Torture works sometimes -- but it's always wrong
So the easy argument against torture, that it is ineffective, is wrong. Torture can work. Nor can one simply dismiss the philosophical "ticking bomb" debate. Even ethicists bitterly opposed to torture acknowledge that if that hypothetical situation -- endlessly depicted in Fox's TV show "24" -- actually existed, there would be a compelling moral and philosophical argument for torture in that instance.
But in the real world, the "ticking bomb" situation never arises. It is never the case that we know we can automatically avert mass slaughter by torturing someone. Reality is not that neat. Guilt and knowledge are not established in advance. Those whom we torture may or may not be planning nefarious deeds. As the British political scientist Henry Shue pointed out in his classic 1978 essay "Torture," "Notice how unlike the circumstances of an actual choice about torture the philosopher's example is. The proposed victim of our torture is not someone we suspect of planting the device: he is the perpetrator. He is not some pitiful psychotic making one last play for attention: He did plant the device. The wiring is not backwards, the mechanism is not jammed: the device will destroy the city if not deactivated." Shue concludes that "The distance between the situations which must be concocted in order to have a plausible case of morally permissible torture and the situations which actually occur is, if anything, further reason why the existing prohibitions against torture should remain and should be strengthened by making torture an international crime."
As Shue suggests, the "ticking bomb" situation should be left in the classroom, for ethicists and philosophers to ponder. It has nothing to do with the real world. And those who invoke it are leading society down a fatal slippery slope, which ends with the wholesale justification of torture. Their arguments, which appeal to and are based in fear and anger, not considered analysis, would return us to the Middle Ages.
In a recent Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, Hayden and former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey asserted that Abu Zubaydah was "coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of Sept. 11, who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM [9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad] and other senior terrorists, and the disruption of follow-up plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S." According to the Washington Post, Hayden and Mukasey's account is false: Zubaydah gave most of his useful information before being waterboarded, and the CIA was unable to provide any examples of specific leads acquired by the use of torture.
Quantcast
