I have recently finished reading Sam Harris’s “The End of Faith”. It has been widely acclaimed as a passionate call to the West to wake up to the dangers of irrational thinking, with a special warning about the dangers of Islam. It was compelling reading, rich in illuminating factual illustrations, and was argued with the cogency that you would expect from a philosophy graduate. However, the book has left me with a big problem.
In one small section of the book, the author points out that it is inconsistent to accept the need to take defensive military action on the one hand, and on the other, to make blanket condemnations of all torture in principle. He then presents the case for justifying torture in certain situations under certain conditions. My liberal instincts wanted to recoil from his conclusions, yet I found it difficult to fault his argument. I am presenting the argument below in the hope that you will be able to find the weaknesses.
- Although pacifists exist, most people would want to be able to defend themselves or their families from attack or oppression. Pacifism would just lead to our imprisonment or death. Ghandi, one of the most famous pacifists, was once asked what he would have said to the Jews in Nazi Germany about how they should resist. He advocated mass suicide to draw their plight to the attention of the German population. Leaving aside the issue that this would have resulted in their death, if this had happened, what should the German people then have done? Committed mass suicide themselves to make the world see the problem? Most of us would want to resist the impotency and futility of the pacifist argument.
- If we accept the need to take action to defend ourselves, we accept that troops fight on our behalf.
- We accept that although efforts are made to avoid unnecessary death and suffering, the nature of warfare is such that it inevitably happens. Our enemies are killed, or are maimed and may face excruciating pain and a lifetime of suffering.
- We may not like it, but we also accept that there is also suffering caused to other ‘innocents’ - so called ‘collateral damage’.
- Enter the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario. Imagine that you had captured a terrorist - someone with an unexploded suicide bomb strapped to his/her body and had found a farewell suicide video in her/his home. And imagine that you knew that other bombs attacks were planned for that day with the potential for further massive life loss, wouldn’t torture be justified in this situation in an attempt to extract information to save further deaths? If we sanction war on the grounds of self-protection, how can we logically recoil from torture in the above incident?
When thinking about the above, please bear in mind the following:
- He is not talking about routine torture of everyone, but only torture on very rare occasions on people that most people using common sense would accept had information to reveal.
- He is not talking about torture as a punishment, but as a means of extracting limited information to save life.
- If you want to use the ‘thin end of the wedge’ argument and say once we justify it, others will do it worse than us because of the example we are setting, and it would inevitably grow to become common, Sam Harris wouldn’t accept that. First, he argues that lots of our enemies are using torture anyway and our restricted and limited usage would have no effect on them. Secondly, he argues that we should keep torture as officially illegal, so that if resorted to, it should only be done as a last resort in extreme circumstances, with the torturer knowing that their actions would be held to account in court. Thirdly, he argues that there are lots of ‘difficult’ things that we do, that we only engage in rarely because we know how costly those things are. The fact that we may think that war is justified doesn’t mean that we therefore engage in it lightly at the drop of a hat.
What is the liberal case for accepting that war may be a ‘necessary evil’ on occasions, but at the same time torture never is? Help me out here, please.
You can read a version of Sam Harris’s argument here.
I read your post and found it quite interesting. It is a very difficult issue. Perhaps one could try to do 2 things:
1. Place yourself in the position of the person having to give such orders which will allow you to actually clarify where you yourself stand.
2. The difficulty in talking about such extreme situations lies in that they are in fact extreme. This makes it very difficult to foresee how one would act. For surely such situations will be made in very specific circumstances which will determine how valid they would be. This you argue very well in your last paragraph. This is why statesmen/women truly must have a practical wisdom few of us can imagine.
Perhaps it would also be best to try to see how this specific argument plays in the context of the book you have read.
Andrés
Thanks for your comments Andrés. I understand what you are saying. However, to me your arguments seem pragmatic and appeal to the emotion. I am not saying that they are not important. I am just trying to find a flaw (if it exists) in the logic.
Sam Harris is setting out a specific opinion and inventing scenarios to support it. Thus he arrives at an apparently “logical” conclusion that he has carefully prepared. That strikes me as somewhat deceitful.
We have no reason to assume that any of the scenarios that Sam Harris presents would ever actually occur. His refutation of the Gandhian proposal for German Jews proves nothing. It was never implemented so we do not know how it would have turned out.
The scenario of the captured suicide bomber is the flimsiest of all. Why would a suicide bomber possess precise details of other bombs about to be exploded? Such knowledge would not be required for his or her task and possessing it would represent a security threat for the terrorist movement. You cannot justify a point of view by citing a fictitious scenario, much less an unlikely one.
In the real world, we know that torture has been used by our “allies” the Americans. How useful has it been? No one is saying, of course. No amazing breakthroughs appear to have occurred, however, so I am sceptical that their programme of torture has been particularly useful. We know that one of the problems of torture is that the tortured will say whatever they think their torturers want to hear in order to achieve release, whether or not the “information” is true. For that reason, information obtained under torture is generally held to be of low value.
Then there is the question of ethics. Developing a scheme of ethics is beyond the scope of a comment like this but I think that most people would agree that torture is unethical. (Even Sam Harris proposes that it remain illegal.) A society that is unethical betrays the principles upon which its survival depends.
People who proceed by acts of terrorism, murder, kidnap and torture undermine society by repudiating ethical behaviour. They do gain a small advantage by doing this just as social parasites such as thieves and fraudsters gain a small advantage in our society but in general terms, their behaviour is destructive of society. The last thing, then, that we should do is imitate their behaviour if we want our society to survive and thrive.
One of the insidious effects of insurgency and terrorism is that it risks subverting the society that it attacks. Our own society has suffered a loss of rights and freedoms in the name of the war against terrorism. If we give in and adopt the methods of terrorists we hand them the moral victory. To do so is not only deeply unethical but extremely stupid.
Sam Harris’s argument appears to me weak and specious. I wouldn’t have wasted any time on it had you not asked for opinions. The above are mine.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. Part of me wants to agree with you, yet I still remain unconvinced by your arguments. Regardless of any practical difficulties, or hypothetical scenarios, for me the crux of the matter is this: If war is sometimes justified, why do we then argue that occasional, restricted torture is not justified. Philosophically it doesn’t make sense.
Your arguments may be pragmatic and raise issues about the unrestricted widescale use of torture, but for me, they do not address the logic of Harris’s case. Perhaps in trying to separate out pragmatism from rationalism I am chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Surely the answer must be, that we all have the right to defend ourselves if attacked provided we use the minimum amount of force. But to torture is actually to be the aggressor.
But wouldn’t a limited amount of ‘aggressive torture’:
a) be done in order to better defend ourselves;
b) be less heinous than some of the acts that we already sanction in warfare?
To quote Silver Tiger: “People who proceed by acts of terrorism, murder, kidnap and torture undermine society by repudiating ethical behaviour. They do gain a small advantage by doing this just as social parasites such as thieves and fraudsters gain a small advantage in our society but in general terms, their behaviour is destructive of society. The last thing, then, that we should do is imitate their behaviour if we want our society to survive and thrive.”
How can we justify any amount of aggression other than in a defensive manner? Whether we believe in God or not, our hearts tell us that it’s morally wrong! We could try kidding ourselves that a limited amount of ‘aggressive torture’ could be used in order to better defend ourselves, and from a practical standpoint, in some cases this could be true. But morally it still cannot be justified.
The same principals apply to your second point. By introducing degrees of heinousness we try to justify our actions…we can’t! We just have to except that philosophically things can’t always be defined fully, and on this earth there will always be more questions than answers.
So if your wife and children were to be killed by a terrorist explosion that could have been prevented by gaining information from another via limited use of torture, you would be sad at the loss, but glad that torture was not used? And you wouldn’t feel any contradiction by the fact that the same country that was refusing to torture, also had your support for dropping bombs that killed enemies and also caused indescriminate damage? You would find no contradiction between your agreement that your government can engage in war and kill and wound thousands in a foreign country, many of whom are innocent, and your balking at a restricted use of torture on one individual to save many lives?
It seems to me that the only way out of that contradiction is to resort to pacifism - which I suspect is where Silver Tiger may be coming from. For me, pacifism would get you out of that logical dilemma, only to lead you into probable captivity or death through a non-aggression position.
With regards to your appeal to conscience - our consciences are informed by what we think and believe. People with different thoughts and beliefs to you would come to different conclusions as to what their consciences were telling them. You can’t assume that because your thoughts and beliefs make torture unacceptable to you that you can then appeal to ‘our consciences’ to make your point.
To say that we can’t understand it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try, and given that at the moment torture is being used by many governments, including the American, and probably ours, it is surely worthwhile trying to understand how they could justify it. I found Sam Harris’s book so interesting because for the first time, I caught a glimpse of how some people in the West could justify it.
I was simply trying to be objective in my comments, and do not feel that inventing scenarios to support our views particularly helpful. However, if your scenario were the case I still could not advocate the use of torture.
As you have said: “Our consciences are informed by what we think and believe.” But there’s still the fact of good and evil isn’t there? As a Christian, I believe that God has commanded all men to love their neighbours, so I can’t advocate the use of violence against another human being. But I accept the other side of the coin too, not because I agree with it, but because it is a fact.
I am not saying that Sam Harris’s book isn’t interesting and of great value to you personally, I just feel there is a special dignity in every human being, and to torture is so dehumanizing and a violation of that human dignity and respect we should all have for each other.
I am afraid that as long as you insist on adopting the principle that the ends justify the means (which is what you are doing when you claim the need to torture someone if it is the only way to obtain information that might forestall a terrorist or similar act) then no arguments will prevail and we are wasting our time making them.
I think it confuses the issue to compare torture and war which are not the same thing. Deal with torture qua torture and war qua war. If you want to discuss war, fine, I’ll discuss it but not in this context. I consider it a deceitful sleight of hand to conflate them. Harris no doubt does it because his case for torture is is logically weak and morally obnoxious.
The argument is simple: people put bombs in the London tube but we do not put bombs in their homes or in other places where they gather. Civilized society imposes limits on its ability to act against criminals and other miscreants. That is what distinguishes a civilized society. A society that has recourse to torture is not a civilized society. It has crossed the line into barbarism. It has joined hands with the terrorists.
That argument does not trump your ends-justify-the-means argument. No argument can. The only question we can ask is do you wish to live in a civilized society or not?
Tit for tat bombs is not the argument. No-one is being deceitful.
PEople are just trying to understand. There are so many scenarios where torture could have saved lives i don’t know where to begin. It is so easy from comfortable armchairs to say one wouldn’t engage in anything so morally repugnant when one has no stake in the scenario. Most people see things very differently when a loved one might be saved. “It’s your call mr snow, we’ll just sleep deprive him into telling us where your daughter is. He will tell us the truth because we only let him sleep when she is found. Ofcourse this is classed as torture and if you gotta problem with that……. The clock is ticking mr snow.” Scenarios? 9/11. indonesia. bali. london 7/7. madrid. on and on and on and on. When you are the one who will not relieve the suffering of thousands of people by giving the go ahead to sleep deprive a terrorist who knows where the key is, then it’s you who have slipped the common sense of a civilized society.