Torture produces terrorists

Second, their analogy assumes the only point it needs to prove. One can legally defend oneself; but what legal system has ever authorised a case of torture “in self-defence”? In the United States, and in fact throughout the world, it is generally considered worse to torture than to kill. Bagaric and Clarke think it obvious that if we can kill in self-defence, therefore we can torture. They assert their position as self-evident. It is nothing of the kind.

Third, self-defence is about individual action, torture is about government action. There is a profound difference between the two. Government action - law - carries a mark of legitimacy with it. Self-defence is not the same as a government program which institutionalises and legitimises torture. No matter how limited, torture is thereby made right in a way that no act of personal self-defence ever makes murder right.

So too, the reach and mechanisms of government power make torture a weapon from which no member of a community will feel immune. If the state could torture any one of us, what sort of a society would we live in? Bagaric and Clarke imply that torture would only affect those who deserved it. They insist that it is “verging on moral indecency...to favour the interests of wrongdoers over those of the innocent”. The word “wrongdoer” is another question-begging term, since the authors assume that we know who they are. But any torture that takes place will probably precede a trial that might establish whether or not they are innocent. So much for the rule of law: another suspicion has been magically converted into a certainty.

Opposing it

For Bagaric and Clarke, torture is simply a calculation: one tortured terrorist versus so-many innocent lives. Their argument is a crude example of utilitarianism, except that they have not attempted to take into account the actual costs and benefits of the balancing act they propose.

Against utilitarianism, there is not much to say that has not been said many times before. Ethics means that there are some things you do not do even though it would advantage you (or the whole society) to do them. Slavery, for example, would not be less wrong if more people gained from it than lost. It would not be less wrong even if we only enslaved “wrongdoers”. The wrong is not negotiable in terms of costs and benefits. And if there is anything at all that we have a right to protect against the government and against all of society, it is our bodily integrity, indeed our sanity, our very self. That is the absolute right of which torture threatens to deprive us. We cannot trivialise the discussion as a minor thought-experiment.

Torture is wrong not because it leads to certain bad outcomes, but for no reason: simply and inherently. This is not a perverse argument. Let me offer an example. When Voltaire was a relatively young man, Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, wrote A Modest Proposal of his own. What will we do about the poor children of Ireland, he asked, who are such a burden to their parents?

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

There’s a solution to famine for you, and what after all is wrong with it? If children seem too innocent, let us eat only wrongdoers. Without a sense of our limits, the calibration of costs and benefits is unstoppable: and we shall commit atrocities. The current modest proposal for torture makes the same mistake. But Swift’s modest proposal was satire, while Bagaric and Clarke’s is farce.

Both proposals display that dangerous human quality of arrogance which assumes that we can weigh up pain against pain, life against life, and do so while resolutely ignoring the broader context and the deeper consequences. It is the economist’s approach to life and the tyrant’s approach to politics: everything is about numbers, and no calculation is too reckless.

We know all about the Western history of state-sanctioned torture, l’amende honorable and the Inquisition. They are not traditions worth reviving. Our repugnance is not simply the instinctive and “reflex rejection of torture” that Bagaric and Clarke disparage. We have learnt this feeling of disgust over time. Disgust, like shame, is not a pointless emotion. On the contrary, it is a powerful way to change the behaviour of people and of communities. Voltaire would weep to read the arguments now being used to justify this revived tolerance of torture. He saw torture and he knew what it looked like. And he also knew that at some point the arguments must stop so that the disgust might begin. Écrasez l’infâme. Don’t negotiate: just wipe it out.