In my view, this is a watershed issue. For America to sanction torture is to embrace a new level of barbarism. For this to come from the administration of a President who openly names himsel a Christian hurts all the more. So much for the “culture of life.” But just as concerning to me is this question: Where is the evangelical Christian opposition to torture? Our silence on this issue undermines our status as defenders of biblical morality and surrenders the moral high ground to the liberals at the worst possible moment.
Rick has a military background and can hardly be accused of a “soft” disposition on these issues. In fact, many times I’ve thought he sounded far too hawkish (which probably reveals more about me and my problematic politics then it does about him). But it certainly gives him credibility on this issue with me.
I do think this is going to land us in a maze of issues of trying to come up with clear boundaries so that we avoid this sort of thing. But dealing with the maze is what we’re called to do.
So do you disbelieve in all forms of corporal punishment? I ask because it sounds like you’re taking one activity – not telling the truth – and bracketing it off from other activities. So, for the activity of murder, we embrace the death penalty. For perjury, prison. For refusing to tell where the bomb is hidden? Why not beat someone until they tell? I guess I’m just having a hard time understanding why that kind of punishment is not acceptable. As for water-boarding, yes that it is a bit scary to imagine, so I don’t know what to think about the means of torture. But torture itself seems to simply be corporal punishment for refusing to talk.
I’m not against corporal punishment, but, right or wrong, I’ve never really been a big fan of the spank until you meet my demands approach. I know that sometimes verbal confrontations can be much more scarring to a child than a reasonable spanking, so I’m not saying I’ve articulated any sort of perfect solution to avoiding barbarism in parenting, but it is still my gut reaction.
But parents typically love their children and want what is best for them. Politicians may “love” public safety in some way, but even when I can see the decision as just, I still think it is self-warping. We have people choosing to inflict various forms of bodily harm on a concrete person for the sake of a theoretical and probable model. The big exception is the kidnapper refusing to reveal where his (dying?) captive is held, which is why we all sympathize with Dirty Harry. But that’s barely ever the issue with national security.
And then there is the issue of torturers. Do we want to host a cadre of people recruited, trained, and disciplined to do this? It is bad enough we have such occupations, as executioners and prison guards. Let’s not add to it.
Oh, wait. Let’s not forget that I’m still enough of a recon to want to eliminate the prison system and create ways to enforce capital crimes that require no official office of executioner. So, yeah, I’m actually against many forms of corporal punishment. (Though, oddly, I think caning makes a lot of sense for some juvenile stuff).
I’m a postmocern mass of self-contradictions 🙂
Was 39 lashes or blows unjustly immoral punishment for every crime?
Is the issue with torture the problem of ‘torturing someone until they divulge’, which puts no limit on the torment? I’d tend to agree.
There’s still the question of being able to discern everyones motives. Christians (rightly?) have a ‘don’t challenge the current political order directly’ ethos. This affected slavery and the civil rights movement, where the call to obey the civil magistrate and live peacably is seen in conflict with calls to civil disobedience in the name of overthrowing an unjust order.
There are alternative motivations to consider besides some kind of pragmatic political alliance kinds. Maybe evangelicals analyze the data differently.
“Personal advantage”? A government official using violence to achieve military goals is generally not regarded as acting for personal advantage. Preventing another 9/11 is pretty far from a ‘personal’ question.
“gratuitous violence”? Violence inflicted for a particular purpose (extracting information, inflicting just punishment) is the opposite of gratuitious.
Oh, and lets see what Robinson catlogs that Rick calls ‘gratuitous violence’: “sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, bombardment with ear-splitting noise” and “other assaults” (?) They all sound alot less damaging (and humiliating) than 39 blows
No one advocates the use of torture as punishment, it’s used as a means to elicit information in order to save other people.
I do not believe that there is a principled case against torture: If you can find the nuke in NYC by breaking the little finger of a terrorist, I hope that the police do not share Mark’s scruples, and instead will choose to save the millions.
The problem is that it’s all but impossible to pre-define the cases under which torture should be permitted. Given permission, the natural darkness of the human heart takes over, and lots of people are tortured for no good reason.
So, like murder, torture should be illegal. But like murder, affirmative defenses should be allowed for people charged with the crime — defenses like the defense of others. I’d even be willing to impose strict liability: for an affirmative defense, the defendant must prove that his actions directly prevented a greater harm. If not the guy gets punished.
Mark — are you saying that you would punish Nicholas Cage’s character in “Guarding Tess” for the actions he took against Austin Pendleton in the hospital, by which he located the kidnap victim (even if it was Shirely MacLaine)?
even when I can see the decision as just, I still think it is self-warping.
On the other hand, I can agree with you here. But my agreement here ends up just bugging me about the whole Christain project. It seems like anabaptism is the only actualy moral and christian option. Involving ourselves in the mess of captialism or republican government just means we’re committing sins left and right, embroiled in ‘covenantal contexts’ that leave us damned doers or don’ters.
Paul: “personal advantage”? I don’t know what you’re referring to.
Jim: See my response to Jon: “The big exception is the kidnapper refusing to reveal where his (dying?) captive is held, which is why we all sympathize with Dirty Harry. But that’s barely ever the issue with national security.”
I’m quite in favor of all sorts of torture in a case like you’re describing with a nuclear warhead, and I completely agree with your rationale about how it should be done with the legal system.
“Given permission, the natural darkness of the human heart takes over, and lots of people are tortured for no good reason.” Exactly. Let a person prove himself when he is forced to do it, but lets not have a generalized allowance for torture in the case of a generalized national security policy.
That was Phillips moral analysis of what made ‘torture’ wrong
Torture involves inflicting savage violence against people who are at our mercy and are no longer able to threaten us. Sure, we might benefit from the information gained by torture, but since when did personal advantage justify gratuitous violence?
I think better critiques of torture have been written.
OK. But I think I agree with Rick (who was just writing a blog entry, not an ethics paper). Rick is asking why it is OK to inflict savage harm on a person for the sake of an abstraction. The more concrete you can make the threat (girl with limited air buried alive at undisclosed location, nuclear bomb hidden in city) the more you can justify the violence. But to make it a policy to simply torture to find out more for the sake of national security. You can say it is not “personal advantage” and that we are all guarded by wonderful heroes who only have our best interests at heart, but what it comes down to ninety-nine percent of the time is precisely “personal advantage.” Will I be able to send my supervisor some neat intel to justify my job?. Love of public security is almost the same as love of math.
Look, we would all be safer in certain ways if we had no civil rights at all. But we choose not to live in that sort of society nor allow the benefits to attract us. The fact that someone can see some possible benefit to allowing torture as a a general policy simply doesn’t make me prone to agree with him. And I’m slightly revulted by the calculus itself.
I just made up a word: revulsion +revolted = “revulted”
“Love of public security is almost the same as love of math.”
Math. Mmmmmm (like Homer Simpson).
More seriously, if you allow public need as an affirmative defense to torture, I don’t think we have a disagreement.
But then, since I would hope that the Christian police officer would be aquitted by the Christian jury on Christian principles, I have a hard time with facile equivalences like
torture = barbarism = unChristian behavior
(Look, at equation. Oooo. Math. Mmmmmm.)
Torture is punishment – it is punishment for not talking, right?
I’m not going to die the death that you can’t squint at the definition of torture hard enough to squeeze it into a definition of punishment.
The ordinary sense of punishment as, say, defined in a dictionary, says that punishment is retribution — i.e., it has a retrospective element and is proportionate. I.e., it is applied irrespective of the hope of future gain.
Torture, at least as we’re talking about here, as an informational instrument, is wholly prospective in purpose.
More generally, torture can be used without any purpose at all — simply to be cruel to the person under your control. In that case, it is not punishment in any sense of the word. (Although I’ll stipulate that you could rejoin that torture for no purpose at all is torture as punishment simply for being who you are.)
I saw the title to this post and wondered, “What, seminary? trials of ordination? listening to certain preachers?”