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Christianity Today talks about torture. Now, not being a Christian, and not finding scripture a compelling arguement for anything, I can't say that I agree with all the reasoning within the article, or some of the conclusions that it draws, but I'm for the overreaching statement: it's not okay to torture. Ever.
While I would argue this from the stance of compassion, human dignity, and principles of universal justice (because someone behaves in an unjust way towards you does NOT ever make it okay to behave unjustly towards them), I would also argue it from the corruptive psychological effect that permitting such acts has on individuals and societies.
Human beings are many things. But three of the biggest are: social, pattern-making, egocentric narrativists. We move in groups, we yearn for the approval and acceptance of the group. We need to create meaning from events, and form patterns from the past to inform the present and the future. And we're each living a narrative in our head which says that we, and that which we identify, are good, and right, and true. There are very, very few individuals who can live without the companionship of others. And there are even fewer who can accept every event as an individual occurence without any relationship to the future or other events. And I don't know of anyone who doesn't rewrite the past to make themselves the good guy, who doesn't find it hard to admit doing wrong, or pointing out the flaws of their own group.
What this means is that we have a tendency to justify what we do, incorporate it into our standard operating procedure, /and/ communicate those new mores to the people around us. And the more extreme the action, the more likely we are to justify it and seek to get others to approve of it, or hide it if we can't get that approval. And once a relationship has been changed to incorporate a new behavior, it's /extremely/ hard to place boundaries on that behavior or bar it again. In addition, as each new occurrance is justified, pushing the behavior to more extreme ends becomes easier and easier.
The prisoner/warden relationship is especially vulnerable to a vicious downwards spiral. For one, it's a huge power imbalance...the prisoner has no real power to resist the warden, and power on that level is intoxicating. For another, the prisoner is operating under a cultural assumption that he is there to be punished...even if, as in many of the cases of our current 'detanees', the prisoner has not be charged with any crime or wrongdoing and there is no evidence that they've done anything but be in the wrong place, at the wrong time. This creates an atmosphere where 'punishment' can easily slip over to 'abuse', especially considering the highly emotional components of the current situation, and the stress that the wardens--who in general are soldiers with no or little training in managing prisons or prisoners, and who often don't speak the same language as their prisoners and have inadequate knowledge of their prisoners' cultures--are under. And once a single incident of abuse takes place, the only way to keep it from spreading and escalating is for there to be strong rules and consequences rigidly enforced by superiors.
Instead, what we have are situations where the rules are inadequate or contradictory, where superiors or those outside the chain of command are covertly encouraging abuse (then leaving their subordinates hanging out to dry when someone finally gets appalled), and an environment of dehumanization is encouraged. And that spreads to the wider society, as the rest of the culture works to justify the acts of 'our' people, coming up with ways to make such actions true and right, and allowing a creeping acceptance of those things as, if not admirable, at least acceptable or unavoidable. Because, like it or not, it's not a large step to becoming an abuser for any of us, as long as we can justify the actions to ourselves. And the more exceptions we allow, the more exceptions will present themselves. Especially when and if the people in authority are encouraging or allowing such acts. Look up the Milgram obedience study and the Zimbardo prison study for some of these principles in practice in a laboratory setting. But it's easy to see just about anywhere in real life. History, or the present...we adapt to what has happened. If a violation of the norm is not immediately and strongly condemned, it becomes a possibility. From a possibility, it becomes a probability.
The question from there becomes: do we wish to become a society where torture is okay? Is /this/ behavior one that we want to be known for, as individuals (for we are always judged by the company we keep and the groups we belong to) and as a society? Justice and torture are not things that can coeexist, in my opinion. We can become known for one, or for the other. Unfortunately, I believe that it is more likely, on the path we're taking, that it will be the latter.
While I would argue this from the stance of compassion, human dignity, and principles of universal justice (because someone behaves in an unjust way towards you does NOT ever make it okay to behave unjustly towards them), I would also argue it from the corruptive psychological effect that permitting such acts has on individuals and societies.
Human beings are many things. But three of the biggest are: social, pattern-making, egocentric narrativists. We move in groups, we yearn for the approval and acceptance of the group. We need to create meaning from events, and form patterns from the past to inform the present and the future. And we're each living a narrative in our head which says that we, and that which we identify, are good, and right, and true. There are very, very few individuals who can live without the companionship of others. And there are even fewer who can accept every event as an individual occurence without any relationship to the future or other events. And I don't know of anyone who doesn't rewrite the past to make themselves the good guy, who doesn't find it hard to admit doing wrong, or pointing out the flaws of their own group.
What this means is that we have a tendency to justify what we do, incorporate it into our standard operating procedure, /and/ communicate those new mores to the people around us. And the more extreme the action, the more likely we are to justify it and seek to get others to approve of it, or hide it if we can't get that approval. And once a relationship has been changed to incorporate a new behavior, it's /extremely/ hard to place boundaries on that behavior or bar it again. In addition, as each new occurrance is justified, pushing the behavior to more extreme ends becomes easier and easier.
The prisoner/warden relationship is especially vulnerable to a vicious downwards spiral. For one, it's a huge power imbalance...the prisoner has no real power to resist the warden, and power on that level is intoxicating. For another, the prisoner is operating under a cultural assumption that he is there to be punished...even if, as in many of the cases of our current 'detanees', the prisoner has not be charged with any crime or wrongdoing and there is no evidence that they've done anything but be in the wrong place, at the wrong time. This creates an atmosphere where 'punishment' can easily slip over to 'abuse', especially considering the highly emotional components of the current situation, and the stress that the wardens--who in general are soldiers with no or little training in managing prisons or prisoners, and who often don't speak the same language as their prisoners and have inadequate knowledge of their prisoners' cultures--are under. And once a single incident of abuse takes place, the only way to keep it from spreading and escalating is for there to be strong rules and consequences rigidly enforced by superiors.
Instead, what we have are situations where the rules are inadequate or contradictory, where superiors or those outside the chain of command are covertly encouraging abuse (then leaving their subordinates hanging out to dry when someone finally gets appalled), and an environment of dehumanization is encouraged. And that spreads to the wider society, as the rest of the culture works to justify the acts of 'our' people, coming up with ways to make such actions true and right, and allowing a creeping acceptance of those things as, if not admirable, at least acceptable or unavoidable. Because, like it or not, it's not a large step to becoming an abuser for any of us, as long as we can justify the actions to ourselves. And the more exceptions we allow, the more exceptions will present themselves. Especially when and if the people in authority are encouraging or allowing such acts. Look up the Milgram obedience study and the Zimbardo prison study for some of these principles in practice in a laboratory setting. But it's easy to see just about anywhere in real life. History, or the present...we adapt to what has happened. If a violation of the norm is not immediately and strongly condemned, it becomes a possibility. From a possibility, it becomes a probability.
The question from there becomes: do we wish to become a society where torture is okay? Is /this/ behavior one that we want to be known for, as individuals (for we are always judged by the company we keep and the groups we belong to) and as a society? Justice and torture are not things that can coeexist, in my opinion. We can become known for one, or for the other. Unfortunately, I believe that it is more likely, on the path we're taking, that it will be the latter.
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Pop Quiz: You have just captured a terrorist who has planted a nuclear device in the middle of Washington. It's on a 60-minute timer and the clock is ticking. Do your morals allow you to question the man by legal means only and let Washington D.C. go Boom if he won't talk, or do you break out the thumbscrews and car batteries to make him talk before time runs out?
(I know that's a melodramatic argument, but it makes my point.)
For instance, I believe that killing is wrong, yet sometimes it needs to be done for the "greater good". I also recognize that this can lead to a very slippery slope. The world is painted in shades of grey, and I don't know if there is any rule that should /never/ be broken. Sometimes all your choices are bad ones, and it's a matter of choosing which poison you want to swallow.
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Torture is sadism, not information gathering. The information is only an excuse to hurt the person in front of you, to punish them for your own frustration, fear, and hatred.
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Really, the trappings of the scenario are meaningless, they only serve to frame the question, which really is "Is it /ever/ justified to torture somebody?" What if you need the information to save the life of one innocent person? How about ten? A hundred thousand? Is there a point where a morally repugnant action becomes necessary, even moral, to stop something even worse?
I guess the classic example is WW2. I firmly believe that killing is wrong. "Thou shalt not kill" is generally a very, very good rule to live by. I also believe that the only way the Nazis were going to be stopped is by killing a whole bunch of them. Peaceful sit-down protests weren't going to cut it. If the Nazis weren't stopped then they were going to keep on killing innocents by the thousands in the concentration camps. So, if I'm a sniper on the front with a Nazi in my crosshairs, what's the correct, moral choice? I have a gut feeling that I shouln't pull the trigger, that killing is wrong and that's that. But... can I just stand by and let evil go on because I can't stomach the necessary action? (I have this same argument with myself every time I read about a "peacekeeping" mission.)
A disquieting thought just came to me. I have heard that nobody can stand up under sustained torture, and I've also heard the opposite, that it's a horribly ineffective means of gathering information. I know I've never run across anything definitive. Have you, in the course of your studies? It occurs to me that somebody, somewhere, has probably done research on how effective torture really is. There's a report that I /really/ don't want to read.
That said, whether an action is effective or not really shouldn't have anything to do with whether it is morally right.
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1. Is torture effective? (The answer is...not usually. Given enough time, you can break someone to the point that they will tell you whatever you want to hear, sure. But by the time that point comes, they are unlikely to even remember the truth, much less be able to adequately communicate it. In addition, in the situation you outline, the torture victim knows that if he can hold out long enough for the bomb to go off, then he will have his revenge on the torturers. He has hope of success, and no real incentive to give in (If he gives in, will they stop? Can he trust them to stop? Why would they? What if they simply kill him instead? If not, he's going to prison either way, and he can do so either with the knowledge that he succeeded or that he failed.), so there's no reason to 'break'.) To answer your question, though, a search of the University's online databases reveals no peer-reviewed articles on the effectiveness of torture. For obvious reasons, it's very hard to devise an experiment for this subject, or even to find subjects to self-report afterwards, since torture is usually undertaken in secret, and often for reasons entirely unrelated to the gathering of information. However, that also means that there is NO evidence that torture actually works...and before anyone gets out the hot pokers and the professional rapists (rape and other sexual assualt is a very popular method of torturing prisoners, both female and male), I'd prefer to see someone actually justify the use of those techniques, and so far, I haven't.
Actually, if you wanted to talk about 'wrong but effective' methods of information gathering, what you would /really/ be talking about is inducing Stockholm Syndrome...deliberately acting to cause your target to identify more with you than they do with their normal group, and thus cooperate willingly and gladly with you. It does not, for the record, involve car batteries.
2. Is torture necessary? Modern interrogation techniques are actually very good, very sophisticated, and based on sound psychological principles. If you have enough time to interrogate someone, then you have enough time to do it /right/. If you don't have enough time to do it right, then doing it incorrectly isn't going to change a damn thing.
3. Is there a point where a morally repugnant action becomes necessary, even moral, to stop something even worse? The eternal question. But first, I would suggest that the 'morally repugnant' action actually be one that WORKS. When you find one, we can debate the specifics?
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When I asked the more general question "Is there a point where a morally repugnant action becomes necessary, even moral, to stop something even worse?" I guess I was skipping ahead a step, exploring the ramifications of putting certain actions completely out of bounds for a society. I was certainly not attempting to justify them.
Torture is supposed to be out of bounds in North American society. That said, one could make an argument (indeed, I believe many have) that much of what happened at Guantanamo and in Iraq isn't really "torture" since there wasn't any permanent physical damage done. To which I say "Bull."
But what about drugs? Or threats? Or the Stockholm Syndrome approach you mentioned? Despite a lack of physical violence these methods can have the same effects, permanently altering and damaging the suject's mind. Is a clinical or chemical approach to interrogation any less morally wrong than messier physical approaches if the results to the victim's mind are essentially the same, even if is easier to mop up afterwards?
Where does interrogation stop and torture begin? Where's the line? Also, If we take the position of being a civilized society and choose to set certain tools aside because they are morally wrong, then what tools are we still allowed to use? How far can we go? Will I ever stop asking questions with no good answers?
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And no, I don't think torture is ever justified. I don't think drugs are justified. I don't think brainwashing is justified. I don't think threats against someone's physical or mental health are justified. (Outlining legal consequences is fine, telling someone that if they don't tell you want to know, you're going to break their legs is not.) And yes, I do believe that there are gradients of 'wrong' based on the consequences (although whether you go for physical or psychological torture, it doesn't matter. Either way, the victim experiences both physiological and psychological effects that can last for /years/.), but the point is not to be pushing on the barriers to see how 'far you can go' before someone stops you. /Always/, we should be striving to uphold the highest standards of justice. And that means putting some things off limits.
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Sidenoted, how do you feel about incarceration? Personally, I think it's another form of torture, but I haven't got a better solution.
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And that's wrong. I have to define that as wrong, or accept that Pinochet deserves the prize for wise and benevolent rulership.
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How do you know that the information he gives is reliable and not just saying something to make the pain go away?
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What if the truth isn't what the interrogator wants to hear? What if that bomb isn't actually /in/ D.C., it's in New York? Sure, at some point, the prisoner might tell you that, but you're not going to believe him, and you're going to keep beating, cutting, shocking, raping, kicking, or using whatever fun little procedure you've come up with until he tells you what you've been convinced of all along. And what if he /does/ lie? When are you going to believe him? What is the correct amount of pain and suffering that translates into absolute truth?
You can't put a lie detector on him...torture is going to make the needle go all over the damned place (assuming lie detectors were effective anyway, which they're usually not). If you have a way to confirm the information, then you wouldn't need to be torturing the guy in the first place.
Honestly, my feeling on it is that if people want to use torture as a viable technique, they need to be the ones coming up with good, solid evidence on why it is the best, and only, technique that will give effective results.
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I remember when I was trying to find "OMG D&D IS TEH EVIL" articles for a speech, and the Christianity Today article was distressingly neutral.
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Yes, they tend to lean towards the center or liberal side of Christianity, although it varies by writer. Same with Christian Science Monitor in a lot of ways, I've noticed. I don't usually read either of them, but when I've picked them up to flip through, I've rarely seen anything offensive. (Eyerolling, occassionally, but I admit that's more a measure of my reaction to some tenets of Christianity.)
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