The Case Against Torture - a paper by Maria Arrigo

A Consequentialist Argument against Torture Interrogation of Terrorists - Jean Maria Arrigo, Ph.D.

Joint Services Conference on Professional Ethics
January 30-31, 2003, Springfield, Virginia

Alan Dershowitz closes his essay on “Torture of terrorists” with this challenge:

Had law enforcement officials arrested terrorists boarding one of the airplanes and learned that other planes, then airborne, were headed toward unknown occupied buildings, there would have been an understandable incentive to torture those terrorists to learn the identity of the buildings and evacuate them.

I would like to close my essay with a reply.
The individual law enforcement officials, of course, can make their own moral choices and take their own risks. But if it is state policy to torture the terrorist, then the policy should be rational and the torture interrogation proceed with a reasonable chance of success.

Terrorists selected for such a role—like most American POWs in North Vietnam—can probably stand up to commonplace tortures from untrained staff for a long time. The use of sophisticated techniques by a trained staff entails the problematic institutional arrangements I have laid out: physician assistance; cutting edge, secret biomedical research for torture techniques unknown to the terrorist organization and tailored to the individual captive for swift effect; well trained torturers, quickly accessible at major locations; pre-arranged permission from the courts because of the urgency; rejection of independent
monitoring due to security issues; and so on. These institutional arrangements will have to be in place, with all their unintended and accumulating consequences. Then the terrorists themselves must be detected while letting
pass without torture a thousand other criminal suspects or dissidents, that is, avoiding a dragnet interrogation policy.

The moral error in reasoning from in the ticking bomb scenario arises from weighing the harm to the guilty terrorist against the harm to the prospective
innocent victims. Instead, the harm to innocent terrorist victims should be weighed against the breakdown of key social institutions and the state-sponsored
torture of many innocents. Stated most starkly, the damaging social consequences of a program of torture interrogation evolve from institutional
dynamics that are independent of the original moral rationale.

http://www.usafa.af.mil/jscope/JSCOPE03/Arrigo03.html

[derby378]

1. Here's a simpler reply: HELL, NO

That was easy...

2. that is funny

although that argument mostly works when you are a parent or a dictator.

3. kick