FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Torture: Right or Wrong?

Rant N. 455 8 September 2011

How would you like it, if you were tortured? Er...Not much, surely. But feelings settle nothing. The question is: would it ever be right to torture you? If, for instance, you were a captive, apocalyptic terrorist, part of a group intent on exploding an atomic bomb in London’s Westminster. The bomb is already in place, ticking away. In hours, it will go off. You won’t tell the bomb’s location. Could the authorities be justified in using torture to make you sing?

This gloomy scenario upsets human rights-driven people. It is too hypothetical, unreal and deceptive. Even malignant. Designed to weaken and undermine good people’s revulsion at the thought of inflicting pain on others. It spreads a fog. Hard cases don’t make a law. Even if valid, it could never justify a systematic, institutional, widespread use of torture.

Agreed on the latter. However, imagine, just for the sake of it, right prevailing. Fiat justitia, pereat mundus. Torture is withheld. Booom! The nuclear bomb goes off. Despite frantic evacuation, thousands are killed or maimed. How would you judge the authorities who chose not to torture?

The problem of dirty hands. ‘Do you think one can govern innocently?’ says a character in Sartre’s Les Mains Sales. Those entrusted with the common good at times must take terrible decisions for the sake of the whole. Churchill made a deal with Stalin to destroy Hitler. Tony Blair hugged Gaddafi. Lovely Obama may have to order the torture of a terrorist...that sort of hogwash. Verily, the human mind can spin the most ingenious theories to justify doing evil. Did not Caiaphas, the Jewish High Priest, say: ‘It is expedient one man should die for the people, so that the whole nation perish not?’ (John, 11:50) The man in question was Christ, remember.

Consider Kant’s luminous moral maxim: always treat another human being as an end himself, not merely as a means to your ends. Now torture is a paradigm case of treating another person as means to your ends, of failing to respect him as a person. Hence torture is always morally impermissible.

Kant’s ethical formula pissed off Schopenhauer, another great Kraut. Sounds important but it is vague, indefinite and problematical, he argued. Penal law is predicated on punishing the criminal exactly as a means of fulfilling the law and so to maintain the public good. What’s wrong with that? (Kant’s use of his principle could be puritanical: if a man has sex outside marriage, he treats himself as a mere means to catering to his animal lusts, fails to respect himself and so sinks to the level of beasts. N.B. Kant was a lifelong virgin...)

Classical antiquity differentiated between people liable to torture. Slaves could be tortured, if guilty of crimes. They could not, however, be tortured to make them testify against their masters. Free men too could suffer, but only in the case of especially heinous crimes, like treason or incest. Slavery gone and formal equality under the law now universal dogma, could there be a case for making a difference between men? Could monsters, individuals who have tortured and raped children, beasts like that, ever be tortured? But for what? Punishment? Confession? Very murky realms. Beside, they would probably sue and get millions in compensation. Forget it.

Does torture work? The debate rages on. Critics deny it. Yet, a practice that has lasted millennia and been practised by all cultures would hardly have endured if it had not ‘worked’, somehow. Sadists torture for pleasure but the law is not per sesadistic. The question should not be whether torture works but whether it is right.

Legally, there is no doubt. The 1987 UN convention against torture not only forbids it, it also stipulates that no exceptional circumstances ‘may be invoked as a justification for torture’. Not even ‘a public emergency’. Presumably that rules out the ticking bomb scenario. Necessity knows no law – the convention rejects that tag. Tough-minded critics might respond that simply underlies the ultimate irrelevance of the UN and international law, when it comes to the survival, the well-being of a nation, or indeed all nations. Respect for the law is all very well but...The law was made for man, not man for the law. If the law were to clash with the scope for which it was set up, the protection of the common good, the law should be overridden, they might say.

And morality? The ethics of the third millennium is not loftily Kantian but utilitarian. It studies the consequences of actions. But how do you do those, really? Moralist Henry Sidgwick argued that ‘man has not the foreknowledge to trace the consequences of a single act of his own’. How then can utilitarianism work? Still, the consequences of a nuclear explosion on a big city are all too well-known, pace Sidgwick. If torturing a guilty man could prevent that horror...back where we began.

‘We betrayed our values with torture’. The title of a tedious article in The Independent. Pompous Dominic Lawson claimed that by stooping to methods such as water-boarding and rendition America and her British ally have betrayed the ideals they ‘are meant to promote’. Here is a man who takes – or pretends to take - his civilisation too seriously. The rhetoric of Western democracies and their realities have always been at odds. What is worse, attaching electrodes to a man’s cojones, or dropping the atom bomb over Hiroshima? The obliteration bombings of German cities and civilians in WWII – was that better than water-boarding? The massacres of innocent Africans by the civilised Belgians of King Leopold – were those morally higher than torture? The true glories of the West are called Plato, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Goethe, Newton and Pasteur, not Churchill or Roosevelt.

A civilisation is a holistic affair. It covers all the key features of a culture. Maybe the greatest, most refined and sophisticated civilisation of all times was China. Yet the Chinese inflicted exquisite tortures on miscreants. Bamboo splinters under fingernails, mutilations, savage beatings...you name them. Was China less glorious because of that? Are America and Britain because of rendition?

Dear reader, the ball is in your court.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli