Where Should the Moral Dividing Line Fall?

The sort of argumentative challenge used to discuss whether

or not torture can be justifiable often takes the form of the classic “ticking

bomb” scenario. It usually goes

something like this:

“Let’s assume that you are the

President, facing a terrible situation. You know there is a nuclear weapon hidden in New York City and about to

explode, but the federal government has in its custody the leader of the terrorist

gang that planted it. Your agents still

have a chance to find and disarm the weapon if he divulges the location. Would it be justified to torture him in

order to extract this vital information?”

Thus phrased, the question is designed to make it very

appealing to answer “yes.” Many reasonable

and moral people, one suspects, would choose to torture a murderous terrorist

rather than see millions of innocent fellow-citizens slaughtered.

Part of

what makes an affirmative answer tempting, however, is the artificiality of the

given premises: you know there’s a

bomb that will explode if you do

nothing, you know you can stop it if

the terrorist ringleader divulges the location, and you are also apparently

sure that he knows the weapon’s

location. In the real world, of course, you probably wouldn’t be able to have

such certainties – and that makes the issue rather more complicated. You may

have intelligence reports that there’s a bomb, and some sensor readings may

show that a suitable quantity of fissile material passed through some port of entry

last week. But is an intelligence analyst’s “high confidence” assessment the

same thing as a certainty? Does this terrorist in fact actually know the

weapons’ location? Would he reveal it if tortured? And can you stop an

explosion in time even if he did?

Only those who would answer “no” in

response to the initial hypothetical would be untroubled by this additional

complexity: it would merely reinforce their unwillingness to engage in torture.

For the rest, however, such real-world complications must at some point become

problematic. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that it would be moral to

respond “yes” to the question as originally posed, how much degradation of

certainty would transform this morality into barbarism? My guess is that most people

would not find torture justified if there were only a remote chance that using it would prevent the explosion – or, in a

different hypothetical situation, if there were a high chance of preventing

harm but the evil in question were much less grave – but where should the moral

dividing line fall in the grayer zone between these boundary cases?

This

insight into the potential impact of complexity and uncertainty upon such moral

balancing acts points us toward a better understanding how the Bush Administration

appears to have tried to deal with the issue of draconian “coercive”

interrogation techniques such as “waterboarding,” and what seems to have gone

wrong.