This from Gary Kamiya at Salon. Gary's argument is that torture is always wrong, except when there is a ticking bomb, which never happens. The always and never are in the original argument. He very briefly distinguishes between Kantians and Benthamites, and takes, I take it, what he thinks is the Kantian position, that torture is always wrong.
Normally to attack Gary's position would be to attack a straw man, but since he conveniently takes the position of that man, I don't suppose attacking him falls prey to that objection. I continue to be baffled by why so many intelligent people are willing to say that torture is always wrong. At least Gary admits that torture can be effective in extracting information, a point I think is obvious. All you have to do is imagine that you are a reasonably important member of a group such as al Qaeda and that you are in the custody of the CIA. Why exactly would you give them any useful information except to avoid pain or distress? Well, you might do so in order to, say, get to watch your favorite TV show. But if you are a determined terrorist, these sorts of incentives will be resistable for a long time, until you have been in prison so long that they are very meaningful, at least compared to your fading fanaticism. If there is time pressure, and it can be a lot less than a ticking bomb, you (the CIA) need something that works a lot faster. Torture undoubtedly would have costs and benefits as a technique for extracting information, but that it could be very useful in doing so seems to me all but obvious.
You don't need to be some sort of thorough-going utilitarian to think that there is something deeply misguided about the view that the right thing to do is to refuse to deliberately inflict pain on someone you know, to a reasonable certainty, is actively part of an organization committed to killing as many American civilians as possible, even if that refusal makes it, pick your standard, substantially, materially more likely that one or many thousand innocents will die, be maimed, suffer grief from losing loved ones, and on and on. Part of the problem I think is that while some critics can imagine what it must be like to be waterboarded, and I am certain it is pretty dreadful, they cannot imagine the magnitude of the suffering caused by being blown into pieces, or losing a wife, husband or child in a terrorist act. Compared to the latter, the former is nothing. That's right, nothing. A mere rounding error in the economy of suffering. All but a lucky few of those who died on 9/11(it is reasonable to infer) suffered far, far more than any of the terrorists who were waterboarded, slammed against flexible walls, and so on. Have any of these critics honestly pondered for say, ten whole minutes in a row, what it must have been like for any of the passengers in the final 30 minutes, the final 5 minutes, the final 60 seconds, on one of the three planes the terrorists used as their flying bombs? What it was like for the family members who got the cell phone calls saying goodbye? What it is like to die of thirst, chocking on concrete dust, your lower body crushed, in the rubble of a building? To die of smoke inhalation from burning jet fuel? To be burned alive in burning jet fuel? To agonize over whether to jump to your certain death rather than to be burned alive? Say you are a believing Christian. Is it moral, or a sin, to end your own life in this way rather than to burned alive? I ask, because I think that's a question the moral experts on torture should ponder for awhile. I am not just being dramatic here. I think it is a real problem when simple-minded deontologists (and one could call them a lot worse) wave their hands about "utilitarianism" and say "torture is always wrong." Utilitarianism in this context is just a word, and hardly the most accurate one at that, for concern about the utterly unjustified but horrible suffering of completely innocent people. If torture prevents such a profound injustice, and such an enormous magnitude of human suffering, it is justified. Indeed, it is easy to imagine circumstances under which it would be one's moral duty to torture. Critics of torture one is tempted to say pose as so very morally sensitive. Yet, no doubt many critics are quite sincere, though others seem to be glorying in their own self-proclaimed sensitivity. But in fact, their sensitivity is very one sided. They simply do not understand, or refuse to understand, the suffering of those the torturers are trying to protect.
There are many other questions one could ask and arguments one could make. I for one wonder how a terrorist comes by an absolute right not to be tortured. Where exactly would I get the right not to have a hand laid on me even though I am conspiring with people who plan -- and one shudders that it is not hyperbolic -- to kill thousands. I do not believe such an absolute right exists. Nor do I think do most people.
As to ticking bombs, to say they never happen, which Gary does, is just dumb. The bombs that were the airliners of 9/11 were not just ticking bombs but bombs that actually went off, to devastating effect. To the terrorists, the airliners were just flying bombs, where the guidance system (including the timer) was themselves, the explosive was jet fuel, and which happened to be carrying meat. Christian, Jewish and non-believing meat, mostly.
I read this morning in the New York Times an "
analysis" that noted
Even President Obama’s new director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, wrote in a memorandum to his staff last week that “high value information came from interrogations in which these methods were used,” an assertion left out when the memorandum was edited for public release. By contrast, Mr. Obama and most of his top aides have argued that the use of those methods betrayed American values — and anyway, produced unreliable information. Those are a convenient pair of opinions, of course: the moral balancing would be far trickier if the C.I.A. methods were demonstrated to have been crucial in disrupting major plots.
I don't see what would be tricky about the moral balancing at all, not if CIA methods actually did disrupt major plots. I do not find it difficult to believe that it did. Needless to say, it is beyond ironic that the Obama administration is apparently going to resist releasing the information that might show that it did.
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