Is Torture Morally Acceptable

Torture: Is It Morally Acceptable?
Part 1: Introduction
Is torture morally acceptable? In the U.S., arguments have been made both for and against the use of torture in fighting terrorism. Enhanced interrogation technique is a term that has been supplemented in the place of “torture” to make practices like waterboarding seem more acceptable to the public—but in spite of the name applied, the same questions persist. Depending on one’s ethical perspective, torture may or may not be justified. There are several practical problems with torture—namely that confessions made under duress do not even hold up in a court of law, so to assume that any information obtained under duress would be authentic is to go against reason as used in courts of law. However, this paper will look at the morality of torture using the deontological position. First, it will explain the deontological position. Then it will show that from the basis of duty to prisoners of war, torture is immoral. From there it will discuss the counter-argument from the utilitarian position. A response to the utilitarian objection will also be given, and summary will conclude the paper. The argument this paper makes is that torture is neither morally acceptable from the deontological position nor from the utilitarian position from which one might object to the deontological argument.
Part 2: Ethical Argument
The key ethical issues in this topic are that prisoners of war or suspects of any crime are protected by law (both national and international) and have rights as human beings that must be respected. When a nation abuses those rights and violates them, they send a message to the international community that they neither respect the law nor respect human rights. Such a message is an offense to justice and can rouse the righteous anger of many in the international and national community, which can in turn lead to blowback in terms of more aggressive and hostile behavior from those who are opposed to the doctrines and actions of the nation doing the torture. Nations have a duty to protect and respect the rights of prisoners of war and of suspects who are detained for whatever reason.
The moral argument here can be supported by deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics. Deontology supports it, obviously, because of the nationally and internationally recognized duty that states owe to prisoners of war and suspects in criminal cases. Utilitarianism supports it because the greatest good is neither served by using torture nor possible by using torture, as the risk of blowback is likely and the fact that torture does not yield authentic confessions under any court of law. From the virtue ethics position, torture is immoral because it stains the good character and reputation of the country doing it. The most important argument, however, is that a nation that acts with any respect for the law is duty-bound to honor the law by protecting the rights of suspects and prisoners of war—otherwise, that nation surrenders its right to command respect and honor among other nations and among its own people. A nation that flouts the law deliberately is a nation that promotes lawlessness. The state is as duty-bound as its people are to the laws of the land.
Part 3: Explanation and Defense
The deontological moral position is based on the idea that morality is determined by one’s duty (Mosser, 2013). This is different from the utilitarian moral position which is determined by the outcome of the behavior—i.e., whether or not it has the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. It also differs from the virtue ethics moral position, which examines the effect of the behavior on the character to determine the morality of the action. Deontology looks at what one’s duty is and determines morality by assessing whether the action is consistent with the duty one is obligate to fulfill. Kant is widely credited with advancing the deontological argument, though variations of the argument have been put forward over the years, with some disagreeing about how to determine what one’s duty is. For example, the argument of the “white lie”—i.e., whether it is permissible to tell a white lie to protect someone one feels duty-bound to protect or whether one is duty-bound to tell the truth in all instances—is an example of where deontologists differ (Sen, 1983).
Deontology guides and constrains moral reasoning by looking strictly at the duty that is owed. Behavior is to be judged moral or immoral in terms of whether it aligns with the duty expected of the individual or state. This approach constrains moral reasoning to the identification of the duty, which, once identified, serves as the guide for moral behavior. If a states has a duty to respect the rights of the person under arrest, then torture cannot be said to be moral, as torture is a violation of a prisoner’s rights. However, if a state has a duty to protect its people from terrorism and a suspect is believed to have information about terrorism that the state believes can only be obtained through the application of torture, the duty may be identified as protecting the people of the state, which would override the rights of the prisoner. But this is a utilitarian argument—it looks at the protection of the people of state as being more important than the rights of the prisoner (the many are greater than the few). It is also a faulty argument because it assumes that torture works in obtaining authentic information, when there is no proof that it does so (O’Mara, 2015). This argument will be examined more in the next section. Here, it must be understood that a state’s duties are many: it is true that it is duty-bound to protect its own people from harm by thwarting terrorism if it can; however, it is also duty-bound to respect national and international law and the human rights of individuals. One duty does not cancel out another. Both must be fulfilled but neither at the expense of the other. The state can seek information from the prisoner but not in a manner that violates his human rights.
Part 4: Objection and Response
Utilitarianism is the moral position which supposes that the maximization of benefit is what determines the moral good. As Sandle (2009) notes, utilitarians are concerned with maximizing welfare and use that position to justify torture—but they forget that there is a tremendous downside to torture that does not actually allow for the maximizing of welfare, which is that confessions made under torture cannot be trusted as authentic and that blowback is a serious risk, which could negatively impact the welfare of the people supposedly being protected through the use of torture. For example, if a prisoner is tortured, that practice can inflame the prisoner’s people back in his native land; inflamed, they can vow to attack the nation committing the torture with even more fury. This puts the nation’s own people at greater risk because those responsible with caring for the prisoner and treating him with respect have failed to do their duty. The utilitarian assumes that torture is productive and that it works.
This assumption is invalid, first of all and has never been validated (O’Mara, 2015). Secondly, it assumes that torture can be used to protect the people and safeguard them by using the information obtained from the tortured person to prevent future terror attacks. This assumption is also invalid as the possibility of blowback as described above is significant (O’Mara, 2015) and therefore does not make the people back home any safer. If anything, it makes them less safe. So from the utilitarian’s own moral perspective, the argument is wrong. However, from the deontological argument it is also wrong because the state has a responsibility to honor international law when it is acting internationally. A state that does not honor international law is a state that must be considered rogue and immoral.
Part 5: Conclusion
In the first section, this paper described the moral issue at stake by asking the question of whether torture is morally acceptable. It stated that from a deontological position, torture is not morally acceptable—and it also stated that torture is immoral from any ethical perspective, including utilitarianism and virtue ethics. In the second section, it described the key ethical issues at stake regarding torture, which are that: 1) it violates the prisoner’s human rights, 2) it does not work in obtaining authentic information, and 3) it risks blowback on the nation that applies it. In the third section, the ethical position of deontology was described and applied to this moral question. It was shown that a state has a moral duty to respect national and international law and human rights. In the fourth section, the utilitarian argument of maximizing the welfare of the state by applying torture to stop terrorism was discussed and shown to rest on invalid premises, and that whether one uses duty-based ethics or pragmatic-based ethics, the conclusion is the same: torture is immoral.


References
Mosser, K. (2013). Ethics and social responsibility (2nd ed.) [Electronic version]. 
O'Mara, S. (2015). Why Torture Doesn’t Work. Harvard University Press.
Sandle, M. (2009). Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
Sen, A. (1983). Evaluator relativity and consequential evaluation. Philosophy & Public
Affairs, 113-132.