Sam Harris argues that the euphemism we have come to know as "collateral damage" is morally equivalent to the practice of torture. He is surely right. Harris also argues that in extreme cases we might have to stifle our collective conscience and be prepared to do terrible things in order to save (many) lives. He may be right on this too, but what if the terrible things we need to consider are even more distasteful than torture?

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In her review of Sam Harris’s superb book The End of Faith, Natalie Angier wrote:

It’s not often that I see my florid strain of atheism expressed in any document this side of the Seine, but The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated, almost personally understood. ( NYT 9th May 2004
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/new-york-times)

I completely agree. Harris succeeds in a work of non-fiction where many so-called literary figures fail—in giving such eloquent voice to my own feelings as a reader. He exposes religious ideas as largely delusional, or at best humbug, and our docile acceptance of most faith-based claims as a malign influence in western culture—a cultural disease that needs urgent treatment.

So far so good. But in this devastating critique, Harris also devotes a few well-argued pages to scotching the idea of absolute pacifism (as distinct from the general principle of non-violence), and in the process unexpectedly argues himself into a bind: that the military euphamism we have come to know as "collateral damage" is at least as bad as the infliction of torture. He says:

In modern warfare, “collateral damage”—the maiming and killing of innocent noncombatants—is unavoidable. . . There is no escaping the fact that whenever we drop bombs, we drop them with the knowledge that some number of children will be blinded, disemboweled, paralyzed, orphaned, and killed by them.

He continues:

[I]f we are willing to act in a way that guarantees the misery and death of . . . innocent children, why spare the rod with known terrorists? . . . What is the [moral] difference between pursuing a course of action where we run the risk of inadvertently subjecting some innocent men to torture, and pursuing one in which we will inadvertently kill far greater numbers of innocent men, women, and children? Rather, it seems obvious that the misapplication of torture should be far less troubling to us than collateral damage: there are, after all, no infants interned at Guantanamo Bay. Torture need not even impose a significant risk of death or permanent injury on its victims; while the collaterally damaged are, almost by definition, crippled or killed. The ethical divide that seems to be opening up here suggests that those who are willing to drop bombs might want to abduct the nearest and dearest of suspected terrorists—their wives, mothers, and daughters—and torture them as well, assuming anything profitable to our side might come of it. (Ref - unless otherwise noted, all Harris quotes come from this essay, which is a version of chapter 6 of his book The End of Faith)

Now, this isn’t just some clever slight of hand on Harris's part, or some infernal philosophical conundrum for vegetarian luvvies like me to wrestle with. This is serious; lives are lost or ruined because of this kind of moral calculation every day. Bombs fall, shells are fired, and, as the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture can attest, even in the 21st century, people are routinely tortured, in horrendous ways, often by supposedly reputable governments. The “problem of torture”, in other words, is a dark reality that is neither hypothetical nor a practice we can conviniently confine to "evil-doers".

On the face of it, torture is evil—a ghastly evil—that no civilized person wants anything to do with. It is a practice about which we can surely declare: "not in my name". Most of us regard torture as a medieval barbarity that has no more place in the modern world than its equally stupid and long abandoned stable-mate, trial by ordeal. George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian recently, gives us what is perhaps the standard argument against torture: that whatever its occasional merits may be, torture must ultimately be rejected because it “turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting” (Ref). According to this line of reasoning, once we begin to use torture—no matter how well intentioned we might be—we inevitably end up torturing people in situations where it was never intended, with less and less oversight, with worse and worse consequences. Thus, as torturers, or as those who permit torture, we soon become unable to defend any moral ground as our reputation for decency, compassion, and fairness crumbles. This path risks a grim, amoral future in which we can justify any action, no matter how dreadful it may seem.

But before we say a definitive "No" to waterboarding and the like, perhaps there are other things to consider, such as the sense of urgency introduced by the famous “ticking bomb scenario”, so ably described by Harris:

Imagine that a known terrorist has planted a bomb in the heart of a nearby city. He now sits in your custody. Rather than conceal his guilt, he gloats about the forthcoming explosion and the magnitude of human suffering it will cause. Given this state of affairs—in particular, given that there is still time to prevent an imminent atrocity—it seems that subjecting this unpleasant fellow to torture may be justifiable. (Ref)

As Harris says, for any doubters, we need only make the case even more compelling. Let us assume that the theoretical city is the one in which your nearest and dearest live, and the ticking bomb is a nuclear one. Surely we will do anything—anything at all, including torturing the bomber—if it might possibly give us the location of the device. How could we let millions die in order to satisfy some nice, cozy, middle-class principle of non-violence—even in the case of a known killer, and even if he is a hand-cuffed detainee? Now, this scenario may be fantastically unlikely, as Harris admits, but this is not the point. Not only is the commission of a small crime in order to prevent a serious one a long accepted defence, but as Harris makes painfully clear, if we are prepared to accept the death and agony of small children in some circumstances—as we clearly are when we inflict "collateral damage"—why do we suddenly become so squeamish when it comes to strapping electrodes to the genitals of known killers?

Harris, who must surely be one of the most unlikely defenders of torture (in very limited circumstances) ever, says that if—and this is an if that has an awful lot hanging on it—if we are prepared to accept the grim reality of so-called collateral damage (the death and maiming of innocents) then even if there’s “a one in a million chance” that torturing a suspect, or his wife, or perhaps even his children, might achieve some sufficiently important objective, we should use it. As he concludes, not only is there a moral equivalence between the acceptance of collateral damage and the practice of torture, but the mistaken or accidental torture of an innocent man is surely better, morally, than the slaughter of innocents in their homes:

if we are willing to drop bombs, or even risk that rifle rounds might go astray, we should be willing to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners; if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern war.

This is, as Harris says, a “ghastly result to have reached by logical argument”, and a way of escaping it would be very welcome to him. He reminds his readers:

I hope my case for torture is wrong, as I would be much happier standing side by side with all the good people who oppose torture categorically. I invite any reader who discovers a problem with my argument to point it out to me . . . I would be sincerely grateful to have my mind changed on this subject.

Harris's line of argument (also advanced by people such as Alan Dershowitz) is not without force; it seems the revulsion we feel at the thought of sanctioning torture may not be enough to forbid its use.

I think this is all wrong.

The feeling of revulsion by itself is not sufficient to ban anything (contra Leon Kass - Steven Pinker explains why here), but there are other compelling reasons to consider.

Firstly, what Harris's argument makes plain is that we should indeed be much, much more reticent about launching military action. If we are going to kill and maim children, even foreign ones, it had better be for a truly desperate reason.

Moreover, surely it follows from what Harris says that in suitably desperate circumstances we should torture just about everyone, and their kids, "just in case"—after all, there may possibly be a chance it could help. And if we try to prevent this absurdity, perhaps by tightening up the conditions under which torture is to be administered, this only raises further hard questions: what is torture exactly? How severe does an interrogation have to be—how harmful?—before it qualifies as an instance of torture? How pressing must a threat be, how reliable the intelligence, how suspect the suspect, before we put a Black & Decker through his knee-caps, or his daughter's? Just how many lives need to be in the balance? And if we're satisfied on these points, what techniques, precisely, should be allowed? Which ones work best? And how, by the way, do we know that?

Even if we grant the logic of Harris’s case, the practicability of it clearly fails: Who? When? How? Why? The calculus is not precise, the categories are never clean. Judgments are required. Mistakes are inevitable. The same worldly chaos and chance that explodes space shuttles and multiplies Single Tandem Repeats, also perturbs politics, and religion, and the rest of messy human life. And this is to say nothing of mischief. The price of torture, in other words, is much too high.

It seems to me that to defend torture, one must either be able to offer an unanswerable line of reasoning as to its merits, or else show that in practice it works at least as well as other available methods of obtaining information—especially in a situation as dire as the ticking bomb scenario, in which the failure to use the best method available could have terrible consequences. The arguments thus far don't even come close to convincing me, and I have heard no compelling arguments that either the threat or practice of torture yields reliable information any better than other forms of interrogation. Where is the the logic, the evidence, the peer-reviewed studies?

Moreover, there are at least two categories of suspects in which we know torture won't work: those who don't crack; and those who go mad. There is, of course, another, overlooked category: those who don't know the answers to the questions put to them—the innocent.

In the case of the tough nuts who won't crack (of which there are many documented cases), I wonder whether there might in some cases be a neurological explanation for their intractability—that they cannot crack. Perhaps their brains switch into a mode of silence or resistance or auto-anasthesia. And in cases where the practice, or prospect, of torture sends a suspect psychotic (which might also explain many in the first category), obviously any information obtained must be considered suspect. If there really was a ticking bomb and we had the man who planted it before us, torturing him may well be the worst thing we could do. And if we don't know if our suspect posesses the information we require, torturing him would be worse still.

Here's a thought: perhaps it would be better to promise our killer freedom.

If there was at least a "one in a million" chance that the promise of freedom—perhaps guaranteed publicly by the head of state—would save many lives, shouldn't the argument of saving lives justify the proposal in exactly the same way that saving lives is used to justify the use of torture? If doing something we find deeply unpleasant allows us to defuse the bomb and thus save many lives, asks Harris, shouldn't we do it? Indeed. But is it really so much harder to swallow the idea of releasing a killer than maiming, or even killing an innocent? I don't think this is a difficult moral decision. It speaks much of our times that we should find it so.

But we could go further. What if our killer agrees to give us the location of the bomb if we give him a house in Monte Carlo and a child to have sex with? Or what if he offers us some bizarre deal such as the address of the bomb for the life of the President? What are we to say? We must decide quickly—many lives are at stake, remember. Why do we find it more comfortable to countenance some forms of brutality than others? Does torture satisfy some dark need in us?

We must also consider the matter of the language we use. As Orwell pointed out (in "Politics and the English Language"), we deceive ourselves by inventing euphemisms like “collateral damage” to camouflage some of the most sickening and brutal of our behaviours. I repeat, what Harris’s argument reveals is not that we should be ready to torture suspects, but that we really should be much more reticent about waging modern warfare (a point that Sydney Peace Prize winner, and Booker Prize winner, Arundhati Roy has made with considerable force and elegance—see here). As an aside, it is interesting that our leaders often speak of keeping the "military option" "on the table"—as if bombing were just one of many policy choices available and not the very last option a commander reaches for, when all else has failed. It seems to me that if war is any further up the option list than last place, something is wrong.

But aside from the question of whether we are too eager to bomb people—or torture them—one of the things that the defenders of torture blithely assume (as do the defenders of bombing) is that torture (or bombing) stands a good chance of working. I have also thus far assumed, by the way, that torture is essentially a means of extracting information. As I shall come to, I think this is doubtful.

As those who practice it have long known, torture is by no means infallible as a means of getting at the truth. There are documented cases where even the Gestapo couldn't crack their victims, and it seems contemporary torturers often fare no better: Deputy Superintendent Devinder Singh of the Indian security forces recently admitted, on television no less, that he poured petrol into a suspect’s anus and gave him electric shocks on his genitals, “...but I could not break him.” said Singh, “He did not reveal anything to me despite our hardest possible interrogation.” (Ref) 

Astonishingly, it turns out that many people are quite willing to countenance, if not actually perform, the infliction of grievous physical and psychological harm in the service of national security (Ref). Given this readiness to get out the thumb screws for the sake of an abstract idea, I don't suppose the boffins even bothered to ask their subjects if they would have any qualms about torturing someone who had abducted their own child or a loved one? The lesson: there has never been, nor will there be, a shortage of volunteers to man the dungeons. It may be that a torturer lurks somewhere in each of us.

Perhaps in the end there is much to be said for simply taking the higher ground—declaring that we behave better than our supposed enemies. As Senator McCain put it in connection with his horrendous treatment, and that of his comrades, at the hands of the Vietnamese in the 1960s:

every one of us—every single one of us—knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them. (Ref)

Nevertheless, as the philosopher Slavoj Zizek says,

[M]ost of us can imagine a singular situation in which we might resort to torture—to save a loved one from immediate, unspeakable harm perhaps. I can. In such a case, however, it is crucial that I do not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle. (New York Times, emphasis added, Ref)

And this is the heart of the matter. If "we" really and truly feared that our very existence was at stake, and we sincerely believed that torture was the only course open to us, would we still refuse to engage in acts of the worst brutality? The question is relevant on both the personal and cultural levels.

But if "we" really do believe ourselves morally superior to those who fly planes into buildings, then surely "we" have to base our actions on a different set of moral criteria to "them", and justify our behaviour in terms that can be recognized by anyone, anywhere. Right now we don’t. We, the west, are still engaged in an old fashioned zero-sum game—with "Communism", "Islamism", "Islamo-fascism", "drugs", and goodness knows what else—the result of which doesn’t demonstrate much intellecual coherence, never mind any moral superiority, at all.

Bottom line: torture is a desperate measure. To be sure, torture will get you compliance and co-operation, and it’ll probably get you any kind of confession you want, but you'll always be unsure as to how reliable your information actually is. You will know, however, that the number of people who fear you, and who want to kill you, and your children, will increase. Accordingly, I don't think the primary job of torture is to obtain information. I doubt it ever has been. There are other, more reliable ways to do that. No, I think you use torture to inculcate fear in those you perceive as enemies or potential enemies. Above all, you use it to broadcast a message: don't fuck with me; I will get my way—by fair means or foul.

Politically, and from the point of view of social psychology, torture is a way of protecting status. It shows you mean business and are prepared to keep potential rivals at bay, no matter what. This is what Noam Chomsky calls “maintaining credibility”. (Ref)

But psychologically—that is to say on the personal or individual level—as the late Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya harrowingly revealed, you torture because you enjoy it, or because it's expected of you, or because you have stifled enough doubt to convince yourself that what you're doing isn't really torture—it's merely "tough interrogation" in the service of a greater cause, or some such nonsense.

To use torture, or worse, to let others do your torturing for you while pretending that you won't have any truck with it, as seems to be the case with the US government, is obscenely dishonest, not to say cowardly.

Notes

Naomi Wolf on the use of torture by Americans -
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/what-is-probably-in-the-m_b_76708.html

Alan Dershowitz -
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/dershowitz-opposes-tortur_b_7088.html

Milgram experiment - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Stanford experiment - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

Arundhati Roy on the futility of torture -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,1972788,00.html

William K Clifford - The Ethics of Belief (1877) - http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/w_k_clifford/ethics_of_belief.html

Caroline Arnold makes the case that torture is useless at CommonDreams -
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/07/6889/