Identify the following components of the argument:
1. Issue:
2. Type of Issue: (why):
3. Conclusion:
4. Five (5) Reasons:
5. Five (5) Ambiguities:
5. Value Assumption/Priority/Preference:
6. Value Conflict:
7. Five (5) Descriptive Assumptions:
The
Case for Torture
It
is generally assumed that torture is impermissible, a throwback to a more
brutal age. Enlightened societies reject
it outright, and regimes suspected of using it risk the wrath of the United
States.
I
believe this attitude is unwise. There
are situations in which torture is not merely permissible but morally
mandatory. Moreover, these situations
are moving from the realm of imagination to fact.
Death: Suppose a
terrorist has hidden an atomic bomb on Manhattan Island which will detonate at
noon on July 4 unless . . . . ( here follow the usual demands for money and
release of his friends from jail).
Suppose, further, that he is caught at 10 A.M. on that fateful day
but—preferring death to failure—won’t disclose where the bomb is. What do we do?
If we follow due process—wait for his lawyer and arraign him—millions of
people will die. If the only way to save
those lives is to subject the terrorist to the most excruciating possible pain,
what grounds can their be for not doing so? I suggest there are none. In any case, I ask you to face the question
with an open mind.
Torturing the terrorist is unconstitutional? Probably.
But millions of lives surely outweigh constitutionality. Torture is barbaric? Mass murder is far more barbaric. Indeed letting millions die in deference to
one who flaunts his guilt is moral cowardice, an unwillingness to dirty one’s
hands. If you caught the terrorist, could you sleep nights knowing that
millions died because you could not bring yourself to apply the electrodes?
Once you concede that torture is justified in extreme
cases, you have admitted that the decision to use torture is a matter of
balancing innocent lives against the means to save them. You must now face more realistic cases
involving more modest numbers. Someone
plants a bomb on a jumbo jet. He alone
can disarm it, and his demands cannot be met (or if they can, we refuse to set
a precedent by yielding to his threats).
Surely we can, we must, do anything to the extortionist to save the
passengers. How can we tell 300, or 100,
or 10 people who never asked to be put in danger, “I’m sorry, you’ll have to
die in agony, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to. . . . “
Here are the results of an informal poll about a third,
hypothetical case. Suppose a terrorist
group kidnapped a newborn baby from a hospital.
I asked four mothers if they would approve of torturing kidnappers if
that were necessary to get their own newborns back. All said “yes”, the most “liberal” adding
that she would like to administer it herself.
I am not advocating torture as a punishment. Punishment is addressed to deeds irrevocably
past. Rather, I am advocating torture as
an acceptable measure for preventing future evils. So understood, it is far less objectionable
than many extant punishments. Opponents
of the death penalty, for example, are forever insisting that executing a
murderer will not bring back the victim (as if the purpose of capital
punishment were resurrection, not deterrence or retribution). But torture, in the cases described, is
intended not to bring anyone back but to keep innocents from being
dispatched. The most powerful argument
against using torture as a punishment or to secure confessions is that such
practices disregard the rights of the individual. Well, if the individual is all that
important—and he is—it is correspondingly important to protect the rights of
individuals threatened by terrorists. If
life is so valuable that it must never be taken, the lives of the innocents
must be saved even at the price of hurting the one who endangers them.
Better precedents for torture are assassination and
pre-emptive attack. No Allied leader
would have flinched at assassinating Hitler, had that been possible. (The Allies did assassinate Heydrich.) Americans will be angered to learn that
Roosevelt could have had Hitler killed in 1943—thereby shortening the war and
saving millions of lives—but refused on moral grounds. Similarly, if nation A learns that nation B is
about to launch an unprovoked attack, A
has the right to save itself by destroying B’s
military capability first. In the same
way, if police can by torture save those who would otherwise die at the hands
of kidnappers or terrorists, they must.
Idealism: There
is an important difference between terrorists and their victims that should
mute talk of the terrorist’s “rights”.
The terrorist’s victims are at risk unintentionally, not having asked to
be endangered. But the terrorist
knowingly initiated his actions. Unlike
his victims, he volunteered for the risks of his deed. By threatening to kill for profit or
idealism, he renounces civilized standards, and he can have no complaint if
civilization tries to thwart him by whatever means necessary.
Just as torture is justified only to save lives (not to
extort confessions or recantations) it is justifiably administered only to
those known to hold innocent lives in
their hands. Ah, but how can
authorities ever be sure they have the right malefactor? Isn’t there a danger of error and abuse? Won’t WE turn into THEM?
Questions like that are disingenuous in a world in which
terrorists proclaim themselves and perform for television. The name of their game is public
recognition. After all, you can’t very
well intimidate a government into releasing your freedom fighters unless you
announce that it is your group that has seized the embassy. “Clear guilt” is difficult to define, but
when 40 million people see a group of masked gunmen seize an airplane on the
evening news, there is not much question who the perpetrators are. There will be hard cases where the situation
is murkier. Nevertheless, a line
demarcating the legitimate use of torture can be drawn. Torture only the obviously guilty, and only
for the sake of saving innocents and the line between US and THEM will remain
clear.
There is little danger that the Western democracies will
lose their way if they choose to inflict pain as a way of preserving
order. Paralysis in the face of evil is
a greater danger. Someday soon a
terrorist will threaten tens of thousands of loves and torture will be the only
way to save them. We had better start
thinking about this.
Michael Levin, educated at Michigan State University
and Columbia University, has taught philosophy at Columbia and now at City
College of the City University of New York.
Levin has written numerous papers for professional journals and a book
entitled, metaphysics and the
Mind-Body Problem. His most recent book (with Lawrence Thomas) is Sexual Orientation
and Human Rights (1999). The preceding essay is intended for a
general audience.
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