Who Knows What Evil Lurks In The Hearts Of Men? Posted by David Shorr

Leon Panetta's exchange with Senator Burr on torture and ticking bomb scenarios at his confirmation hearing the other day brought to mind an excellent December 2005 Andrew Sullivan essay in The New Republic. The more I think about it, the gloves-off, do-whatever-it-takes argument is more than an attempt to make the ends justify the means, and at some level is even more fundamental than the compelling ethical questions involved. When we talk about prying information out of someone's mind, we are fundamentally at odds with what it means to be human. Not as a matter of ideals, but as a matter of definition. Once you accept the premise that information can be extracted from someone's mind against his or her will, you have strayed from any recognizable concept of humans as conscious beings and are presuming a power that no one has over anyone else.

In other words, aside from the other problems with the ticking bomb debate, I don't think we've taken stock of how twisted and bizarre the whole idea is. One passage from the Sullivan essay gets to the heart of the matter:

What you see in the relationship between torturer and tortured is the absolute darkness of totalitarianism. You see one individual granted the most complete power he can ever hold over another. Not just confinement of his mobility--the abolition of his very agency. Torture uses a person's body to remove from his own control his conscience, his thoughts, his faith, his selfhood.

This is totally separate from any other judgments we might make about a person -- the evil of his acts or intentions. Here we are dealing with the basic fact of his being human. Namely, the only access we have to the contents of his mind are via his own decision to disclose them. If you believe in free will, then this barrier between what he knows and what we know cannot be breached forcibly. Skilled interrogators can tell us a lot about manipulation and and the tricks playing off human foibles, but information can only be coaxed, not pried. The way I see it, this renders the entire ticking bomb debate entirely moot.

Comments

[Dan Kervick]

While there are many excellent reasons to oppose torture, I have to say that Sullivan's particular contention makes no sense to me at all, and on its face seems to express a form of superstition similar to the superstition that taking someone's photo removes their soul.

If you coerce somebody into saying something they would prefer not to say, you haven't literally "removed" anything from them. The thoughts and beliefs that they had are still in them. And while I suppose torturing someone might in some cases be so severe as to "remove" or eradicate a person's conscience, faith or selfhood, I doubt that is generally the case. Many people have survived torture, and still possess their conscience and selfhood. Some even maintain their faith.

Somehow, this approach to torture seems to grab the wrong end of the moral stick, as though the problem with torture is that it is a free speech violation or freedom of conscience violation. I think our focus should be on the horrifying degree of bodily agony produced, not not the supposed inviolable sanctity of the information the victim possess. I am willing to stipulate that in many cases the torture victim has no "right" to keep the information he possesses secret, and has a moral requirement to divulge it. But the fact that we admit he has that obligation to divulge the information does not mean that we can't condemn the barbarism of electrocuting his testicles or sticking a hot metal rod up his rectum to get him to reveal it.