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We have plenty of excuses for torture. Most of them are bad. Evaluating these bad excuses, as ethical philosophers are able to do, should disarm them. We can hope that clear thinking about excuses will prevent future generations–for the sake of their moral health–from falling into the trap.

Ignorance. Senator John McCain knows torture at first hand and condemns it unequivocally. Most of the rest of us don’t have his sort of experience. Does that give us an excuse to condone it or cover it up? Not at all. We can easily read accounts of his torture, along with his heroic response to it. Literature about prison camps is full of tales of torture. With a little imagination, we can feel how torture would affect us. Reading and imagination are crucial to moral education.

Anger and fear. In the grip of fear and anger, people do things they would never do in a calm frame of mind. This is especially true in combat. After heart-rending losses, soldiers are more likely to abuse prisoners or hack up the bodies of enemies they have killed. That’s understandable in the heat of battle. But in the cold-blooded context of the so-called war on terror this excuse has no traction. Of course we are angry at terrorists and we fear what they may do to us, but these feelings are dispositions. They are not the sort of passions that disarm the moral sense. So they do not excuse the torture of detainees after 9/11.

Even in the heat of battle, well-led troops hold back from atrocities. A fellow Vietnam veteran once told me that he had in his power a Viet Cong prisoner, who, he believed, had killed his best friend. He was raging to kill the man, and he could have done it. “What held you back?” I asked. “I knew if I shot him, and word got out, my commander would have me court-martialed.” He was grateful for his commander’s leadership. That saved him from a burden on his conscience.

Saving lives. Defenders of torture say that it has saved American lives. The evidence does not support this, as the Feinstein Committee has shown, but the myth persists. In military intelligence school in 1969 I was taught that torture is rarely effective, because prisoners tell you what they think you want to hear. Or they tell you what they want you to hear. In the case of the Battle of Algiers, one terrorist group gave the French information that led the French to wipe out competing groups.

Suppose, however, that the facts were otherwise, that torture does save lives. That is no excuse. Suppose I go into hospital for an appendectomy and the next day my loved ones come to collect me. What they find is a cadaver with vital organs removed. “Don’t fret,” they are told. “We took his life painlessly under anesthetic and saved five other lives with his organs. A good bargain don’t you think?” No. We all know it is wrong to kill one person merely to save others. What would make it right in the case of torture?

The detainees are guilty of terrible crimes. Perhaps. But we do not know this. They have not had a chance for a hearing. And even if they were found guilty, torture is not permitted under ethics or law.

The ad hominem. The worst excuse possible, but often heard: Criticism of torture is politically motivated. Perhaps so, but that is irrelevant. Attacking the critics is no way to defend torture.

Bad leadership: the “pickle-barrel” excuse. Zimbardo has argued that we should excuse the guards at Abu Ghraib because they has been plunged into a situation that we know turns good people bad. His prison experiment at Stanford proved the point. He compares the guards to cucumbers soaked in a pickle barrel. If the cucumbers turn into pickles, don’t blame them. This is the best of the excuses so far; the bipartisan Schlesinger Commission cited a failure of leadership at Abu Ghraib. Still, this is a weak excuse; not all the guards turned sour. They had choices. But good leadership and supervision would have prevented the problem, as it would at the infamous Salt Pit of which we have just learned.

We need to disarm these bad excuses, and the best way to do that is through leadership and education. Torture is a sign of hubris–of the arrogant feeling that we have the power and knowledge to carry out torture properly. We don’t. The ancient Greeks knew that the antidote to hubris is reverence, a quality singularly missing in modern American life.

Headline image credit: ‘Witness Against Torture: Captive Hands’ by Justin Norman. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr 

The post Excusing torture appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Paul Woodruff is a professor of philosophy and classics at the University of Texas at Austin.  In his latest book,  The Necessity of Theater, Woodruff articulates why we created theater, why we practice it, and above all, why we need it. Throughout book, poignant examples of our day to day need for watching and being watched are weaved in with cornerstones of our traditional definition of theater—football is compared to Hamlet, family weddings with Waiting for Godot.  In the following excerpt, Woodruff picks apart the role of spatial definition in both traditional and day to day theater.

Why does theater need a measured space? In order to practice the art of theater successfully, some people must be watching the actions of others. Whether your job tonight is to watch or be watched, you need to know which job is yours; the watcher-watched distinction is essential to theater. We shall see that even this can break down at the end of a theater piece, with marvelous consequences. But one of those consequences is that the event is no longer theatrical. When no one is watching, it’s not theater; it has grown into something else. Marking off space in theater is a device for meeting the need to distinguish the watcher from the watched. In most traditions there is a circle or a stage or sanctuary or a playing field.

Plot measures time better than a clock does, but what could measure space? This is a hard question, because theater space seems to be much more elastic than theater time, and nothing serves the function of plot to give space a structure that is comparable to the beginning, middle and end of the time in theater.

Back to the green lawn in front of the tower, the lying plastic disks, and the leaping, twirling young men. Suppose that, after our meeting concludes, we return past the same green and see the students still playing. Our meeting ended early, and we have time to watch again. The throes are longer now: one student leaps the hedge to catch a long throw; his friend dashes down the steps to retrieve another. In the pause for retrieval, the third player recognizes one of us, and, as a challenge, throws her an extra disk that had been kept in reserve on top of his backpack. Wordlessly, one of us moves into the green and we commence to play, a separate game, fully clothed and far less skillful. But on the same ground. The student players shift slightly to make room for us.

The student game never had boundaries, although perhaps the green looked as if it gave the players a spatial boundary. But no. They violated nothing when they leaped over the hedge and we violated nothing when we stepped through a gap in the hedge and began our own game.

But imagine the outcry if the nest football game between Texas and Oklahoma went the same way. In this stadium, there is a line drawn on the grass, and it marks the space for the game. If a player crosses the line, he must pay a price for that. The game will stop if he does not stay sitting in the front row at this game, grow bored with the poor quality of play, we might decide to start our own game of catch on the same field during the game. But to do so would be to risk being disarmed by the crowd. We would be straying into sacred space. Certainly, this space is sacred to this crowd of football fans. (I almost said “worshipers, but football mania is not worship. It merely resembles worship.) And for an audience member who intrudes on that space the price is much higher than for a player to stray outside it.

“Sacred” is a word we have almost l