Torture Ethics
In the torture debate, some say that it is always immoral to torture. Others insist that if torturing an evil man can save many innocent lives, it is the only moral option. The disagreement turns partly on whether you subscribe to virtue ethics, utilitarianism, or some mix. Comparing the virtues and flaws of those systems is a centuries old enterprise, unlikely to be resolved in our lifetimes. That’s one reason I think Megan McArdle is wrong when she insists that torture opponents should never argue that extreme interrogation tactics are ineffective. Our society is inhabited by a fair number of people whose primary approach to ethics is mostly or substantially utilitarian. I’d like to convince them to oppose torture, as it is the policy position I believe to be correct, and they influence what policy is ultimately used by our government.
Megan is right that these utilitarians may wind up supporting torture. If I am wrong, and torture is proved to be an interrogation tactic that saves the most lives and thwarts the most terrorism without awful adverse consequences, it makes sense for a utilitarian to favor the practice. I might try to persuade them that their ethical system is incomplete and therefore wrongheaded, but until I successfully swayed them on that foundational question, any debate about torture relying on virtue ethics would be pointless.
Now consider those who subscribe wholly or partly to some form of virtue ethics. Even among these folks, there are some who insist that torture is always an evil practice, and others who maintain that torture is sometimes the most moral alternative available to us. The disagreement among these folks turns on whether immoral acts are always acts of commission, or whether an act of omission can be immoral. This strikes me as an awfully hard question to answer, and one that I haven’t seen adequately debated in the blogosphere, especially if I am right that it is central to the deep disagreements between Americans about whether torture is ever justified.
Why do I say this question is awfully hard to answer? Because I cannot get there by abstract reasoning, and my moral intuition leads me to different conclusions depending upon what hypothetical I conjure.
Do I think it is wrong to steal? Yes. Would I find it morally objectionable if a father refused to steal a loaf of bread, thereby allowing his toddler to starve to death? Of course. I’d find his decision abhorrent.
Do I think it is wrong to rape? Yes. What if a gunman said to a man, “Rape that woman over there or I will kill this hostage.” Would I find it morally objectionable if the man raped the woman? Yes, I think so. If he refused to rape the woman would I judge that he — like the father who let his daughter starve — committed a sin of omission? Certainly not.
These aren’t perfectly analogous situations, but neither are any of the various real life situations to which virtue ethics might be applied. Anyway, even if I am mistakenly missing “the right answer” in one of both of the situations above, the point is that neither my reasoning skills nor my moral intuition allows me to set forth a definitive, consistent standard for when, if ever, an act of omission might be immoral.
What does my moral intuition say about hypotheticals involving torture? Well, my gut says if the choice is the utterly implausible “torture this man or all of humanity perishes,” the most moral choice is torture, whereas if it’s “torture this man or there might be a terrorist attack that kills innocent people” or even “torture this man or there will be a terrorist attack that kills an innocent woman,” the most moral choice is not to torture. But I can’t defend those positions particularly well, especially to virtue ethicists who disagree (in either direction), since I suspect that I’m using a partly utilitarian calculus when I draw those distinctions. The more I think about it, the more I come around to Jim’s assertion that we should be skeptical of abstract moral reasoning on these questions, and that tradition must help guide us.
Are all these abstractions beside the point? After all, they don’t resemble the actual circumstances in which our government used torture. Well, I am on record opposing the specific ways in which the Bush Administration treated prisoners, but I think the abstract debate is nevertheless important. It informs how we’ll treat torture in the future. Again, my preference is that the practice be banned, partly but not only for utilitarian reasons. I’d like to convince those torture proponents who subscribe to virtue ethics to oppose torture too. Are they wrong when they assert that acts of omission can sometimes constitute an immoral course — that there are some things you can’t let happen if you have the power to stop them, and that circumstances of that very kind can sometimes justify torture? Why?
I think you’re confusing virtue ethics with deontological ethics…
— Philosophy Student · May 5, 01:34 PM · #
Yeah, your metaethics is kind of sloppy, but I really appreciate the open and honest introspection.
Instead of unpacking the post hoc rationalizations, I think you’d find it more fruitful to think about how the mind filters, compresses, accents and interprets information cues from the environment.
For example, the variability of the trolley problem when in-group/out-group identifiers are added, or when the bad consequence is foreseeable but unintended vs. foreseeable and intended vs. unforeseeable and therefore unintended.
Or with torture, the presupposition that those being tortured are wrong-doers, which plays on many facets of human morality — particularly the “pay to punish” drive and the dehumanization of “evil men”, i.e., those who have been mentally removed from “the circle” for critically bad acts (this is a real psychological phenomenon).
After that, you still are faced with the moralization of abstractions, and the diverse ways those can be conceptualized and accented. Know your audience: do they see faceless boogymen torturing the helpless in dark dank cells, or do they see Americans resigned to a tragic vision of the world, willing to do whatever it takes to keep their family and countrymen safe back home, whatever the cost to themselves? Do they see a cackling Cheney throwing his cigar under a Bronze Bull to light the fire, or do they see disciplined men and women tuning a terrorist’s environment in intense but border-line acceptable ways? The way they think determines how they construct these mental images, and how they construct these mental images determines how they think.
This is all stylized, of course, but the point stands. Forget the philosophical superstructure; it’s a red herring. Most people are inch-deep; they alt-tab between mutually exclusive rationalization modes without rhyme or reason or awareness.
Find out how they think, prefab information, and figure out the most effective way to get it into their heads: this is the way to change a moral mind.
— Sargent · May 5, 04:16 PM · #
Yes, I think that’s right. The virtue ethicist’s position is more like the one I was gesturing toward above, where it’s the exigencies of real-life situations that structure moral deliberation, and where the demands they pose can be inescapably particularistic.
— John Schwenkler · May 5, 04:19 PM · #
Are they wrong when they assert that acts of omission can sometimes constitute an immoral course — that there are some things you can’t let happen if you have the power to stop them, and that circumstances of that very kind can sometimes justify torture? Why?
I would focus on the source of this “power to stop them”. What gives these officials this power is our system of rules and laws. Once you’ve gone outside those rules, your power becomes illegitimate. This starts a new argument over when it’s obligatory to use illegitimate power, but managing to put the argument in these terms represents real progress.
I would also focus on the supposed extent of “power to stop them”. It implies an arrogant belief that we do, in fact, have the power to stop all terror, and a certainty that our actions won’t lead to more terror.
Perhaps extreme circumstances can make torture obligatory, but for a person with integrity and humility, those circumstances would have to be very extreme indeed—conceivable in some possible worlds, but not likely to have ever occurred in this actual one.
There’s a bridge between virtue ethics and utilitarianism—specifically, being virtuous and being a citizen of a virtuous nation are pleasurable things that are worth some risk of harm in order to retain.
— Consumatopia · May 5, 04:24 PM · #
Apologies, I hadn’t seen this before I posted.
— Consumatopia · May 5, 05:20 PM · #
I think could be described as more or less a virtue ethicist. I mostly agree with Schwenkler’s post above for reasons I’ll explain.
I generally do consider acts of omission as equally moral/immoral as acts of commission. But this does not lead me toward a pro-torture (in real life) viewpoint because of the specific epistemological issues involved in any of the standard hypotheticals people use for moral reasoning of this sort.
Just to flesh it out all the way: Let’s say that a captured terrorist has information on a plot to detonate a bomb and kill lots of innocent people. Assume that torture is the only method that will allow you to get this information in time to prevent the attack. Assume also that if you do not obtain this information before the bomb goes off, you will be unable to stop the plot (i.e., the plot will not be disrupted in other ways or by other people).
Now I can’t really say for sure what I’d do here, since it’s a highly stylized scenario, but I think I would probably support torture in this instance because it seems to me that by not torturing the terrorist you are killing the innocent citizens just as surely as he is. You have the power to stop it but choose not to use it. This strikes me as morally wrong.
However, this is not a very helpful guide to any real-life situations because of the two epistemological assumptions of this scenario. The hypothetical assumed that no other method but torture will obtain the desired information and that without obtaining the information the plot will succeed. If both these conditions are true, then we are justified in saying that torture is actually “necessary” in order to save innocent lives. But if one or both of these conditions are not true, then torture is not actually necessary.
Obviously, in real life, no human being could ever actually “know” that these two conditions obtain, because that would require knowledge of the future. And you can’t definitively “know” whether the torture was morally justified even in hindsight, because to know this you’d have to know a contrafactual (i.e., what would have happened if you hadn’t tortured the terrorist; perhaps the plot would’ve been disrupted in another way).
So the best that could ever be said in any real-life event is that you strongly “believe” that these two conditions obtain in the particular scenario in which you’re debating torturing the terrorist.
Under what conditions in a real-life scenario could we say that we have strong grounds for believing that the two conditions obtain, and thus have strong grounds for saying that torture is truly “necessary.”
I have trouble coming up with a realistic scenario under which I could actually say: “My belief that these two assumptions obtain in this instance is so strong that I am justified torturing this person.” In the pressure of any real-life event, I am highly likely, due to both fear and bias, to believe that the grounds for my belief are stronger than they actually are. And since I can’t trust myself in any real-life scenario to reason clearly about the validity of my grounds for thinking that torture in this case is necessary, I think the correct response is to say: “Well, I can’t know whether it’s necessary or not, and given that I shouldn’t do it.”
In short, the two assumptions of the ticking-time bomb scenario have to be true for the moral hypothetical to guide us, and it doesn’t seem to me that in any real-life event we could actually be sufficiently sure that the two assumptions obtain to decide that torture was truly necessary.
— Dave Roth · May 5, 06:56 PM · #
My biggest problem with the people who think torture is acceptable in some circumstances is that they always seem to leave off how the ticking-time bomb events are extraordinarily rare in comparison to the thousands of instances of torture occurring in the world that have nothing to do with anything anybody’s safety or security.
Is it truly so hard for them to admit how rare their conditions are?
The people most likely to be victims of torture? Minorities. The Mentally Ill. Prison Inmates. Children. Not terrorists with a ticking bomb somewhere. Not pedophiles who abducted a child and stashed them who knows where.
Is it really so hard to condemn torture when it’s used for those purposes?
Ask some torture proponents and find out.
If they can say it is, then hey, good for them, they’ve shown they’ve got some brains and realize they’re dealing with an extreme case. If they can’t, then you have to wonder why they’re so resentful over it.
— Thetortuoustruth · May 6, 03:28 AM · #
Americans need to do their best in the upcoming controversial months of debate over the torture topic that the matter at hand is not as simple as black and white. There is no justification for human torture and likewise for an all out ban of these interrogation techniques. If a captured prisoner is KNOWN to have information vital to preventing the loss of innocent lives, some course of action must be taken. And if the people responsible for extracting that information have found effective techniques for doing so we must accept that sometimes the inalienable rights of one individual must be sacrificed for the good of the commonwealth. Yet, we cannot allow our government to begin deploying these techniques on prisoners merely SUSPECTED of having useful information. This is a slippery slope that can lead us down a very dark path to the future in which anyone suspected of wrong doing can be stripped of the rights guaranteed to all humanity in the Declaration of Independence, the Geneva Convention, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. As an absolute last resort torture can legitimately be used as an effective way to prevent the loss of live and promote the well being of the common man. Regardless, systems of organization and standards must be formed and upheld to ensure that no unneccessary torture ever occurs in America and abroad. We can’t allow torture nor can we ban it. We must do our best to prevent torture, but when push comes to shove sometimes extentuating circumstances leave no other options. In such cases torture cannot be seen as a criminal act to never be deployed on anyone in any situation. We should work to eliminate torture but don’t be shocked if you learn it was practiced to secure the lives of innocent people.
— Mike · May 13, 05:41 PM · #