Ticking Time Bomb, My Ass

There was a brilliant piece in Harper’s about torture and the “ticking time bomb” justification for it. The whole issue, including a case for the impeachment of GW Bush and a story on the politicization of science by the AIDS industry, is fantastic, but I can’t seem to find it on their site. Just buy the magazine. Trust me, it’s great.

Whenever I hear the “ticking time bomb” argument, I am pretty sure that I am dealing with an idiot and that pointing out the utter illogic of the argument will be a waste of time. Seriously, when would such a scenario ever happen? You know there’s a time bomb, and you know that the guy you have in custody knows about it. Under those circumstances, if you tortured the guy and got the information needed to thwart the bombing, no jury would ever convict you of anything. No prosecutor would ever charge you. There is really no need for a law legitimizing torture in the case of the ticking time bomb scenario, and the scenario serves only as a red herring to soften us up to the idea of torture as legitimate under any circumstances.

It does not follow that because one might feel justified in taking extreme measures under extreme and highly improbable circumstances that the measures should somehow be considered other than extreme. I summarize the ticking time bomb argument as follows: “If one can imagine a scenario when an evil act might be justifiable, then that evil act is always justifiable.”

Let us imagine a scenario in which the only way to save a trainload of people from certain death is to throw a switch diverting the train onto a siding where a baby is playing in the new path of the train. You might decide that killing the baby is justified under the circumstances, but it does not follow that baby killing becomes less heinous because one might imagine an extreme situation in which it might be a suitable choice. I concede that once you kill your first baby, it probably becomes easier. Perhaps once you imagine killing a baby, it becomes easier to imagine killing them.

Let us imagine that a baby has wandered into a room where it has access to the enabled launch controls of nuclear missiles and that the baby is about to launch the missiles unless you shoot her in the head at once. The baby does not know what she is doing. She is a good baby and very cute, not unlike the Gerber baby. Unless you shoot that baby, millions will die in a nuclear holocaust. Shooting the baby would be understandable, wouldn’t it, but should we by this logic condone shooting babies as policy in less dire circumstances? What if she is about to launch a conventional weapon that will kill at most 10 people? Should you still shoot her? What if she is endangering only a single person or property or government secrets? What if she is crying in a theater?

What if the baby is the child of your suspect and the only way to get him to talk is to torture that baby in front of him by burning it with a soldering iron? What if you were only 10% sure that the suspect had the information you needed? 1%? 0.00001%?

Is there really a continuum along which baby killing on one end is evil and must be avoided and on the other end baby killing is a moral and civic duty? Is there a point on this continuum, the location of which it is reasonable to argue about, where baby killing ceases to be morally objectionable? I submit that it is not useful to think in such terms and that the continuum is an argumentative con job. Baby killing is only appropriate in extreme and improbable examples such as the ones I have described, and, what’s more, it is still a bad thing to have to kill the baby.

As far as I know, nobody tortured by the US or its proxies is believed to have had information about a ticking time bomb. Rather, some thugs suspect, based on God only knows what information, that their victims might know something about something and that torture might get them to talk about it. This is a long way from the ticking time bomb scenario.

So why condone torture? First of all, there is a certain constituency among slack jawed yahoos who think that torturing is manly and that scruples about torture are wimpy. The GOP is going for the votes of the morally handicapped. Secondly, some folks get off on torture. Thirdly, torture is part of a program of terror. One tortures prisoners to frighten others who might become prisoners. None of these is a morally legitimate reason to condone torture.