When I hear the questions "Is torture ok?" and "Does torture work?", on a moral basis I'm almost offended, and I just want to say no quickly, I feel like I can justify being anti-torture for many moral reasons (seeing it as cruel and unusual punishment, and too severe of way to extract information from people, and stripping people of their dignity). However, I don't feel like I have much else to say to back that up. So I was really interested to read the "Does torture work?" Chapter that Dr. Johnson sent us.
In the chapter he breaks down his research by posing these 8 questions:
1. Can torture be scientific?
2. Can one produce pain in a controlled manner?
3. Does technology help torturers in this respect?
4. Can pain be administered respectfully and professionally?
5. Can interrogators separate deceptive from accurate information when it is given to them?
6. How accurately do co-operative prisoners remember information after torture?
7. Does this investigative method yield better results than others normally at an army's disposal?
8. If not, does this investigative method yield better results under conditions of constrained time?
Throughout the chapter, he basically goes on to answer all of these questions with "No." He poses the question, "Is anything better than nothing?" In instances where torture is the only way we know to extract information, is it worth it to try it to get that information? He answers that by saying that "the problem of torture does not lie with the prisoner who has information. It lies with the prisoner with no information. Such a person is also likely to lie, to say anything, often convincingly. The torture of the informed may generate no more lies than normal interrogation, but the torture of the ignorant and innocent overwhelms investigators with misleading information." (461)
So, for me, I am still left with an unanswered question. Why do we torture? If some people see it as morally reprehensible, and even morally unjustifiable, and studies show that it does not always yield the results (truthful information) that we are looking for, why do we still torture? Why do we still employ a tactic that strips people (and not always criminals) of their humanity, and inflict on them a pain until just short of death, when we know that it isn't always successful? I have a hard time letting go of things that I can't morally justify, and torture is certainly one of those things. To bring back in some of our old philosophers, Kant would say that torture is immoral because there is no way that we could universally will torture as an international law. I realize that Kant would also say that there's no way that we could see the future, so we wouldn't be able to know that perhaps the people we'd be torturing were innocent, or perhaps their confessions would be lies, but he would also say that we can't justify torture as a universal law, and so it is therefore unjust.
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Why we torture seems a very hard question to give an answer for, especially thinking back on the reading you referenced. In class we talked both about how torture is the most dehumanizing action possible, while it also requires the torturers themselves to give up certain seemingly natural human characteristics, such as empathy, in order to carry out acts of torture. Given the point that you made and in our readings, though, that there is no evidence that torture actually produces accurate or useful information, torture seems just to demand too much in order to possible be justified on any level.
ReplyDeleteI wonder whether the rational for torture exist though in many situations. For example, in Abu Graib, the ill-treatment of the prisoners was definitely a form of torture, but it also wasn’t for the purpose of gaining information or any other utility, but seemingly just because the guards were put at a point where normal human considerations of empathy and consideration for others were degraded and torture was no longer problematic. It seems like this might be true in many cases of torture. For the question of why, then, maybe one answer is just that when placed in certain conditions people will naturally move to abuse each other, and not even realize the morally suspect implications of their actions. Especially in cases of war, where soldiers have reached a psychological breaking point in regards to what they are put through each day, torturing a prisoner may no longer have any actual point other than to dehumanize the enemy, in the same way that the soldiers themselves are dehumanized. As a result, in many cases it seems there might be no rational for why people torture- torture happens because in some situations people no longer find it a problem.
Maybe another issue, then, goes beyond the problem that the legitimization of torture requires training of torturers who must be beyond the bounds of a normal human condition to do their work. Rather, the problem might be that we have already been too successful in creating social conditions in which this kind of inhuman condition is developed naturally.