Is Torture Ever Justified?

Recommend (1) Comments (4)

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.