Morning Thoughts

Blogs are places for thinking through things. 

The advocates of torture always seem to have in their minds movie and TV scenarios where the hero has captured a wrongdoer with limited time to go before some disaster befalls the innocent, the key to avoiding which the wrongdoer knows. But, quite apart from the question of whether these imagined events are ever realistic, they take place within a context of crime, gang violence and the like, in which the hero is always implicated and ambiguous. They are episodes of passion and moral conflict, in which the hero might or might not take the decision he (it’s always he) does. This is what makes them dramatic. The fictional scenarios never show what really happens in torture: the calculated and deliberate infliction of pain by officials of the State, in accordance with a predetermined policy. In those, more real, circumstances, when states and their agents use torture they take a step of degradation. The State should by rights act to restrain violence and promote law and negotiation: by using violence to extract information (setting aside the question of the reliability of the information so extracted), states instead normalise such acts, and lower the resistance of others to doing the same as them. Greater violence, if you like, circulates in the system. Whereas the fictional act of torture takes place in a context which is already lawless and violent, the real one injects more violence into a context in which the State’s role should be to reduce it and to bring about adherence to law. This is why the use of torture by states degrades those involved in it, the states themselves, and the world community, and why, in that fictional scenario, it might actually be – chillingly – better for innocents to suffer to avoid worse events in the future.