I am thankful for Jeremy Pierce’s thoughtful reply to my posts on torture. You can find it here.
If I do nothing else, perhaps my opposition to torture in this space will provoke more posts such as this one. In that case, my posts will have served a good purpose and perhaps merit the praise that Holmes gave Watson:
“Really, Watson, you excel yourself,” said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. “I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.”
Let me attempt to stimulate even more good writing by confessing that I am still not persuaded that torture can be licit. Perhaps it is merely the nearly universal opposition of the church that has blinded my eyes, the fear of a slippery slope, or mere Victorian squeamishness.
Too much reading of Trollope can make a man unfit for the way we live now.
Of course, it is greatly comforting to me that Pierce has not argued in favor of any actual torture, even waterboarding. He is merely unpersuaded by my arguments opposing torture in all cases.
However, I am still not convinced by his reasoning. Perhaps I can persuade him or he can show me where I have gone wrong. Since his view is that of the majority of the American public, it would certainly be beneficial to me if I could learn to accept it.
Pierce on the Image of God
I agree with Pierce that from a Biblical point of view the death penalty is allowable in some circumstances. Pierce rightly notes that this does not mean that modern societies should use the death penalty. As many Christian have noted, wealthy modern cultures have options for dealing with those judged guilty that ancient cultures did not have.
Pierce concludes from this:
So I don’t think the fact that we’re made in the image of God is going to rule out all torture, since it doesn’t rule out all killing and it’s the explicit biblical reason not to kill people.
This, however, equates killing and torture. Obviously, however, they are not the same act. I do not rule out killing a man, but I do rule out torturing him.
Let me explain what seems an odd position: torture is worse than killing.
Killing a man is not always murder. From a Biblical point of view death is after all God’s severe mercy on mankind. We will all die. In the world after the Fall, death is nature. Torture obviously is different from this.
We shall all die, but we shall not all be tortured.
Pierce should note that though the death penalty is licit, the Bible does not suggest “drawing and quartering” the guilty. We do not torture the accused. Hanging a man may be unpleasant, but it is devised to kill him quickly. The story of Christian practice of the death penalty shows a long and commendable movement toward humane ways of causing death with the least amount of gratuitous pain. Even Madam Guillotine was introduced in an attempt to ease the sufferings of the condemned.
Killing a man is a single action where the future consequences of that action to the man killed are left to a good and merciful God. We pray, as Christians, that the great judge, the Lord God, has mercy on the condemned souls.
Torture is, by its very nature, a drawn out act that leaves the man tortured with psychological wounds that he will have to work out in this world not in the world to come.
If we kill an innocent man in a miscarriage of justice, he goes to face a compassionate and just God and a better world. If we torture an innocent man by our own grievous fault, we leave him in our imperfect world to try to cope with issues that no man should or perhaps can face.
The Christian magistrate sends the condemned man to God with the wish (if not the words) that the Lord God might have mercy on his soul. The torturer sends him back broken to the world of men . . . and that is much worse.
This worry partly motivates the banning of weapons in Christian warfare designed to wound and not to kill. We think it wrong headed (torture!) to intend to cause a man a lifetime of pain in this fallen world.
Better to kill him cleanly and send him to God.
After death, thank God, comes God, after torture, God help us, comes human society. Falling into the hands of God is a fate different in kind than being released back into fallen American culture or (worse still) a life in prison.
Killing is sometimes (very rarely) a power God has given the state or (even more rarely) individuals. No man, however, can murder. It is not always wrong to kill, but it is always wrong to murder.
A man who kills from hate is wrong, even if he is called an “executioner.” Ideally, the condemned and guilty man is killed by agents of the state who execute justice compassionately and with mercy. This is why the state should not (and does not) allow the family of the victim to “throw the lever.”
No man who wants to be an executioner is fit to be one.
Pierce says:
Aristotelian virtue arguments point out how bad it is to become the sort of person who could bring yourself to torture someone. Of course this is right, but it’s also bad to become the sort of person who could bring yourself to kill someone.
This seems wrong to me for two reasons.
First, killing a man as his executioner is a single act. In battle, it is done in the heat of the moment and under the threat of immediate peril to those the soldier is sworn to defend.
Torturing a man takes place over time. The “peril” that justifies the act comes from the prisoner indirectly. He has no bomb. He is powerless . . . in himself. The torturer is hurting him permanently (in almost every case) to get information that will be helpful.
A soldier may have to kill many times, though many soldiers serve without killing anyone. Each killing is a single action done in the heat of battle.
Christians worry about a “professional army” for exactly the reason that we do not want to see a man so hardened to death that he rejoices in it. We want a Christian officer and gentleman to think “war is terrible” so that he does not find pleasure in it. We also worry about any conflict that goes on too long and requires our lads to carry too great a psychological burden.
A just war may cease to be just if it comes at the cost of destroying the souls of our brave troops.
Of course, this is the ideal, but the ideal is possible. I have former students that have lived it out as officers and gentlemen.
Can a man be a torturer and a gentleman?
I think not and behavior in battle shows us the difference.
We give a man a medal for killing his foes in the heat of battle. He did what, sadly, sometimes must be done, but we put him on trial if he killed them in a way that dishonors his opponent. We allow a man to put a bullet in the brain of an enemy soldier, but we do not allow him to shoot a man in the leg and then slowly cut him to ribbons with his bayonet.
In that way, a Christian warrior is different from a barbarian.We can fight, but not use any means to do so. The closer our means of war comes to torture, the less we applaud it.
If you doubt that this is the Christian consensus, then consider that Christian nations have long outlawed weapons that torture a man and do not just kill him. Not for us the poison gas that slowly chokes a man or the bullet that maims more often than it kills.
We try to fight war as men and not as brutes and so want our foe dead with the least possible suffering. Why? We love our enemies and wish that they did not have to die and so certainly do not wish them a lingering and painful death.
Christians would kill no man if they could, but will do so quickly and cleanly if they must.
Christian nations take the unfortunate wounded and heal them using all the skill we use on our own wounded. We send them to prisoner of war camps that are humane. We give prisoners rights under international conventions.
Christians do not think anything is fair in love or war.
We could have shot them in the heat of battle, but if we only wounded our foe now have a duty to heal him. A Christian nation treats its prisoners as it would wish others treated its prisoners.
A just war is, therefore, different in kind from torture and we consider anything like torture that happens in battle wrong and avoid it whenever we can even to the cost of banning certain weapons from use.
Do Pierce and I disagree?
At the end of his post Pierce says:
But then I think it’s also worth noting JMR’s definition of torture, given in a comment on one of the posts: “For the purpose of this discussion, I am describing torture as the desire to “break the will” of a man and to inflict permanent psychological and physical harm.”
If that’s what torture is, then I’m not sure anyone currently defending torture is defending that. Not many defenders of extreme interrogation methods see the mere goal of breaking someone’s will or the infliction of psychological or physical harm as an end worth pursuing in its own right. Some might see breaking someone’s will as a means to an end, but the torture anyone is defending isn’t itself the desire to break people’s wills or to inflict permanent or psychological harm.
Pierce is responding to my argument that torture attacks the soul of a man. A man’s body, and his bodily integrity are very important. Few have the right to transgress this right, but his soul is even more valuable.
It is not gnostic to say that the soul matters more than the body to a Christian. Our Lord himself said we should fear those more that have the power to harm our soul than those who have the power to harm our body.
A moral state can only kill you, it cannot damn you.
I have said, therefore, that the state should never attempt to transgress the free will of a man. His soul liberty should be left intact. We can, in need, coerce him physically, but we canot break him psychologically.
There is a difference between tricking a man and making him give information and breaking his will so he spills. Ask John McCain . . . which is a personal reason he opposes any use of torture. A tricked man feels the fool, but is left with his integrity intact. He is and has always been our foe.
The tortured man is left broken.
Under the Soviet Union, I have been told Christians would be drugged and forced to deny the faith. They were then released to deal with the horrific psychological consequences of what they had been “forced to do.” It is no good telling such a man “he could not help it.” Heroes like McCain still struggle with such denials over a lifetime of pain . . . because something more important than their body has been broken.
Are we so confident in our own “righteousness” that will break the jihadi and remove his will? Are we so sure that this will not make us like the Soviets in the eyes of history?
Every torturer in every period of history has been sure that his view was so correct and his foes so heretical and wrongheaded that any psychological breaking (in ancient times usually indirectly through extreme physical torment) was merited.
The judgment of Christian history does not rewards the inquisitor, however.
Physical torture is a mere attempt to break the will. It, therefore, moves from a power God has given men, to coerce him physically, to a power that God has not given man. We can put a man in prison, we can make him consider his path with persuasion, but we must leave him fit to decide. If he will not join us or help, then we must honor his choice by leaving him alone.
We can threaten to imprison a man who will not testify in a trial, but we do not invade his mind with drugs and make him talk. If he has the courage of his convictions, then we will leave him in his cell to ponder his choices. We can make him work, so long as the work is not soul breaking as it was in the gulag.
The American military draft and how it has been treated in American history shows that I am in the mainstream of American thought with this argument. First, many of us oppose the draft in all circumstances and wish to rely only on volunteers for the reason I have given. Second, most Americans who favor the draft do so only if conscientious objectors are allowed not to fight.
We can draft men to fight only if they have no principled objection to fighting. If you have a concerted moral view against warfare, we allow other service to pacifists. Conscientious objection is the honorable solution to this problem.
The consistent Christian state will not even make a man take an oath if he has moral objections to it. We found a way to let those opposed to oath taking serve . . . without impeding their moral integrity.
A state that will allow a Quaker to be President on an affirmation, rather than making him swear, is a state that has protected the right of a man to his own conscience.
Coercing the body is a power the state has, but God help us all if we allow the state power to control our minds and wills.
War and Torture: the Differences
Pierce is right to say that the difference between war and torture is not the premeditation of the general act. There is, however, a difference in the premeditation of the particular act.
A soldier does not kill his particular foe after long planning to kill that man. GI Joe does not kill Fritz, because he planned to kill Fritz, but because Fritz is in a Nazi uniform and fighting America. He does not go after Fritz as Fritz.
Torturer Joe (and I dread the action figures) has decided to break Fritz in particular with planning and forethought. He plans his torture around what will break Fritz and would choose different means to attack Hans.
To be effective Torturer Joe must break Fritz as Fritz, not just attack him as a Nazi.
That is an important moral difference.
Pierce rightly points to the differences between war and torture, but thinks these are not relevant. I think some of them are.
He says we still fight people without “much of chance” and that this means torture is not so different than war.
This makes little sense to me. If he keeps fighting, he is still fighting. We will honor his choice by continuing the battle.
A man on the rack has no choice and no chance. We are not trying to kill him and end a war, but break him. That is a difference in kind.
I argue, therefore, that the difference in torture and war is that a just war has as its goal the physical restraint of the foe. We must kill Nazis to keep them from killing us and the innocent.
Torture, however, attempts to break a man psychologically. If a man persists in being a Nazi after the war, we can throw him in jail or even execute him for his crimes, but we cannot torture him in Orwellian fashion until he learns to love democracy.
We do not give the power of transformation or being “born again” to the state. It cannot force a man to have “right thoughts” and to mentally do the right thing. He must be allowed his disagreements with us.
We can lead a man to water, but we are not allowed to make him want to drink.
Appendix- Pierce and Aristotle: A Small Point
Pierce makes a common mistake (so far as I can tell) and forgets that the Aristotelian Golden Mean does not apply to actions Aristotle believes are inherently base. For example, there is no “moderate” amount of adultery.
How do we know such actions?
Aristotle believes a properly educated man (what I have been calling a “gentleman”) will know, but that there is no use telling a grownup with a bad education.
Put in Victorian terms, if a man cannot simply see that torture is disgusting, then there is no use arguing with him. He is the product of a bad education. A proper gentleman would not even consider such actions.
This is an interesting point of view, but my argument here does not depend on it.
Ever.
January 9th, 2010 | 3:51 pm | #1
“Torture is, by its very nature, a drawn out act that leaves the man tortured with psychological wounds that he will have to work out in this world not in the world to come.”
i) Whether the mental wellbeing of the terrorist is all-important begs the very question at issue.
ii) But beyond that, this objection is problematic on its own grounds. For innocent survivors of a terrorist attack also suffer “psychological wounds.” Their mental wellbeing may be shattered for life as they suffer the inconsolable loss of their loved ones in the attack.
So either way, you’ll be left with “broken” individuals. That being the case, why should the mental wellbeing of the terrorist take precedence over the mental wellbeing of his victims?
Even on his own terms, I’ve unclear about the coherence of JMR’s moral priorities at this juncture.
January 9th, 2010 | 4:39 pm | #2
While two Wrights certainly can make an airplane, two wrongs don’t do anything but mulitply wrongs.
The terrorist is a man and my enemy. As a Christian my basic disposition toward him is love.
The mental well being of a terrorist is not the issue. His crimes have harmed his own soul and God will judge him. I can punish him for his crimes, but there are limits to what a man can do.
He broke individuals, but (in a Christian ethic) that does not mean I can break him. It is not eye for an eye in our faith.
We do not help the victims of terror by terrorizing the terrorist.
January 9th, 2010 | 4:51 pm | #3
“While two Wrights certainly can make an airplane, two wrongs don’t do anything but mulitply wrongs.”
Whether it’s wrong to break the will of a terrorist begs the question.
“The terrorist is a man and my enemy. As a Christian my basic disposition toward him is love.”
i) And what about your disposition towards his prospective victims?
ii) Moreover, it’s not a question of whether he’s my personal enemy. He may be no threat to me personally. But he’s a threat to others.
Do you think one can be equally loving to everyone? What about a schoolyard sniper? If it’s a choice between the life of the sniper and the life of the next victim in the crosshairs, should the police sharpshooter be more loving towards the sniper than the students he has pinned down in the schoolyard?
“The mental well being of a terrorist is not the issue.”
Is isn’t? I thought you made that a central issue. We mustn’t psychologically wound the terrorist.
“His crimes have harmed his own soul and God will judge him. I can punish him for his crimes, but there are limits to what a man can do.”
That’s a category mistake. Coercive interrogation isn’t punitive.
“He broke individuals, but (in a Christian ethic) that does not mean I can break him. It is not eye for an eye in our faith.”
That commits the same category mistake.
“We do not help the victims of terror by terrorizing the terrorist.”
Oh, please! We certainly help potential victims by preventing their victimizing by a terrorist if we can foil the plot through effective interrogation.
January 9th, 2010 | 5:21 pm | #4
Hays asks me:
i) And what about your disposition towards his prospective victims?
I am sorry for them and will help them as much as I can, but not at the cost of adding to the wrong.
I am not calling the prospective victim, the terrorist is. We may execute him for his greater crimes.
There are simply some things we cannot do (surely you agree?) to save the innocent.
Hays asks me:
ii) Moreover, it’s not a question of whether he’s my personal enemy. He may be no threat to me personally. But he’s a threat to others.
The fact that he is a threat does not justify doing anything to stop that threat. Right?
We can stop the sniper by killing him. Nobody disagrees (in this thread with that).
Hays notes that I have said:
“The mental well being of a terrorist is not the issue.”
Is isn’t? I thought you made that a central issue. We mustn’t psychologically wound the terrorist.
I confess:
I misspoke. I should have said: “The mental well being of the terrorist is not the only issue.”
Hays claims I make a category mistake because: “coercive interrogation isn’t punitive.”
Let me assume this is true ideally. (One could argue that it could never be true in practice, but I will not.)
I don’t think all punitive actions wrong, but I also don’t think all good ends (hopefully stopping a future harm) justify all actions. The harm I do in torture is certain and the good I will get from it less so. Much less so.
The usefulness of torture depends on: a. having the right man, b. knowing he has good information, c. be willing to do whatever it takes to get that information.
Nobody I know believes that “c” is moral. Everyone I know argues that waterboarding is NOT torture, because “c” is obviously a problem.
On examining what effective waterboarding is I think it is torture and so cannot be done.
If you believe “c,” then we have too little in common to talk.
Hays concludes by saying:
“Oh, please! We certainly help potential victims by preventing their victimizing by a terrorist if we can foil the plot through effective interrogation.”
We might foil the plot, but only by becoming like them. I would not buy victory at that price and I hope that my innocent fellow citizens would be willing to die for the ideals of our nation.
We fight to defend a way of life and must not destroy it or undermine it in our way of defending it.
Otherwise, we could save all the lives by merely giving up and letting the first set of terrorists win. We could give them what they want (power) and nobody would die.
Why defeat them by creating a group of government sanctioned brutes who will do what it takes? Many will have died and bluntly I find home grown barbarians and tyrants no more appealing than foreign born.
If this is my last post today on this topic, it is not due to lack of interest but the need to work on other writing projects!
January 9th, 2010 | 9:48 pm | #5
John Mark Reynolds
“I am sorry for them and will help them as much as I can…”
You’re “sorry” for them? That’s it?
Feeling sorry for them is hardly a moral substitute for taking precautionary measures which would forestall their unjust loss in the first place.
Feeling sorry is appropriate if that’s the most we can do. But it’s not something we should do in lieu of taking reasonable measures to avoid tragic, foreseeable outcome.
“…but not at the cost of adding to the wrong.”
Which begs the question of whether we’d be adding to the wrong.
“I am not calling the prospective victim, the terrorist is.”
I think you must have used the wrong verb. Did you mean “harming” rather than “calling”?
If so, then it’s quite possible for a third party to harm someone through negligence. If a hospital administrator knows that one of his surgeons is an alcoholic, but takes no preemptive action, and the surgeon butchers a patient, the administrator is morally complicit.
However, it’s possible that I misread your sentence.
“We may execute him for his greater crimes.”
The question at issue is not what we can do after the fact, but what we can do in advance to avert a foreseeable atrocity.
We can also stand by as we watch a man beat his 5-year-old to death, then execute him for murder. But is that a substitute for timely intervention?
“There are simply some things we cannot do (surely you agree?) to save the innocent.”
I agree. And thus far you haven’t come anywhere near crossing that threshold.
“The fact that he is a threat does not justify doing anything to stop that threat. Right?”
Agreed. But these fact-free abstractions do nothing to resolve the concrete issue.
“We can stop the sniper by killing him. Nobody disagrees (in this thread with that).”
But killing the sniper isn’t loving to the sniper. It’s loving to his potential victims, but not to the sniper.
“I don’t think all punitive actions wrong, but I also don’t think all good ends (hopefully stopping a future harm) justify all actions.”
Agreed. But that’s another airy-fairy abstraction. To set an abstract boundary says nothing about what lies on either side of the boundary.
“The harm I do in torture is certain and the good I will get from it less so. Much less so.”
That’s a tendentious claim. One the one hand you “traumatize” the terrorist. So maybe he has nightmares for the rest of his life. Big deal. Why should terrorism be a risk-free occupation?
On the other hand, you save the lives of, let’s say, dozens of innocent men, women, and children.
Or let’s say it’s just one 5-year-old girl. Say she’d be horribly burned in a terrorist attack. Or lose her mother. How you think the harm of “torture” (as you define it) outweighs the good of her physical or emotional wellbeing still eludes me.
“The usefulness of torture depends on: a. having the right man, b. knowing he has good information, c. be willing to do whatever it takes to get that information. Nobody I know believes that ‘c’ is moral.”
Richard Posner might demur.
However, I’m happy to keep this within the confines of Christian ethics–since that’s my own frame of reference.
Incidentally, you’re a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, aren’t you? To my knowledge, and I’m no expert, the Eastern Orthodox could be pretty ruthless in suppressing heretics, not to mention what they had to do to fend of Muslims armies for as long as they could.
How does your opposition to any form of coercive interrogation correlate with the anthropology of Eastern Orthodox theologians?
“Everyone I know argues that waterboarding is NOT torture, because ‘c’ is obviously a problem.”
i) Depends, in part, on how you define “torture.” If you define torture as anything coercive, anything designed to break the resistance of the terrorist, then, yes, waterboarding would qualify as torture.
ii) However, I think that trivializes the definition of torture.
iii) Moreover, you’re equivocating. Waterboarding a terrorist is hardly a case of “doing whatever it takes.”
From what I’ve read and seen, waterboarding is very unpleasant. It triggers an involuntary gag reflex. Unbearable.
But there are far worse things you can do to a human being, both physically, emotionally, or both.
iv) Even more to the point, you’re fallaciously arguing that because forms of “torture” or coercion at the far end of the spectrum are illicit, then any form of “torture” or coercion is illicit even if it’s far milder. But it’s hardly valid to extrapolate from the most extreme cases conceivable to far more moderate forms of coercion, like, say, sleep deprivation.
“On examining what effective waterboarding is I think it is torture and so cannot be done.”
You define it as torture because you define any coercive technique as torture. You posit such a low threshold for what constitutes torture that by definition, waterboarding is torture–just as various techniques well short of waterboarding are torture under your definition.
“If you believe “c” then we have too little in common to talk.”
I agree with you that “c” goes too far. However, your test-case (waterboarding) fails to illustrate “c.”
“We might foil the plot, but only by becoming like them.”
I always find it intriguing that opponents of “torture” like yourself presume to raise moralistic objections to “torture,” but in the process you erase all moral distinctions.
Coercing a terrorist to divulge actionable intel doesn’t make us just like him. Aims and motives are hardly irrelevant to the moral valuation of a deed.
On the one hand we have a malicious terrorist who uses any means whatsoever to kill the innocent for no good reason. On the other hand we have a conscientious interrogator who uses some, by not all means, to protect the innocent from unjust harm.
If you refuse to draw necessary ethical distinctions, then you have no right to make moral pronouncements.
“I would not buy victory at that price and I hope that my innocent fellow citizens would be willing to die for the ideals of our nation.”
You’re welcome to speak for yourself, but I’d like to think our national ideals include the duty to take reasonable precautions in safeguarding innocent men, women, and children from mass murder.
“We fight to defend a way of life and must not destroy it or undermine it in our way of defending it.”
A way of life is a luxury of the living. How does allowing jihadis to kill us preserve our way of life?
“Otherwise, we could save all the lives by merely giving up and letting the first set of terrorists win. We could give them what they want (power) and nobody would die.”
You have defined “torture” in such minimalistic terms that if we captured a terrorist with foreknowledge of an impending attack on a sold-out football stadium, and if we knew that he suffered from coulrophobia (due to some childhood trauma), it would be morally preferable to let 100,000 spectators die in a conflagration rather than violate his “soul liberty” by bringing a circus clown into the interrogation room to perform a skit in his presence.
January 9th, 2010 | 9:55 pm | #6
“Why defeat them by creating a group of government sanctioned brutes who will do what it takes? Many will have died and bluntly I find home grown barbarians and tyrants no more appealing than foreign born.”
This is nothing more than a caricature of men and women on our side doing what it takes, within the guidelines and boundaries of applicable laws, to keep our country safe.
It is a true shame JMR has been talking past those with whom he disagrees in the vain effort to advance his assertions instead of a complete argument.
January 9th, 2010 | 10:20 pm | #7
Mr. Hays,
You will note that I am mostly “off line” the rest of week end. I found your replies great fun, however, whatever the merits of your argument. I hope you can understand the limits of my time to respond.
I enjoyed your irony and got a good laugh from one of your examples. Thanks!
I am perfectly willing to pass on clown torture on the clown-phobic since I can relate. Is there anything more horrifying than clowns?
In any case, we don’t agree, but that is not the point of this post.
I am responding due to your question about Eastern Orthodoxy. As with the Catholic hierarchy, so with my own, they are nearly universal (I personally know of no exceptions) in rejecting torture or enhanced interrogation techniques as incompatible with the Faith.
See this statement:
It was signed by:
Most Rev. Metropolitan Christopher
Serbian Orthodox Church in the USA and Canada
Archbishop Nicolae Condrea
Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese in America and Canada
Archbishop Demetrios
Primate, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America
Metropolitan Philip
Primate, The Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.
I will try to say more on this topic next week!
Meanwhile, I would be curious how many Catholic or Orthodox bishops who find “ends/means” argument persuasive or who favor “enhanced interrogation.”
January 10th, 2010 | 11:00 am | #8
Thanks, Mr. Reynolds.
However, in context, my question pertained to the *historic* position of the Orthodox church. Back when, say, the Byzantines and Romanians were having to fend off Muslims armies. Or back when the Orthodox church had the temporal power to suppress heretics.
How did those measure line up with the Orthodox anthropology of Orthodox theologians or prelates back *then*?
January 10th, 2010 | 5:23 pm | #9
Steve Hays writes:
“That being the case, why should the mental wellbeing of the terrorist take precedence over the mental wellbeing of his victims?”
and
“Or let’s say it’s just one 5-year-old girl. Say she’d be horribly burned in a terrorist attack. Or lose her mother. How you think the harm of “torture” (as you define it) outweighs the good of her physical or emotional wellbeing still eludes me.”
Could you say a bit more about what this talk of “taking precedence over” and of goods “outweighing” harms amounts to? Even if we agreed on a certain theory of value according to which, say, the death of 1000 innocent people “outweighs” the harm done to a victim of torture, I don’t see how that would do much to support the view that torturing someone in order to prevent 1000 deaths is morally justified – probably not even if one accepted a fairly bald consequentialism. After all, it seems likely that the death of 1000 innocent people “outweighs” (in the same sense) the harm done by, say, raping or killing or torturing the innocent daughter of a terrorist we think has relevant information, etc. But surely you agree that raping the innocent daughter of a terrorist in order to prevent 1000 deaths is not morally justified, no?
So even if we agreed to a theory that “weighed” harms in the manner your comments suggest, we wouldn’t be any closer to a justification of torture unless we subscribed to a moral principle (“an action is justified/permissible if the harm it does is “outweighed” by the harm it prevents”) with absurd consequences. At the very least, you’d want to stipulate that the harm caused by torture is outweighed by the harm that the torture prevents *and* that there are no available alternatives that do less harm. But even this principle seems open to the type of counterexample I’ve mentioned above (not to mention the reasons to think that real-world cases rarely if ever satisfy the second conjunct).
Perhaps your language of “precedence” and “weighing” wasn’t intended to suggest a consequentialist view of the sort I’ve questioned, or you have a more refined sort of consequentialist view in mind. But I didn’t understand why you thought that Reynolds’ view either (1) committed him to the position that the harm caused by torture “outweighs” the harm done by terrorists, or (2) should accept a moral principle or view according to which one’s actions should be guided (solely? primarily? defeasibly?) by the “weights” we give various outcomes. Could you clarify?
January 10th, 2010 | 7:39 pm | #10
Brian Boeninger
“Could you say a bit more about what this talk of ‘taking precedence over’ and of goods ‘outweighing’ harms amounts to? Even if we agreed on a certain theory of value according to which, say, the death of 1000 innocent people ‘outweighs’ the harm done to a victim of torture, I don’t see how that would do much to support the view that torturing someone in order to prevent 1000 deaths is morally justified – probably not even if one accepted a fairly bald consequentialism. After all, it seems likely that the death of 1000 innocent people ‘outweighs’ (in the same sense) the harm done by, say, raping or killing or torturing the innocent daughter of a terrorist we think has relevant information, etc. But surely you agree that raping the innocent daughter of a terrorist in order to prevent 1000 deaths is not morally justified, no?”
i) Your counterexample involves a fatal equivocation. My example involved a contrast between a wrongdoer (i.e. a murderous terrorist) and the innocent victims of a premeditated plot. Your counterexample ignores the distinction between guilt and innocence, malicious intent and noble intent, as if those considerations are irrelevant to moral decisions.
ii) ”Torture” is your choice of words, not mine.
iii) And why would you characterize a terrorist as the “victim”?
“So even if we agreed to a theory that ‘weighed’ harms in the manner your comments suggest, we wouldn’t be any closer to a justification of torture unless we subscribed to a moral principle (‘an action is justified/permissible if the harm it does is “outweighed” by the harm it prevents’) with absurd consequences.”
But that’s a misrepresentation of what I said. Why did you misrepresent my argument?
i) I introduced a qualification involving the distinction between guilt and innocence, malicious intent (i.e., to take innocent life) and noble intent (i.e. to save innocent life).
Why does that disappear from your summary? There can be no distinction between right and wrong without an attendant distinction between innocence and guilt.
Suppose a wounded schoolyard sniper (say, a man in his 30s) is wheeled into the ER along with one of his gunshot victims (say, a 7-year-old student). Suppose both the sniper and student have the same rare blood type. The hospital only has enough of that plasma on hand to treat one of them.
Do you think the needs of the innocent gunshot victim ought to override the needs of the wounded sniper? Or should the surgeon flip a coin?
“At the very least, you’d want to stipulate that the harm caused by torture is outweighed by the harm that the torture prevents *and* that there are no available alternatives that do less harm. But even this principle seems open to the type of counterexample I’ve mentioned above (not to mention the reasons to think that real-world cases rarely if ever satisfy the second conjunct).”
That builds on your previous misrepresentation.
“Perhaps your language of “precedence” and “weighing” wasn’t intended to suggest a consequentialist view of the sort I’ve questioned, or you have a more refined sort of consequentialist view in mind.”
i) To begin with, I’m not the only one who’s introducing consequentialist considerations into this discussion.
Both JMR and Joe Carter have also been introducing consequentialist considerations into their opposition to “torture.”
If you disapprove of any consideration to the probability or magnitude of the consequences of a given policy, then why aren’t you more evenhanded in your objections?
ii) Any well-rounded value theory will need to integrate a number of criteria in decision-making, viz. motives, moral norms, circumstances, consequences.
iii) It’s not an all-or-nothing choice between treating consequences as either all-important or wholly unimportant.
iv) I don’t know why you’re so disturbed by the idea of comparing the tradeoffs between one action and another.
In treating a patient, a doctor has to take a wide variety of issues into consideration. He will take greater risks in case the patient is at greater risk of death unless a high-risk procedure is performed. He will consider the probable success or failure of different procedures. One procedure might have both a greater upside (superior potential benefits) as well as a greater downside (be more hazardous). Another procedure might have both a lesser upside as well as a lesser downside.
January 11th, 2010 | 2:42 am | #11
Hello Steve – thanks for your reply!
I took this comment of yours:
“How you [Reynolds] think the harm of “torture” (as you define it) outweighs the good of her physical or emotional wellbeing still eludes me”
to be an attempt to *object* to something Reynolds had argued. I could think of two ways your comment would amount to an objection: first, if Reynolds claimed (or said something which entailed) that the harm of torture outweighed the good of preventing e.g. the death of innocent people; or second, if Reynolds agreed with you that the good of preventing the death of innocent people outweighed the harm of torture, but failed to draw the conclusion that the harm of torture was *thereby* justified. How else would your “precedence” and “outweighing” comments amount to an objection? (But perhaps I’ve overlooked other possibilities…)
The plainest reading of your comment suggests the first objection. But I saw nothing in what Reynolds said which entailed that he disagreed with your “comparative value” assessment. In charity, then, I thought perhaps your comments were intended to convey the second sort of objection. Obviously, though, there is great distance between the premise “the good of X outweighs the harm of Y” and the conclusion “Therefore, Y is justified as a means of securing X.” Mine was a simple request to fill in for us those gaps (i.e. implicit premises) in your argument. After all (and this was the point of my counterexample), denying that Y is justified as a means of securing X does not entail that one takes Y to somehow “outweigh” X, unless one packs quite a lot (of substantial, controversial content) into the notion of “outweighing.” Hence my request for you to say a bit more about it, to clarify it.
You’ve done some of that: you mentioned the distinction between a wrongdoer and an innocent, for instance, and one’s motives in doing an action. But this doesn’t fill all the gaps (i.e. it doesn’t show how your “outweighing” comment amounts to a good objection to something Reynolds says). After all, plenty of other cases come to mind: a terrorist has information about a bomb planted in a mall which would kill 10 people. The harm done to the terrorist if one were to cut off his fingers, one at a time, and then his toes, is outweighed (in some sense of that term) by the good of preventing 20 innocent deaths; that harm is done to a wrongdoer, with the intent of saving innocent lives. Do these facts (outweighing, wrongdoer vs. innocents, motives and purposes, etc.) yield the conclusion that the harm to the terrorist is justified? I still don’t know how you’d want to analyze “X (morally) outweighs Y,” or more importantly what you’d add to “X outweighs Y” in order to get a sufficient condition for X being morally permissible. So claiming that Reynolds thinks the harm of torture “outweighs” the good of saving innocent life seemed dialectically dubious, at best.
Again, my main question to you concerned why you thought that Reynolds was committed to saying that the harm of torture “outweighed” the good of preventing e.g. innocent death. It seems obvious that one could agree with your “weights” while still accepting Reynolds’ conclusion; so that made me think you were tacitly assuming some substantial moral principles, ones that Reynolds would not (or need not) accept. And that made me wonder what your objection really amounted to.
January 11th, 2010 | 1:38 pm | #12
Brian Boeninger
“The plainest reading of your comment suggests the first objection. But I saw nothing in what Reynolds said which entailed that he disagreed with your ‘comparative value’ assessment.”
i) If he regards coercive interrogation of whatever degree or kind as inherently evil, then a comparative value assessment would have no impact on his position.
ii) On the other hand, if he’s concerned with the physical/psychological wellbeing of the terrorist, then the terrorist is not the only party whose wellbeing is at stake.
I’m drawing attention to an apparent inconsistency in his position.
“Mine was a simple request to fill in for us those gaps (i.e. implicit premises) in your argument.”
Since I’ve repeatedly and explicitly introduced the guilt or innocence of the affected parties was one of the differential factors, that is not a gap in my argument. So are you alluding to some other alleged gap in my argument?
“You’ve done some of that: you mentioned the distinction between a wrongdoer and an innocent, for instance, and one’s motives in doing an action.”
I’ve been doing that in multiple replies to JMR. So that’s not an ex post facto response to your objection.
“After all, plenty of other cases come to mind: a terrorist has information about a bomb planted in a mall which would kill 10 people. The harm done to the terrorist if one were to cut off his fingers, one at a time, and then his toes, is outweighed (in some sense of that term) by the good of preventing 20 innocent deaths; that harm is done to a wrongdoer, with the intent of saving innocent lives. Do these facts (outweighing, wrongdoer vs. innocents, motives and purposes, etc.) yield the conclusion that the harm to the terrorist is justified?”
i) We could always discuss the question whether there are some lines we can’t cross, and how to draw them. But that’s premature at this stage of the argument. Until we settle the prior question of whether coercive interrogation of *any* degree or kind is morally permissible, it’s a moot point to debate which coercive techniques fall inside or outside the bounds of moral propriety.
ii) Moreover, objecting to coercive interrogation on the basis of borderline cases is fallacious. For we’re confronted with borderline cases on many ethical issues. But unless you think the existence of borderline cases is an excuse to never act at all (and inaction is, itself, a morally freighted posture), then raising the specter of borderline cases is just a blocking maneuver rather than a principled objection.
“I still don’t know how you’d want to analyze “X (morally) outweighs Y,” or more importantly what you’d add to “X outweighs Y” in order to get a sufficient condition for X being morally permissible”
What are you looking for? A mathematical formula in making moral decisions? That doesn’t exist. We bring certain criteria to bear, and we make a value judgment.
Go back to my hypothetical of the wounded sniper and his gunshot victim. Do you have a priority structure for dealing with that situation?
“Again, my main question to you concerned why you thought that Reynolds was committed to saying that the harm of torture ‘outweighed’ the good of preventing e.g. innocent death.”
Maybe because he’s actually used arguments to that effect. The dehumanizing effect of “torture” on the tormenter outweighs the potential value of the intelligence garnered by that procedure. You can’t be a “gentleman” soldier. Or allowing “torture” leads to “disastrous” consequences. So, on that view, the “disastrous” consequences outweigh the potential value of the intelligence.
Or do you have a problem with stock metaphors like “outweigh,” “override,” &c.?
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