In one of my undergraduate political theory seminars (this would be in about 1999), the professor posed this problem to the class: “A group of terrorists have planted a bomb in a major American city. The bomb is set to go off in one hour. If it goes off, it will kill hundreds of people. You’ve captured a member of the terrorist organization, and he knows where the bomb is. If you torture him, you can get the information and possibly defuse the bomb before it goes off. Who thinks you should torture him?”
There were about nine students in the class. Everyone raised their hands.
The professor was taken aback. “So we’re all in favor of torture? Wow.”
Nobody said anything.
The professor said, “Does anyone want to try to argue the other side?”
I said halfheartedly, “I mean, I could.”
The professor said, “Does anyone think it’s just wrong to torture? If you torture him, he may lie, and actually lead you away from the bomb. Maybe he doesn’t know where the bomb is. Maybe you’ve picked up the wrong guy, and he’s completely innocent, and you’re going to torture him.”
“But wait,” I said. “When you introduced the scenario, you stipulated that this guy knows where the bomb is, and that torturing him would get the information. Now you’re just introducing hypothetical counterfactuals. If torturing doesn’t work, or if you’ve got the wrong guy, then obviously you shouldn’t torture him. But if we’re serious about the ethical implications here, we should be discussing the hard case. Stipulate that you’ve got the right guy, and that torture works, and that you can save hundreds of lives by torturing, should you do it then?”
The professor said, “But that’s not real life. In real life you can never be that certain of the facts on the ground.”
This is a problem with a lot of debates in political science. If you don’t stipulate certain facts, you spend all your time arguing practicalities rather than ethics. But in real life there are seldom clearly stipulated facts.
Anyway, in the years since then I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that discussion. I mean, did I support torture? The best answer I could ever come up with, assuming that torture does work to saves lives, was that there should be harsh punishments against torture, and in the rare circumstances where torture was necessary, the individuals who engaged in torture should subsequently turn themselves over to the authorities and face the prescribed punishment, be it incarceration, execution, whatever. But still the issue bugged me. It didn’t seem right to punish people for doing what was necessary under the circumstances, but on the other hand, if people were permitted to torture without repercussion, torture would quickly become standard operating procedure, and there would be no question that it would be used gratuitously and on completely innocent people.
(Though apparently everyone in the intelligence community these days agrees that torture doesn’t actually work. If this is true, then of course the debate is over right there.)
One of the disturbing things about studying political science is that you realize when you’re about twenty-two that you know more about these issues than the people who are actually making the decisions, and that’s really, really scary. An example of this would be Condoleeza Rice, in the wake of the September 11th attacks, making the jaw-dropping declaration that no one could have anticipated that terrorists would use hijacked planes as weapons. Say what? That was something I’d been worried about since I was about fifteen, when I saw a step-by-step infographic in TIME magazine laying out exactly that scenario. And the freaking National Security Advisor was completely unaware of the possibility?
It’s the same thing with torture. I feel like I spent more time worrying about it than the people who were actually torturing people. I spent so much time pondering what sort of punishment or restitution a person who had tortured (as a desperate, last resort) should volunteer for, and it apparently never even occurred to any of these assholes that they should have to sacrifice anything.
The thing I just can’t stop thinking about, and just can’t get over, is that someone like George W. Bush, from one of the wealthiest families in the country, who attended some of the top schools, and who had an army of highly-paid lawyers and advisors (who also attended some of the top schools), made the call that we should start torturing prisoners. And when the first hints of that decision started coming out, he lied about it, and was willing to sit back in his comfy chair in the White House, where he was the most powerful person on the planet, and let a 23-year-old girl from a trailer park in Alabama, who had volunteered for military service to this country, take the fall for him — for a decision he made. What kind of person does something like that?
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