May 17, 2005
Legalizing torture
Two Australian law professors, Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke, believe that torture should be legalised and is a “morally defensible” form of interrogation. From The Age:
“Of course, it is far more repugnant to inflict harm on an innocent person than a wrongdoer,” said Professor Bagaric, who has been head of Deakin’s law school for more than two years.
“But in some extreme cases, where it is almost certain someone has information that could prevent many lives being lost and there is no other way to obtain that information, the mere fact that they’re not directly involved in creating that threat doesn’t mean they can wash their hands of responsibility.”
Asked if he believed interrogators should be able to legally torture an innocent person to death if they had evidence the person knew about a major public threat, such as the September 11 attacks, Professor Bagaric replied: “Yes, you could.”
Never mind the moral indefensibility of Bagaric’s argument. It’s the “almost certain” in the second paragraph that undermines any theoretical utilitarian value of torture as a solution to 9/11-like scenarios. As Ken Parish explains:
The probability of knowing enough in advance to be able to make a reasonable calculation of the utility of torture (i.e. about what the suspect knows and could tell us, and whether it could assist materially in preventing a major catastrophe) is so low as to discount the utility of making a general rule legalising torture. Moreover, that conclusion is fortified by the much higher probability that any legalisation of torture would be abused and frequently used in much less extreme situations than the one Bagaric envisions, whatever ostensible safeguards were enacted.
The paper is being published in the July edition of the University of San Francisco Law Review. Let the authors know what you think.
Thanks to the road to surfdom.
Posted by Stephen at 12:30 AM in Humanity | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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