The Ethics of Torture 101

“no, I’m not going to do evil whether or not I perceive an advantage to it.””

I have a hard time finding an great argument against necrophilia. (Bear with me, not long)

So it is not the violation of a body that is immoral, but of a body connected to a self, and mostly the self. Torture is the violation of a self that sees its body.

What does it mean to violate a self without touching a body? A self, excluding physical and social aspects, is a aggregation of values, memories, preferences.

Where can I get the right, the privilege to turn her from “It’s green” to “It’s blue?” What are the justifications but using her as a means to my goals, not hers; or greatest good for greatest number; or “for her own good.” which mostly translate again to my goals for her.

Persuasion, or the use of my greater facility* with language (or my status, power, or money etc) to use her toward the fulfilling of my own goals is a violation of her self, is never admirable.

*even if it doesn’t work. The problem is at my end, seeing her as means.

Torture is seeing Khalid Sheikh Muhammed as a means to our ends. It is more moral to simply shoot him. It is immoral to interrogate him in any way**, or even to speak to him in a friendly manner, except perhaps on his spontaneous request.

**See conventions about prisoners in WWII.

According to Digby:

Hayden was on with Blitzer this afternoon and said that “rectal feeding” was a perfectly reasonable way of “getting nutrition” into someone. And he also said that he had no problem waterboarding Americans if they are responsible for killing innocent people.

And there’s the greatest irony for the torture apologists. Leaving aside the moral, ethical, civil and human issues, one would think that sheer personal interest alone would make everyone oppose sanctioned torture. If we don’t throw some “people” (I use the term loosely) in jail soon, torture will start creeping into our domestic affairs.

Jesus wept, what is wrong with us?

Utilitarians knew their moral system was flawed, so they came up with rules or act utilitarianism, which essentially created a category of moral principles that you did not violate, even if such an action would bring about “greater good”. Utilitarianism is a dangerous idea, even its proponents thought so, and we can see now that torture is being done in the name of the greater good. Torture is both evil and not effective.

You seem to be taking the position that an airtight, purely pragmatic, argument against torture cannot be made. I think this is because the dominant public view of intelligence is expressed (consciously and unconsciously) primarily in tactical, even fictional terms (i.e., what folks see in thrillers or read in the hyperventilating descriptions of the commentariat).

To make an effective pragmatic argument, one needs to take a systemic approach. Yes, one *can* make torture work, in the sense that given sufficient time and resources one can extract usable information from subjects that can be fused with other information to produce intelligence product. The problem here for pragmatics is the “sufficient time and resources”. The resource investment required to verify and fuse information from coercive means is huge, as in orders of magnitude greater than other information, because of the high prevalence of fabrication. Any intelligence organization that engages in torture is wasting resources that could be more effectively deployed other ways – even in edge cases. This is yet another reason why one wants one’s intelligence organizations to be consistently starved for resources – it keeps them focused on activities that have high payoff.

Ian you bring up good points up about the problem with unprovable axioms and arguments against torture. I can’t disagree with anything you said in that regard, however I think there’s a huge area that acts as a buttress to the ethical arguments and it’s rarely mentioned in our current discussions. And that’s history. We have literally centuries of documentation on torture, the types of regimes and movements that practice it, the effects in their culture, and the historical record of how the west turned away from torture and viewed it as a taboo over time.

This isn’t like an ethical argument over some new technology that’s never existed and there’s a relatively clean slate for analyzing it and discussing the ethics involved.

The weight of history overwhelmingly backs up the ethical arguments against torture on every front. From the Spanish Inquisition to the cruelty of the vikings and their “blood eagles”, the use of torture in medieval courts to extract false confessions, to their modern incarnations under such “enlightened” regimes like the Nazis and it’s wholesale use by the communist world in China and Russia and their various satellites. (we also see shades of this with the domestic surveillance debate, where the mountains of historical evidence of its use, impacts, and negative costs in society are completely ignored.)

Part of the problem is Americans just don’t give a damn about history, literally have no idea what the history of torture is, and why the western world largely abandoned it as a govt sanctioned practice. As a result, centuries worth of damning conclusions and cultural revulsion gets washed away in the pants-wetting fear-mongering of our current generation of morally rudderless elites and our equally ethically bankrupt population.

I have had CNN on off and on for the last few days and I’ve seen precisely zero historians on, or any other discussion of the historical use, impacts, etc of torture. It’s like this issue sprang up out of whole cloth with no prior evidence or history of use. As a result it’s just another he-said/she-said debate with the majority of the air time given to torture apologists and their concern troll allies. I swear the same band of apologists must be sleeping on a cots at CNN’s studios, since the same group is on so frequently.

Novelist Teju Cole:

Let’s acknowledge torture for what it is: It is punishment, vengeance. It’s the kind of havoc you wreak on an enemy or bystander merely because your rage needs an outlet. It has vanishingly little to do with intelligence-gathering. It spreads grief, and though it intends to do so, it spreads even much more than it intends. It destroys the perpetrators too. Rage is not a precision weapon.

Exactly.

A couple of diverse points:

1) I’m not sure that it is necessary, or even desirable, to closely define what torture is or what society is for in order to make a pragmatic case against it. If argumentation depends on explicit definition, folks will wiggle against the boundaries of that definition to achieve freedom of action (witness the convoluted legal arguments in the various infamous memos). Similarly, definition of what society as for strikes me as an undertaking of some scope – end even then, everything that I know about the plasticity and variability of human behaviour tells me that any given definition will apply to a narrow range of societies, and even then only for a given period in time.

2) While I see the appeal of moral arguments against torture, I don’t think they work as well as pragmatic ones. Morals are plastic and torture can be quite a seductive option to managers in a jam – particularly when goals are split between parts of the organization. Better in my mind to undercut it in coin that has real value to them – it just doesn’t work when looked at on the scale of the enterprise. The logical extension of this would see torture (and worse measures) placed at one end of a continuum including all coercive techniques and ranging to “sweeter” techniques at the other end. Anything – not just torture – that spikes the fabrication rate would be something to avoid. It isn’t as simple as doing anything short of torture without concern to the downsides.

3) While “the purpose of torture is to terrorize” is sometimes true, I don’t think it was in this case. If one wants to terrorize, one does not keep it a secret of the highest order. The collateral that I’ve seen indicates to me that this was a very compartmentalized activity, particularly at the beginning (i.e., when the design purpose of the program was “freshest”). Similarly, the techniques would be different (e.g., they wouldn’t segregate their prisoners like they did – that indicates that information extraction was paramount). Torture (like terror) is a set of activities that can serve more than one strategy.

@ Ian
There is so much I want to say and yet I cannot even begin to feel there would be any point in doing so.
Your last three paragraphs pretty much say it all…

If I had an edit:

I would insert a short paragraph between the end of “Torture is the raw face …” and the start of “Maimonides …” which would say:

Torture is the marker that civil society and civilization itself have ceased to exist. Neither have the ability to prevail without existential damage when encountering torture and are destroyed in the same manner that trust is when faced with lies.

Thanks for the indulgence