Mother Jones has a fantastic article about the effects that torture — excuse me, “enhanced interrogation techniques” — can have on the torturers. (h/t Eve) This, I think, is the best argument to make against torture. It’s horrifying and dehumanizing to the victims, but we regularly accept the necessity of other dehumanizing acts, especially when on a war footing.
The more important point, and the one that far too few emphasize, is that torture destroys the soul of the torturer. It’s dehumanizing to be tortured, but it is, at least, something that someone else is doing to you. To be the torturer is to dehumanize yourself — or, perhaps, to rip off that veil of second nature that hid something you had never seen before. A state that permits — indeed, encourages — its citizens and soldiers to destroy themselves morally in its service as no business compelling anyone’s loyalty.
Ben Allbright doesn’t want to accept that what he did was torture, because unless you’ve deadened yourself to the term (and disturbingly many have) you have to accept that it’s wrong.
Ben loves to debate, perhaps because he usually wins, but now he was endlessly, fruitlessly arguing with himself. “Every human being instinctively knows right from wrong. There is never a justification for torture.” But then again, “Is softening people up wrong on some levels? I don’t know. It wasn’t beneficial to them, but it was presented as necessary.” He had seen a side of himself he didn’t know existed, and now he had to live with that. “In combat you question your mortality,” he told me. “In these prisons you question your morality.”
Ben isn’t the exception. People do these things. People enjoy doing these things. There is a seed of darkness at the heart of man. It isn’t overwhelming — we feel guilty, until we train ourselves not to — but it’s there, and the whole purpose of society and tradition and culture and (if we must) the state is to teach us: first, not to let it out and then, to eradicate it if we can.
For the most extensive period of human history, punishment was certainly not meted out because people held the instigator of evil responsible for his actions, and thus it was not assumed that only the guilty party should be punished: — it was much more as it still is now when parents punish their children out of anger over some harm they have suffered, anger vented on the perpetrator — but anger restrained and modified through the idea that every injury has some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in fact, be paid out, even if that is through the pain of the perpetrator. …to what extent can suffering be a compensation for “debts”? To the extent that making someone suffer provides the highest degree of pleasure, to the extent that the person hurt by the debt, in exchange for the injury as well as for the distress caused by the injury, got an extraordinary offsetting pleasure: creating suffering — a real celebration… (Nietzsche, 1887)
There are any number of reasons why John Yoo, and the rest of the Bush Justice Department that tried to find legal justifications for torture, are wicked men, but here is the best: they decided, on utilitarian grounds, that torture was necessary, then demanded that someone else pay the price. There is certainly something noble in throwing yourself on a grenade to save the rest of your platoon. There may, I think, be something noble in doing the same with your soul — if there really is a ticking time bomb, if it really will save New York, then perhaps it’s noble to damn yourself to save others.
It is never noble to throw someone else on a grenade.
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