Is Torture Ever Justified?

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The human person is a creation of God. Every inch of the human body and every aspect of the human spirit come from God and bear witness to his handiwork. We are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-28). Human dignity (value, worth) comes as a permanent and ineradicable endowment of the Creator, to every person.

Recognition of the intrinsic dignity of the human being requires a corresponding restraint in our behavior toward all human beings. Christians, at least, should be trained to see in every person the imprint of God’s grandeur. This should create in us a sense of reverence or even sacredness. Here, we say—and we say it even of detainees in the war on terror—is a human being sacred in God’s sight, made in God’s image, someone for whom Christ died. No one is ever “subhuman” or “human debris,” as Rush Limbaugh has described some of our adversaries in Iraq. An inchoate sense of the proper reverence due to every human person makes its way even into “secular” and public codes, such as international legal documents. These texts may not be able to say why human beings should be treated with respect but they know that this is in fact a binding obligation. Christians can say why: because this “detainee,” even this “terrorist,” if he is one, is a child of God, made in God’s image.

A moral commitment to the dignity of the human person is sometimes fleshed out in terms of human rights. Just because they are human, on this view, people have rights to many things, including the right not to be tortured. Christians sometimes debate the legitimacy of “rights-talk,” partly because it is a language often overused in modern debate and partly because we think about how Jesus gave up all of his “rights.” Just because someone claims a “right” does not mean that it is a right. But I believe that at least an implication of a biblical understanding of human dignity is the existence of a set of human rights. Among the most widely recognized of these in both legal and moral theory is the right to bodily integrity; that is, the right not to have intentional physical and psychological harm inflicted upon oneself by others. The ban on torture is one expression of the right to bodily integrity.

The absoluteness of such human rights can be debated. Following the categories of Catholic moral reasoning, Robert G. Kennedy has argued that even the most widely recognized human rights, such as the right to life or the right not to be tortured, are absolute in existence but not extent. What this means is that while the right not to be tortured applies to all persons, like all rights it can, at least in theory, be qualified by other rights and by the requirements of justice. Kennedy argues that “defensive interrogatory torture” (and only this kind of torture) may be morally legitimate under very carefully qualified conditions. And yet he goes on to argue that “it is quite likely that most instances in which interrogatory torture is employed would not conform to these principles and so would be immoral.”

Whether we open the door to torture just a crack, as Kennedy suggests, or keep it firmly shut as an absolute ban, as I believe, the principle of human dignity and its correlated rights remains a transcendently important reason to resist the turn toward torture. And because rights correspond with obligations, all of us who recognize the human right not to be tortured have an obligation to protect those rights. This is an obligation—I say it with sorrow—that as Christians, and as Americans, we have not been meeting in the last four years.