On Torture

philosophy bites: Raimond Gaita on Torture

"The convention against torture and the Declaration of Human Rights [something] immediately after the war. These were not drafted by naive people. These were people who lived in a blood-soaked century. And yet far from thinking that maybe torture should be one of the instruments to protect citizens, they banned it completely...

In the actual argument in public life, as opposed to the sort of things that might go on in philosophy classrooms, I didn't think that people were tempted to think that torture might in certain circumstances be permissible because they had been convinced by a consequentialist.

It's true they thought the consequences of not permitting torture might be truly horrible, but it was my impression that they thought that torture would then be the lesser evil. And they meant it as an evil.

Whereas a consequentialist, if he's a strict consequentialist, can't think that something you're morally obliged to do in order to prevent these terrible consequences can itself be an evil...

[On torture not working] There's some controversy about that. Michael Ignatieff did make the observation: If torture is so ineffective how come people keep wanting to use it?

But supposing it's true that it doesn't for the most part work. It probably would work if the people who were doing the torturing threatened to torture the victim's children or wife if he led them up a garden path.

It's very interesting actually because some people say there are no moral absolutes, but everybody wants to stop somewhere...

The people who felt incredulous that torture was as they put it again on the agenda had the idea that there ought to be some things that are undiscussable. Now that of course very seriously offends liberal instincts because the thought is everything should be discussable.

But as a matter of fact and this is where philosophers can just remind people of some things, society is to some degree defined by what is undiscussable. For example in our society it's undiscussable whether we should enslave our black population. The point here is not that we have on balance thought it's a bad thing - it's just not an option. The things that we find undiscussable are things for which we treat as having no two sides.

Nobody thinks in our society that it's discussable whether homesexual should be publicly castrated. Or even take a much more modest example - nobody thinks it's publicly discussable whether politicians should routinely be up for assassination.

Now there are people who live in the society who come from countries that do believe that and someone who came from another country might think that's a bad way to live and I would much rather live here but that person who thinks on the whole that's a bad way to live and I've seen is not like a person for whom it's never been an option.

So this has enormous implications for the idea of what would count as a sober discussion."