Counterrevolutionary Meditations

My EM colleague, Zippy Catholic, responded to my initial contribution towards a clarification of the concept of ‘torture’ and an understanding of the nature of torture that would enable us to discriminate between instances of torture and instances of other acts that the ignorant and unscrupulous might conflate with torture for any number of less than wholesome reasons. After observing that torture, or the object of an act of torture, cannot be to induce either an externally-observable physical state or a specifiable internal state in the victim, Zippy offers a serviceable, preliminary definition of torture:

I submit that whenever a helpless captive is treated as an object and made to suffer as a means to some end unrelated to his own personal good, he has been treated inhumanely. The person who does this has committed an immoral act, no matter what good end he hopes to serve by so doing.

Furthermore, after a spirited and illuminating exchange with Lydia, Zippy offers the following elaboration upon the conditional expressed in the phrase, “…as a means to some end unrelated to his own personal good…”:

It isn’t punishment or discipline if in principle someone or something else could provide what we are after. (snip) If an inanimate object (say a piece of paper with information on it) is interchangeable even in principle for the suffering we are inflicting on a human person, we are doing wrong in inflicting that suffering.

What I propose to argue is that these definitional statements do not succeed in dispelling the necessity of an attempt to analyze the characteristics or qualities of hypothetical acts of torture (Or the imposition of suffering, extreme or otherwise.) in an effort to distinguish, however provisionally, when mere unpleasantness crosses over into rank torture. As regards Zippy’s first statement, quoted above, I maintain that one could intend at least one object integral to the good of the victim, yet perpetrate acts virtually everyone would concur in designating ‘torture’. As regards the second statement, I maintain that it is confused, although I am unsettled, or undecided, as to the precise sense in which I consider it confused.

Consider the following scenario, in which acts of torture could well be performed upon a victim, not in order to objectify him towards the attainment of some other end, be it “defusing the (largely mythical) ticking bomb” or satisfying the sadistic impulses of the torturer. Imagine a Cathar or Albigensian of medieval times who has come under the power of Catholic authorties determined to extirpate this pestiferous heresy, by which terrestrial peace is perturbated and immortal souls are led away to perdition. Imagine, further, that this medieval manichee, caring naught for the flesh of this life, fairly willingly discloses the identities of his brethren in heresy. However, he steadfastly persists in his heresy, refusing to countenance the mere thought of renunciation of his belief that he is a spark of primal divinity entombed in the matter conjured by a malevolent demiurge. His captors mourn over such blasphemous errors, fearing not only that they may disturb the peace of society, but precipitate the ruin of souls, inclusive of that of the heretic in their custody. Hence, they elect to subject him to a gradual, sliding scale of “inducements”, ranging from the merely unpleasant, such as a cold, damp cell bereft of light and meagre rations, to rank torture, such as the thumscrews, iron maiden, rack, and perhaps even an application of a hot iron. The object of this exercise in what we would all rightly regard, if only intuitively, as gross barbarism is not to reduce our heretic to a mere means to some end, to render his extreme suffering fungible with some specifiable good. The object of the exercise is, on the understanding of its perpetrators, the good of the soul of their victim: his eternal salvation, which is impossible of attainment should he imagine that he is a flinder of the divine essence hidden beneath a carapace of matter.

It seems to me self-evident that what the torturers in the example do is objectively wicked and unjust, and that quite apart from characteristically modern fetishes for ‘autonomy’ and self-determination. However, it cannot be said that their victim is made to suffer as a object or means, unless a coherent construction can be made of the claim that it is possible for someone to be made a means to the end of himself, and that this is unjust. I would suggest that it is impossible to perform the latter operation save by taking into account the composite nature of man: unless there are certain acts which, by their nature, objectify and reduce a man, it is, strictly speaking, not possible to define the illiceity of torture solely by reference to intent, the circumstances that may be indicative of intent (the fungibility argument), and thus to place a wide fence around those acts thought to correllate with the intent to objectify and torture, even to the point of including in the general proscription many acts of coercion and discipline which have hitherto been regarded by most as uncontroversial. We must be able to identify the characteristics of acts of torture in virtue of which they are acts of torture, and that by reference, not merely to the intent of the actors, but also to the physicality, nay, composite nature, of man. While this approach must reckon with the inevitable ’sandpile’ questions, I do not grant that it is, on principle, utterly impossible, inasmuch as we already possess an elaborate body of moral theology according to which certain sexual acts are inherently objectifying precisely because they are performed counter to the teleology of the body and the goods of human personhood.

The second statement of Zippy’s that I have quoted strikes me as confused, although I think it best understood as a corollary, or perhaps an exegesis of, the first: a making concrete of the moral content of objectification. It is that idealistic “in principle” that I simply cannot accept. The trouble with it, as I perceive the matter, is that it evacuates prudential reason from the sphere of moral deliberation, and renders observance of the moral law a mere acting upon abstract postulates and precepts; I think this a truncated view of the moral life, which, like so many aspects of life, is often a matter of asking, “How much?, and “How far?”, and so on. Absent this element of the moral life, the struggle of that life becomes much less comprehensible, as the personal, existential elements have been drained away, or have been reduced to mere background, upon which the moral drama of “Will I or will I not act in accordance with self-evident principle X?” is enacted. The trouble is, that is to say, that I do not believe that a theory of moral obligation can ignore the way categorical norms are applied, embodied, realized, or merely approximated, in contingent circumstances.

We simply do possess differing moral obligations with respect to different categories of persons, as determined by relation, situation, moral colouration, and a host of other factors. My obligation towards the poor does not supercede, or even compete, with my obligation to my wife and children.

And our obligations toward the jihadi are not identical with our obligations toward even serial killers and child molestors, not least when the former is an enemy combatant and the latter are citizens. More generally, the moral status of the malefactor must be a consideration in determining what is and is not permissible during an interrogation; this seems to me to be the presupposition of the bargaining that police and prosecutors engage in with suspects and defendants on a routine basis. There exists no moral right to refrain from disclosing information regarding illicit activities; in fact there exists a positive duty to disclose such information, as such disclosure tends to the good of those who may be spared from harm as a consequence, the good of those others whose apprehension as the result of such disclosures will prevent them from engaging in evils destructive of their own souls, and that of the interrogatee himself, who performs his moral duty by disclosing that information and, if nothing else, by so doing affords himself at least the opportunity of becoming a better person than he otherwise would have been. Hence, in a very real sense, the discomforts, even should they be no more harsh than the provision of PBJs to a man who detests them, are not the currency of illicit coercion (and I find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that, on the understanding I am now considering, that provision of PBJs could qualify as “objectifying” and thus illicit, inasmuch as the unpleasantness of PBJs to the interrogatee is being made fungible with the information he is being asked to provide….) but discipline for failing to perform a moral duty not to conceal evil.

The exclusion of this moral variable from the consideration of the fungibility of suffering strikes me as being of the same order as a syllogism without a second term. Or, perhaps better, as analogous to the fallacies of plausibility in the arguments of a Heather MacDonald to the effect that because one can (hypothetically) construct a conservative political philosophy on a purely rationalistic basis, that the historical genesis of the Actually Existing Western Traditions and Conservative Philosophies somehow slouches off into irrelevancy. The prisoner in these hypotheticals is not being treated as an object, and, in a sense, the question of the fungibility of his discomforts with the information cannot arise; one cannot be treated as an object by being made to perform one’s duty. If one could, then we would shortly find ourselves in the company of the Foucaults of the world, among whom moral ideas are mere expressions of preference, and when “imposed”, illicit acts of the will to power. The notion of fungibility in this context suggests that something illicit is transpiring, that there is something arbitrary, ungrounded, and factitious about it all. But this is what must be proved. There is, I should rather say, short of actual torture, no conversion of suffering/punishment to information, but rather the conversion of the objective moral guilt of the malefactor to observable conditions of his existence. This is the existential meaning of justice. It does seem evident to me that the idea of the fungibility of suffering and information, when pushed too forcefully - in other words, beyond the realm of obvious torture - may rightly be read as implying a right to conceal evil.

Between, therefore, the possibility of at least one instance of the imposition of torture towards the ultimate good of the victim and the duty of the prisoner to disclose his knowledge of plans for the perpetration of evil acts, it remains obvious, to me if to no one else, that we cannot discuss torture solely in terms of intent, or what amounts to objectification in the mind of the torturer, even as inferred from a combination of circumstances. It will not do simply to dismiss the former possibility as ’stupid’. There is a grave error in moral reasoning in any attempt to justify that sort of thing; it simply, so far as I can see now, has nothing to do with treating someone as an object toward an end unrelated to his personal good, or rendering his suffering fungible with some end, itself of lesser value than a human life, that, in principle, could be obtained by other means. That is to say, we must be capable of discussing torture, somehow, with respect to the bodily constitution of man, even his nature as a composite being, and I cannot see that this discussion can avoid the drawing of lines in theory, and not merely as pragmatic, statutory markers of possible ill intent. If this is presumed to be impossible, then we will be left without any clear criteria for distinguishing licit acts of coercion and punishment from acts that are cruel, inhuman, and degrading. The mere fact that people, all of whom are opposed to torture, can discourse volubly on the nature, conditions, and characteristics of torture should suffice to indicate that those broaching the questions and expressing reservations about the declarations of some that ‘what is torture’ is self-evident are not members of some Coalition for Fog seeking to legitimate the illigitimate and justify the unjustifiable.

I do believe that there exists a promising avenue for further analysis along these lines, suggested by Professor Pruss in the comments section of a post at Zippy’s blog. Essentially, the injustice and iniquity of torture would subsist in the attempt to derange the reason of the victim, to unseat his reason and render him a pliable object of manipulation. Such as approach would have to take into account the relationship of the body to the mind, and would take us beyond discussions of intent, although it could not leave them behind altogether.

While I would not wish to dismiss this approach, I do not perceive that it can evade the question of degrees. Clearly there exist licit degrees of ‘bodily mortification’, self-imposed, or imposed by others, that are manifestly intended to either weaken, re-orient, tutor, limit, discipline, or otherwise canalize reason. The ascetic disciplines of the Orthodox Church aim at the weakening of the passions and the re-orientation of the affections towards their right ends; it is at once a use of reason against the body, for the body, and a humbling of reason, so often merely the slave of those passions, before the supra-rational Good of human nature. It would be incoherent to suggest that all of these practices do not aim at influencing the rational faculties, principally by weakening their corrupt expressions. One could say something analogous regarding military training, which both physically and psychologically, aims at breaking down, to some degree, the reason and personality of the individual soldier, to the end that he might be rendered a fit, contributing member of a cohesive unit. And one could also conceive of examples of ‘training’ - hazing, which, like it or not, is at some level an integral aspect of this way of life - which are excessive. And one could also say much the same thing regarding the punishment of the malefactor who refuses to divulge information concerning the evil he and his comrades have plotted. Some punishments simply will aim at breaking down his reason, because his reason is depraved. Leaving aside the question of varying physical constitutions, I seriously doubt that sleep deprivation, for example, is inherently torturous, inherently destructive of reason; certainly, one night of deprivation will not derange reason, even though ten nights certainly would be productive of that effect, just as one drink will not impair one’s faculties, while ten surely will. I do not see, therefore, that the question of degrees, the question of the construction of sandpiles, can be eschewed altogether. It would seem to be graven, not necessarily in certain mistaken modes of reasoning, but in the nature of things. It is still true that

Regulations about exeternal physicalities don’t properly define torture.

And that

… it makes no sense to treat a list of physicalities as what just is torture.

It is just that physicality, defined broadly so as to encompass psychological effects, is necessary, though not sufficient, to a definition of torture, just as an understanding of intent is necessary, though not sufficient, to that definition.