At her blog Hullabaloo, the always excellent Digby asks someone “who knows more about theology than [she does] to explain” Gary Bauer’s following remarks to her:
For Christians, intent is integral to determining whether and when certain techniques, including water-boarding, are morally permissible.
Actually, although I find Bauer unpleasant and his attempt to justify the US’s torture regime despicable, I don’t think what he says here is necessarily wrong. Nor, indeed, is it just for Christians or does it require a knowledge of theology to appreciate.
If you take a child to the dentist to have some teeth removed, just to make her suffer, you have done something morally impermissible. If you take the same child to the dentist to have some teeth removed because you reasonably think they are rotten, you have not acted impermissibly. And these judgments hold even if, in the first case, it turned out that the removed teeth just happened to be rotten; and in the second case, it turned out that the teeth were not rotten after all. So the difference in the morality of the actions in the two scenarios is exclusively a matter of intention.
Now it may be that what puzzles Digby is not the general principle that the morality of an action may be determined by the intention with which it was performed, but the idea that this extends even to such actions as waterboarding or other types of torture. Why should this be so? Perhaps Digby is thinking something like this: when we describe certain actions as torture, we are already building in to the description of what was done some element of intention on the part of the agent. Torturing someone is inflicting pain on them, with the intention of causing suffering. So perhaps one might think that it is impossible that some further element of intent could, as it were, cancel the moral impermissibility of an action of torture that derives from the inbuilt intention of causing suffering. But I don’t see why this should be so. Take an action like punishing someone. It might be thought that, like torturing, punishing someone is doing something to them with the intention of causing some suffering. But suppose, for example, one’s child rushes to take a seat on a bus ahead of an elderly person trying to occupy the same seat. Punishing one’s child (perhaps mildly) with the intention of making them aware of the error of their behavior is surely quite morally permissible. The inbuilt negative intention in the punishing, of causing some suffering in the child, is integral to one’s educational purpose and the moral impermissibility it might endow the action with in other circumstances is canceled by the further element of intention here, to educate one’s child and make them more sensitive to the needs of the elderly.
I am aware that any attempt to consider issues like torture in terms of general principles about action and morality and in terms of constructed examples that are designed to make certain things stand out more clearly, is to invite the accusation that one is ‘soft’ on torture or temporizing on behalf of torturers. So let me stress once again, these remarks do not imply that I think that the torture regime of the US is morally acceptable. I think it is morally unacceptable. But I don’t think it helps anyone to look for what makes it unacceptable in the wrong place. I have written further on this matter here.
August 30, 2009 at 1:46 am
Because the Romans who tortured and killed Jesus knew not what they were doing, it was morally acceptable. Is that correct?
August 30, 2009 at 2:02 am
the sentence by bauer you defend, if not in its spirit, in the technicality of the letter, seems to me one of those sentences that really must be taken in context. the sentence is too short and too benign on its own to be discussed at all, really. the context here is that of torture. you say, correctly, that torture has the inbuilt “intention of causing suffering.” this however still seems to me under-descriptive. after all, as you say, sometimes we *want* to cause suffering for good reasons (example of the insensitive child).
so, two points. it seems to me that, in order to be morally permissible, intending to cause suffering must meet a number of conditions, and indeed those conditions are so many and so strict that at the end of the day we are left with very few cases in which it is morally okay to intend to cause suffering. i’m not going to list the conditions here (too boring), but let’s take the example of the child on the bus: i find uneducational to cause any pain to the child who doesn’t know/want to renounce a seat on behalf of someone who needs it more. you can teach without causing pain; in fact, you must teach without causing pain. and i’m assuming you’re not meaning here physical pain. even an ostensibly milder pain like humiliation, feeling of rejection, sadness etc. would be horrible here. how are you going to teach your child to be kind to others when you are not kind to your child in the first place?
torture is that extreme case in which no-good-intention-whatsover is built in the act. none. even the loathsome ticking bomb scenario (it sickens me to write this sentence) is demonstrably wrong-headed. as the word used to imply before we started quibbling over it, torture is perpetrated by immoral scumbags who use pain in inadmissible, horrible ways. the whole world agrees on this.
the only cases i can think of in which we cause pain with some moral justification are the so-called just war and the penal system. me, i’m not overly fond of either. in any case, they are precisely those kind of cases in which pain must be administered under such strict guidelines that, hopefully, one will think a hundred times before acting.
so, in conclusion, in the context in which digby quotes bauer, bauer is wrong. there is absolutely no justification for torture, ever, and the possibility of good intention is batted out of the park in advance of any conversation.
August 30, 2009 at 2:16 am
Gio, I agree with a lot of what you say; the quote has no context, etc. There are strict guidelines about when it is OK to cause pain etc. (though I very much doubt that there are ‘guidelines’ in the sense of a discursively expressible list of conditions). But, as I explain in the linked-to post on the ticking time bomb situation, by (in a given hypothetical scenario) inflating the bad consequences of not performing some action, one can require that a person who still thinks one should not act have a very strong stomach indeed. (“Really? You won’t do it even to prevent 1,000,000 people dying in horrible agony?”) Of course, if you reply that such situations are inevitably hypothetical and could never arise in real life, I’d probably agree with you. Also, defenders of torture via the ticking time bomb scenario seem not to realize that the argument has nothing essentially to do with torture. The same argument will justify doing anything – such as killing an innocent child at random. IF that were the only thing one could do to prevent 1,000,000 people dying agony, one should do that too.
August 30, 2009 at 2:20 am
yeah. i hate the ticking bomb scenario for its logical sloppiness and rhetorical bullishness. and yes, i actually think one can list the conditions under which it is morally permissible to cause pain. in fact, i’m pretty sure a lot of people have. if you want me to provide a list (not of the people who did, of the conditions), please include a books & books $100 gift card with your request.
August 30, 2009 at 2:03 am
Mike, in the Gospels, it seems pretty clear that what the Romans did was morally horrendous. But I wasn’t saying that anytime someone lacks an intention to do bad, their action is therefore acceptable. I was just saying that the presence (or in the Gospel case the absence – if that is what the phrase “they know not what they do” means) of certain intentions CAN affect the morality of the action.
August 30, 2009 at 6:35 am
How many did the Americans torture even unto death? This is not a false equivalency, this is the same moral agency which Bauer interprets to, in effect, morally justify the crucifixion.
August 30, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Mike, not sure I get your point here. Can you explain it to me again, like I was a four-year-old? Thanks.
August 30, 2009 at 3:26 pm
My understanding of Digby’s problem with the intentional justification of torture is specifically that none of the justificatory intentions that have been adverted by torture apologists satisfy her (or me, for that matter). That is, she considers an intention to torture to “save American lives” to be equally abhorrent as an intention to torture for mere amusement.
August 30, 2009 at 3:31 pm
If that’s her problem, then I agree with her – and you.