In the immortal words of Catholic theology: Bingo!

A reader writes (sorry, my stupid comboxes won’t let my link) about Thiessen’s recent attempt to act as Court Prophet for Torture:

I’ve only scanned the comments, but I watched the interview. Let me say that I’m a hardened neocon, though a Catholic first. But I’ve got to say that Thiessen was committing the classic error of confusing the (valid) principle of double effect with the (invalid) theory of consequentialism.

Consequentialism says that when you do an intrinsically evil act, you can ignore the evil by pointing to the good you hope to gain by the act. I.e., only consequences matter. That’s not double effect. Double effect applies only to evil effects that are NOT DESIRED, EITHER AS ENDS OR AS MEANS.

In the case of torture, you’re willing the torture, even if it’s for a good end, so that’s consequentialism, not double effect. By contrast, if you bomb a purely military target, and a civilian is killed, that’s double effect, b/c (or I should say, as long as) the killing of the civilian was an undesired side-effect, and not desired either as an end (“We want to kill civilians!”) or as a means (“We don’t want to kill civilians but we figure that by doing so we will demoralize the enemy and that will have good consequences”).

When called on this error by one of the e-mailers who accused him of using ends-justifies-the-means logic (i.e., of falling into consequentialism), Thiessen retreated into saying the acts he’s talking about aren’t torture. Well if that were true (and obviously it’s a highly controversial claim), then there’d be no need to invoke either double effect or consequentialism to justify them: if it’s not evil, you can just, you know, do it!

One useful diagnostic for telling the difference between a real double effect argument and consequentialism is to replace your preferred intrinsic moral evil with something you are still willing to regard as an intrinsic and grave moral evil and then see if you’d still be willing to do it in order to achieve your good end. So, for instance, replace “torturing the hairy, smelly bad guy” with, say, “torturing the screaming child of the hairy, smelly bad guy”. If your argument is *really* a double effect argument, nothing will change. If your argument is just consequentialist hogwash, this becomes obvious really fast. Then the choice is to abandon consequentialism or (which is always possible with the fallen mind) find a fresh rationale for wading more deeply into grave evil. History suggests that the latter course is commonly (though not always) taken.

By the way, arguments for, say, terror bombing civilian populations (like Dresden) are, precisely, arguments for achieving a good end through the deliberate torture and murder of children. They achieve *their* effect by melting (literally) the screaming children into a vast statistical pool of other victims so as to anonymize the face of the little girl with the skin burned away.