Opposite of My View on Torture

It comes as no surprise this moral philosopher has published such an abhorrent view in an international journal. Most of the time, if "international" appears in the scholarly journal's title, then that should signify how "unrecognizable" that journal is. (I have no qualms about committing ad hominems in my own blogspace. The virtue comes in recognizing one's own pronouncement as a fallacy)

A Defense of Torture

In response to this article, I can only claim that we have competing intuitions. I start from the intuition that for principles to matter and spell out exactly how we ought to act, they must be able to stand on their own. Even if I were a particularist or contextualist, the role of principles as spelled out in a codified law, such as due-process still stand on their own feet without collapsing them away by offering the intuition of ticking-time bomb scenarios as ultimate defeasibility of my position. The reason why I cannot accomodate the intuition supporting torture is that I do not think the intuition can be accomodated---period, end of story. I find myself repeating myself on this point: To truly value a principle, such as in our jurisprudence, is to think such a principle so laudable that the value endorsed speaks about who our character as a nation. This may sound like rhetorical nonesense, but I will explain.

A character of a person is determined by the set of principles and values that person endorses. The set of endorsed values form the practical identity people see as a salient criteria used in judging people morally. For example, if Jones is honest all the time and he lied about X, then we should think something is up for why he lied about X. Similarly, if he then changed from an honest person to constantly lying, Jones' honest reputation and good character become undermined by the complete change of character. Let's assume his lying is based on endorsing the value of his wants and desires over others no matter what. In fact, he firmly admits that committing himself to principles of putting himself ahead of others, including in truth-telling, is something he sees himself as neglecting from years of being an upstanding honest person. He acquires a new character somewhere over time. Thus, practical identity is a moral feature of our experience used in judging the character of moral agents. By extension, this holds for a state.

Practically speaking, the United States is like Jones. When in times past if the United States called attention to human rights violations, then the world would listen. Now, the Junta in Burma are slapping down democracy and our want to call attention to this in international circles is defeated by our inconsistency on the one hand of judging others to be violators of human rights when at the same time the US cannot honor commitments of non-torture. This is an inconsistency in what we say we value from how we act. Our practical identity of a free nation is supplanted by the truer picture of our character. In essence, our practical identity is held as a salient feature for morally judging the US. This is a consequence of the inconsistency between a nation founded on the rule of law with those in power causing the split between the good principles we value from putting their wants ahead of what is truly morally good.

Following through on the deontological intuitions regarding torture

First, the link of absolute agreement:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/opinion/01thu1.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin

The view I am going to espouse may seem practically absurd, but it is the one I share being a deontologist over a utilitarian. Before proceeding, I give a brief definition of the two. A deontologist is anyone who feels there are inviolable principles of duties that must be adhered to independent of consequences. Deontological principles are good for their own sake. A utilitarian is anyone who thinks principles of duty should try to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Put another way, for the deontologist there are inviolable principles of morality that are independently objective, and should be adhered on their own intrinsic merit. These principles indicate what it is as a nation we value, and one of them is the rule of law above the political and tactical expediency that the promise of torure brings. Let's put this into the often cited example of a ticking time-bomb scenario so favorable to many pragmatic conservatives.

Suppose there is a ticking time-bomb, a nuclear bomb to be more precise. The bomb will destroy a major metropolitan city in the contiguous United States unless it is found. US police authorities have every justifiable reason for thinking that they have in their custody a person involved in the bombing plot. Further, let us concede that from a meta-perspective he truly is a fully knowledgeable participant in the concealing of the nuclear bomb. So far, Mr. X has been resistant to all conventional interrogation methods, and the detonation is just hours away. Do the police authorities now with impending nuclear calamity have justification to torture Mr. X since all avenues of interrogation have failed?

The principles embedded in the rule of law are constraints on what we can and cannot due when it comes to treating prisoners, people subjected to the due process of law. If due process is suspended, then the values of our law do not apply, and our failure to be consistent with the very same principles we endorse for our greatness are betrayed to the expedient. This is not an option since no one can make for them an exception to the demand of morality behind these principles, and as such, in keeping with the fairness principles of the rule of law, I put forward something like:

(1) Principles consistent with a fair rule of law prohibit the torture of any detainee.

From there, we move to our particular case:

(2) Mr. X is a detainee

Therefore, (3) Mr X should not be tortured

The tension here is that there are rights versus the possibly good consequences torture would engender---the safety of thousands of innocent civilians. Rights are inviolable, and no matter of interpretation or matters of convenience can get us past them. They form the values of what we as a society truly value, and those values are worth dying for since so much is put behind how enlightened our principles are. Do rights trump utility? I think they do, so here is the basic absurdity of this view that many Americans may not agree with.

By not torturing Mr. X, the authorities rightly lay claim to what is most valuable, the principles of fairness within our rule of law. If people die in this scenario, it is because the government chose rightly not to torture Mr. X. If all legitimate and moral manners of treatment of Mr. X led to the detonation of the nuclear device, then the government did all it could that was morally right in trying to rectify the scenario, and the preventable blood on the government's hands is the price we all pay for adhering to a morally fair rule of law.

One likely objection here is that I have reached an absurd conclusion. Certainly, consequences matter more than deontological prohibitions on one's actions since the consequentialist qua utilitarian would get us out of this scenario by choosing to torture Mr. X. The loss of so many can hardly be the greatest good for the greatest number.

My response is more formal. I think that consequentialist positions that try to bring about their state of affairs cannot reliably demonstrate how consequences will play out. Consequences take on a life of their own in human action, but what is controllable on our part as moral agents is that we can at least control the intention behind our actions. The deontological focus of intentions is within our power to judge what is good. Thus, the story goes that we judge what principles to adhere to, and conform our actions to those principles that ring true for all time.

Moreover, there is a plight attached to the utilitarian. For the utilitarian, it matters not if you use others as pawns to maximize the good for the greatest number. One could sacrifice another in this scheme for the greater good of the many even if it meant torturing one to save a city. Clearly, a single act of torture is wrong on any count, and as a deontologist, I bite the bullet on that account. On this view, morality is not something to be shed lightly simply as a matter of convenience.

Due-process rights are a culmination of two centuries of case law. They did not spring up over night, and they are very easily forgotten as the current situation with the Bush Administration easily shows. I hope this post has shown that practices like waterboarding or any other form of torture are wrong, and how torture looks from the deontological moral point of view.