Torture, like slavery, is one of those cruelties which are condemned by all right-minded people but which may never have been more popular in practice. So the people who advocate it – among them perhaps the CIA operatives found to have practised torture in the wake of 9/11 – will normally claim that they are advocating some other policy which coincidentally involves the deliberate infliction of pain for some higher end. There are exceptions. The American writer Sam Harris, for instance, devoted a substantial section of his first book urging the torture of Muslim suspects on utilitarian grounds: “I believe that I have successfully argued for the use of torture in any circumstance in which we would be willing to cause collateral damage”, he wrote. “Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only permissible, but necessary.”
But even Harris claims now that torture should be illegal, though he would qualify this by saying that torturers – at least those on his side – should be free to break the law.
The assumption underlying Harris’s arguments is that torture works to supply information, and should therefore be judged by its consequences. And the use of torture to extract information was widespread and generally accepted before the 18th century. However, there was also another purpose to torture then, which was as a deterrent or instructive spectacle. A heretic or suspected witch might be tortured to make them confess their sins and their accomplices; but they would be burnt at the stake because the pain was both pleasurable and instructive to the audience. This theatrical, public form of torture is defended by no philosopher I know of today.
It was most tellingly attacked by Voltaire, who also used it to denounce the Catholic church in his writings on a young man condemned for blasphemy (he was supposed to have struck and defaced a statue of the Virgin Mary, to have sung impious songs, and to have failed to raise his hat when a religious procession passed). “The judges of Abbeville, men comparable to Roman senators, ordered not only that his tongue should be torn out, that his hands should be torn off, and his body burned at a slow fire, but they further applied the torture, to know precisely how many songs he had sung, and how many processions he had seen with his hat on his head.” Such hideous forms of execution were replaced, after the revolution, by the guillotine.
Since then, torture has been almost entirely practised as a means of acquiring information, and much of the philosophical discussion around it has centred on the question of whether it works. As far back as the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes argued that it did not: “What is … confessed, tendeth to the ease of him that is tortured; not to the informing of the torturers: and therefore ought not to have the credit of a sufficient testimony.”
Against this is the common experience that torture does sometimes work to extract information. To take a recent example, quoted by the American philosopher Claudia Card, Australian police beat a confession out of a suspect who had abandoned a stolen car with a baby in it who would have died from heatstroke. The criminal had refused at first to tell them where he’d left it.
This is the closest you will get in real life to the “ticking bomb” scenario, in which a terrorist who knows where an explosive has been hidden is traced by the security services who need to know where it is before it goes off.
Card goes on to raise a number of objections: chief among them that police could not have known they had the right man when they started beating him. He was a Pacific Islander, which may have made him both more conspicuous and more likely to have been the victim of stereotyping. Obviously, if the police were to round up all the members of a minority in any given area and beat them until they confessed to something, some crimes would be cleared up – and some would even be solved (for some of the confessions would be truthful). But such a policy would be unacceptable, not least on pragmatic grounds.
Finally, there are philosophers who claim that torture is absolutely wrong, whether on Kantian or religious grounds. The catechism of the Catholic church, for instance, states today that “torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity”.
