Notice Board

War crimes committed by U.S. forces in the (so-called) War on Terror had long since been rumoured.  And, at least in the case of Abu Graib, confirmed.  But it was only in early December of 2014 that a committee of the U.S. Senate published its rather scathing report on the CIA’s post-9/11 ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’, EITs being the Bush administration’s  euphemism for, well, torture.

At the same time a number of Republicans on the committee issued their own minority report, allowing that, yes, mistakes had been made, but insisting nonetheless that the program was, and remains, completely justified.

The worry, of course, is this ‘and remains’.  In August 1945 there was an empire that had to be dismantled, but it was only going to go down fighting, and taking a helluva lot of American soldiers with it.  But if we continue to think the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was morally justified on grounds of ‘extreme emergency’, we have no reason to think there won’t be another extreme emergency, and so another Hiroshima.  Likewise, then, since, by definition, the War on Terror can never be over, neither can torture ever be eschewed.  And at least some people find that more than a tad worrying.

The report was the controversy-of-the-week, and the talking-heads infotainment industry has since moved on.  But the debate, short-lived though it was, raised enough issues to constitute a nigh-complete undergraduate program in philosophy.  Not unlike rape, the torture of prisoners of war will always be with us.  But unlike Dawkins’ Selfish Gene Hypothesis, which purports only to explain rape, the attempt to justify torture raises the following issues, and then some: 

In argumentation theory we have the definitional sleight-of-hand of designating waterboarding as mere ‘enhanced interrogation’ rather than torture.  And we have ducking the Hague and Geneva Conventions by inventing a category called ‘illegal combatants’.

In the philosophy of language we have the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, brought to literature by Doublespeak in Orwell’s 1984.

In moral ontology we have the (albeit often unrecognized) theological underpinnings of moral progressivists, like Tom Hurka, in their privileging of human beings.

In first-order ethics we have the perennial clash between our Utilitarian and Kantian intuitions.  And so on.

So this is a second-order abstract.  It’s an abstract of a paper which can itself only be an abstract of these innumerable implicata.  I begin with the analytics, i.e. what is torture, and what are the wider practices in which it’s embedded.  Then I focus on what could ground the cases for and against it.  And, finally, I ask: if we judge torture to be morally intolerable, what, if anything, might we do to give effect to that disapprobation?