How and When to Shoot Your Dog

The most heated shrieking in political contests is invariably devoid of factual content or, more importantly, useful policy implications. In several earlier posts the shrill accusations against the current US administration that they have politicized science, as if it was a special perfidy recently introduced, were debunked. The facts are that this is a long standing practice enthusiastically endorsed by current critics when their political teams were in charge. The useful policy issues apply to all administrations past, present and future and are devoid of political content. They revolve around mechanisms to achieve high levels of scientific output, chiefly funding methods, and mechanisms for integrating that data with policy inputs from other disciplines such as economics and ethics to formulate policies that reflect the will of society in all its subtle and conflicting expressions. Useful policy isn't merely crude, majoritarian or authoritarian imposition of policy on dissident minorities. Benign despots are not just impossible to identify, they don't exist.

Another such issue has bobbed to the surface of the polluted stream of political activism and conflict like a turd in a sewer outflow: Extraordinary Rendition, a policy of employing other nations that have uninhibited interrogation procedures to interrogate suspects of crimes. In plain words, subcontracting interrogation to nations that still use torture to loosen tongues. It's a hot subject in dingy corners of the blogosphere since a bill has been introduced in congress to allow the practice.

In an attempt to part the verbal thickets concealing the issue, an often fruitless activity, I found what appears to be that rarest of treasures - a thoughtful and insightful report.

Bill Clinton is not President anymore, and I wasn't a huge fan of his when he was. I already knew that part of the groundwork for the "extraordinary rendition" policy was laid during his presidency. I've said a hundred times that this is not and should not be a partisan issue. But apparently I am more naive and more partisan than I'd like to think, because when I read this article I was shocked that this could happen under a Democratic president. I promptly set to work on an internal list of the differences between this case, and Abu Ghraib and Maher Arar's deportation...

Really, though, what's the use? I prefer torturing the guilty to torturing the innocent, but torture is torture. It was still illegal. It was still wrong. It was still unnecessary.

Illegal? That's debatable. Wrong? This is obviously a moral judgement, one I agree with. Unnecessary? Ah, this is where the subject gets interesting and where there exists an intellectual history worth recounting. I find Michael Walzer's views, as expressed in this interview in Imprints, illuminating.

A number of US intellectuals have been reassessing their commitment to civil liberties which they now see as a liability to security, post September 11. This reassessment has led to torture being placed on the political agenda, as in the case of Alan Dershowitz. What are your views and feelings with respect to this new climate of debate?

I don't think that I have changed my position – except perhaps in the way I distribute the burden of argument. After 9/11, those of us who want to defend civil liberties have to accept a greater burden than before. It isn't enough to point to The Patriot Act and scream 'Fascism!' We have to make the case to our fellow citizens that the government can defend them against terrorism within the constitutional constraints, whatever they are, that we believe necessary to personal freedom and democratic politics. Only if we can't make that case would we have to consider modifying the constitutional regime. Right now, I think that we can make the case; I only regret that so many people on the left don't believe that they have to make it. They talk about this question as if the last thing they want to worry about is the safety of their fellow citizens.

Back in the early 1970s, I published an article called 'Dirty Hands' that dealt with the responsibility of political leaders in extreme situations, where the safety of their people seemed to require immoral acts. One of my examples was the 'ticking bomb' case, where a captured terrorist knows, but refuses to reveal, the location of a bomb that is timed to go off soon in a school building. I argued that a political leader in such a case might be bound to order the torture of the prisoner, but that we should regard this as a moral paradox, where the right thing to do was also wrong. The leader would have to bear the guilt and opprobrium of the wrongful act he had ordered, and we should want leaders who were prepared both to give the order and to bear the guilt. This was widely criticised at the time as an incoherent position, and the article has been frequently reprinted, most often, I think, as an example of philosophical incoherence. But I am inclined to think that the moral world is much less tidy than most moral philosophers are prepared to admit. Now Dershowitz has cited my argument in his defence of torture in extreme cases (though he insists on a judicial warrant before anything at all can be done to the prisoner).

But extreme cases make bad law. Yes, I would do whatever was necessary to extract information in the ticking bomb case – that is, I would make the same argument after 9/11 that I made 30 years before. But I don't want to generalise from cases like that; I don't want to rewrite the rule against torture to incorporate this exception. Rules are rules, and exceptions are exceptions. I want political leaders to accept the rule, to understand its reasons, even to internalise it. I also want them to be smart enough to know when to break it. And finally, because they believe in the rule, I want them to feel guilty about breaking it – which is the only guarantee they can offer us that they won't break it too often.

I find this to be a compelling argument. Torture is a moral paradox since there are cases when seeming moral absolutes conflict. The relevant points for the current debate are:

• torture must be against the rules
• we must always elect leaders capable of breaking the rules when necessary
• we must always elect leaders who will suffer guilt when breaking rules

Which situations require rule breaking? How much suffering is required and how is it expressed? How often is too often? These are the questions that distinguish mindless partisan bickering from useful moral policy deliberation; having the intellectual maturity to recognize that moral paradox exists, that leaders face paradox, and that the measure of their character and worth to society is the way that they handle paradox.

How does subcontracting torture to those who suffer no moral qualms about it change things? In my rustic world we have a saying: You are obligated to shoot your own dog, or horse, when it is best for the animal to go quickly. It's not nicer to hire someone else to do it. Actually, the saying as commonly used is a bit more pungent but this is the meaning. When you have to look them in the eye and do the deed you are forced to think deeply about the correctness of the act, and will carry the memory with you in future to inform decisions that may lead to a repeat occurrence. This helps you avoid convenience killing and getting into scrapes where killing becomes an option.

Subcontracting your torture work is like hiring the vet to kill your suffering dog. It's not nicer. It's too easy. Though it can be argued that the moral paradox is unchanged, and that there is still guilt, it seems wrong to me and more likely to be done too often. I want to hire executives with the stones to do the right thing, the brains to know what's right, and the moral development to suffer. The safety of fellow citizens is not the last thing I worry about, but I would prefer an executive too timid to torture to one too indifferent to suffer or too eager to torture. But a too eager executive isn't the worst possibility. That's no where near as grave a failing as one that doesn't even see that there is a paradox.