Torture Risks Negative Consequences At Many Levels

Those who know anything about moral theory know that the argument for torture is essentially a utilitarian one. Some are willing to torture because they believe it is the best means available to protect the 300 million people who live in this country. Hundreds/thousands of (foreign) detainees suffer as the price of protecting millions of us. Thus we achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Utilitarianism is a deeply flawed moral theory, as has been shown by many. In emphasizing intrinsic human dignity, and concerns about both personal and national character, I have implicitly rejected any purely utilitarian argument for (or against) torture. Indeed, because I believe that torture is intrinsically wrong, it poses a risk to the very argument I am making even to entertain utilitarian considerations. But because many policymakers and citizens at least implicitly operate from a utilitarian framework, it must be addressed here.

The greatest gain promised by the resort to torture is that it might extract information from suspects that would otherwise be unavailable. In the most sensational and widely discussed scenario—the so-called ticking bomb case—utilitarians argue strongly that the torture of one terrorist at a pivotal moment could in turn save thousands of lives, and thus it must be permitted.  

In a brilliant utilitarian analysis of what an institutionalized torture regime might look like, and what its consequences might be, Jean Marie Arriga has suggested a number of difficulties even for a utilitarian approach to torture.

For example, and as many others have noted, there is abundant evidence that people will say anything under torture, just to stop the pain. It is not just that they will be intentionally deceptive, but even more that after sufficient torture they may lack the mental ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood or to convey the truth. If the goal of torture is to extract critical information, these problems are obviously profound. Several news agencies have reported that information apparently gained from torture has proven false—after being announced as an important intelligence score by the U.S. government. The overall reliability of intelligence gained from torture remains the subject of great controversy.

The ultimate goal in gaining this information is to protect national security. However, there is good reason to wonder whether the use of torture more deeply motivates extant terrorists, and turns more people from concerned bystanders into hardened terrorists, than any intelligence benefit that might be gained. An editorial in the Vancouver Sun put it well: “Those subjected to physical torture usually conceive undying hatred for their torturers.” One must therefore also consider the greater likelihood that American civilians (here or especially abroad) and American troops overseas will be subject to torture (or terror) by aggrieved enemies.

Further, as has already happened, sometimes the consequences of torture are worse than intended, as when victims die prematurely due to the physical or mental toll. From a utilitarian perspective the main problem here is that a dead person cannot give you any information whatsoever. And, of course, as news of deaths trickle out, moral outrage scandalizes the torturer’s own people, the families and communities of the persons who have died in custody, and general world opinion.  

Arriga’s most original insights concern the unintended but likely institutional consequences that can and often do flow from a torture regime. For example, medical and psychological practitioners become involved in enhancing and medically managing torture techniques, thereby risking the corruption of these institutions which are supposed to serve as agents of healing—or evoking their opposition. Biomedical specialists are recruited to study and develop torture, and torture resistance, techniques. Special torture interrogation units are established, with training in especially sophisticated methods of torture and a consequent demoralization and negative effect on other governmental and security institutions. The use of rogue torture interrogation services, such as organized crime, covert U.S. torture agencies, and brutal foreign intelligence services also poses severe problems in terms of command and control of torture operations and the empowerment of rogue elements here and abroad. Arriga’s article was published in 2004; one wonders how many of her concerns already are uncomfortably close to hitting their mark in our own case.  

The “ticking bomb” case is theoretically important but in actuality a red herring. It has been wisely said that “bad cases make bad law” and this is true here. The percentage of such ticking bomb cases among the thousands of people we have detained must be less than infinitesmal. It is just as foolish to legitimize the practice of torture because of this rare possible exception as it would be, say, to legitimize the practice of adultery because of the possibility that someone might have to commit adultery to save their child’s life from a criminal who demands sex in exchange for the child’s survival.
 
Much ink has been spilled considering how to handle these very rare ticking bomb cases. Perhaps the most widely discussed proposal has been Alan Dershowitz’s suggestion that we permit torture only through a “torture warrant” signed by a judge or a very high government official, such as the president himself, who would therefore bear full legal, political, and moral responsibility.

This would certainly be better than what we are doing now. But I think that any potential resort to torture in rare, ticking bomb cases would be better handled within the context of an outright ban. The grand moral tradition of civil disobedience, for example, specifies that there are instances in which obedience to laws must be overridden by loyalty to a higher moral obligation. These are usually unjust laws but this is not always the case. Dietrich Bonhoeffer participated in an assassination plot against Hitler but did not argue for the rewriting of moral prohibitions of political assassinations. He was prepared to let God and history be his judge. If a one-in-a-million instance were to emerge in which a responsible official believed that the ban on torture must be overridden as a matter of emergency response, let him do so knowing fully that he would have to answer for his action before God, law, and neighbor. This is a long way from an authorized torture regime.  

Long ago, German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote about the perennial human tendency to find exceptions to binding moral rules when those obligations bind just a bit too tightly on us. “Hence there arises a natural…disposition to argue against these strict laws of duty and to question their validity, or at least their purity and strictness; and, if possible, to make them more accordant with our wishes and inclinations, that is to say, to corrupt them at their very source, and entirely to destroy their worth.”

I believe that this is the best explanation for what is happening on the issue of torture in our nation. Our current crisis represents our succumbing to the temptation to waive moral rules that we have every reason to know are applicable to us. They are part of international law, military law, and moral law. We would certainly not want our troops or our “detainees” or ourselves to be tortured were the shoe on the other foot. We know that torture is wrong, but just not now, not in our exceptional case, not in this global war on terror. We are tempted to follow the logic of a Time magazine article when it says, “In the war on terrorism, the personal dignity of a fanatic trained for mass murder may be an inevitable casualty.”

And yet we are queasy enough about even this “inevitable casualty” that we do not want to call torture torture. We do not want to expose our policies, or our prisons, or our prisoners, to public view. We deny that we are torturing, or we deny that our prisoners are really prisoners, or when pushed to the wall we remind one another of how evil the enemy is. We give every evidence of the kind of self-deception so characteristic of the descent into sin.

It is past time for evangelical Christians to remind both government and society of perennial moral values that also just happen to be international and domestic laws. We must shake free now, without any further delay, from our sluggish inattention to this issue, and from our overall tendency toward comfortable partnership with (Republican) American government. We must speak truth to power here. We say we care about moral values and that we vote on the basis of such values. Many of us say that we care deeply about human rights violations around the world. Now it is time to raise our voice about human rights violations directed and permitted by our own government.  

This is a call to say a clear and unequivocal No to torture, ultimately on religious grounds, but not on the basis of any kind of idealistic withdrawal from realistic engagement with the world. It is time that we raise our voices and make ourselves heard in our churches, in Congress, in the judiciary, in the executive branch, in the military, and in public opinion.

Christians have dual loyalties that do not always easily cohere. We are loyal to our nation but also, and always more fundamentally, loyal to Jesus Christ. Sometimes these loyalties conflict. In this case, though, rightly understood, they do not.

We serve a tortured, crucified Savior. In the politics of a long ago Empire, reasons of state appeared to require his torture and death. “It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish” (Jn. 11:50).

I have sought to show that a proper understanding of our national well-being requires the rejection of torture. Now I want to close by saying that for Christians a proper understanding of our ultimate loyalty—to Jesus the tortured one—makes any support of torture unthinkable.