In a recent piece over at richarddawkins.net, Richard Dawkins has tried to put Sam Harris’s “defence” of torture into perspective for us. Entitled “It’s What Moral Philosophers Do,” Dawkins argues that Harris has been unjustly vilified for doing what moral philosophers routinely do. He uses an example from P.Z. Myers, regarding the morality of abortion:
We can make all the philosophical and scientific arguments that anyone might want, but ultimately what it all reduces to is a simple question: do women have autonomous control of their bodies or not? Even if I thought embryos were conscious, aware beings writing poetry in the womb (I don’t, and they’re not), I’d have to bow out of any say in the decision the woman bearing responsibility has to make.
In response to this Dawkins justly says:
Now a reasonable person could disagree with him here. A humane rationalist could be pro-abortion under existing conditions, but anti-abortion under the counterfactual condition of the Myers thought experiment – the conscious, poetry-writing embryo. That is the whole reason why Myers found it worthwhile to invent his excellent thought-experiment.
And I think this is a good response to Myers’ thought experiment. If embryos in the womb had conscious life, as well as life plans and projects, then, it seems, abortion would have to be ruled out as morally appropriate. The point of the argument against the attribution of person-defining characteristics to embryos is precisely that they do not have them. The only one with life projects, hopes, fears, and other attributes that belong to persons, in the case of abortion, is the pregnant woman, and that is why it is inappropriate to arbitrarily define personhood in terms that would apply to embryos and foetuses, because doing so results in the abrogation of women’s rights to make decisions regarding their lives freely, and so is an unacceptable harm.
Imagining thought experiments may be what moral philosophers do, but the purpose of making thought experiments is to come to morally relevant conclusions on the basis of them. As a matter of fact, P.Z. Myers’ thought experiment regarding abortion shows clearly why, if the foetus was a conscious, poetry writing being, with the same sorts of hopes and fears and life projects as the woman in whose womb he or she is growing, then abortion would be an unalloyed moral wrong. What surprises me is that P.Z. Myers did not draw the consequences from his thought experiment that it seems intuitively obvious that he should, for the reason that personhood should not be attributed to foetuses is that they do not in fact have the kinds of consciousness and life prospects and projects that the thought experiment attributes to them. That is precisely why Peter Singer can ask about the rights of mature, fully conscious animals, contrasted with adult human beings with dementia. On what grounds do we give preferential moral treatment to mindless human beings, and none at all to adult cows? The anwsers are not clear, and they deserve close attention.
Harris’s argument regarding torture in The End of Faith (see pp. 192-199, “A Loophole for Torquemada?”) is similar to Peter Singer’s argument. What he does is to set up a moral equivalence between two situations, between the collateral damage caused by bombing, and the torture of a terrorist suspect in order to derive information from him. And Harris does not only dream up a thought experiment, he draws conclusions from it:
Because I believe the account offered above is basically sound, [he writes] I believe that I have successfully argued for the use of torture in any circumstance in which we would be willing to cause collateral damage. [198; my italics]
And presumably, in the light of the italicised words, he would be willing to see the institution of torture legalised for precisely those situations. In other words, what Harris does here is to argue that torture is a perfectly legitimate means of obtaining information in the situation, as it was, and perhaps still is in the so-called “war on terrorism”, where we are prepared to accept that dropping bombs or using drones to attack high value terrorist suspects will result in collateral injuries to innocent civilians.
Due to a neurological quirk we are quite prepared to cause harm where the consequences of that harm are not obvious to us, as in the case of dropping bombs from thousands of feet in the air, but that is merely an illusion, Harris says. As he puts it with accustomed exemplary clarity:
Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only permissible but necessary. Still, it does not seem any more acceptable, in ethical terms, than it did before. The reasons for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion. In fact, there is already some scientific evidence that our ethical intuitions are driven by considerations of proximity and emotional salience of the sort I addressed above. [199]
Since the chapter in which this claim is made is entitled “The Science of Good and Evil,” it is in good company. But at this point Harris is doing something that moral philosophers do not do. He seems to think that it is possible to short-circuit the process, and to settle a moral conundrum — that is, our intuitive sense that torture is wrong — by adverting to scientific evidence. And, indeed, on the basis of this, he was prepared to say that torture is not only permissible but necessary in certain circumstances.
The question I want to ask — not by way of vilification of Harris — is whether Harris has really exhausted moral argument at the point where he reaches into his scientific bag of tricks. To start with, consider the “Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.” According to Part I, Article 1, Subsection 1, this reads:
For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. [my italics]
(Recall that the United States is a signatory of this Convention.) The terms of the convention are quite clear as to what constitutes torture. The fact that we consider these things to be wrong, and yet tolerate collateral damage in acts of war — though the latitude for such tolerance has increasingly narrowed over the years — is based, not on the proximity or distance between causing harm and our awareness of the harm caused, but on the lawfulness or otherwise of the acts involved in causing that harm.
It is the rule of law that Harris left out of consideration altogether in his thought experiment, and that he continues to leave out, even in his defence of his defence of torture. Now, notice, my point is not that, in some situations, people out of great concern might not justly resort, in extremis, to torture in order to elicit information from a suspect whom they have good reason to suppose is concealing information that may, for example, save the life of a child. This is the example to which Harris directs his readers in his article (to which Dawkins directs us), called “Wrestling the Troll.” Harris points us in the direction of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry under Torture. The author of the piece recounts the story of the theft of a car which had a baby in it, subsequently abandoned, and the captured thief, whose beating by the police extracts the location of the vehicle, and in which the baby is, as a consequence, saved. According to Harris his ”position on torture is more or less identical to the one prescribed in that handbook of evil, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,” something you would never have known (he suggests) from reading the article in which he is taken to task, in which he is called one of the 5 most awful atheists around (who ruin it for everyone else).
However, the point about law is still being missed. The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry under torture makes it very clear that the question of the lawfulness of torture is of great importance. For example, the article says that
[t]he practice of torture is endemic in many, perhaps most, military, police, and correctional institutions in the world today, including democracies such as India. It is only in recent times and with great difficulty that torture in Australian prisons and police services, for example, has been largely eliminated, or at least very significantly reduced.
Even though it is against the law it is still very often resorted to, and not often in the kinds of circumstances considered by Harris. Also of importance is the fact that the ease with which torture is adopted by police departments means that, if legalised, it would have the tendency to spiral out of control. Indeed, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia article,
[i]n the light of the evidence it would be a massive understatement to say that historically the sub-institution of torture—whether in a lawful or unlawful form—has been no stranger to military, police, and correctional institutions. Further, there is now a great deal of empirical evidence that in institutional environments in which torture is routinely practised it has a massive impact on other practices and on moral attitudes. For example, in police organisations in which torture is routinely used the quality of investigations and, in particular, of interviewing of suspects, tends to be low. Careful, logically based, questioning on the basis of the available evidence is replaced by beating up suspects.
This is vital, and it is not mentioned by Harris, who defends himself on the basis of one case where beating up a suspect, provoked as it was by circumstances, actually worked. More important is the fact that Harris wrote his book The End of Faith just at a time when the question of the official use of torture by American authorities was being widely discussed, as well as practiced. Extraordinary rendition to places where suspects could be “legally” tortured was carried out routinely by the CIA, and the use of cultural and sexual humiliation was being widely used in Iraq to extort information from suspects, even though this fact was hidden by blaming it on low ranking service men and women at the Abu Ghraib prison. In that context it cannot be said that Harris’s defence of torture, by saying that it is only an illusion that we disapprove more of torture than we do of collateral damage, was altogether harmless, or, indeed, simply what moral philosophers do.
What Harris needed to do was to go beyond the short-cut scientific route to the establishment of moral equivalence, by considering many other aspects of the issue of torture, what the effect of institutionalising torture would be, and whether, in fact, there is no moral difference between collateral damage, and the deliberate causing of harm to individual persons in the quest of information. For the end of the story should not have come by means of claims about neurology, but by means of a thorough unpacking of the thought experiment, and this was not done. In the end, we are told that the difference between collateral damage and torture is simply neurological. Nothing is said about intention. Nothing is said about the value of international protocols. Nothing is said about the implications of institutionalising torture. Nothing is said about the impossibility of institutionalising collateral damage, or about the fact that increasingly accurate weaponry has reduced — or should have reduced — the amount of collateral damage in war. Nor is anything said about the justification of a “war on terror” in the first place, as if it were quite clear that this was a reasonable thing to undertake, or even to try to conceive of in military terms. My point here is not to vilify Harris, for I admire much that he has written, but I do not think that he is a moral philosopher, and I do think that his misguided belief that moral questions can be answered scientifically, and the correlative tendency to believe that our intuitions can simply be dismissed, on the basis of neurological evidence, as illusions, is warranted. In this case, it seems to me, Harris has been led into a moral cul-de-sac, and it would be helpful if he would try to get out of it.
Again, your points are well made. Speaking purely personally, I believe that I have a fairly low pain threshold. If I were to be subject to torture, I would quickly give the torturer the answer that I believed he wanted, whether or not I knew the true answer. Whilst I totally condemn torture in principle, for the reasons you have given above, I also feel that the rationalisations given for its use fail the test of usefulness. The example of the baby in the car is very simple and straightforward – a misleading answer under torture would soon be spotted. Torture for military intelligence is not so amenable to instant verification, and torture for confession is simply self-fulfilling, rather than likely to arrive at the truth.
The collateral damage comparison is simply invalid.
It seems to me that “the end justifies the means” argument is as wrong here as it is in the increased tendency towards a police state both in the UK and North America “to protect us from terrorists”. In a democracy, I believe that we must always accept a certain amount of risk that we will be harmed by the actions of others. There must be a balance between policing & surveillance on the one hand, and freedom on the other. Freedom from a police state (including the right to torture for information that might save lives) involves a certain amount of risk of harm from terrorists, but that risk is much less than the authorities would have us believe.
In summary, torture is always wrong.
While I think you are right, Haggis, that torture is always wrong, it may sometimes be retrospectively justified. Those who have achieved “good outcomes” by means of beating up a suspect, may be seen to be justified in the event, but they must always suffer the consequences of having acted outside of acceptable moral limits. The Stanford article on torture concludes as follows:
That seems to me to strike the right note. If there are no consequences for acts of torture, then they would become routine, and may as well be legalised. Instead, acts of torture should be confined to the occasional risk carefully weighed out as to its consequences. There may be “justified” examples of torture, but they do not justify torture as an institution.
Tricky stuff. As a person living into the (comparatively) safe developed world I can agree that torture is always wrong. But on reflection I can see that there could be greater wrongs, some of which might be mitigated by the ‘lesser’ wrong of torture. Would you torture one person to find out where the dirty atomic bomb was hidden in your city? Or which multistorey office building was going to be incinerated with all the people in it? Or to find where your kidnapped loved on was being held?
I can see Eric’s point about the cultural issues (such as Conventions and laws) affecting the issues surrounding torture, and agree that such issues need to be considered. However, although I don’t necessarily agree with everything that Sam Harris says, I think there is a case to be made for stripping away all the social and cultural issues and considering moral or ethical questions from the point of basic human construction and innate evolutionary motivations. Then you should carefully rebuild the social and cultural issues onto the ‘natural’ base, seeking to create a coherent structure.
Societies change, morals change, ethics change, at least in practice. How can you truthfully consider a moral viewpoint unless you know it is well founded?
DiscoveredJoys, you say:
It seems to me that this is something that we cannot do. It is, I suspect, pointless to suppose that we can simply strip away all the cultural evolution of the past (say) ten thousand years, and suppose that there is anything left that it would be intelligible to say that we could build on. Could we strip ourselves back to the stone age, and then suppose that there is something there that would produce a more sane and just world order? This simply doesn’t make sense. With the greatest respect, this is precisely where Philip Kitcher’s book Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature comes in. Much of it is very technical, and I do not have the skills to understand it, especially where he is dealing with sophisticated logic and mathematics, but it nevertheless raises important questions for the new biological positivism. The supposition that there is something left, when all the cultural baggage of the last ten thousand years is dimsissed, is a remarkable suggestion, but there is surely no scientific basis for the claim that we can ever achieve such a purely “scientific” ground upon which to build anything resembling a society.
Not only is the use of torture gravely immoral but it is also known to be ineffective. The victim will say absolutely anything to stop the pain. It makes no difference whether what the victim says is true, it has to be what the torturer already believes is true. Of course we can do thought experiments involving dirty bombs, millions of lives being saved, and most importantly, being able to quickly verify that the victim has told the truth, but these speculations don’t really reflect reality.
Does physical punishment in schools qualify as torture? Being quite an old guy, I attended school in the UK at a time when physical punishment was used quite regularly. The slipper and the cane were the usual methods, both were agonisingly painful. Physical punishment was abolished in UK schools in the nineteen eighties. My problem is that although I absolutely approve of the ban, my daughter’s school is infested with vile little oiks who disrupt the classes for those who are keen to learn, and the teachers have no sancions to use against them.
I would be interested to hear the thoughts of Americans who can make comparisons between paddling states and non-paddling states with regard to the long term outcomes for low acheivers.
Eric,
But I would contend that it is something we are already trying to do, although in a poke and hope way rather than anything organised. Painting with a broad brush I’d suggest that the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment periods of history were at least in part about peeling back layers of magical beliefs and prejudices and trying to see who and what we really are. You could argue that science, since Darwin, has continued this exploration.
All I’m arguing is that we have to understand the foundations of our humanity properly before we can judge contextual morals – and more importantly what we should strive for. I’d argue further and say that many of the ‘developed’ religions contain big chunks of improvised dogma that is inhuman and destined to fail.
Not so much tear everything down and start again (that would be deadly) but first underpin the shaky foundations then straighten walls, re-plumb, re-wire, scrape off the toxic lead paint, re-decorate.
The hypotheticals of the form – “would you kill or torture person x to save person(s) a, b, c, d, e, etc. always seem silly to me. We cannot replay history – so we can never be truly sure what the outcome would be; our action or inaction changes its path. How can anyone kill or torture another without absolute knowledge of the future?
Lots of people seem to manage to torture others in practice without absolute knowledge.
I acknowledge that thought experiments do not necessarily expose our true behaviours, but similarly morals need to be informed by observed behaviour. I’ve often thought that there ought to be an investigation into the gaop between what people say is ‘right’ and what they do in real life. You might even say that morals are hypotheticals…
I am not saying they don’t – many people obviously think they know all kinds of things that they can’t possibly know and act accordingly.
Let’s say someone claims he will blow up a building full of shoppers if you do not kill the person tied up next to you, do you know if he actually has a bomb? do you know if he is bluffing? What if the person were a random person off the street, your hated boss, your spouse, your child? What if the building were full of wall street bankers, pedophile priests, school children? What if you knew you would be tried and convicted of murder, if you killed the person and it turned out to be a bluff?
And yes, given our incomplete knowledge, one always needs to ask given x, y and z, what should I do?
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I’ve argued before at some length that Harris’ argument fails even on its own terms, and his use of the missing child in the car example actually bolsters my criticism better than it supports his argument — once you realize that the judgment of the torture’s effectiveness was only made (and could only be made) after the fact. What if, instead, the suspect had given a false location and sent police cars streaming in entirely the wrong direction, drawing resources away from a more methodical search that would have instead found the infant in a timely fashion? Overall, how many instances of false confessions or misleading misinformation are produced for every instance of useful information? And how does one determine in the various sorts of “ticking time bomb” scenarios whether THIS PARTICULAR INFORMATION extracted from a subject by means of torture will be useful or misleading? There is plenty of evidence to support the conclusion that torture has been shown empirically to give misinformation as frequently and probably more frequently than legitimate information. Moreover, lengthy interrogations with nothing that could be called torture, only pressure from authority figures and ever-growing anxiety, have been demonstrated to generate false confessions in an appalling number of cases — appalling because we have no idea how many other false confessions are never detected. The evidence that torture is much, much worse from an epistemic standpoint — that is, worse at producing reliable confessions and information than standard interrogation techniques (which are themselves very, very imperfect) — causes Harris’ argument fail even on its own terms. A more detailed version of this basic argument (including a lengthy exchange with some pretty sloppy Harris defenders) can be found here.
Having just re-read my old post and the following thread, I feel I should rephrase my characterization of it: I only remembered the negative. I should have said, “(including a lengthy comment thread with some very thoughtful back-and-forth discussion, and one or two very sloppy defenders of Harris’ argument).”
More importantly, though, I think you have gotten something wrong in your characterization of Harris’ position. To wit, this:
I don’t know how clearly he made this point in The End of Faith, and I don’t have it handy to look up right now — but Harris was very clear in the blog post I discussed at the link cited above, where he says:
This, I’m afraid, seems to make much of your argument in this post inapplicable.
Well, yes, Philosophical Primate, that’s true. I wasn’t familiar with that blog post. However, Harris still plays around with the equivalence of collateral damage and torture. As he says at the end of that blog post he says, again:
The equivalence is not there. I hope no one is saying that wars are nice things, and that no one gets hurt. However, there are surely cases in which the use of military force is not only necessary, but quite justified. (I am making no comments about Afghanistan or Iraq.) And there are international laws governing the conduct of war. However, torture has, for good reasons, been declared illegal in international law. Besides, Harris does not do his homework. He also says, in the same post:
Anyone who is familiar with police brutality in quite ordinary situations — for example, at the protests at the G-20 in Toronto a year ago — knows that this is simply not true. Killing prisoners is a very different thing, and there are laws regarding this which are fairly strictly enforced. Telling police that, while torture is illegal, there are times when they should use it, is really, to all intents and purposes, making it legal. I still think that Harris is too ready to defend the use of torture, and I still find that disturbing.
As to my reading of The End of Faith, while Harris may have a more nuanced appreciation of torture than he had, I think my statement, in relation to his discussion of torture in that book, was perfectly justified. On the strength of those italicised words, I still think that legality is in the wind. However, I do acknowledge that he has softened his stand, but not, I think, very much,
We wouldn’t be having this discussion if we knew that torture never works, and we would probably be having a different discussion if we knew that torture always works. The question of efficacy is necessarily part of the moral question.
We do know that torture is effective in producing confessions. We generally don’t know whether a suspect in custody actually possesses the fact we want to learn. There are two questions we need to learn in this case: does the suspect have the fact, and what is the fact? Torture assumes and effectively proves the former, and provides an ambiguous answer to the latter, since if the information proves false the suspect must have lied.
Moral issues aside, it’s just not a sound experimental design.
Just catching up here.
@ Eric #2
I have to disagree with this. It raises the question ‘what ratio of “justified” torture to “unjustified torture” is acceptable?’ Is it right to permit the torture of a thousand people for one good outcome? Would a hundred be acceptable? Ten? Two? And, since the good outcome cannot be predicted in advance, one cannot know in advance what the outcome ratio may be. I can see the “trolley” arguments here, but for me this is a moral absolute: torture is always wrong.
@ Stoneyground – I was schooled in Scotland, where the use at the time of the belt or “Lochgelly Tawse” was normal for classroom discipline, usually to maintain order. In our school this would involve up to six strokes on the palm of the outstretched hand, depending on the severity of the offence. It was painful for up to an hour afterwards, as I recall, and was regarded by us as pupils as an effective deterrent, but not humiliating, excessive, or cruel (and certainly not torture). Indeed, some pupils would boast (out of bravado) during term of the number of times they had survived this punishment, though even this keeping score did not encourage deliberate flouting of the rules to increase one’s tally. From what I hear nowadays about classroom disruption, I think it was probably a mistake to remove this sanction from teachers.
@ pp #11 – I agree. Your detailed arguments serve to convince me that there can be no justification for torture in any circumstance.
Perhaps we can abstract away from the problem that torture sometimes fails by imagining an infallible brain-reading machine. You can make it painful but non-destructive if you like, or you can imagine that it’s quite painless and its only drawback is the utter violation of the victim’s most private and intimate thoughts. Do we use it? And if not, why not?
So it’s not clear to me that his failure was in adverting to scientific evidence so much as that the evidence he used was of limited utility for the question at hand. I think neurology can play a role in informing us about moral questions, but it’s not obvious that it can used to the exclusion of other sciences. For example, questioning, “what the effect of institutionalising torture would be” is scientific, in that there is empirical evidence that would help us answer that question. Harris failed not only to fully unpack his thought experiment, but failed to delve into other pertinent scientific questions that should inform his answer, failed to look beyond the neurological level to psychology, history, etc..
The case of torture is similar to the case of capital punishment, in that, if it is available as a sanction, it will be misapplied. There are cases, perhaps, when one might feel (and I use that word intentionally) that the criminal deserves the death penalty, but if it is available to be applied to him, it will be available for another who was convicted because of prosecutorial misconduct, human error, inadequate defense, and all the other vagaries of the criminal justice system. The freeing of people from death row by DNA evidence is proof, not that the system works, but that, in some cases, its errors have been found by dedicated people fighting that system. If it is available, it will be used and abused. As with capital punishment, so with torture.
where we are prepared to accept that dropping bombs or using drones to attack high value terrorist suspects will result in collateral injuries to innocent civilians.
To what extent can the use of drones to locate and kill terrorists living among people whose education level is essentially Stone Age be seen as torture? Even if it can’t be termed torture or isn’t immoral in other respects, is it an effective way of dissuading people from becoming terrorists, or does it, instead, increase the propensity for terrorism? If the latter, using drones to kill terrorists is a bad idea even if it can be morally justified (and I don’t think it can).
Hours after I posted my comments above, I resolved to come back and say basically what you responded with, Eric: Even in the face of Harris explicitly denying that he thinks torture should be legal in any circumstances, his moral approval of torture in some circumstances directly gives tacit consent and encouragement for law enforcement to use it in supposedly extraordinary circumstances — which invites all the same abuse that making it legal in some circumstances invites, and ultimately raises the same moral arguments used in regards to torture’s legality.
I’ve argued that Harris’ argument utterly fails on even its own terms, but the additional criticisms you make here are quite relevant, and do point to a broader problem: Harris’ utter failure to take moral philosophy seriously at all. His widely-cited failure to recognize that the is-ought fallacy is a genuine and meaningful obstacle is only one of the gaps in his understanding of these matters, and here I think you indicate another.
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Network, position statement, torture
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Philosophical Primate: “…the judgment of the torture’s effectiveness was only made (and could only be made) after the fact.”
Exactly. In order for torture to be ethically justifiable (or at least even arguably so), the information obtained must of such important value that it excuses the torture. But it is impossible to know in advance whether the ends will justify the means. We have also learned as a matter of practice that torture almost never works and wastes resources on average. Citing a single successful instance is never sufficient to ethically justify a morally indefensible practice. I can imagine a scenario where I shoot a random passerby in the head and thereby unwittingly stop someone who was a serial killer. That doesn’t mean randomly killing strangers is therefore “sometimes ethically justified.”
Exactly, H.H. To morally justify any instance torture, we’d need time travel to pick out the few instances where the moral cost is worth the benefits — but time travel presents its own problems.
While I agree that this is true of torture, it is also true of almost any human endeavour. Should we do no surgery because we cannot know if it will go well? Should we build no bridges? Should we not try and reform wrongdoers? How about not asking an attractive person out on a date? People still manage to live worthwhile lives in the absence of absolute knowledge.
My suspicion is that moraity is a set of relative rules of thumb to help us get through life without having to think through every choice from first principles. People’s desire to make life simple then tries to make rules of thumb into absolute rules – and then we end up debating the exceptions to an absolute rule that doesn’t actually exist.
Interesting discussion. I’m afraid I was away for most of it — which explains my “silence”. There are a number of things I could pick up on and take further, but I’ll confine myself to two. First Hal:
I don’t think this is applicable. Capital punishment is a punishment of someone convicted. The reason for using it is not clear, since it has been shown quite decisively not to be a deterrent. Also, capital “punishment” simply adds to the sum of violence in a society, and it is hard to see much good coming from that. But torture is the attempt to elicit information from someone you “believe” to have it. Often, all authorities have to go on is a guess. So the person tortured is presumed to be guilty. This obviously has another relationship to the rule of law than the relationship in the case of capital punishment (or “punishment”).
Second, DiscoveredJoys who says, about torture:
First, we have pretty good evidence to go on to calculate risk in the case of surgery. Second, since we don’t know that the tortured person knows what we want to know, each case is distinct. There is no obvious way to calculate the benefits or disbenefits. And third, torture has aanother effect, which we can’t calculate either. It encourages opponents to use torture as a means to obtain information, or as a means to terrorise their opponents. If we torture them, especially since it has been, until now, taken for granted that law governed societies don’t engage in torture, they will certainly torture us, if they get the chance. Is this really what we want?
Just replace the rather meaningless idea ‘torture’ with ‘using evil’ and then things begin to make more sense.
I find that the use of torture fails by almost every moral metric one can apply to it. It is obviously the infliction of suffering. In a consequentialist sense it has been shown not to be effective. In a hypocritical sense reasonable people do not want to live in a society that has the ability to inflict torture on them, for any reason.
Most importantly, as others already pointed out, there can be no due process and formalized determination of guilt, so there can be little to put a halt on who the state could torture. The time critical doomsday scenarios that are used to justify torture fail in this metric. Speedy trial laws and double jeopardy laws are very important in preventing a government from oppressing its lawful detractors; they put a burden on the legal system that prevents abuse of incarceration. Can we really put a system in place that can prevent the abuse of a state right to torture in “emergencies”? I do not think so. No decent society can ever resort to torturing its own citizens if it cares about those citizens at all.
I am certain the use of torture and double standard of due process in the US has done more for extremist recruitment than it has ever done for catching terrorists. Using measures like torture make cooperative human relationships forever impossible between the torturers and victims. I think Harris has good insight on many things, but he is very wrong on this issue.