Accompanying the moral arguments against torture, there must be legal procedures to ensure that the perpetrators of torture are brought to justice. The inhumanity of the act, along with its questionable usefulness and wider implications, makes torture always morally wrong. However, the humanity of the situation; it will always be individual people who must make the decisions must be taken into account as a mitigating factor.
In this essay, I have sought to argue that torture is always morally wrong through a critique of this scenario and through exposing the moral problems that it serves to obscure.
After explaining the problem as it is presented and outlining the main arguments for and against torture, I have shown the immediate flaws in the scenario. These include assumptions of the existence of the bomb, the guilt of the suspect, the effectiveness of torture and ineffectiveness of other methods, and the ability to prevent the disaster. Each is extremely unlikely to be certain in reality, however straightforwardly they may be presented in the moral puzzle, and each uncertainty weakens the case that torture is necessary and, therefore, justified.
In particular, the assumption that torture will produce accurate information is deeply flawed as it can provide no measure for truth and cannot distinguish the guilty from the innocent. Having shown the weaknesses of the case for torture, I then went on to make the case that torture is always morally wrong. The evidence for this is found largely in the wider context of the situation, where we can see implications of legitimising the practice that go beyond the immediate life and death of the situation itself.
There would undoubtedly be innocent victims faced with long-term suffering as a result, and these victims would include those required to carry out torture.
Further, the use of torture makes it impossible to use any evidence collected in a criminal trial and the US has already begun to see key suspects being acquitted as a result.
These arguments lead me to believe that torture is unjustifiable, even in extreme cases. However, because the immediate choice is so difficult and because the person making it is possesses human emotions and instincts, I would not absolutely condemn the decision to torture provided it was made in an emergency situation and with the correct intention.
To make prior judgement that torture is justified in some circumstances is dangerous and wrong — torture must be prosecuted as a crime wherever it occurs. However, to recognise the mitigating circumstances when it occurs is also important. Bowden, M. Cogan, C. Dershowitz, A. Erskine, T. Herman, M. Mayer, J. Pfiffner J. Rodley, N. Shue, H. Turner, B. Toni Erskine Date written: Before you download your free e-book, please consider donating to support open access publishing.
E-IR is an independent non-profit publisher run by an all volunteer team. Consider, for example, a South African police officer in the days of apartheid who used a cattle prodder which delivers an electric shock on contact as a means of controlling an unruly crowd of South African blacks. On the other hand, if — as also evidently took place in apartheid South Africa — a person was tied to a chair and thereby rendered defenceless, and then subjected to repeated electric shocks from a cattle prodder this would constitute torture.
Does torture necessarily involve coercion? No doubt the threat of torture, and torture in its preliminary stages, simply functions as a form of coercion in this sense. However, torture proper has as its starting point the failure of coercion, or that coercion is not even going to be attempted.
As we have seen, torture proper targets autonomy itself, and seeks to overwhelm the capacity of the victims to exercise rational control over their decisions — at least in relation to certain matters for a limited period of time — by literally terrorising them into submission.
Hence there is a close affinity between terrorism and torture. Indeed, arguably torture is a terrorist tactic. However, it is one that can be used by groups other than terrorists, e.
In relation to the claim that torture is not coercion, it might be responded that at least some forms or instances of torture involve coercion, namely those in which the torturer is seeking something from the victim, e. This response is plausible. However, even if the response is accepted, there will remain instances of torture in which these above-mentioned conditions do not obtain; presumably, these will not be instances of coercion.
Secondly, torture needs to be distinguished from excruciatingly painful medical procedures. These kinds of case differ from torture in a number of respects. Thirdly, there is corporal punishment. Moreover, unlike torture, corporal punishment will normally consist of a determinate set of specific, pre-determined and publicly known acts administered during a definite and limited time period, e.
Fourthly, there are ordeals involving the infliction of severe pain. Consider Gordon Liddy who reportedly held his hand over a burning candle till his flesh burnt in order to test his will. Moreover, ordeals — as the Liddy example illustrates — can be voluntary, unlike torture.
Having provided ourselves with an analytic account of torture and distinguished torture from some closely related practices, we need to turn now to the question, What is Wrong with Torture? In terms of the above definition of torture there are at least two things that are inherently morally wrong with torture. Firstly, torture consists in part in the intentional infliction of severe physical suffering — typically, severe pain; that is, torture hurts very badly.
For this reason alone, torture is an evil thing. Secondly, torture of human beings consists in part in the intentional, substantial curtailment of individual autonomy. Given the moral importance of autonomy, torture is an evil thing — even considered independently of the physical suffering it involves. Nevertheless, there is some dispute about how great an evil torture is relative to other great evils, specifically killing and murder.
Many have suggested that torture is a greater evil than killing or even murder. Certainly, torturing an innocent person to death is worse than murder, for it involves torture in addition to murder. On the other hand, torture does not necessarily involve killing, let alone murder, and indeed torturers do not necessarily have the power of life and death over their victims.
Consider police officers whose superiors turn a blind eye to their illegal use of torture, but who do not, and could not, cover-up the murder of those tortured; the infliction of pain in police cells can be kept secret, but not the existence of dead bodies. First, torture is similar to killing in that both interrupt and render impossible the normal conduct of human life, albeit the latter — but not the former — necessarily forever.
Indeed, given the extreme suffering being experienced and the consequent loss of autonomy, the victim would presumably rather be dead than alive during that period. So, as already noted, torture is a very great evil.
However, it does not follow from this that being killed is preferable to being tortured. Nor does it follow that torturing someone is morally worse than killing him. For the same reason it does not follow that torturing a person is morally worse than killing that person. If the harm brought about by an act of torture is a lesser evil than the harm done by an act of killing then, other things being equal, the latter is morally worse than the former.
A second point pertains to the powerlessness of the victims of torture. Dead people necessarily have no autonomy or power; so killing people is an infringement of their right to autonomy as well as their right to life.
The person being tortured is for the duration of the torturing process physically powerless in relation to the torturer. Perhaps the terrorist could negotiate the cessation of torture and immunity for himself, if he talks. Consider also a situation in which both a hostage and his torturer know that it is only a matter of an hour before the police arrive, free the hostage and arrest the torturer; perhaps the hostage is a defence official who is refusing to disclose the whereabouts of important military documents and who is strengthened in his resolve by this knowledge of the limited duration of the pain being inflicted upon him.
The conclusion to be drawn from these considerations is that torture is not necessarily morally worse than killing or more undesirable than death , though in many instances it may well be. Killing is an infringement of the right to life and the right to autonomy.
Torture is an infringement of the right to autonomy, but not necessarily of the right to life. Let us now turn directly to the question of the moral justification for torture in extreme emergencies. Here we must distinguish between one-off cases of torture, on the one hand, and legalised or institutionalised torture, on the other.
In this section one-off, non-institutionalised acts of torture performed by state actors in emergency situations are considered. The argument is that there are, or could well be, one-off acts of torture in extreme emergencies that are, all things considered, morally justifiable. Accordingly, the assumption is that the routine use of torture is not morally justified; so if it turned out that the routine use of torture was necessary to, say, win the war on terrorism, then some of what is said here would not be to the point.
The most obvious version of the argument in favour of one-off acts of torture in extreme emergencies is consequentialist in form. For example, Bagaric and Clarke 29 offer a version of the ticking bomb scenario in the context of their hedonistic act utilitarian theoretical perspective.
A standard objection to this kind of appeal to consequentialism is that it licenses far too much: torture of a few innocent victims may well be justified, on this account, if it provides intense pleasure for a much larger number of sadists. As it happens, Bagaric and Clarke insist that they want to restrict the practice of torture; only the guilty are to be subjected to torture and only for the purpose of extracting information.
However it is far from clear how this desired restriction can be reconciled with consequentialism in any of its various permutations, let alone the relatively permissive version favoured by Bagaric and Clarke. Why, for example, should torture be restricted to the guilty, if torturing a small number of innocent persons would enable the lives of many other innocents to be saved as presumably it might.
Again, why should under-resourced Indian police not torture — as they often do in reality — a repeat offender responsible for a very large number of property crimes, if this proves to be the only available efficient and effective form of retrieving the stolen property in question and, thereby, securing the conviction of this offender, reducing property crime and making a large number of property owners happy?
The essential problem confronted by consequentialists participating in the torture debate is that their theoretically admissible moral barriers to torture are relatively flimsy; too flimsy, it seems, to accommodate the strong moral intuitions in play.
But see Arrigo However, their moral absolutism is not without its own problems: specifically, in relation to torturing the guilty few for the purpose of saving the innocent many. See Walzer , Miller ; Kershnar and Steinhoff Before turning in detail to the arguments on this issue, let us consider some putative examples of the justified use of torture.
The first is a policing example, the second a terrorist example. Arguably, both examples are realistic, albeit the terrorist ticking bomb scenario is often claimed by moral absolutists to be utterly fanciful. Certainly, the policing example is realistic; indeed, it was provided by a former police officer from his own experience. So is it entirely fanciful that there could be such an attack and that an Al Qaeda operative known on the basis of intercepted communications to be a member of the cell involved in the planned attack might not be arrested, interrogated and tortured?
At any rate, these are the two most popular kinds of example discussed in the literature. These cases include the real-life Daschner case involving the threat to torture a kidnapper by German police in which resulted in the kidnapper disclosing the location of a kidnapped child Miller Consider the following case study: Height of the antipodean summer, Mercury at the century-mark; the noonday sun softened the bitumen beneath the tyres of her little Hyundai sedan to the consistency of putty.
Her three year old son, quiet at last, snuffled in his sleep on the back seat. He had a summer cold and wailed like a banshee in the supermarket, forcing her to cut short her shopping. Her car needed petrol. Her tot was asleep on the back seat. She poured twenty litres into the tank; thumbing notes from her purse, harried and distracted, her keys dangled from the ignition.
Whilst she was in the service station a man drove off in her car. Where did you dump the car? He quite enjoyed handing out a bit of biffo, but now, kneeling on hands and knees in his own urine, in pain he had never known, he finally realised the beating would go on until he told the police where he had abandoned the child and the car. When found, the stolen child was dehydrated, too weak to cry; there were ice packs and dehydration in the casualty ward but no long-time prognosis on brain damage.
In this case study torture of the car thief can be provided with a substantial moral justification, even if it does not convince everyone. Consider the following case. A terrorist group has planted a small nuclear device with a timing mechanism in London and it is about to go off. If it does it will kill thousands and make a large part of the city uninhabitable for decades.
One of the terrorists has been captured by the police, and if he can be made to disclose the location of the device then the police can probably disarm it and thereby save the lives of thousands. The police know the terrorist in question. They know he has orchestrated terrorist attacks, albeit non-nuclear ones, in the past. Moreover, on the basis of intercepted mobile phone calls and e-mails the police know that this attack is under way in some location in London and that he is the leader of the group.
Unfortunately, the terrorist is refusing to talk and time is slipping away. However, the police know that there is a reasonable chance that he will talk, if tortured. Moreover, all their other sources of information have dried up. Furthermore, there is no other way to avoid catastrophe; evacuation of the city, for example, cannot be undertaken in the limited time available.
Torture is not normally used by the police, and indeed it is unlawful to use it. In this case study there is also a substantial moral justification for torture, albeit one that many moral absolutists do not find compelling.
Consider the following points: 1 The police reasonably believe that torturing the terrorist will probably save thousands of innocent lives; 2 the police know that there is no other way to save those lives; 3 the threat to life is more or less imminent; 4 the thousands about to be murdered are innocent — the terrorist has no good, let alone decisive, justificatory moral reason for murdering them; 5 the terrorist is known to be jointly with the other terrorists morally responsible for planning, transporting, and arming the nuclear device and, if it explodes, he will be jointly with the other terrorists morally responsible for the murder of thousands.
In addition to the above set of moral considerations, consider the following points. The terrorist is culpable on two counts. Firstly, the terrorist is forcing the police to choose between two evils, namely, torturing the terrorist or allowing thousands of lives to be lost.
Were the terrorist to do what he ought to do, namely, disclose the location of the ticking bomb, the police could refrain from torturing him. This would be true of the terrorist, even if he were not actively participating in the bombing project. Secondly, the terrorist is in the process of completing his jointly undertaken action of murdering thousands of innocent people. He has already undertaken his individual actions of, say, transporting and arming the nuclear device; he has performed these individual actions in the context of other individual actions performed by the other members of the terrorist cell in order to realise the end shared by the other members of the cell of murdering thousands of Londoners.
In refusing to disclose the location of the device the terrorist is preventing the police from preventing him from completing his joint action of murdering thousands of innocent people. In the institutional environment described, torture is both unlawful and highly unusual. Accordingly the police, if it is discovered that they have tortured the terrorist, would be tried for a serious crime and, if found guilty, sentenced. We will return to this issue in the following section. Here simply note that the bare illegality of their act of torture does not render it morally impermissible, given it was otherwise morally permissible.
Here it is the bare fact that it is illegal that is in question. So the relevant moral considerations comprise whatever moral weight attaches to compliance with the law just for the sake of compliance with the law, as distinct from compliance for the sake of the public benefits the law brings or compliance because of the moral weight that attaches to the moral principle that a particular law might embody.
But even if it is held that compliance with the law for its own sake has some moral weight — and arguably it has none — it does not have sufficient moral weight to make a decisive difference in this kind of scenario. In short, if torturing the terrorist is morally permissible absent questions of legality, the bare fact of torture being illegal does not render it morally impermissible.
Note also that since the terrorist is, when being tortured, still in the process of attempting to complete his joint action of murdering thousands of Londoners, and murdering also the police about to torture him, the post factum legal defence of necessity may well be available to the police should they subsequently be tried for torture. Some commentators on scenarios of this kind are reluctant to concede that the police are morally entitled — let alone morally obliged — to torture the offender.
How do these commentators justify their position? Someone might claim that torture is an absolute moral wrong Matthews ; Brecher For criticisms of these authors see especially Steinhoff and Allhoff On this view there simply are no real or imaginable circumstances in which torture could be morally justified. This is a hard view to sustain, not least because we have already seen that being tortured is not necessarily worse than being killed, and torturing someone not necessarily morally worse than killing him.
Naturally, someone might hold that killing is an absolute moral wrong, i. View the program online. ReasonOnline: Ticking Bombast: What would you do to save millions of lives?
Unqualified Offerings: Ticking in Reverse. John Quiggin: The ticking bomb problem. Balkinization: Torture and the Ticking Time Bomb. Carpetbagger Report: Forget the ticking time-bomb scenario. The Debate on Torture. A case for torture By Mirko Bagaric. Cox International Law Center. Bush Administration Policy on Torture. White House: Statement on the U. International Day in Support of Victims of Torture Other White House statements, press briefings, executive orders, interviews, and articles on torture are here.
James Woolsey, director of Central Intelligence from — Justice Dept. Also on another site that loads quicker. Rendition and Secret Prisons. Secret World of U. Interrogation May 11, Google Directory: Extraordinary Rendition.
Wikipedia: Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. Encarta: Abu Ghraib Scandal. Wikipedia: Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse. Guardian Unlimited: US military in torture scandal. Human Rights Watch: U. Torture and Abuse of Detainees. Yahoo Directory: Abu Ghraib Prison. News Reports on Torture and Related Subjects. Archive of news articles on these subjects.
Magazine Coverage of Torture. More articles on torture. Commentary: Torture More articles on torture. Nation: In Torture We Trust? Politico: Roosevelt was right: Waterboarding wrong More articles on torture. Reason: Torturing Logic More articles on torture. Salon: Did waterboarding really work on Abu Zubaydah? Slate: Containing Torture: How torture begets even more torture More articles on torture.
Time: Redefining Torture More articles on torture. TomPaine: Torture? Uh-Uh, Not Us More articles on torture. Balkinization: Anti-Torture Memos More entries on torture. Daily Dish: Enhanced Interrogation More entries on torture. Daily Kos: Torture elicits lies More entries on torture. More entries on torture. Talking Points Memo: Torture runs counter to decades of U.
Editorial Cartoons on Torture. Political Cartoons. Cartoonist Group: Torture. Torture also has corrosive effects on organisations, as the leadership focus on results will allow space for increasing brutality and circumvention of checks and balances. Finally, torture hinders intelligence activity in the longer term. It breaks social networks, [33] which makes non-coercive intelligence collection harder, diverts effort from potentially more reliable methods of interrogation [34] such as rapport-building and information gathering interviews, [35] and hampers efforts to build diplomatic, political and military alliances.
Even with plenty of evidence on the inefficacy of torture and its pervasive negative effects, many democratic governments have tried to legitimise and control the practice. France then responded with a counterinsurgency operation that was the first in any modern democratic state to allow torture explicitly. This unquestionable success has been historically tied to the supposedly superior intelligence gathered through torture and is used by apologists as the staple case of why the practice works.
However, accounts from the French torturers themselves describe that the technique not only de-professionalised soldiers and fragmented French military institutions but also produced intelligence that was inferior to those obtained through other practices.
The main findings were that the use of EITs was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence, as multiple detainees fabricated information or refused to cooperate. Due to its lack of efficiency, the whole program rested on inaccurate claims made by the CIA on its effectiveness. It was also uncovered that the torture applied was far more brutal and the conditions of confinement far harsher than what had been portrayed to the government, and that techniques that were not authorised had been applied to a greater extent of detainees than officially reported.
It was also pointed out that the Central Agency had been actively dodging oversight by democratic institutions such as the Congress and the White House. Both cases highlighted above prove through empiric experience that allowing torture, even under the guise of exceptionalism and governmental control, is not effective.
As the French and US cases show, once institutionalised, the use of torture will grow, institutions will erode, and the negative outcomes will far exceed the benefits reaped from intelligence that is nevertheless unreliable. As seen above, the realist and consequentialist ethical views on torture, which legitimise the practice, allow states to implement torture programmes.
Furthermore, allowing torture even under extreme circumstances sets a dangerous precedent, as those who are willing to broaden the application of the technique will exploit any legal permission to do so, [52] as was shown by the French and US cases. Additionally, torture is an inefficient way to gather intelligence, as it elicits unreliable information, generates time-consuming false leads, and produces cognitive effects that impair collection even when the sources are willing to collaborate.
The technique also has a corrosive impact on organisations, increasing brutality and resistance to democratic oversight. Finally, torture is detrimental to intelligence per se, as it breaks social networks, undermines non-coercive collection, diverts effort from more reliable methods of interrogation, taints the public perception of intelligence and hampers efforts to build alliances. Thus, as there is no ethical justification for the practice nor proof of its unparalleled effectiveness, much on the contrary, there should be an absolute legal ban on torture.
Banham, Cynthia. Hart Publishing, Bellaby, Ross W. Duke, Misty C.
0コメント