Torture is never justified...

Eliza Manningham-Buller, formerly head of Britain's MI5

Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of Britain's MI5, said recently in her Reith Lectures that the use of torture is 'wrong and never justified'. Here is how the BBC reported her statements on their website: Eliza Manningham-Buller said it should be "utterly rejected even when it may offer the prospect of saving lives".


Giving the second of her BBC Radio Reith lectures, she acknowledged recent disclosures about alleged British intelligence operations in Libya would "raise widespread concerns". "No-one could justify what went on under Qaddafi's regime," she added.

Baroness Manningham-Buller's lectures examine the issues of terrorism and security on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

She said that the use of torture had not made the world a safer place, adding that the use of water-boarding by the United States was a "profound mistake" and as a result America lost its "moral authority".

Allegations have recently emerged that the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was involved in the rendition of Libyan terror suspects, following the discovery of papers suggesting close ties between MI6, the CIA and the Gaddafi regime. (BBC Website)

Eliza Manningham-Buller clearly believes that torture is never justified. Her belief rests in part on the fact that it is against British and international law and partly on what is a clear aversion to doing anything of that kind, but what other grounds might she have for this assertion? If she were confronted with the terrorist's son situation would she be able to accept the prospective death of 200,000 people rather than authorizing the torture of the terrorist's four-year old son? The horror of torturing a child seems outmatched by the even greater horror of the terrible deaths of so many people as a result of the terrorist's dirty nuclear bomb. Or does it? It is hard - much more than hard - to give one's assent to either course of action, but the world might sometimes demand that you do unacceptable things, things that will undermine your sense of yourself as a civilised person. 

Manningham-Buller's position seems to fit into the deontological pattern of moral beliefs. It is simply wrong to torture or allow someone to be tortured. It is an absolute rule that should never be broken, like not killing or murdering people or breaking promises or dishonouring one's mother or father. But surely she is being a little disingenuous here. Doesn't being a civil servant in charge of Britain's internal security involve people in lies and deception in order to protect the greater community? Don't we have people - spies and double agents embedded in all kinds of organisations and don't some of these sometimes engage in activities and violence? We certainly allow killing in times of war or as say when the SAS gunned down three IRA members in Gibralter. We do not hear moral objections expressed so strongly when it comes to Afghanistan or Libya. What is it that makes torture so special, the thing that can never be allowed? It almost seems as though it has been picked out as being a moral prohibition stronger than other moral prohibitions. Could such a view ever be justified?


Torture does seem a particularly abhorrent activity, perhaps because it seems to be such a personal infliction of pain and suffering by one person on another. Killing four men in a tank with a precision bomb from the air somehow doesn't seem as bad as torturing that hapless person in front of you and who is utterly in your power. It is, I think, this image of one person having total power over another and using it in ways that so directly deny his common humanity that disturbs us most. Doing this to a child makes this even worse as the child must look to its elders for protection, not torture and suffering. If torture seems worse to us than killing, then, this may be because it presents us with an image of ourselves that shows the ugliness of what we might become. It is everything that we want to think that we are not and ever would be. More than anything else torturing another person goes against that sense of human sympathy and solidarity that we mentioned earlier in another post (Friends, Enemies and Morality). The activities of warfare seem quite rational and utilitarian in comparison. It is much easier to believe that the end justifies the means. It is much more difficult to believe i the rightness of torturing people. You can't really be under any illusion about what you doing. Nor can you be under any illusion about the sort of person you have become.


One last comment might be made here. Manningham-Buller does reckon things in consequences at least to the extent of placing value on the preservation of a country's 'moral capital'. The country's good reputation in the world as a civilising influence is something that - it might be argued - has intrinsic value and is also useful for good purposes in the longer run. Perhaps this is important enough to justify not torturing people. We should accept the consequences of not torturing terrorists (or anyone else) as this will in the long run help us to further the aims of a civilised world community.


You might like to hear Eliza Manningham-Buller talking about torture in her recent Reith Lectures: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14750998



Just two more problems - five more posts - to go. Remember, it's your ability to talk clearly and sensibly about these sorts of problems that is important and not the actual points or arguments presented here. 

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