I find it revealing that the political controversy over the recently released Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s (majority) Report on the C.I.A.’s abuse of terrorism suspects focuses so heavily on the question of whether the alleged torture “worked,” that is to say, whether it produced valuable, life-saving information that could not be obtained by other means.[1] The nature of this debate suggests that the participants implicitly understand that the voting public would support torture if the benefits are significant enough. In contrast, most philosophers, including (especially?) libertarian types, appear to have a different view.
Thus, Sheldon Richman, writing in Reason.com, claims flatly that “No excuse for torture is acceptable” (no argument offered).[2] Jacob Sullum, in this same publication,[3] quotes with apparent approval the absolutist argument of philosophers Charles and Gregory Fried, in their 2010 book, Because It Is Wrong, which he summarizes as follows,
The Frieds go further, contending that “innocence and guilt are irrelevant to torture,” which desecrates “the image of God” or, in the secular version of the argument, “the ultimate value of the human form as it is incorporated in every person.”
The Frieds argue that we lose our humanity by denying someone else’s, by treating him as an animal to be beaten into submission or an object to be bent or broken at will. “To make him writhe in pain, to injure, smear, mutilate, render loathsome and disgusting the envelope of what is most precious to each of us,” they write, “is to be the agent of ultimate evil—no matter how great the evil we hope to avert by what we do.”
I side here, on a qualified basis, with the common man, and against our intellectuals. I have not read the Frieds’ book, but I am highly skeptical that, whatever the ethical bedrock of their theory, they have identified the sole moral value in the universe. Indeed, most philosophers in this discipline are moral pluralists, meaning that, whatever value they regard as paramount, they do not regard it as the only binding norm.[4]
So, regarding the claim that torture can never be justified under any theoretical scenario, imagine that your choice is torture one innocent person to death, or 7 billion other innocent people will die. And there you have it: rights, including rights against torture, are not absolute.
I also, contra the Frieds, believe it matters a great deal who is being tortured. Imagine that the Allies had captured Adolph Eichmann (or some other member of Hitler’s inner circle) in 1942, and that only by torturing him could we obtain information that would save the lives of just a few innocent people. I would say, “Please hand me the thumbscrews.” My intuition is that the threshold for the application of unsavory techniques is much lower with mass murders than with innocent persons.
Lying behind this impulse may be a somewhat more substantive insight. Quite plausibly, men of great evil have, by their deeds, at least partially removed themselves from the moral community, and thus are no longer entitled to the respect due its members. In summarizing Kant’s idea that only “persons” (meaning moral agents) are entitled to the highest level of respect and dignity, Judith Thomson (a respected academic philosopher) writes that, “the capacity to conform your conduct to moral law is a necessary and sufficient condition for the moral law to apply to you.”[5] Those who have deliberately murdered innocent civilians to advance their goals have arguably surrendered their own rights, at least to the extent of permitting torture in circumstances that could not justify doing this to the innocent.
This is a very narrow claim. I am not asserting that the CIA was right to torture, as this would depend on a variety of facts I am not capable of evaluating. There are also “slippery-slope” considerations, meaning that even permitting torture in a small number of justified cases, might lead to wider abuses. I merely wish to say that claims that torture can never by justified seem precious, and smack of moral preening.
[1] The executive summary of the Report is here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/249655870/Senate-Torture-Report.
[2] Sheldon Richman, “Getting Away With Torture,” December 18, 2014, http://reason.com/archives/2014/12/18/getting-away-with-torture.
[3] Jacob Sullum, “Torture As an Absolute Wrong,” December 17, 2014, http://reason.com/archives/2014/12/17/torture-as-an-absolute-wrong.
[4] Elinor Mason, “Value Pluralism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-pluralism/.
[5] Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 215.
