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Many people argue that because they can create a hypothetical case like this there should be no rules against torture, and I think that is a grave moral error. The problem is we never know if that information can be elicited by other means. There’s no way to verify that, indeed, torture is the only option in those cases. So what happens if you torture that person and you turn out to be wrong, the information proves not to be true? But what do you say then to the person who’s tortured at your hands? ...My good friend, Shaun Casey, professor of religion at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, participated in a conversation on PBS earlier this week. The lively conversation can be found here.We need a thorough moral accounting of what’s gone on. We’ve had an air of moral permissiveness in the last administration under which tens of thousands of innocent people have been tortured — not simply the special Al Qaeda cases. We need to find out why that happened. We need to find out who was accountable in order to build a very tall wall against this kind of behavior. We need to empower the folks who do the interrogating with very bright lines about what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable.
Published May 3, 2009 by Larry James |
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| Tags:
Ethics
Evangelical
Hate
Human Rights
Morality
Public Policy
Religion
Torture
Violence
War
Comments (1)
I agree with Shaun Casey. We are never really in the ticking-bomb situation, which is so misleadingly ubiquitous in the show, 24. We rarely, if ever, really know whether people we have in custody have useful information or whether torture will get it out of them. What we do know is that people being tortured say whatever they think we want to hear -- wouldn't you?! At least as often as not, what they think we want to hear has nothing to do with the truth.
Posted by Peter Tramel
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May 3, 2009 6:25 AM
Posted on May 3, 2009 06:25