Torturous Morality

If the torturer George W Bush ever pops over here, should some enterprising bobby arrest him or should we celebrate him as a noble if somewhat dimwitted hero?

Bush tortured people and it’s fashionable to condemn him as a dim-witted, evil American who trampled over human rights in his bloodthirsty crusade against Islam. He might indeed be dim-witted, he might be bloodthirsty, and he probably is American, but what I think is worth closer examination is the universal condemnation of torture.

When you ask a member of the public whether they would have a terrorist tortured to save 200 lives on a plane, quite a lot of reasonable looking people answer ‘No.’

‘No?’ I say.

‘No,’ they say, ‘you shouldn’t violate human rights no matter the cost.’
This sort of thinking perplexes me. ‘No matter the cost’ – does this mean that these quite average people would rather destroy everything, every human being on the planet, rather than violate the ‘human rights’ of one man?

Maybe these standard-looking people don’t actually mean ‘no matter the cost’; maybe they wouldn’t actually destroy every single human in the name of human rights. But where does that leave us? If one bad man’s rights are worth more than 200 people’s lives but less than 7 billion people’s lives, then are we now going to haggle over how many innocent lives one evil man’s human rights are worth? 500? 1000? 10 000? It is untenable to suggest that torture is morally wrong no matter how many lives it could save.

Whether torture does actually save lives is a completely separate issue. It is often alleged that people under torture spout any ridiculous nonsense to make it stop and as someone who has been forced to sit through numerous romantic comedies, I can confirm this. However, there have been cases of torture saving lives; the waterboarding of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed allegedly revealed a planned terrorist attack on Canary Wharf.

Where the case for torture falls down is in the wider context. It may be morally right to torture one man to save 200 people but if that torture then enrages many more people so much, that they become terrorists who kill another 1000 people, then that is wrong. The photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib are quoted with sickening frequency when terrorist explain their actions. The hypocrisy of America’s promotion of its self-image as the upholder of human rights whilst it continues to torture people has done incalculable damage to Americas standing in the East.

So if torture can save lives it’s fine but only if no-one finds out. To this effect one could suggest that after torture the victims are killed. Possibly, to make properly sure no one finds out, the torturers would be killed when they retire, along with the guards and everyone else who knew about it. After all, they must be evil and deserve it because they torture people.