Torture, a political winner in the U.S.

Even though I'm glad the Republicans got thumped in the last election, I found it very depressing that people like Ohio's senator elect Sherrod Brown voted for Bush's torture bill. I found it even more depressing that Bush's torture proposal was specifically timed so that it could be used as a campaign issue (so that officials who voted against the torture bill could be painted as soft on terror). In other words, in American politics being pro-torture is a political winner. What have we become?

Lt. Brandon del Pozo on torture:

Henry Shue, and more recently David Sussman, describe at length the way torture violates the person in an extremely sinister way. They talk about the way torture makes a person feel, the vulnerabilities it exploits, and the way in which it turns the very substance of personhood against itself. It uses a person’s extension in the physical world to enslave her consciousness, devolving her personhood to a state where it is no more endowed with dignity and rational agency than the most primitive sentient being, all the while subjected to the most severe forms of distress, fear and agony that sentience permits. Sussman argues that “through the combination of captivity, restraint, and pain, the physical and social bases of rational agency are actively turned against such agency itself... [a] perversion of the most basic human relations.” Making clear that in his view this cannot be justified by our present understanding of when and how we may cause harm, he concludes that “whether such objections could ever be overcome by legitimate military or punitive interests is a question that waits upon more comprehensive understandings of the morality of punishment, warfare, and self-defense.”

...

[comparing war to torture] What is warfare, after all, but an attempt by one army to control and shape a battlefield’s ecology so that it not only kills the enemy, but induces mental states in the survivors that produce capitulation? Battle, when “properly done,” produces intense feelings of isolation, hunger, and exhaustion. It induces extreme fear, deprives of sleep, and causes a person to consider abandoning convictions that are deeply-held enough to fight and die for only for the sake of escaping misery and suffering. It seeks to exploit every type of physical weakness in a person in order to enslave her soul to them, so that she will give anything she is asked for rather than persevere. If war planners had a completely free hand, and the proper means, they would design a battlefield to be a torture chamber for those soldiers who are not directly killed.

Del Pozo argues that torture and war may not be different in kind, only different in degree. According to del Pozo, torture (unlike war) cannot be justified. I'm not convinced. It seems to me that a key difference is that the victim of torture is an unarmed prisoner.

Torture should still not be permitted, but not because it is a morally special act. Instead, it should not be permitted because the requirements of justice and our own ethics do not allow for its coherent practice. We must build requirements of certainty into our justifications for actions that harm others, and we have established certain thresholds before which we will not consider exercising certain harmful options. These thresholds and requirements grow in proportion with the magnitude of the harm we might inflict. These requirements are not only in effect in domestic settings, in cases concerning fellow citizens, but also in international settings, and in war, as well as in private transactions. They are designed to respect our own feelings of empathy for fellow human beings, to safeguard ourselves from the damage done to us as a person when we ignore them, and they also acknowledge the dignity and rational agency of others. If we honor these requirements, then we cannot construct a torture policy that would plausibly indicate its use. War gives us levels of certainty that are not present in torture; we can kill a man with a certain uniform, for example, because the uniform is meant to convey knowledge of his status, but we can almost never know if the person we may torture possesses the knowledge we seek, or if torture will produce the end we want, for all of its awfulness. To put it most simply, when applied to torture, justice and our ethics create practical epistemic and policy problems that simply cannot be solved.

Also, two excellent podcast lectures on torture and U.S. policy.

"The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil" by Philip G. Zimbardo.


"Into the Light of Day: Human Rights after Abu Ghraib" by Mark Danner