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Death vs. torture: uncomfortable thoughts
Under one view, it is worse to torture someone than to kill him, at least provided the level of torture is sufficiently high. That can hold, a'la Amartya Sen, even if the person, in the Paretian sense, would prefer to be tortured than to be killed.
Most of us, including left-wing opponents of torture, think it is OK to kill al Qaeda operatives to stop an operation in progress or perhaps even kill them pre-emptively with reasonable cause. Those same people don't think it is OK to torture, except under extreme circumstances. They also usually think that the slow torture of jail, including the homosexual rapes, is OK or perhaps to be ignored rather than to be either endorsed or countered (read Jane Galt on related questions).
One question is why (traditional) torture should be so much worse than murder. For instance we might think that torture is worse for "public choice" reasons. Perhaps the "mentality of the torturer" infects the body politic more than the "mentality of the murderer." Perhaps it is more likely that torture privileges will be abused than that murder privileges will be abused. Well, maybe, but I haven't seen the evidence. At the very least our current state of knowledge on these questions does not justify the extreme aversions of the anti-torture critics.
(Could it be that torturers are simply less admirable than murderers, as Robin Hanson suggested to me, and thus we like torture less?)
I toy with the moral view that torture is simply worse than painless murder. Pain is a bad in a way that a missing life is not, noting that we must make adjustments for the pain of the relatives of the murdered. Forget about comparing just the consequences of each action, there is something relational and enduring about the torture which is highly objectionable.
But no matter where I come out on that issue, I endorse a strong anti-torture view because I am in general anti-punishment. Punishment is sometimes necessary, but in my core I think it is also wrong to send people to jail and that we should do so only with great trepidation. Of course this view is unacceptable to the American public.
Many torture critics, willingly or not, end up with a waffling view on the sanctity of life. In their moral schema murder is less bad than torture. Sure, murder can still be "very very bad," but surely we start to wonder why lives are worth less than avoiding pains. Some extreme pacifists will argue that we have no license to kill the same operatives we might otherwise be torturing. That position would at least be consistent.
I believe the anti-torture forces, of which I count myself a member, find it easy to posture on the torture question, but overall they do not sit in an easily defensible , or for that matter popular, moral position.
Last week Robin Hanson dared me to write a pro-torture post; this is the closest I can come to that.
Addendum: International law, and other legal documents, surely creates other differences between torture and murder, but I am asking the prior question of how those laws should read.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 3, 2006 at 08:13 AM in Law | Permalink
Comments
I am curious what you would recommend be done with violent, predatory criminals (other than jail)?
Posted by: Matthew Cromer at Oct 3, 2006 8:30:35 AM
(1) I'm not sure I buy a torture/death distinction, as a sufficiently high level of torture generally does end in death, as has happened frequently to prisoners tortured by US forces, some due to supposedly non-harmful methods like putting bags over their heads (a little too tight) or excessive exposure to cold. And that's not to mention that the highest levels of torture involve killing someone else while you watch.
(2) You are of course ignoring the entire doctrines of just war and jus in bello, which recognize war as a sometimes necessary evil but try to minimize the violence to the least necessary. In this view, killing is worse than torture, but killing is sometimes necessary while torture never is (assuming information gained by torture is unreliable). I'm not sure you can ask the "prior question of how those laws should read" without addressing the necessity defense.
(3) Torture also denies the possibility of a death with dignity or honor, which many cultures (Roman, most war movies, modern secular humanism) believe to be more important than simply extending life. I don't think anyone can believe your argument above and simultaneously believe that euthanasia is OK.
(4) IMHO the public choice effects on the body politic are critical. I'm not sure we need more evidence for this -- we have millions of data points suggesting that most but not all soldiers who have killed in war can be reintegrated into society. The data on reintegrating torturers into society is much less extensive, but that is NOT a reason to think it is easier.
Posted by: DK at Oct 3, 2006 8:44:44 AM
Since Lost is the only exposure to torture I have, I'll use it as an example that there are strong reasons for torture in a community at risk. To Robin's suggestion that torturers are less admirable people, it's hard to make that point about Sayid, a former Republican guard for Saddam Hussein and a professional torturer. Sayid's torturing uncovered the infiltration of one of the Others - the false Henry Gale. In the end, the Losties chose not to listen to Sayid, and that mistake cost them dearly. But, it's interesting that torture appears to have been the only mechanism available to have uncovered the plot involving the false Henry Gale.
That said, torture elicits false positives, even for experts like Sayid. Sayid caught Gale in a lie only because Shannon had died recently, and therefore Sayid felt certain that it was impossible Gale could not describe in detail the burial of his alleged wife. But he'd been unable to learn that Sawyer was bluffing when he had tortured him earlier. So it appears to be a fairly crude instrument, eliciting many false positives, and costly to the community because of the guilt they incur. Sayid seems to be on the island partly because of his past as a torturer, for instance. It's the one sin he cannot escape - yet, he knows his value to the community lies in his brutality and ability to ignore his conscience for the sake of his friends. So perhaps torturers are heroes.
Posted by: Jason Voorhees at Oct 3, 2006 8:53:15 AM
I am anti-punishment which is to say I seldom see punishment as a valid ends. But I see punishment as a valid means. Punishment increases the cost associated with taking actions that society largely agrees should not be taken. This means that less of these actions will be taken. I have little interest in mythical notions of justice, and think that revenge is an immoral motive. I think prison is a fairly ideal punishment because it is unpleasant while preventing the criminal from commiting crimes. I think exile is probably ideal, those that refuse to participate in the social contract should be prevented from reaping the benefits of said contract.
Posted by: Michael Foody at Oct 3, 2006 8:55:54 AM
They also usually think that the slow torture of jail, including the homosexual rapes, is OK or perhaps to be ignored rather than to be either endorsed or countered
That's simply untrue, unless you're making the naive college-kid point that if you don't devote everything to a cause or ideal, you aren't really supporting it. I assume the next post will say, "Liberals don't really believe in redistribution; look at how few of their high and mid-high income earners give away the majority of their income to the poor."
Note also that, "Those same people don't think it is OK to torture, except under extreme circumstances," is also true of killing (in your account, "murdering") someone: no one thinks it's OK to execute Al Queda operatives who are in our control and who have not had at least a modicum of due process. Well, no Democrat and no Blue thinks that.
but overall they do not sit in an easily defensible , or for that matter popular, moral position.
This is a sloppy post, and you've not made the slightest step towards demonstrating the above. I'm not even sure of the outline of your argument. And the connection you seem to imply between "easily defensible" and "popular" by listing the two serially is bizarre.
Posted by: SomeCallMeTim at Oct 3, 2006 8:58:01 AM
I more or less agree w/ SCMT above, especially that the "slow torture of jail" point is trash, but also would point out that many types and ways of killing an al quaeda opperative are not "murder" and that those that are should be avoided if capture is at all possible. Killing someone in a military action isn't murder and is arguably not even morally wrong at all. Killing someone who is trying (actively) to kill you also isn't murder. Often enough killing a dangerous criminal who is fleeing isn't murder, either, though that case is a bit harder. So, many, perhaps even most, of the plausible cases where we might kill and al quaeda opperative are not murder, so your argument breaks down preatty heavily there. In cases that would be murder we should do our best to capture the people in question rather than murder them. It's not hard to see this, and the post is made much less valuable by not noting this.
Posted by: Matt at Oct 3, 2006 9:55:29 AM
I hope your throwaway line about Hanson's dare explains this moronic post. The murder/torture comparison you make is not realistic: you propose murder "to stop an operation in progress", which implies clear guilt on the part of the murderee. In such cases toerure might be acceptable, in a counterfactual world in which torture is the only possible way to stop the individual in question from completing the operation in progress. (Which is presumably the only reason why we've justified killing in such cases.) Torture isn't used in such circumstances - it is for extracting information about potential operations from potential suspects. (And even in the case of ongoing operations, it is used to (try and) stop the actions of other persons -- not the recipient of the torture, who is obviously already in custody.) We shouldn't sanction gov't torture of suspects any more than we should sanction government murder of suspects. All that not to mention the pragmatic effects, that we'd like discourage torture and other human rights abuses worldwide, which our own endorsement thereof makes quite difficult.
Posted by: Brock Landers at Oct 3, 2006 10:04:16 AM
I think you shouldn't have taken the bait dangled by Robert Hanson. It's clear from the tortured prose that you don't really have your heart in this topic.
Posted by: soaringeagle at Oct 3, 2006 10:06:33 AM
Invective is a good sign that I have hit a nerve. On SCMT, it does not matter for the comparison whether we call it "killing" or "murdering" the al qaeda operative. True, we (usually) don't kill operatives in our custody, but we are willing to kill those outside of our custody. In any case there remains a killing vs. torture comparison (even if some other comparisons involve relevant ancillary information) in which we seem to think killing apparently is fine but torture is not. And while we may (ought?) to seek to capture operatives before killing them, it could equally be argued that we may try to stop terrorist operations in the field before torturing for more information. But often, in both cases, we can't achieve the preferred end and thus we resort to some less preferred end.
Remember, the point of the post is not to defend torture, but rather to show that many torture critics are not very consistent and place a great stress on what are actually fairly arbitrary distinctions. I welcome you all to take a more consistent anti-punishment position.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Oct 3, 2006 10:15:24 AM
They also usually think that the slow torture of jail, including the homosexual rapes, is OK or perhaps to be ignored rather than to be either endorsed or countered
What SCTM and Matt said. This is just false. Someone at the Volokh Conspiracy commented that they'd rather be tortured than subjected to the American prison system, and I retorted that their comment went to the horrible nature of the latter, not the acceptable nature of the former.
Our prisons are just another example of why America is nothing like a "Christian nation."
Posted by: Anderson at Oct 3, 2006 10:33:39 AM
I have never heard a non-arbitrary ethical distinction for (traditional) torture per se. Every argument I've ever heard for why torture is imoral, comes down to people rationalizing their aesthetic predispositions, which I feel are not to be trusted.
Posted by: josh at Oct 3, 2006 10:34:46 AM
Some people like to judge cultures by how they treat their prisoners, criminal or otherwise. Americans would like to consider themselves civilized. Therefore, we should treat our prisoners with dignity and respect, even the prisoners that would not do the same if the situation was reversed.
Obviously, there are some flaws in the US. Our criminal prisoners are treated fairly well, but there are many problems in our system (drugs, crime, prison-rape.)
The terror-suspect prisoners (Gitmo/CIA black ops prisons) and recent war prisoners (iraq) certainly have been treated poorly.
People have been framing the torture argument in terms of whether or not these particular prisoners should be tortured. However, as society, our major fear should be if we can justify torture for these prisoners, we're do draw the line in the future. It is a slippery slope argument I'm making, but in this case it is justified.
Only terrorists should be tortured, or possible terrorists. How about drug dealers? Well, maybe only drug kingpins, they're worse than terrorists. Major drug dealers, too. Maybe minor dealers, they sell drugs to little kids. Speaking of kids, why not pedophile killers. Why not just plain ol' pedophiles, we need to know how many kids they've hurt. That's it right there. That's the line. Well, how about industrial polluters? They kill millions of people around the world...
Posted by: Xmas at Oct 3, 2006 10:45:27 AM
I have to agree with everyone here objecting to the claim that left-wing opponents of torture think that prison is OK or to be ignored. It is simply false, and the post really falls apart when the supposed contradiction vanishes. The "murder" comparison is really best made with the death penalty, after all, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more likely advocate for abolishing the death penalty than a left-wing opponent of torture!
If you're inviting the left wing to agree that prison is miserable and something really should be done, then you're preaching to the choir. Crime is a difficult problem to tackle and I'm at a loss for how we should "put the teeth" in law enforcement for a cost which is not astronomical, but we agree that our prison system is far enough gone that something needs to be done. But if this is your goal, then you really shouldn't preface the argument by accusing your natural allies of not caring.
One last thing: I don't think anyone's been defending torture as punishment, though they may subconsciously enjoy imagining it as such. The (relatively few) people willing to actually defend torture as such defend it as a means of getting information. Perhaps Jack Bauer showed them that beneath the fingernail lies a button to reveal the truth about where the terrorist nukes are hidden?
Posted by: Joe at Oct 3, 2006 10:52:03 AM
Tyler, there may be a (natural) conflation of torture as an activity with sadism as a mental attitude. I myself don't find the idea of applying some forms of torture to restricted classes of individuals all that terrible, but I find sadism, that is, the deriving of pleasure directly from inflicting pain on another creature, to be repugnant in the extreme.
I realize this complicates the utilitarian calculus a bit (are you not deriving pleasure indirectly from the suffering of another when you pre-emptively blow up a terrorist who planned to kill you?), but I suspect dividing line for many is the direct enjoyment of such a thing for its own sake. It's just that some people can't imagine that anybody who engages in such behavior is doing it for purely detached reasons.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at Oct 3, 2006 10:53:03 AM
EditDelete
Invective is a good sign that I have hit a nerve.
Possibly. But it's not a particularly good sign that you hit the nerve you intended to hit. (Looking at the responses, I'm not sure what definition of "invective" you're using, either.) Here, I think people are irritated because someone who we think of as reliably fair, if not always on the right side, has ascribed an argument to liberals that they don't hold.
True, we (usually) don't kill operatives in our custody, but we are willing to kill those outside of our custody.
The in-custody/out-of-custody distinction is a pretty important one. Insofar as you think denying people--including, or even primarily innocent civilians--food and medicine is torture, we're pretty clearly willing to do that. See, e.g., Economic Sanctions, Iraq.
there remains a killing vs. torture comparison (even if some other comparisons involve relevant ancillary information) in which we seem to think killing apparently is fine but torture is not
Except that, as you noted in the post, this isn't true. Again, the ancillary and the parenthetical matters. We do think torture is OK in some circumstances--ticking time-bomb, etc.--just as we think killing is OK in some circumstances.
But often, in both cases, we can't achieve the preferred end and thus we resort to some less preferred end.
Here you seem to be assuming things. It matters that people believe that the ends we seek--protecting US lives--can be accomplished without torture but not without killing. That's an empirical claim, and maybe we're wrong. But if you simply assume away a key part of our argument, then of course you're going to find our argument lacking: you created the lack.
I welcome you all to take a more consistent anti-punishment position.
Nobody's claiming any sort of idealized posture on this. But I think you're overstating the extent to which you've demonstrated that we're not very consistent.
And, finally, Typepad sucks.
Posted by: SomeCallMeTim at Oct 3, 2006 10:53:42 AM
If a nerve is hit here at all it's the one that flares up when economists make consequentialism look like an even more stupid moral theory than it is by carelessly ignoring important distinctions. Even a committed consequentialist can and should make a clear distinction between killing in some cases and murder in others, and it's quite a bad slip not to do this.
Posted by: Matt at Oct 3, 2006 10:57:48 AM
Some extreme pacifists will argue that we have no license to kill the same operatives we might otherwise be torturing. That position would at least be consistent.
I'd argue that the above is the only consistent form of true pacifism, and that it is by definition immoral, equating all actors and all outcomes. Somebody who, say, wants to kill my wife or daughter is not the equivalent of some random schmoe on the street. Killing the former I would consider a highly moral act, while killing the latter I would not. To fail to make a distinction between the two is repugnant in and of itself. There are no privileged frames of moral reference.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at Oct 3, 2006 10:58:20 AM
For a large number of cases, the distinction between torture and some other kinds of punishment is the distinction between hurting and degrading for its own sake and hurting in a way that might lead to some kind of moral improvement. That was supposed to be the idea behind prisons as "reformatories" before we gave up on it. But the big reason why it's OK to kill terrorists but generally not OK to torture them (besides the fact that killing seems to work better) is the slippery-slope argument: once we give the authorities license to intentionally hurt people, it doesn't take too much imagination to see where that could lead. Of course giving the authorities license to kill people can be problematic as well, but at least for now we don't seem to be at a point where a policy of killing terrorists will lead to a situation where any corrupt county sheriff who's had a bad morning can start offing people who annoy him.
Posted by: David J. Balan at Oct 3, 2006 11:07:12 AM
Tyler,
murder is more accepted when it is a result of combat. The other side is trying to harm you too. That's why the death penalty is controversial, but killing Bin Laden is not.
Torture means inflicting pain to someone under your control, rendered defenseless. For some reason we feel irked by such a situation. I can think of a feel answers for this:
- Paretian arguement: a human being can be reformed and brought back to society if he feels respected. Torture usually goes deep in breaking people's dignity. So, torture alienates people that could be brought back to society. It's very hard to overcome or forgive a torture experience.
- Theory of moral sentiments: torture is done at such a close range that we put ourselves in the place of victims and feel their pains.
- I think you already mentioned this one in the post: once opened, the door to torture is much wider than to murder. The threshold is very fuzzy.
Best, Eduardo
Posted by: Eduardo Pegurier at Oct 3, 2006 11:17:26 AM
Two thoughts:
1) The title of your post suggests you have put forward a scenario of torture vs death. Death seems to achieve an action (prevent the dead in participating in some objectionable activity such as terrorism) cheaply and with certainty. That is not the case with torture. If you take torture more broadly as any kind of non-lethal punishment (as you seem to do by including prison), then this objection is less relevant. In this case, the discussion is to rank types of punishment: painfull & non-lethal vs lethal (but not painful?). I think in the case of death, our intuitive thirst for retribution or punishment is shielded behind the excuse of 'now this won't happen again'.
2) "there is something relational and enduring about the torture which is highly objectionable"
What if you could torture someone and then give him a pill that in a few days/hours would makde him forget whatever happened to him and would erase all the effects of the torture (such that you would be torturing only one person/entity a-la-Parfit)? This would allow to increase the intensity of concentrated pain and minimize the enduring effects of it.
Posted by: economister at Oct 3, 2006 11:18:51 AM
rationalizing their aesthetic predispositions, which I feel are not to be trusted.
Actually aesthetic predispositions is all any of us have, in the end. It's the elaborate pretension that there is such a thing as measurable general welfare (or utility) that is not to be trusted. Of course, dueling aesthetic predispositions leave you without a way to settle disagreements (except inasfar as you can convince someone that their means will not lead to the hoped for ends).
For myself, when I hear justifications for torture based on increased security, I am always reminded of the biblical question: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his own soul?". It is not surprising to me that an economist would have trouble justifying opposition to torture, however.
Posted by: bbartlog at Oct 3, 2006 12:16:27 PM
Your illogic in categorizing torture with "punishment" continues to drive me nuts. Torture is not punishment, unless it is sadism it is coercion for a purpose. That may not make it any more defensible, but changes the cost-benefit analysis.
Posted by: dilys at Oct 3, 2006 12:23:33 PM
Let me put it like this. There are all these minds in the world, perhaps in the universe, that experience various levels of happiness and sadness, joy and pain. When we look back from the future we would endorse moral principles that lead to many happy minds. But there are two conflicting views.
The "totalist" view says that we should aim to maximize total happiness. In this view, any mind which is not so unhappy as to commit suicide is a net positive. The "averagist" view says we should aim to maximize not total happiness but average happiness. In this view any mind which is unhappy is a net negative.
Neither view works well. The averagist view would endorse killing off all the minds which are less happy than average, which will thereby raise the average. However we should then do that again, and again, until there is only one mind left, the happiest one of all. (Actually this is not quite true, it neglects the negative impact on the remainder of all those deaths, but still the reasoning goes through to some degree and is clearly inconsistent with our moral intuitions.)
The totalist view endorses increasing population pressure until every single person is so unhappy that they are almost ready to kill themselves. This is an extraordinary degree of unhappiness and no one would endorse a planet full of people living like that as a moral optimum.
Given these problems, we need to find some other principle for evaluating the effects of a moral rule. Otherwise we have no basis for choosing morality via an outcome-based analysis. What principle will work?
Posted by: Hal at Oct 3, 2006 12:41:24 PM
From rational point of view the moral difference between murder and torture is debatable, but from an emotional point of view it is not. Everyone is going to die so on some level we must learn to view death it as acceptable, and murder is just changing the time of death. We also accept the risk of accidental death for much the same reasons. There is no need to emotionally accept torture in the world we live in , or at least the one we grew up in. It is likely in societies where torture is common it also more accepted on an emotional level.
Posted by: joan at Oct 3, 2006 12:53:10 PM
Can anybody explain what would be the point of a prison that wasn't some kind of torture? Furthermore can anybody explain the point of a justice system that didn't involve some kind of torture? Aren't we just drawing an arbitrary line at what kind of torture we feel comfortable inflicting (ie prison, vs. beatings) based on our own aesthetic judgments. Aren't we all going have somewhat different preferences concerning what level of torture we feel comfortable with (granted that we could all agree we wanted to be on some kind of pareto optimal combination of pain and deterence or justice or whatever. I have no problem with any of this; but isn't this exactly what is going on?
Posted by: josh at Oct 3, 2006 1:10:22 PM
