Given this situation, we can see that one could desire to become more loving and compassionate for purely selfish reasons. This is a paradox, of sorts, because these attitudes undermine selfishness, by definition. They also inspire behavior that tends to contribute to the happiness of other human beings. These states of mind not only feel good; they ramify social relationships that lead one to feel good with others, leading others to feel good with oneself. Hate, envy, spite, disgust, shame-these are not sources of happiness, personally or socially. Love and compassion are. Like so much that we know about ourselves, claims of this sort need not be validated by a controlled study. We can easily imagine evolutionary reasons for why positive social emotions make us feel good, while negative ones do not, but they would be beside the point. The point is that the disposition to take the happiness of others into account-to be ethical -seems to be a rational way to augment one's own happiness. As we will see in the next chapter, the linkage here becomes increasingly relevant the more rarefied one's happiness becomes. The connection between spirituality-the cultivation of happiness directly, through precise refinements of attention-and ethics is well attested. Certain attitudes and behaviors seem to be conducive to contemplative insight, while others are not. This is not a proposition to be merely believed. It is, rather, a hypothesis to be tested in the laboratory of one's life.31
A Loophole for Torquemada?
Casting questions about ethics in terms of happiness and suffering can quickly lead us into unfamiliar territory. Consider the case of judicial torture. It would seem, at first glance, to be unambiguously evil. And yet, for the first time in living memory, reasonable men and women in our country have begun to reconsider it publicly. Interest in the subject appears to have been provoked by an interview given by Alan Dershowitz, an erstwhile champion of the rights of the innocent-until-proven-guilty, on CBS's 60 Minutes.32 There, before millions who would have thought the concept of torture impossible to rehabilitate, Dershowitz laid out the paradigmatic ticking-bomb case.
Imagine that a known terrorist has planted a large bomb in the heart of a nearby city. This man now sits in your custody. As to the bomb's location, he will say nothing except that the site was chosen to produce the maximum loss of life. Given this state of affairs-in particular, given that there is still time to prevent an imminent atrocity-it seems there would be no harm in dusting off the strappado and exposing this unpleasant fellow to a suasion of bygone times.
Dershowitz has argued that this situation can be cast in terms that will awaken the Grand Inquisitor in all of us. If a ticking bomb doesn't move you, picture your seven-year-old daughter being slowly asphyxiated in a warehouse just five minutes away, while the man in your custody holds the keys to her release. If your daughter won't tip the scales, then add the daughters of every couple for a thousand miles-millions of little girls have, by some perverse negligence on the part of our government, come under the control of an evil genius who now sits before you in shackles. Clearly, the consequences of one man's uncooperativeness can be made so grave, and his malevolence and culpability so transparent, as to stir even the most self-hating moral relativist from his dogmatic slumbers.
It is generally thought that the gravest ethical problem we face in resorting to torture is that we would be bound to torture some number of innocent men and women. Most of us who were eager to don the Inquisitor's cap in the case above begin to falter in more realistic scenarios, as a person's guilt becomes a matter of some uncertainty. And this is long before other concerns even attract our notice. What, for instance, is the reliability of testimony elicited under torture? We need not even pose questions of this sort yet, since we have already balked at the knowledge that, in the real world, we will not be able to tell the guilty from the innocent just by looking.
So it seems that we have two situations that will strike most sane and decent people as ethically distinct: in the first case, as envisioned by Dershowitz, it seems perverse to worry about the rights of an admitted terrorist when so many innocent lives are at stake; while under more realistic conditions, uncertainty about a person's guilt will generally preclude the use of torture. Is this how the matter really sits with us ? Probably not.
It appears that such restraint in the use of torture cannot be reconciled with our willingness to wage war in the first place. What, after all, is "collateral damage" but the inadvertent torture of innocent men, women, and children? Whenever we consent to drop bombs, we do so with the knowledge that some number of children will be blinded, disemboweled, paralyzed, orphaned, and killed by them. It is curious that while the torture of Osama bin Laden himself could be expected to provoke convulsions of conscience among our leaders, the unintended (though perfectly foreseeable, and therefore accepted) slaughter of children does not.
So we can now ask, if we are willing to act in a way that guarantees the misery and death of some considerable number of innocent children, why spare the rod with suspected terrorists? What is the difference between pursuing a course of action where we run the risk of inadvertently subjecting some innocent men to torture, and pursuing one in which we will inadvertently kill far greater numbers of innocent men, women, and children? Rather, it seems obvious that the misapplication of torture should be far less troubling to us than collateral damage: there are, after all, no infants interned at Guantanamo Bay, just rather scrofulous young men, many of whom were caught in the very act of trying to kill our soldiers.33 Torture need not even impose a significant risk of death or permanent injury on its victims; while the collaterally damaged are, almost by definition, crippled or killed. The ethical divide that seems to be opening up here suggests that those who are willing to drop bombs might want to abduct the nearest and dearest of suspected terrorists-their wives, mothers, and daughters-and torture them as well, assuming anything profitable to our side might come of it. Admittedly, this would be a ghastly result to have reached by logical argument, and we will want to find some way of escaping it.34
In this context, we should note that many variables influence our feelings about an act of physical violence, as well as our intuitions about its ethical status. As Glover points out, "in modern war, what is most shocking is a poor guide to what is most harmful." To learn that one's grandfather flew a bombing mission over Dresden in the Second World War is one thing; to hear that he killed five little girls and their mother with a shovel is another. We can be sure that he would have killed more women and girls by dropping bombs from pristine heights, and they are likely to have died equally horrible deaths, but his culpability would not appear the same. Indeed, we seem to know, intuitively, that it would take a different kind of person to perpetrate violence of the latter sort. And, as we might expect, the psychological effects of participating in these types of violence are generally distinct. Consider the following account of a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan: "It's frightening and unpleasant to have to kill, you think, but you soon realize that what you really find objectionable is shooting someone point-blank. Killing en masse, in a group, is exciting, even-and I've seen this myself-fun."35 This is not to say that no one has ever enjoyed killing people up close; it is just that we all recognize that such enjoyment requires an unusual degree of callousness to the suffering of others.
It is possible that we are simply unequipped to rectify this disparity-to be, in Glover's terms, most shocked by what is most harmful. A biological rationale is not hard to find, as millions of years on the African veldt could not possibly have selected for an ability to make emotional sense of twenty-first-century horror. That our Paleolithic genes now have chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons at their disposal is, from the point of view of our evolution, little different from our having delivered this technology into the hands of chimps. The difference between killing one man and killing a thousand just doesn't seem as salient to us as it should. And, as Glover observes, in many cases we will find the former far more disturbing. Three million souls can be starved and murdered in the Congo, and our Argus-eyed media scarc
ely blink. When a princess dies in a car accident, however, a quarter of the earth's population falls prostrate with grief. Perhaps we are unable to feel what we must feel in order to change our world.
What does it feel like to see three thousand men, women, and children incinerated and crushed to ash in the span of a few seconds ? Anyone who owned a television on September 11, 2001, now knows. But most of us know nothing of the sort. To have watched the World Trade Center absorbing two jet planes, along with the lives of thousands, and to have felt, above all things, disbelief, suggests some form of neurological impairment. Clearly, there are limits to what the human mind can make of the deliverances of its senses-of the mere sight of an office building, known to be full of people, dissolving into rubble. Perhaps this will change.
In any case, if you think the equivalence between torture and collateral damage does not hold, because torture is up close and personal while stray bombs aren't, you stand convicted of a failure of imagination on at least two counts: first, a moment's reflection on the horrors that must have been visited upon innocent Afghanis and Iraqis by our bombs will reveal that they are on par with those of any dungeon. That such an exercise of the imagination is required to bring torture and collateral damage to parity accounts for the dissociation between what is most shocking and what is most harmful that Glover notes. It also demonstrates the degree to which we have been bewitched by our own euphemisms. Killing people at a distance is easier, but perhaps it should not be that much easier.
Second, if our intuition about the wrongness of torture is born of an aversion to how people generally behave while being tortured, we should note that this particular infelicity could be circumvented pharmacologically, because paralytic drugs make it unnecessary for screaming ever to be heard or writhing seen. We could easily devise methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the plight of his victims as a bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet. Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights and sounds of the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against the use of torture. To demonstrate just how abstract the torments of the tortured can be made to seem, we need only imagine an ideal "torture pill"-a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to be an hour's nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a "truth pill" in the end?
No, there is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffering of the tortured or the collaterally damaged appears.
Which way should the balance swing? Assuming that we want to maintain a coherent ethical position on these matters, this appears to be a circumstance of forced choice: if we are willing to drop bombs, or even risk that pistol rounds might go astray, we should be willing to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners; if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern war.
Opponents of torture will be quick to argue that confessions elicited by torture are notoriously unreliable. Given the foregoing, however, this objection seems to lack its usual force. Make these confessions as unreliable as you like-the chance that our interests will be advanced in any instance of torture need only equal the chance of such occasioned by the dropping of a single bomb. What was the chance that the dropping of bomb number 117 on Kandahar would effect the demise of Al Qaeda? It had to be pretty slim. Enter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: our most valuable capture in our war on terror. Here is a character who actually seems cut from Dershowitzian cloth. U.S. officials now believe that his was the hand that decapitated the Wall Street journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Whether or not this is true, his membership in Al Qaeda more or less rules out his
"innocence" in any important sense, and his rank in the organization suggests that his knowledge of planned atrocities must be extensive. The bomb is ticking. Given the damage we were willing to cause to the bodies and minds of innocent children in Afghanistan and Iraq, our disavowal of torture in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed seems perverse. If there is even one chance in a million that he will tell us something under torture that will lead to the further dismantling of Al Qaeda, it seems that we should use every means at our disposal to get him talking.
In all likelihood you began reading this chapter, much as I began writing it, convinced that torture is a very bad thing and that we are wise not to practice it-indeed that we are civilized, in large measure, because we do not practice it. Most of us feel, intuitively at least, that if we can't quite muster a retort to Dershowitz and his ticking bomb, we can take refuge in the fact that the paradigmatic case will almost never arise. From this perspective, adorning the machinery of our justice system with a torture provision seems both unnecessary and dangerous, as the law of unintended consequences may one day find it throwing the whole works into disarray. Because I believe the account offered above is basically sound, I believe that I have successfully argued for the use of torture in any circumstance in which we would be willing to cause collateral damage.36 Paradoxically, this equivalence has not made the practice of torture seem any more acceptable to me; nor has it, I trust, for most readers. I believe that here we come upon an ethical illusion of sorts-analogous to the perceptual illusions that are of such abiding interest to scientists who study the visual pathways in the brain. The full moon appearing on the horizon is no bigger than the full moon when it appears overhead, but it looks bigger, for reasons that are still obscure to neuroscientists. A ruler held up to the sky reveals something that we are otherwise incapable of seeing, even when we understand that our eyes are deceiving us. Given a choice between acting on the basis of the way things seem in this instance, or on the deliverances of our ruler, most of us will be willing to dispense with appearances-particularly if our lives or the lives of others depended on it. I believe that most readers who have followed me this far will find themselves in substantially the same position with respect to the ethics of torture. Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only permissible but necessary. Still, it does not seem any more acceptable, in ethical terms, than it did before. The reasons for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion. In fact, there is already some scientific evidence that our ethical intuitions are driven by considerations of proximity and emotional salience of the sort I addressed above.37 Clearly, these intuitions are fallible. In the present case, many innocent lives could well be lost as a result of our inability to feel a moral equivalence where a moral equivalence seems to exist. It may be time to take out our rulers and hold them up to the sky.38
The False Choice of Pacifism
Pacifism39 is generally considered to be a morally unassailable position to take with respect to human violence. The worst that is said of it, generally, is that it is a difficult position to maintain in practice. It is almost never branded as flagrantly immoral, which I believe it is. While it can seem noble enough when the stakes are low, pacifism is ultimately nothing more than a willingness to die, and to let others die, at the pleasure of the world's thugs. It should be enough to note that a single sociopath, armed with nothing more than a knife, could exterminate a city full of pacifists. There is no doubt that such sociopaths exist, and they are generally better armed. Fearing that the above reflections on torture may offer a potent argument for pacifism, I would like to briefly state why I believe we must accept the fact that violence (or its threat) is often an ethical necessity.
I was once walking the streets of Prague late at night and came upon a man and a young woman in the midst of a struggle. As I drew nearer, it became obvious that the man, who appeared to be both drunk and enraged, wa
s attempting to pull the woman into a car against her will. She was making a forceful show of resistance, but he had seized her arm with one hand and was threatening to strike her in the face with the other-which he had done at least once, it seemed, before I arrived on the scene. The rear door of the car was open, and an accomplice had taken a seat behind the wheel. Several other men were milling about, and from the looks of them, they appeared to approve of the abduction in progress.
Without knowing how I would proceed, I at once found myself interceding on the woman's behalf. As my adrenaline rose, and her assailant's attention turned my way, it occurred to me that his English might be terrible or nonexistent. The mere effort to understand me could be made so costly that it might prove a near-total diversion. The inability to make my intentions clear would also serve to forestall actual conflict. Had we shared a common language our encounter would have almost certainly come to blows within moments, as I would have thought of nothing more clever than to demand that he let the woman go, and he, to save face, would have demanded that I make him. Since he had at least two friends that I could see (and several fans), my evening would probably have ended very badly. Thus, my goal, as I saw it, was to remain unintelligible, without antagonizing any of the assembled hooligans, long enough for the young woman to get away.
"Excuse me," I said. "I seem to have lost my hotel, my lodging, my place of residence, where I lie supine, not prone. Can you help me? Where is it? Where is it?"
"Sex?" The man asked with obvious outrage, as though I had declared myself a rival for his prisoner's affections. It now occurred to me that the woman might be a prostitute, and he an unruly customer.
"No! Not sex. I am looking for a specific building. It has no aluminum siding or stained glass. It could be filled with marzipan. Do you know where it is? This is an emergency."