In light of President Obama’s speech Thursday on torture and Guantanamo Bay, I wanted to share an “interblog” dialogue that’s going on between me, Winston Smith, and his crew at Philosoraptor on the morality of torture. Join in the debate over there if you feel so inclined! It’s a tough one, but very important.
Winston Smith has some more insightful stuff at Philosoraptor about the latest revelations concerning the torture memos. His reply to Charles Krauthammer’s recent editorial is especially interesting. Krauthammer is arguing again today that Speaker Pelosi’s knowledge of waterboarding shortly after 9/11 reveals that our intuitions at that time were that torture was “reasonable,” in his words. He links to a very disturbing piece by the liberal journalist Jonathan Alter, written just weeks after 9/11. If you have time, read Alter’s piece. It is a reminder that the mindset of many Americans just after 9/11 was very, very different than it is today. Alter’s account of the passage of the Patriot Act is just one example of the confusion that reigned shortly after the terrorist attacks. In the end, Alter seems to endorse sending terrorist suspects to the CIA’s black sites to be tortured by foreign governments, something that we ended up doing. It would by “hypocritical”, Alter writes, but “nobody said this was going to be pretty.” I wonder if he would agree with this article today.
What Krauthammer concludes from Alter’s piece, and Nancy Pelosi’s awkward position about waterboarding, is that all the outrage over the torture memos today is really “false”. Our correct intuitions about torture were the ones we had immediately after 9/11, when many people, including liberals like Alter, were considering the use of torture to extract information from terrorist suspects.
But the problem with this argument is the following, and it’s not hard to see. Just because many people, including possibly Nancy Pelosi, were not as disturbed about torture shortly after 9/11 as they are today does not mean that these intuitions were correct back then. I concede that if there were a very significant terrorist attack tomorrow, the percentage of Americans who would support torture as a method to gain intelligence would increase dramatically. Perhaps Pelosi would go back to not speaking out against torture. But that does not prove that these “aftermath” intuitions would be correct. It is often the case that our intuitions about right and wrong are distorted when we are angry or have recently been harmed. One reason why we have laws, I believe, is to check the darker emotions of individuals that may lead them to act in uncivilized ways.
If anything, Krauthammer’s piece challenges those of us who oppose torture to take account of the way that intuitions about right and wrong do seem to have shifted somewhat. Winston Smith is also correct that liberals need to be more open to the possibility that torture may sometimes “work”, in the sense that it may sometimes have been effective at getting at the truth. As he goes on to say, however, torture still seems to be an unreliable method of interrogation, even if it sometimes “works.” (By the way, I have no idea how effective torture is. I have listened to many intelligence officials and professional interrogators say it doesn’t work, but that is consistent with saying it is unreliable but gets at the truth in some cases.)
In any case, even if torture did work, that would not by itself answer the ethical question. In my view, the immorality of torture still stands in all cases except, perhaps, very rare “ticking time bomb” cases. The problem with people like Krauthammer who advocate torture in cases beyond “ticking time bomb” scenarios is that there is no clear end to the lengths we should be willing to go to extract information if his position is correct. Krauthammer says he’s okay with slapping, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and the other techniques that have been used. But if those techniques are okay by him, then what if other terrorists are resistant to these methods? Would Krauthammer be okay with methods that do cause permanent mental or physical suffering? I don’t see how his position prevents him from going down this road.
Krauthammer’s road is a very slippery slope, and barbarism is the destination. Law is the only solution to this problem. We need a truth commission to investigate what happened. We are fortunate to live by a constitution that puts a very high value on the rule of law so that we have a check on the things we might do out of anger and fear. It’s true that the constitution is not a suicide pact, but danger is not a permit to become monsters.