Debating the Ethics of Torture Is Like Debating the Ethics of Rape

There are certain acts which, once one understands their heinous nature, fall outside the boundaries of ethical debate. One can contrive classroom discussions about whether rape, say, or genocide, are always morally wrong--a madman kidnaps you and a woman you've never met. "Rape her!" he orders. "Or I'll kill her!" Or: aliens have landed on earth and given the planet a choice: voluntarily destroy every human being in Rhode Island, or the entire human species will be slaughtered--but these artificial ticking bomb scenarios have little philosophical merit and even less realworld significance. If we play around with them, we do so at our own peril, because even pretending that acts like rape or genocide are sometimes morally acceptable does damage to our deep intuitions that nothing whatsoever can make them so.
Once one understands what torture is, one clearly sees that debates as to whether it can ever be morally defended are stupid or worse. As I've argued in earlier posts,* torture is an act whose aim is to malfigure the self of the victim in the service of the power authorizing the torture. Torture isn't really about intelligence-gathering, although the latter is often a pretense. Torture is about crushing the will of an opponent, destroying her identity, stripping away who and what she is, layer by layer, until what comes out at the end of the process is either a dead corpse or a living one. If dead, no great loss. If living, the torture "survivor" serves the power structure by returning to society as a ghostly warning to all other potential dissenters. And since the living corpse never really leaves the torture chamber, there's very little danger that she'll be anything but compliant. Even after her "release," she'll remain in the hands of torturers: PTSD memories, stress-induced physical ailments, amnesia, panic disorder, and so on. The whole world, as Elaine Scarry points out, will become her torture chamber. Everything, even the simplest, most innocent event--the lighting of a cigarette, eye contact with a stranger, the sound of someone dropping a coffee cup at a bistro--can jumpstart the reliving of torture.
This destruction of the self, this disintegration of the soul, this willful disappearing of the very essence of an individual's personhood, is immoral. Debating the ethics of torture is, therefore, just as irrelevant as debating the ethics of rape or genocide. To not get this is either to misunderstand what torture is all about (stupidity), or to understand but be indifferent or cynically willing to defend torture out of self-interest (moral bankruptcy).
Some ethicists, notably Michael Walzer, Alan Dershowitz, Sam Harris, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, agree that torture is heinous but nonetheless morally justify it by appealing to what's come to be called the "dirty hands" defense. This position argues that the moral obligations of a national leader to protect her citizens may oblige her to authorize actions that are ethically wrong. She oughtn't to rationalize away their immorality. She must recognize that her hands are dirty, confess that her orders were necessary but immoral, and accept responsibility for them. This is what a good leader does: she steps up and takes care of business, even at the expense of her conscience.
But surely this is a pernicious sophistry. On the surface, it concurs with our deep moral repugnance to torture. But in actuality what it does is transform torture into something noble--a distasteful act done for the commonweal--and torturers into heroes who "sacrifice" their good conscience in order to save the rest of us. The dirtier the hands, the louder the confession of guilt, the nobler the sacrifice seems. And, as a bonus, the public confession of the torture-authorizing leader absolves the rest of us from complicity in the torture. We can know that our government is torturing without suffering from any inconvenient twinges of guilt. The President/the Prime Minister/the Generalissimo ordered it, not I! MY hands are clean...
Torture doesn't harvest reliable intelligence. There are other, better ways to gather information. Ticking bomb scenarios, almost always invoked to justify torture, are fictional, not realworld. The use of torture erodes the moral authority of the government that sanctions it, and unnecessarily creates enemies. The only purpose of torture is to destroy selves and demolish wills so that the power structure authorizing torture can maintain itself. And under what possible circumstances can this be morally defended?
Debating the ethics of torture is irrelevant, or worse.
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*For example, Torture & Identity Malfiguration;
The Soul Is the Prison of the Body;
We Are the Priests of Power;
and The First Blow Changes Everything.

torture, morality, dirty hands, human rights, politics

Torture & Soul Death

What does the willingness to condone torture in the name of "national security" do to the soul of a nation? What is a torture-tolerant culture's state of moral health? These are the fundamental questions this blog seeks to explore.

The question is inspired by Dick McSorley, a longtime Jesuit peace activist who asked the same thing about our nation's willingness to build nuclear weapons. McSorley contended that building weapons of mass destruction whose purpose is to kill enormous numbers of human beings and destroy miles of infrastructure is in and of itself a wicked act. It makes little difference if the government building them insists that their purpose is to "act as deterrents," swears that they're necessary for national security, or promises that they'll never be used in a "first strike" capacity. Given their indiscriminately murderous nature, their very existence is evil, and the nation which not only tolerates but insists on having them has failed a fundamental moral test.

Today, the moral test is a nation's willingness to tolerate torture--the deliberate infliction of physical and psychological pain on other human beings in order to degrade, humiliate, and coerce information from them or to break their spirit so that they'll no longer pose a threat. Torture is practiced in over 15o countries, including the United States.

It won't do for citizens of countries that practice torture to take an "it's my government doing it, not me!" approach. If we know that our government tortures and we don't publicly condemn it, our hands are dirty. When it comes to torture, no bystander is innocent. And if we know that our government tortures, and we sanction the torture because we think it somehow makes us safer, our hands are more than just dirty. We become outright accomplices. We become thugs.

How to understand our willingness to condone and even embrace torture? How to grasp our willingness to participate in such evil? Beginning today, the first day of Torture Awareness Month, this blog, which takes its name from Ariel Dorfman's play about torture, will grapple with these and similar questions.

torture, human rights, terrorism