Sam Harris has commented on a curious fact of ethical perceptions. When people are killed as collateral damage in war (e.g. because they happened to be near a target who is being taken out in an operation), that is not found to create an ethical problem; even where the collateral damage dead were the wives or children of the target, or merely innocent passers-by, there still seems to be no concern and no debate. Yet torturing a prisoner for information, even under circumstances of dire necessity, is universally (OK, leaving out Dick Cheney) agreed to be totally unacceptable ethically. Thus to take an example, if you have decided it is justified to kill Osama Bin Laden, the incidental killing of his wife, family and others falls within that justification; but if you have Mrs Bin Laden in your hands, torturing her to find out her husband's location is outside that justification. Put shortly, there apparently is an argument for killing the wife but not for torturing her. How can this be? Surely killing an innocent person, or a guilty one, is a far greater violation than torturing them? How come the lesser violation has come to be perceived as more unacceptable than the greater one?
Torture is prohibited behaviour - it is the means to obtaining the object of the exercise, information. The order to torture is an order to perform a proscribed activity. Collateral damage is not the object of the exercise. There is no order to inflict collateral damage - it's "an accident". Inevitable, perhaps, but not desired, not sought. So much for the quasi-legal argument, what about the ethics? You're allowed to killed people accidentally but not allowed to harm them for "the greater good"? I guess the ethical argument mirrors the legal one - and is about as convincing. The ethics are questionable.
Of course torturing people is prohibited behaviour. Murdering people is also prohibited behaviour. The issue here is why should killing people in war be an exception to the prohibition, but torturing people in war is not an exception to the prohibition. If the collateral damage deaths are known in advance to be inevitable, then surely the order to carry out the operation must include within it an order to kill people as collateral damage too, must it not? Do we not need to consider this not only from the perspective of the people carrying out the orders, but also the people giving the orders?
All well and good but.... "collateral damage" is usually unexpected and unwanted and where inevitable is kept to the absolute minimum. Whenever there has been an incidence of non combatants killed and it is found to be unjustified the soldier in question finds himself in court, several are serving prison terms in the UK and US fro just this type of action. On top of this the opprobrium heaped on our forces and US forces whenever anything like this happens both at home and internationally makes your suggestion of there being no ethical problem look a bit thin.
Is the difference not intent ? If a state of war exists then non combatants have to accept an elevated risk from collateral damage ?
Indeed, it is the people giving orders who are cushioned most from the ethical dilemma. It's a lot different ordering the torture of an individual to the ordering of the execution or assassination of a military target. There's the difference between collateral damage which arguably could be said to be inevitable vs torturing an individual, which is obviously somewhat more than than a putative inevitability - it's a certainty. Plausible deniability (sometimes barely so) - to oneself as much as to an overseeing authority. The grey area attendant to collateral damage is both the legal and the ethical "loophole" that protects those ordering the action. And of course, the individuals carrying out the order were "only following orders". In the former, it's harder to justify innocence - with the latter, "We were following orders, who knew there would be civilian casualties?" may be the justification. As far as the rest of us, watching it all from the peanut gallery, the question uppermost in your mind should be, "How far am I prepared to tolerate unethical behaviour carried out to preserve my way of life?". Ethics isn't, nor shouldn't, be the final arbiter where the survival of the race is concerned. That's why warfare, the defence of oneself against an aggressor, exists.
Also, where would you draw a line regarding torture? What would be a legitimate reason for torture? To find out where the enemy commanders are (as in Bin Laden)? To find out information regarding strategy? To find 'evidence' to justify your own actions? (as in the search for WMDs) To entrap or incriminate someone? And before you know it, it's being used by the local bobby to catch the local perp's. Once you make it acceptable, then it's alright for anyone and everyone to do it.
Torture is outlawed because basically it's pointless, e.g. if I hold. Pair of bolt croppers to your fingers you'll be me what you think I want to hear. OK you may put up a bit of resistance but believe me you wouldn't last long and the info you give out will be unreliable. I could tell you some very interesting things about collateral damage but a public forum is not the place.
So where do you draw the line regarding killing people, then? In the course of a war, it is acceptable to bomb and shoot the enemy - so does that mean the Metropolitan Police therefore bomb and shoot their local perps? Does anyone and everyone do it? Why do you find it easy to draw the line for killing, but impossibly difficult to draw it for torturing?
No, torture is not outlawed because it's pointless. It's outlawed because it's horrifying, it's repugnant, and no-one wants it happening to them or anyone they know or like. No-one even wants to think about it happening at all. But being shot dead or blown up is even worse, yet we do not seem to feel the same repugnance.
The repugnance issue - is there still a feeling that there is a romance in dying, even for the "wrong cause"? The idea of suffering is certainly repugnant to all sane individuals - and the deliberate infliction of suffering, torture, doubly so. The infliction of accidental suffering, which you may describe as "fortunes of war", are a different kettle of fish, at least in our perceptions.
Was Wilfred Owen right? "The old lie ; Dulce et Decorum est , pro Patria mori" On the subject of the thread, re : collateral damage : I think that we have moved forward considerably from the wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter of the past to a genuine attempt to minimise the death of civilians in a conflict situation. Re torture : a difficult one. If your daughter was kidnapped under threat of death, and one of the kidnappers had been apprehended, where would you draw the line in finding out her location? In any case, are the ethics of war and conduct in war overseen by the United Nations and the Geneva Convention? What do they say on the subject?
I agree, death is far worse than torture. But I didn't say I'm for or against either. If somebody had taken one of my children, the line I draw would include anything and everything to get them back safely. My point was, it's very hard to draw a line that can be defined and then legalised in terms of torture. As others have said, the death of innocents is always put down to unplanned, unavoidable, unfortunate. But torture for whatever reason is always deliberate.
I forgot to mention, it's outlawed by nations that accept the Genieva convention, other countries/organisations/terrorists don't adhere to such niceties. I suggest you don't join any of the armed forces if the idea or sight of blood makes you squeamish.
Well, it's all ends and means, isn't it? And thus, not at all simple. War is ritualised murder but there are supposed to be some rules in place that define how you can do it. Sadly, many of those rules seem very arbitrary. Don't use chemical weapons, but it's OK to drop napalm on civilians and burn them to death. It is also OK to mine large areas to maim and cripple people who may include soldiers. In my view, neither of those things are preferable to torture, really. Why is nerve gas so frowned upon (assuming the wind doesn't change) to bump people off, but it's fine to burn and blast them to death? Doesn't make much sense. Torture is repugnant for all the reasons stated, because inflicting misery on someone who is in your power is subhuman conduct. But then you think that something like waterboarding, in which the victim is in no real danger but can't avoid thinking he is, might be justified in some circs. It's clearly not the same as wrenching out people's fingernails, or electrocuting them, of maiming them a bit at a time. As for collateral damage, depends. It might be acceptable to kill 10 innocents in a war to get one major threat eliminated, if you suspect that his continued existence might threaten more than 10 people. But 100? 1'000? And as regards "collateral damage" for unspecified targets in countries you are not even at war with (Pakistan, Yemen) because you suspect someone might want to do you harm, it's clearly totally unacceptable (and counter-productive, it might be said, but the US never learns that lesson).
Actually, it's not. We are signatories to the Ottawa Treaty which bans the use of landmines, we also don't use napalm. Within the perverse logic of warfare it's alright to shoot people and blow them up because that is a targeted weapon the main purpose of which s to kill or injure combatant troops, nerve, chemical and radiological weapons are untargeted and are generally lumped together as "weapons of mass destruction".
