This essay might be doomed from the start, but for those willing to venture out of their comforting notions, a shift in our moral paradigm might be worth undertaking in regards to the ethics of torture. This essay is primarily a thought exercise, an attempt to be consistent with my values and worldview. If you the reader differ with me at the end of this work, I hope you are still confident you are being consistent with your governing philosophies. However, my email remains open for discourse on the topic. There is a reputational cost to undertaking this project, but in being consistent with my beliefs, I feel this is a document worthy of production and dissemination. Torture has always lied in a morally precarious posture, many can imagine people they believe ‘deserve’ torture such as child rapists, mass shooters, and genocidal maniacs; yet the people who would argue for this torture could probably not even stand to watch it happen (let alone perform the acts). This is not the torture I am appealing to, as it stands, torturing for punishment sakes is something I am strongly against. Another knock against torture is that it has also been the home for sadomasochists: people that get sexual pleasure or bliss when being harmed themselves and/or harming others (the more creative the torture the better). Due to its upside down artistic flair, sadomasochist associations, intolerant religious affiliation, and seeming anti-humanist nature, torture has been viewed as a taboo stain on human ingenuity. These points might be true, in fact I believe they are both true and compelling, yet it is despite these truths that I hope to convince you that torture can serve a utilitarian use to save lives and better society. No doubt this is a sensitive subject and due to my religious affiliations, I risk a significant amount of misunderstanding (both deliberate and accidental) among my peers. I hope to clarify the three different modes of torture: Utility, punishment, and hedonistic; the utilitarian mindset and priorities; the irony of pacifism; and the ethical ramifications on society that practices torture.
There are three distinct modes or costumes that torture can wear, and they are not all mutually exclusive. First there is the utility mode, the mode I am arguing has a place in societies. In this form torture is used to achieve a desired outcome whether it be affiliated with partners of crime, locations of hostages or prisoners, vital life saving information, etc. It must be noted that torture should only be implemented after all non-torturous methods have been exhausted. The utility mode of torture subscribes most to the utilitarian mindset and it goes without saying that using torture is not in the desires of the detaining party. Rather, the use of torture is simply the highest ring on the ladder to achieve a outcome that is more valuable than the price paid to enact torture. I will revisit this mode later.
The punishment mode of torture is one I believe has no place in a developed and progressive society. As the name implies, this mode of torture does not have any desired outcome other than the misery, pain, and turmoil of the tortured. Sadistically, this is the mode that has gestated the most creative and ingenious torture methods. Contrary to popular belief, the severity of the act of torture is in fact orthogonal to its capacity to elicit a useful response. This is because some of the most severe torture methods render the one getting tortured unable to talk or think clearly, so the creative sadist is actually at a disadvantage if being employed on a utility measure. The punishment mode is situated in quite an ironic paradox: it is the first mode imagined when the word ‘tortured’ comes to mind and typically elicits a disgusted response (understandably); yet it is this mode in particular that is engrained more heavily in our society than we might imagine. More so, those who are heavily theoretically opposed to the idea of torture never quite realize how unwilling they are to remove particular uses of torture from society. Take prison sentences for example, there is no societal gain achieved from life sentences other than removing a danger from the public sphere but our moral architecture should shake at the question ‘if someone can be proven to no longer be a threat, should we imprison them?’ I will reword it; if we have good reason to believe that someone is not a threat to society, what is accomplished by torturing them with captivity for life? Retributive justice is an oxymoron, and I argue that if the reformation of an individual is apparent, then punishment serves no purpose other than to comfort a subjective instinct of the rest of the people. To my next point, I believe prison- in one sense or another- can be viewed as a form of torture, be that a light one. If prison is not a form of torture, then the experiences that take place within its walls, particularly the privately owned ones that evade a lot of regulations, are. Experiences such as solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, near inedible food, and unmonitored interactions with dangerous people resulting in violence certainly meet the criteria of torture. This is not an essay on prison reform, but my point is that from certain angles, prison can qualify as a form of torture: necessary or not. And it just so happens that many people opposed to the idea of torture view prison and its hostile environment as necessary… meaning they do not support torture in its utility mode but strangely argue for it as a punishment mode.
Lastly there is the hedonistic mode of torture. I do not plan to give this topic much real estate in this essay simply because it is something I am not familiar with nor do I eagerly desire to learn more about it. The hedonistic mode of torture is torture for the sake of pleasure- that be sexually, masochistically, or sadistically. These three forms of pleasure can blend together, for instance, someone may get sexual arousal from torturing someone for sadistic pleasure- the two pleasures are exclusive and yet they still intersect at one point. In a similar way, sadistic pleasure and masochistic pleasure from torture are not always sexually arousing. I will note that the most interesting idea from the hedonistic mode is to decipher if torturers who subscribe to the punishment mode or utility mode have hedonistic tendencies that they shamefully keep to themselves. Did the Catholic inquisitors, the nazis like Josef Mengele, or current cartel members derive pleasure from their torture? Based on their creative methods and rate of torture, there appears to be more than just the mere carrying out of orders.
The punishment mode of torture has been the longest standing mode, ironically the most ingenious sadists happened to be Christians. Praise be to God. The Rack, a famous torture device that rips a person apart slowly by pulling their feet one way and their hands another was used primarily to rip protestants apart during the inquisition.
Other accounts portray apostates and protestants being burned alive or having been suspended in mid air by their arms which were tied behind their back1. For anyone wanting to know just how cruel the Catholics were during the inquisition, I recommend the book Fox’s Book of Martyrs2 . I recall reading one instance where protestants would sing the hymn Amazing Grace while being burned alive. The problem with this was it created too many converts during the execution- thus needing to burn more people, a true burden on the inquisitors. The solution? The tongue screw, a device that would screw someone’s tongue to the bottom of their mouth so they could not speak, let alone sing, while being burned.
The reason I am presenting these forms of torture is because of their lack of social utility and pure evil origin, as far as any means other than sadistic pleasure for the torturer, these are useless and disgusting stains on human (and Christian) history. Regarding the ‘torturee’, I do not believe torture has any ethical standing due to its cruelty, but rather it does find justification regarding essential information. No doubt, refining what I mean by ‘essential’ is critical; I believe for torture to be justified, one must be willfully withholding information that puts other lives at risk. Time certainly plays a factor as well, if time is not of the essence I find torture as a rather arcane idea. One needs to ask of the purpose of morality, is it to make one’s own personal life better? Maybe, but if morality is an objective concept that applies to the species as a whole, it should not be viewed from such a self-centered lens. Rather, I argue morality is a species wide institution ordained by God to maximize the wellbeing of all individuals. In the ethics economy, using torture in the utility mode on one person to save the lives of two or more is a worthy trade. Anyone getting queasy at this idea need only to make the relevant topic apply to themselves hypothetically. For all you parents, imagine an individual has your child locked in a hot car, the child will arguably be dead in minutes from the Summer sun. Now imagine you have captured this person but they are not revealing the location of the car, how far will you go to get that information? I encourage you to ask your spouse how far they would go for their child, their answer might surprise you as they reveal their darker side. For those without kids, imagine you work for the CIA and have a captured terrorist, you also have good reason to believe this terrorist is linked to the stealing of thousands of pounds of high explosives. The cell the terrorist is associated with threatens to use the explosives soon, how far would you go to find out where he is hiding the explosives? Would you not agree that if you had the capability of getting that information via torture, but chose not to, in one way or another, you have blood on your hands if they pull off the attack? Thankfully most people will never be in this situation, but this essay is to convince one that there is a conceivable instance where torture is not just permissible, but justified.
Many might feel that torturing even for utilitarian purposes is truly inhumane and unethical. Linguistics rules the playing field here… One of the reasons I find home in utilitarian philosophy is that it claims to always improve the wellbeing of the most people, and anything that disproportionately harms more people than it helps is by nature not utilitarian. So if the torturing of someone willfully withholding information and upon obtaining that information, caused lives to be saved, then that act of torture is more humane than not torturing them. I am willing to extend a controversial opinion: not torturing (or going to the more radical spectrum of persuasion in any sense) is more inhumane than the act of torture itself. Unironically, many of the strongest opponents to the utility mode of torture identify as pacifist. Pacifists have always confused me; is it a self-righteous thing? A pride thing? Do they think they’re actually helping anybody? Gandhi, a devout pacifist, when asked about the Jews and the Holocaust offered this brilliant enlightened idea: he said, ‘Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.....It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions’3. If your eyebrows are not at the back of your head just from reading that, you need only to ponder what he thought ‘the world and the people of Germany’ would have done after being aroused. Would they kill? riot? continue a world war? If so, getting the rest of the world to commit the violence and murder that he found himself too high above does not sound like consistent and confident pacifism, hell it doesn’t even sound like pacifism at all. The cold reality of pacifism is that it is purely a PR stunt, as pacifism is just as dangerous as the most evil individual in the world at a given time. The reluctance of pacifists to confront and combat the genocidal maniacs and warlords of our day proves only their uselessness when it comes to positive change and the betterment of our world. Pacifists wave their philosophy around like a flag but shudder at the thought of taking responsibility far a lack of commitment in solving world problems. Unfortunately, the genocide in Darfur will not get fixed with ‘peace sign’ posters, walkable sidewalks, and community gardens; nor will the conflicts in Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, etc. From a philosophical standpoint, pacifism will always enable more deaths than it will stop (which will always be zero).
Torturing for utilitarian means, being the implementation of torture to extract information that certainly saves lives, need not find common practice among our CIA, law enforcement, or military. Rather, our institutions should be capable of gauging when torture is to be implemented, most certainly it falls as a last resort. But torture need to be viewed as a taboo if it saves lives. All one would need to do is interview someone whos life was saved from information extracted via torture. If a prisoner relinquishes sites for a suicide attack, locations of IEDS, the houses holding prisoners, or the dates of executions, then all lives saved from preemptive measures (measures that could not be taken without the information), have torture to thank.
No doubt mass regulation and supervision should be implemented, and for accountability and prevention against sadomasochist or hedonists, even the press should have access in one way or another to observing state ran torture. As I said in the introduction, this is a philosophical exercise meant to reveal our consistency to the moral laws and values we claim to cherish. Many of us, including myself, are supportive of sending our soldiers off to fight and die in a war if the foe is desiring to see us all in flames. Many of us calmly ignore the homeless and don’t care to see our taxes going to improve the welfare system in our country. And many of us text and drive, ignore the speed limit, or eat at the wheel despite knowing the statistics of car crash deaths in the country. All these examples show that the age-old adage of ‘you can’t put a price on a life’ is simply not true; we put prices on lives all the time. We could make the speed limit 20mph, thousands of lives would be saved every year, or we could treat every plane take off as if it were a rocket launch, this would also reduce the already seldom amount of plane crashes. But these are simply not worth our comfort and efficiency and we are (whether we know it or not) happy to let the car crashes happen so we can maintain our breezy 70mph and 8:00-5:00 work day. If these are the values we place on normal citizens’ lives, then what value do we give a maniac withholding information that endangers others? Is the value too high to harm him to save those lives?
https://churchandstate.org.uk/2022/06/the-catholic-inquisition-methods-of-torture-and-victims/
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/foxes-book-of-martyrs-by-john-foxe/269803/item/2805290/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=pmax_high_vol_frontlist_under_%2410&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=&gclid=Cj0KCQjwusunBhCYARIsAFBsUP8e_PFJN4urogvIRtERmyVx80rmBQkeCYLvHhuHmzUFuckkHgSNYdwaAoaEEALw_wcB#idiq=2805290&edition=707927
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/gandhi-on-the-holocaust
I like the pictures