My favorite class throughout my entire education (three years of law school included) was a course I took undergrad in Comparative Ethics in my political science major. It was taught by a visiting professor from India, Dr. Chari, a Hindu woman, who was brilliant, yet a great teacher to boot. Since then, I do not take these roiling debates on ethics lightly. Dr. Chari always demanded total honesty in assessing and discussing her always provocative hypotheticals. So here are two I have been mulling over...
Hypo #1: I am a terrorist who has been apprehended shortly before the scheduled implementation of an attack on US soil is to commence. I know where it is to occur and what the means of the attack will be (bomb, bio, nuclear, etc). They torture me (pick a flavor) to get this info. I would like to say that I would be tough and give them no answer or a false answer to stop the indescribable physical pain, but in keeping with Dr. Chari's dictates of total honesty, I suspect that I would fail, and give up the info, just to make the pain stop. The attack would be thwarted, and thousands of lives saved.
Hypo #2: I am a terrorist suspect who has been apprehended. I deny any affiliation, and claim (correctly) that I am a law abiding citizen. After initial torture, my minders are satisfied that I am not privy to any information about any imminent threat, so then they torture me further to get me to make a false confession that I am an active terrorist. Again, I would like to say that I would be tough and keep responding that I was an innocent person, just to stop the indescribable physical pain, but with due deference to Dr. Chari's dictates of total honesty, I suspect that I would fail, and falsely admit that I was a terrorist.
Here is where it gets interesting: The folks who are anti-torture have been leaning exclusively on the latter example, claiming that torture ALWAYS leads to false confessions or useless intelligence. I don't believe it. They completely ignore Hypo #1, because it is very inconvenient for them to acknowledge.
To me, the proper way to approach this moral exercise is to just say that we live in a society that rules out torture as a method to extract information from ANY suspect.
So my point is that getting into arguments about whether torture actually yields real results or is only used to get false confessions is the proverbial "red herring." As long as our own laws against torture (including international treaties/agreements to which we have subscribed) remain in force, who gives a flying fuck whether torture does or does not produce effective results!
~ tom
