I have 2 files; one is an article the assignment is to be based off of and the other is an outline that should be filled out based on information from the article. (Fill out each portion under the bolded section)
How to Argue Against Torture Copyright © Bernard Chazelle July 2009 home Printable PDF How to Argue Against Torture by Bernard Chazelle A signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture, the United States "does not torture." [1] Yet abundant evidence indicates that it does, directly or by proxy—and in fact always has. An old American tradition of state-sponsored torture even has its own lexicon: SOA, Kubark, Phoenix, MK-Ultra, rendition, CIA's "no-touch" paradigm, etc. It is quite popular, too. Torture enjoys more than twice the public support in the US that it does in France, Spain, and the UK. [2] One of the most watched TV dramas, 24, is but an extended ode to the glories of torture. The former director of a prominent human rights center at Harvard writes of the judicious use of sleep deprivation, hooding, and targeted assassinations; he concedes the government's need to "traffic in evils." [3] The nation's most celebrated defense attorney recommends "torture warrants" and "the sterilized needle being shoved under the fingernails" ("sterilized" because he is a liberal). [4] The most cited legal scholar in the land writes: "If the stakes are high enough, torture is permissible. No one who doubts that this is the case should be in a position of responsibility." [5] Anti-torture voices have been left sounding defensive, insecure, incoherent. Yet, while boasting the world's highest incarceration numbers and supermax prisons characterized by a warden as a "clean version of hell," the US has also begun to question its tolerance of torture. [6] The debate is on, and torture is winning. I intend here to lay the foundation for a strong, cogent anti-torture position. It rests upon three principles: Torture is always wrong; Torture must be banned by law unconditionally; Not all torture decisions should be morally codified. The first two principles reject torture on moral grounds (it's wrong) and legal ones (it's bad). Unfortunately, they do not imply that one should never torture. If, indeed, our only choice is between two acts that are immoral, these two rules alone won't tell us what to do. This central dilemma arises in principle—we can all imagine ourselves in an extreme situation about which we cannot say with certainty that we would not torture—but does it arise in practice? Many say, with some justification, that it does not. Whatever the case may be, there is a hefty price to pay for dismissing the central dilemma on implausibility grounds, as many liberals are wont to do. Once the improbable is deemed morally irrelevant, torture can no longer claim the status of absolute wrong, for there is no such thing as an "absolute-wrong-in-practice." Any serious condemnation of torture must How to Argue Against Torture http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/politics/torture09-print.html 1 of 10 7/18/2009 2:28 PM account for the central dilemma. Hence my third principle. It stipulates that no ethical code (ie, universal decision procedure) should tell a would-be torturer what to do in all situations. This is to avoid rationalization and, beyond it, the dilution of moral responsibility in the hypothetical case where not to torture is no less an immoral option than to do so (the central dilemma). The third principle is a point of meta-ethics. It is not a moral rule per se, but a statement about the inapplicability of moral rules. It is designed to overcome the justificatory purposes embedded in any ethical code. One may object that the central dilemma arises with any moral wrong, so why single it out? Because it lies at the core of the "torture issue" itself, which, with the wide support it enjoys, is indeed an issue. How to aggregate universal moral principles into decision procedures, a central problem in ethics, is in my view the only interesting aspect of the torture question; the rest is straightforward. Like many, I feel strongly enough about torture to find the very notion of a "torture debate" distasteful. But sentiment alone means nothing. I feel strongly about racism, too. But racism is not wrong because it offends my sensibilities. It is wrong because it violates reason and human dignity. Likewise, if we cannot offer a reasoned account of the absolute wrongness of torture (especially given the wide public support for it) then our impassioned opposition, indispensable though it may be, will still be, strictly speaking, meaningless. It also matters because one cannot fight effectively for a cause one does not understand. Is it a coincidence that torture has remained so popular in this country amidst such an impoverished public discourse? [7 ] I. Why Torture Is Always Immoral What is torture? "I know it when I see it" is a fine answer and rough agreement with common intuition will do. Supermax incarceration and prison rape can be construed as institutionalized forms of torture. For the purpose of this essay, however, I narrow down the definition to the forced exchange of information for the relief of unbearable pain. Much like slavery, torture is coerced trade. To many, its abhorrence requires no empirical evidence: it is a priori, intuitive, and visceral. So much so, in fact, that even asking why seems immoral, as if merely speaking of a ghost might make it appear. But, if torture is so evil, why is it so hard to explain why? Let's try. Some say a society that allows torture loses its soul and brings shame on its members. This is true, but it explains nothing—at least no more than calling murder wrong because it makes you a bad person. A line often heard is that torture does not work. Never mind the fragility of a proposition that is both unprovable and falsifiable. Even if true, this claim is a gift to the torturers: "Make it work, Mr Inquisitor, and the moral turf is yours." It's like rejecting slavery because "it does not work" or opposing cannibalism on nutritional grounds. Consequentialism is thin gruel against torture. Beware of the sentence that ends with the words, "therefore torture is evil." Better for it to start, "Torture is evil, therefore..." This brings us to the deontological perspective. Do we recoil from torture because it treats a How to Argue Against Torture http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/politics/torture09-print.html 2 of 10 7/18/2009 2:28 PM person only as a means to an end? It is a principled view that might account for our rational rejection of torture, but Kant's Categorical Imperative is too much at variance with Anglo-American norms to explain the instinctive revulsion the practice commonly elicits. (As the death penalty illustrates, note that popularity does not contradict abhorrence.) In his paeans to torture, Dershowitz is merely echoing Bentham and, beyond it, the reigning utilitarianism of our time, which, from conditional welfare to advertising, routinely flouts Kantian ethics. And yet, is there a doubt that the wrongness of torture finds its source, not in a holy book or in the final link of a chain of observations, but deep in humanity's moral intuition? On this we all agree. Or do we? Few would argue that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was worse than shooting him in the head. Yet killing does not make us wince the way torture does. Why? Could it be the excruciating pain? Doubtful. Baby Mohammed lost both legs during Shock- and-Awe and, over a 10-hour period, bled to death stuck in the debris of his home, a horror entirely foreseen in its outline, if not its particulars, by the architects of the war. The baby's pain vastly exceeded that of his namesake. Yet if Rumsfeld must one day cross Europe off his travel plans, it will be because of Khalid Mohammed, not baby Mohammed—despite the former SecDef's direct responsibility in the latter's agony. Pain and death do not explain why torture feels so evil. Then what does? Perhaps the deadly mix of fear, humiliation, abandonment, and open-ended sadism that the practice connotes. The torturer never says, "I go home at 5." Torture stirs in all of us the age-old anxiety of a cruel deity that keeps us forever conscious to suffer an endless agony. Pain, like relativity, distorts time. (A root-canal patient can tell you all about eternity.) Past a certain point, the victim's fear is no longer that he will die but that he won't. Torture is a window into hell, with a satanic god cast as a human sadist. I believe one cannot grasp the role of torture in the imagination without integrating its metaphysical resonance. Torture rehearses eternal damnation. And that's not a good thing, because hell scares the hell out of everyone, even those who don't believe in it. To add insult to injury, the torturer reflects back to us a magnified image of that repressed speck of sadism buried in all of us. This did not always bother us. God gave Moses not one but two commandments against lust, and not a single one against cruelty; likewise, Augustine deemed cupidity a more serious offense. It was not until Montaigne and Montesquieu that cruelty acquired a special status in moral philosophy. [8] Our revulsion toward torture is hardly universal—children can be astonishingly cruel to animals—but, rather, the sign of a certain liberal disposition. Torture offends us through its frontal assault on human dignity. Beyond subverting free will into "anti-will"—your being tortured does not simply violate you: it makes you violate yourself—it denies something even more fundamental than freedom: personhood. It dehumanizes not only the victim and the torturer, but society as a whole. Or so our modern liberal sensibilities tell us. II. Why Torture Should Always Be Illegal Should torture be legalized in exceptional circumstances? The answer is an unequivocal How to Argue Against Torture http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/politics/torture09-print.html 3 of 10 7/18/2009 2:28 PM no. The ban must be unconditional. Why? Because grotesquely evil behavior must be criminalized? Pleasing though it may be, this simple answer won't do. We must first examine whether there might not be a utilitarian reason to make legal exceptions. (Even the most committed deontologist will recognize the need to test laws against their consequences.) I will show that there is no room for exceptions by revisiting the three arguments central to the issue: TBS, self-defense, and torture creep. I'll also discuss the criminal prosecution of torturers. The ticking bomb scenario (TBS) would appear to beg for an exception—see [9] for a definition. (I'll assume the usual conditions of imminence, gravity, proportionality, and certainty, without which TBS is not worthy of consideration.) The first issue to address is consistency. TBS advocates often lack the courtesy to grant the same rights to their enemies. They remain oddly silent on whether