OK, I guess I was asking for it… I definitely know better.
A few days ago I emailed my extended family a recent Kevin Drum post, Torture and Civilization. (Note to self: Don’t!) I found it quite thought provoking, and I got the urge to share it. What followed gave me a fascinating view into the thoughts of people, who, for one reason or another, find themselves defending (or at least rationalizing) the use of torture.
Here is a portion of Kevin’s argument:
The whole point of civilization is as much moral advancement as it is physical and technological advancement. But that moral progress comes slowly and very, very tenuously. In the United States alone, it took centuries to decide that slavery was evil, that children shouldn’t be allowed to work 12-hour days on power looms, and that police shouldn’t be allowed to beat confessions out of suspects.
On other things there’s no consensus yet. Like it or not, we still make war, and so does the rest of the world. But at least until recently, there was a consensus that torture is wrong. Full stop. It was the practice of tyrants and barbarians. But like all moral progress, the consensus on torture is tenuous, and the only way to hold on to it — the only way to expand it — is by insisting absolutely and without exception that we not allow ourselves to backslide. Human nature being what it is — savage, vengeful, and tribal — the temptations are just too great. Small exceptions will inevitably grow into big ones, big ones into routine ones, and the progress of centuries is undone in an eyeblink.
Somebody else could explain this better than me. But the consensus against torture is one of our civilization’s few unqualified moral advances, and it’s a consensus won only after centuries of horror and brutality. We just can’t lose it.
Right? I mean, isn’t that well thought out? Well, I should have known better than to send it to my extended family — these things never end nicely. First, I got the question from Grampa:
“How far do we go to force the criminal to tell us where he has planted the bomb that will kill thousands of innocents if not disabled?”
Oh boy. I shared my take on the insidious ticking time bomb scenario: It distorts our thinking and relies on assumptions that fail under real world examination… basically, it only exists in our heads. Among the false premises: the torture will work, and there are no alternatives to torture. (I threw in a couple of links for good measure: NPR’s “Critics Skeptical Of Made-For-TV Torture Claims” and Stephen Griffin’s “Torture and the Ticking Time Bomb” at Balkinization.)
Then my winger aunt piped in:
“It seems to me that the meaning of torture needs to be defined first. It may mean something very different to me than it does to you. So, what is torture to you?”
I replied that there is long legal precedent on torture, both in US domestic and international law, and that it doesn’t really matter what her or my definition is because this has been decided through hundreds of years of legal and moral tradition. Of course I said more than that, and just for fun, I added that I support Reagan’s definition of torture when he signed the Convention Against Torture:
“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.”
