we know about reality, the world, people, torture, evidence, etc all of these examples are fantastically unlikely, and in the incredible event that one of them happens then that's what Pardons are for.
I have been arguing here that torture is sometimes ethical, not that it should sometimes be legal. There are a variety of mechanisms for obviating or circumventing the law in exceptional cases: prosecutorial discretion, the necessity defense, jury nullification, executive pardon. If torture ever is successfully used to thwart a ticking time bomb plot, I think it is very unlikely that the people who order or carry out the torture would even be prosecuted. Most likely, the Justice Department would simply decline to bring charges, just as the Obama Administration has declined to bring charges against the people involved in the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Josh also pointed out that if you think that torture is morally justifiable in these situations then where do you draw the line?
Yes, that's a difficult question. So is the question of where to draw the line regarding military actions that kill innocent civilians. And where to draw the line regarding life imprisonment or execution. Even relatively mundane questions like how much money to spend on medical research, and how to divide the total spending among different diseases, are incredibly challenging and have enormous implications for human suffering. We are faced with extremely difficult decisions in many areas of public policy, so I don't see how this is an argument against all use of torture.