A Response to The Catholic Blogs Magisterum On Torture (updated)

Over at What’s Wrong with the World a contributor gives a response to the holier than though people that are condemning people left and right that are struggling with this issue. See “It’s just so obvious!”: The case of torture
I have to admit this is not the Catholic blogs best moments. It very much reminds me of just a few months ago when so many Catholics were calling Israel's response to terrorism and rocket barrages unjust. That all that had a different view were somehow "uncatholic"

There is a good debate in the comment section and Mark Shea comes in. I really like Shea. However he has a disappointing habit of being very unchristian on his blog to people that have opposing viewpoints on his blog while later in more mainstream pieces he takes a more balanced tone. As Francis Beckwith noted ,who is a good Christian apologist , said in the comments:

. The main reason for my own self-imposed detachment from this conversation--found on this entry and elsewhere--is Shea's apparent inability to entertain two possibilities: (1) that one can honestly disagree with him while attempting to be true to Church doctrine, and (2) that queries about definitions and distinctions are not Jesuitical inventions of the inauthentic sadist employed to excuse evil, but rather, serious attempts to advance the common good.

Amen to that. I am so tired of people questining good Catholics motives as they struggle with this issue. Again what is torture. For the record I do not think a hand slap or sleep deprivation is torture(maybe for ten days but not five because I have gone without sleep for five days) or other things in that memo.

A good post.

Also see these Getting bashed by Mark Shea and On the Subject of CIA Interrogation of Terrorist Suspects In Light of Recent Events:

I have little patience with Catholics on the right that call their progressive brothers in the left some how un Catholic because they agree with supposed socialist policies. Likewise I have little patience with the left that are so willing to condemn Capitalists or Supply side folks as UN Catholic. THERE IS ROOM FOR PRUDENTIAL JUDGEMENT ON THESE ISSUES.

Update-
I actually like how this dicussion is going in the comment section. It seems we are getting to the heart of the issue. THis question raised in the comments is one that to me is the core.


whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit

Can we go back to this passage in VS? I think that JPII was giving us a hint, in the very last phrase, of what it is about "mutilation, physical and mental torture" that is objectionable in an intrinsic way. In some cases where torture is used, the explicit intent is the "break" the prisoner. By "break" I don't mean something like "get him to stop resisting and tell us what he knows." I mean something more radical than this, I mean break him so that he ceases to resist the torturer in ALL respects - he is willing to do whatever the torturer says, including anything itself immoral.

It is clear why this is appropriately called "coerce the spirit" in a special sense - if the prisoner cedes up his right and duty to consider whether a command to act is moral, he is becoming amoral himself, he ceases to act as a rational, responsible being, and is then being handled as an irrational animal, an instrument.

I agree with the anti-torture crowd that this use of torture is intrinsically immoral, and it is so precisely in that a person is being objectified.

However, I don't think that the semi-break that breaks down the prisoner's refusal to give information is automatically and necessarily in the same category, that it holds the exact same meaning as "coerce the spirit" univocally. First of all, in practice it is possible to do achieve a semi-break without reducing the prisoner to that ultimate jello of doing whatever the torturer demands. The wall that is broken down is on one plane only, not the entire realm of choice. So there is a difference in facts.

Secondly, the pressure (i.e. coercion) imposed on the prisoner is pressure to comply with the state in something that the prisoner has an objective obligation to comply with. The prisoner never has an objective obligation to "do whatever I tell you".

This difference may be noticeable in that the guards themselves are (rightly) convinced that what they are attempting to get the prisoner to do is essentially a moral obligation, and is a duty that morally binds the prisoner to comply with the state's demand for information for the common good. So what the guards are about is visibly different even in the eyes of the prisoner. I.E. there is a subjective difference as well.

I would at this point like to mention that one of the reasons we moderns have higher sensitivity to the notion of torture is also the basis for the Geneva Convention requirements for treatment of POW. A POW does not cease to be a subject of the state he was fighting for. Therefore he retains a moral obligation to that state (so far as he knows, if he understands his country's fight to be just) to withhold information from the enemy that holds him.

Therefore an attempt by the enemy state to get him to divulge information through pain is explicitly an attempt to get him to violate his own conscience.

This does not hold in the case of a criminal. The criminal does not generally believe that he is morally obligated to withhold information about his co-conspirators. So the moral basis for the POW hands-off treatment does not begin to apply here. Convincing him to talk does not constitute getting him to violate his conscience.

There might be (and indeed, there ARE) additional reasons why various uses of pain are wrong in certain circumstances, without amounting to reasons applying to ALL uses of pain, nor amounting a claim that ALL cases where the use is wrong is by being intrinsically evil.
Therefore, there is a reasonable interpretation of the VS passage that BOTH makes sense of why JPII wanted to list torture as intrinsically evil, AND provides perspective on that passage's limitations that allows the older teachings and practice of the Church on torture (that it is permitted) to not be in direct conflict.

In charity, then I would submit that this understanding is to be preferred over one that takes JPIIs passage as more forceful than he himself really intended it, and makes it virtually impossible to reconcile with the ancient Church without a tortured :-) rendition of that teaching.
Thus I agree that there are plenty of instances of the use of pain that are intrinsically evil. I just don't that the teaching requires as a logical conclusion that all use of pain on a prisoner is intrinsically evil.

There is of course another issue here. What effect the enhanced interrogation has on the person doing it. I am somewhat surprised that in this discussion has not raised what happens in American jails and prisons.

As I mentioned in the comments I found what happened to the Iraq prisioners in Abu Ghraib much more an assault on human dignity than many of the practices in Gitmo. However I was not shocked by it. It is amazing to what sane good people will do when they have" guard "over a person. I have seen this at our local prision. The problem is worse in many ways beause these are not exactly high paying jobs and thus we are not exactly getting the best people.

So that is one reason why I am concerned about specific practices here.

Also in the comments:

By the way, just what does "coerce the spirit" mean in this context anyway? I know what coerce means generally, and I know that punishments in general are intended to modify the behavior of the criminal - does a punishment that scares the bejabbers out of the criminal and helps him go straight fall under the description of "coerce the spirit" and if not why not? Does it mean the kind of coercion that results in a broken spirit, so that the recipient can be induced to do essentially anything the authorities demand? If that is what is meant, then that is consistent with "torture" as it is normally used. If you think it means any kind of action that is intended to make the prisoner change his mind, well what about the rehabilitative end of punishment?

In the Dr No example that is being used:

Sgt. Joe may not use water torture to elicit some 6 letter code (which, hey, might be the six letter code to disable six letter codes, that tricksy Dr. No) in this fantasy; he may not use water torture as we did in reality when we manifestly actually unequivocally immorally illegally committed war crimes by using torture in the GWOT.

Hold on just a second here. Let's not beg the question. The fundamental issue is whether Agent 44 may apply some degree of pain to get Dr. No to fork over the code. Before we get to the issue of how much pain (e.g., the issue of "severe" pain and the more particular issue of waterboarding) we have to know whether it is intrinsically evil to apply any pain at all for that purpose. This, again, is what such thought experiments are meant to clarify. So, is it obviously mistaken, is it obviously crazy, is it obviously irrational to say that Agent 44 acts justly if he applies some pain to extract the information from Dr. No?
Maybe it is, but it isn't obviously so.

I think that is a good point.

Returning to the Dr No example in the comments

Back to Dr. No.

Version 1. He has not yet pressed the button. Sgt. Joe can licitly shoot him to prevent the destruction.

Version 2. He has pressed the button, but has rigged it so that the attack continues in operation only so long as he keeps on pressing it. Sgt. Joe can still shoot him to stop the attack.

Version 3. He has pressed the button, but has rigged another button that will cancel the attack. If nothing further is done, the attack will be consummated. Sgt. Joe can shoot to remove him from guarding the "stop" button, and press the stop button to bring the attack to a halt.

Version 4. He has pressed the button, but has rigged number pad that will accept a 6 letter code that will stop the attack. Sgt. Joe may kill him to remove him from guarding the keypad. (And then spend the next 90 seconds entering in 100,00 different combinations...) Or, better yet, Sgt. Joe may seize Dr. No and put him in a painful arm-lock to immobilize him. I.E. to stop Dr. No from attacking him.

But Sgt. Joe may not use any pain whatsoever to elicit the 6 letter code !?!?!? I.E. to stop Dr. No. from attacking a city.
That, my friends, is incredible.

and

The moral intuition traded on in the thought experiment is that there is something odd about declaring just (and not intrinsically evil) Sgt. Rock's killing a person made in the image of God before he presses that button (hence "blocking a great evil) and yet saying it is intrinsically evil to apply even the slightest measure of pain to force him "unwind" (if that is the right term) the chain of events that will "block" the great evil that his sin of commission initiated (pushing the button) and that his sin of ommission (silence) will cause.

At least you appear to concede that there is in fact a valid analytic difference between an attacker doing something and a prisoner not doing anything: between being and not-being.

There is for sure an analytic distinction between being and not being. I'm not so sure that this is the same distinction as between "an attacker doing something and a prisoner not doing anything." It is that "not doing anything" bit that is at issue. There are probably a lot of metaphysical and ontological assumptions here about the nature of persons. I'm assuming that a person is not just a series of discreet acts, that there is something deeper to personal identity and conscioiusness such that "withholding information" can plausibly be said to be an "act." I will leave it to the professional philosophers to tell us whether "withholding information" can plausibly be said to constitute an "act," or whether it is just a crackpot idea I dreamed up before I had my morning coffee fix. My thought experiment was designed to explore exactly this sort of question. I can say that it seems to be at least plausible, because it fits the intuitions of a reasonable person. Sort of like me, for instance.

The questions that Tony in the comments are bring up are the ones that in a sense I am most interested in. I think in these torture discussions that "physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit" seems to be taking in a good bit. As I mentioned in the comments we are almost saying it appears that there is some natural law right of no self incrimination.

As again Beckwith mentions these " queries about definitions and distinctions are not Jesuitical inventions of the inauthentic sadist employed to excuse evil, but rather, serious attempts to advance the common good." I think that would be a good thing to keep in mind as people that very much opposing torture or any form of enhanced interrogation interact with those that have these questions. I am not so sure the answer to this is at obvious

Final update
See part II
Did THe Bush Administration Actually Follow Catholic Teaching on Torture?