The Slippery Slope of Justifying Torture
Conor Friedersdorf explains well how the argument that justifying torture under even limited circumstances would morally corrupt and result in justifying torture under almost any conceivable circumstance has been proven correct in the debate over torture’s role in the death of Osama Bin Laden.
Conor writes:
The return of the torture debate is striking because its apologists no longer feel the need to advocate for a narrow exception to prevent an American city from being nuked or a busload of children from dying. In the jubilation over getting bin Laden, they’re instead employing this frightening standard: torture of multiple detainees is justified if it might produce a single useful nugget that, combined with lots of other intelligence, helps lead us to the secret location of the highest value terrorist leader many years later. It’s suddenly the new baseline in our renewed national argument.
That’s torture creep.
As I tried to allude to in my post this morning, torture will always appear to “work” regardless of whether it in fact “works.” We will attribute any success to it, and any failure to not enough of it. And thus we will soon find that we are justifying it in all manner of situations.
A pretty good point by both you and Connor. I had been a bit on the fence for a while, thinking torture immoral but fearing that my peaceful-and-blessed life made me painfully naive. I painfully naive I may well be, but this ultimately is the argument that tipped me to trust my heart.Report
I was just wondering whatever happened to, “Let’s not blame everyone for the immoral actions of a few bad apples?” Wasn’t that the old argument?Report
That only applies to us.Report
And to bankers and stock brokers, more specifically.Report
Right, but those who did torture somehow went from being “the few bad apples” that shouldn’t spoil the bunch because they tortured to being the real heroes of this war because they tortured. Just wondering how that happened.Report
“But 99, we have to destroy, shoot and kill — we represent all that is wholesome and good in the world!”Report
Which maybe says more about the people who once grudgingly admitted they were bad apples to now being so openly celebratory of those bad apples as to declare them heroes.
Sounds like they really like the idea of torturing people (bad guys) and can now justify it with this.Report
That seems a bit much. I suspect it has more to do with really wanting your political opponent who’s been judging you proved wrong.Report
Yes, that does occur to me as well.Report
Methinks the “few bad apples” meme belongs in the same bucket as “I’m sorry if people were offended” non-apology apologies. The people making the statement didn’t really think the people doing the torturing were bad apples, and didn’t really feel that they were doing anything wrong. But, realizing that “Up with Torture!” was a touchy PR strategy, they went with the “few bad apples” ploy to distance themselves from something they otherwise approved of.
Now that there’s less reason for the daylight between the torturers and their apologists, they can dispense with the “few bad apples” slogan and move onto the more honest “we think it works!” argument.Report
For every moral argument, some moral ambiguity is conceivable – murder is wrong, but what if someone had murdered Hitler, for a clichéd example.
For acts like torture, the bar should be set exceptionally high and the onus should be the proponents to justify the immoral actions with certain, unquestionably beneficial results. Surely, speculative outcomes like “it will make the heathen fear us” should be found grossly insufficient.
Torture creep has it exactly right.Report
Torture creep is already more like torture gallop. We’ve gone from the laughably rare “its OK to torture to find the ticking time bomb” scenario to “it’s OK to torture someone in the hope that some scrap of information (gleaned from the mountains of false and contradictory information that the tortured will spew to stop the torture) can be used with a raft of other intelligence material to capture/kill a self admitted terrorist (or freedom fighter if it is terrorism directed at those we don’t like)” The slippery slope is now coated with grease…Report