From the Salmon

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost and Justin Taylor at Between Two Worlds have sponsored a bit of a symposium on torture. Sensing that Christian intellectuals had been fairly silent on the national debate about torture, they invited several Christian ethicists and writers to respond to Charles Krauthammer’s Weekly Standard essay, ”The Truth About Torture.”

Krauthammer’s piece and the eight symposium contributions are worth perusing, not simply because this debate is timely, but because this is a critical part of a larger debate over who we in the United States want to be as a country and, separately, over what role we who claim to be part of the Christian church must play in this debate and others.

I think it’s worthy to note that, of the eight participants, four are Baptist, two are Catholic, one is Presbyterian, and I’m not sure about the eighth. This isn’t a criticism, since I would imagine that it’s not the easiest thing for a blogger to get a broad representation of Christian scholars to participate in a medium like this, and because I don’t know who was asked but chose not to participate. But if you consider that the two major historical Christian traditions regarding war and violence have been just war and pacifism, it’s a shame that the symposium didn’t also include the thoughts of a scholar or two that came out of the latter tradition.

That said, I was a little surprised by the essays. Particularly, I was shocked that only two saw fit to mention Jesus. In fact, there were just as many mentions of Alan Dershowitz. That’s not to say that these weren’t written from a recognizably Christian perspective. There was plenty of Augustine and Romans 13 and such. But the repeated choice not to consider the arguments for torture in the context of the teachings and life of the Christ of Christianity was troubling to me.

It’s also somewhat telling. The essays that do mention Jesus (Mark Liederbach and Rob Vischer) make the some of the clearest statements that Christians cannot condone torture. And I wonder whether this is in part because it’s hard to imagine the Jesus of the Gospels condoning coercive violence. I don’t ask this to be flippant or to reduce this important or weighty question to a bumper sticker platitude, but can you imagine what Jesus’ response might have been if He had been asked whether torture was ever permissable?

Read the essays and form your own opinion. Maybe I’ll come back to some of the individual arguments in more detail in later posts. But here are a few interesting excerpts that I offer without editorial comment:

Darrell Cole:

More to the point, if we are tempted to do evil in order to preserve what we hold dear, then we are holding the wrong things dear. No real good demands evil to preserve it. Instead, those who want to see a good preserved demand that we do evil to preserve it. But if the ultimate human good is a good that is incompatible with doing evil, then we may not do evil to preserve it. When moral realists tell Christians that they must do evil in order to save themselves, and Christians are tempted to heed this advice, they should realize that they have become their own false gods.

Moral realists like to formulate dilemmas that require we choose evil if we wish to preserve a cherished good. This hinders our ability to formulate other solutions. Those who know that they can use evil do not need to think about how to win without doing evil. If Christians are to support the war on terror, and they ought to support a just war, they need to be reasonably sure that their government does not as a matter of policy torture people in order to get information. Christians — and all those opposed to torture — should be urging their governments to think about other ways to win the war on terror.

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Albert Mohler:

First, the use of torture should be prohibited as a matter of state policy — period. No set of qualifications and exceptions can do anything but diminish the moral credibility of this policy. At the same time, rare exceptions under extreme circumstances can be considered under those circumstances by legitimate state agents, knowing that a full accounting of these decisions must be made to the public, through appropriate means and mechanisms.

Second, a thorough and legitimate review must be conducted subsequent to the use of any such techniques, with the agents who authorized or conducted such use of torture fully accountable, even to the point of maximum legal prosecution if their use of extreme coercion is seen to have been unjustified (not simply because the interrogation did not produce the desired information, but because the grounds of justification were invalid). The absence of legitimate accountability through a thorough and comprehensive process of review — with the threat of real and appropriate sanctions against those found to have acted without due justification — makes the state complicit in a web of cruelty and the official rationalization of evil.

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Mark Liederbach:

While admittedly, the anti-torture stance argued for here may not satisfy the pragmatist, the Christian must remember that life on a fallen planet does not guarantee the kind of safety, security, and consequences Krauthammer is trying to use as motivation to justify torture. Nor does it become justifiable to break a command based on circumstances or an uncertain prediction of future events — even when the event appears likely. One does not always have to like the boundaries that commands give us to know they are best to be obeyed. Thus, the just warrior engages the enemy within principled boundaries if for no other reason than it is wrong to do so and breaking the boundaries makes him no different than the one he is combating. We worship God, not safety.

In making his case Krauthammer makes reference to George Bernard Shaw’s joke about the man who asks a woman if she’d sleep with him for a million dollars. When she says yes, he asks if she’d sleep with him for five dollars. Indignantly the woman then responds, “What do you think I am?” The answer given is: “We’re already established what you are, ma’am, now we’re just haggling over the price.” What strikes me as amazing about Krauthammer’s argument is that he so readily admits his is an ethic of prostituted principle. In his citation of Shaw, not only does he cavalierly toss aside the foundations of just-war principles at the price of speculative safety, like a profligate schoolboy he has the audacity to claim this is the only path to the moral manliness of his “rational moral calculus.”

One can’t help in the final analysis recall the words of Caiaphas as he argued that crucifying Jesus was the only way to save the way of life the Pharisees had come to love and cherish: “It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish.” Caiaphas was right in the sense that his prediction did prove to be of great value for the many, but this does not justify the ethic under which he functioned. One would need to be perfectly omniscient in order to have proportionalism or utilitarianism be the guiding moral principle. For those of us who are not omniscient, commands and principles must lead the way and shape how a utilitarian calculus is employed. Certainly one could foresee that if employed Krauthammer’s Caiaphas ethic may indeed provide the results he argues for — but at what price? The argument may sound good, but we must be careful lest we forget that this “Caiaphas ethic” is far more dangerous than it appears. Indeed, it can even be used to justify the murder of God.

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Robert Vischer:

Self-preservation is not the ultimate value underlying Christian ethics, and recognition of that fact must underlie any attempt to articulate a Christian response to torture. The specter of terrorists holding information that could save thousands of lives does not alter or eviscerate the Gospel’s call to transform our world through an abiding and uncompromising ethic of love. Foremost in any framework purporting to implement this ethic is a prohibition against using our fellow humans instrumentally, as a convenient means to our chosen ends, no matter how noble.

[...]

One argument raised in the [August 2002 “torture"] memo was that such practices were necessary, despite the harm caused to the subject being questioned, given the possible harms averted. Yoo wrote:

“Clearly, any harm that might occur during an interrogation would pale to insignificance compared to the harm avoided by preventing such an attack, which could take hundreds or thousands of lives.”

And in that single statement, we have the essence of why Christians cannot condone torture, no matter the justifications offered. An ethic grounded in human dignity can never hold that the purposeful infliction of pain on a person is insignificant, nor that its significance can be minimized as though concerns over human life and dignity are mere variables in a cost-benefit analysis. The Catholic Church’s teaching addresses the temptation to relativize human suffering by placing torture in the sphere of categorical prohibition, beyond the reach of well-meaning pragmatists.

[...]

Whatever our convictions as to torture’s purported necessity or connection to the public good, the Gospel’s call to honor human dignity while recognizing human sinfulness compels Christians to resist the temptation to embrace the utilitarian bent toward using another human life as an instrument of self-preservation.

For two additional responses to Krauthammer that, while not written explicitly from a Christian perspective, are compelling, read Andrew Sullivan and Michael Kinsley.