I guess we are condemned to discuss torture once again. Dr. Tollefsen wrote an article on Marc Thiessen’s misuse of double effect. In the article, Tollefsen states, “…I do not address the question of Catholic teaching on torture….” He is addressing Thiessen’s argument. In specific, he argues that action taken against a person for not cooperating are discrete from the reception of the cooperation. As such, the act of inducing the cooperation must at least be morally neutral for the two acts taken in totality to be licit. In short, he is arguing that there is a clear violation of the 3rd test of the principle of double effect: we cannot do evil so that good may come. This is certainly okay as far as it goes, but it does not get to the heart of the Church’s objection to torture.
My objection is here:
So the infliction of some pain, ranging from various forms of minor discomfort to something presumably quite unpleasant might be permissible as a way of inducing another to render himself no longer a threat. … But, on the other side, the interrogational torturer, by my account, can inflict some pain for the sake of inducing a suspect to talk.
To start, I think we get off on the wrong foot when we try to define an intrinsically evil act as a magnitude of an accident. To define cruel and unusual punishment as a disproportionate infliction of pain is okay. To define rape as sex using a disproportionate amount of persuasion is inadequate in defining what is occurring. To define abortion as a disproportionate disregard for the well-being of the fetus is likewise inadequate.
Certainly reductio ad absurdum can be valuable. For example, one could certainly argue an instance of hitting a child was not corporal punishment by showing the pain inflicted was such so as to show the actor did not have concern for the well being of the child. And it is a legitimate argument, but the argument does not show us the essence of caring for a child. The absence of consent in rape does not show us the essence of love. It is in fact the antithesis of love. Likewise, torture is not merely the disproportionate infliction of pain, it is the antithesis of social order.
Those opposed to torture are asked to defend one person being denied sleep for a week against some other actor killing 20 or however many people. That some people have allowed themselves to be denied sleep for that long (or waterboarded) means that to do so to a person involuntarily cannot be understood to be substantially different, or so it is argued. Many old people confine themselves to small apartments. Their situation is substantially different than a person confined to prison. Consent substantially differentiates acts. The difference between sex and rape, slavery and labor, and mortification and torture very much lies in consent, not in degree but in its presence or absence.
Proponents of the techniques of torture have argued that we are adjudicating a conflict between social order and a transitory harm to a person. We are not keeping the person from harming society for they are in custody and therefore prevented. We aren’t offering the person a reconciliation with society. We are treating him as an involuntary instrument of our anti-terrorism efforts. Since we have ascribed him the status of enemy combatant, we have granted ourselves license to use him as we see fit as long as we deem the harm given to him is merely transitory, even if in practice it leaves a permanent scar or death. Essentially the argument is that we can have social order by destroying the human dignity of a person.
Yet, how can we live with the knowledge that someone in our midst has knowledge of grave evil and has allowed an injustice to occur? Is a jail cell really adequate to address this evil? This actually does happen. Rather than enemy combatants, we call these people journalists. There have been actual people that have committed crimes whose freedom continues unabated due to journalists refusing to testify. Yes, we do put those journalists in jail for contempt of court. And it is proper to put them in jail just as I can understand the reticence of the journalist to testify. Of course, they are innocents. Well, we also have co-conspirators that refuse to admit their own wrong doing or who aided and abetted them in their wrong doing. In the former case, we declare them to have a right not to admit guilt, even if doing so will allow them to go free. Conceivably, we can compel them to testify about who aided and abetted in their crimes once they are convicted or we give them immunity. They can even be held in contempt of court and sent to jail for refusing to cooperate. And yet gang leaders, drug kingpins, and mob bosses walk free because they refuse to cooperate. And let’s be honest, the deaths for which they are responsible is not a trivial number. And yet we basically let them walk free for their insolence, even if we do make them serve time for the lesser crimes they committed. We take it as a fundamental value of Western society that we will tolerate the injustice of men if it preserves us from our government acting unjustly.
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