Fighting against tortured logic
There is a good interview with Mark Shea over at Ministry Values on the topic of torture. Mark has become the preeminent spokesperson in the Catholic blogosphere for defending the Church’s condemnation of torture. An excerpt:
We asked Mr. Shea, how the policy of torture or enhanced interrogation found its way into official government policy. The obvious answer was of course everything changed after 9/11. Protecting our citizens at all cost became paramount but what we found interesting was his identification of the philosophical under pinnings of the moral justification for torture.
Mr.Shea gave an impassioned discourse on the ideal of “consequentialism” a philosophy that is the intellectual foundation for those whosupport “enhanced interrogation methods” . Simply put”Consequentialism” is “let us do evil as long as it results in good” or better known as “the end justifies the means”.
Mr. Shea assured us that this “ideal” of “consequentialism” has been fully condemned by Pope John Paul II and others. Mark Shea’s view on this issue he admits is not popular these days with many of his conservative friends.
Check out the whole interview here.
How can we say absolutely “no” to torture when we give the state the right to execute criminals, as per the Catechism?
How can we allow the state to exact the ultimate price (one’s life) to protect the innocent of society, and yet completely and totally remove the right of the state to exact a lesser price (discomfort or pain) no matter what?
Note: I have deleted a comment that simply insults Mark and does nothing to further the discussion. I don’t mind someone disagreeing with me, but personal attacks (especially against those who are not even here) will not be tolerated under any circumstances.
mrteachersir,
Tom over at Disputations handles this question here.
If one may not do evil in pursuit of the greater good, so much for that just war thingy.
First, define “torture”. I don’t consider it torture to exact some truth from someone so long as the pain/damage isn’t permanent – whether emotionally or physically. Football players at time feel more “pain” (and sometimes, more lasting) than those who have been “waterboarded”.
The military subjects its recruits to all sorts of unpleasant “experiences” to get them to behave in a certain fashion.
I know one thing. If a terrorist knew some secrets which could save the lives and there was only one way to get it, namely, torture of the type that wasn’t of a mermanent nature, I’d be on him! Unlike Shea, I don’t believe that torture is “objectively evil”. In fact, it can often be a useful tool to achieve some good objective.
What bothers me most on Catholic blogs about this subject is that rather than reasonable logic, using the teachings of the Church as the basis for decisions, there is a lot of jumping to conclusions, name-calling and proof-texting to prove Mark’s and others’ point of view that anything other than Miranda rights is torture. I do not think that is true. In fact, as I read it, the Catechism talks about coercion, not questioning for specific information. I just don’t see how it is torture when someone thinks they are being slammed into a wall, but the wall itself is engineered to make noise while keeping the person from injury. Cutting, burning, hanging people from their arms, electrocution, that’s different, but not what’s being discussed. Seems to me the ones with a political agenda are those criticizing the questioners.
Mark Shea and your defintion of Torture is so broad that “any” unpleasantness one is subjected to fits the bill. Just because you and Shea “Think” it’s torture, doesn’t make it so.
Mark seems to focus on the Bush Administration far too much. Did he mention that Obama used the same technique? Nope. He must be a closet liberal.
Are you guys serious? Let me take on a few of the things I see in the comments above.
1. “If one may not do evil in pursuit of the greater good, so much for that just war thingy.” You fail to distinguish between a “physical evil” and a moral evil. Loosing an arm through amputation, for instance, is a physical evil, yet sometimes it is necessary to amputate an arm (perform a physical evil, if you like) to obtain a greater good (save the life of someone with gangrene). War is a physical evil even at its best, but it may be either morally good or morally evil depending on its circumstances. What we are never justified in doing is performing a MORAL EVIL so that good may result.
2. As for the “define torture” crowd: Define life. What, there are as many ideas about what life is as for torture? Well, if you can’t tell me what life is, you have no business complaining that terrorists took the lives of 3 thousand people on 9-11-2001. Or, just maybe, you could use sense. Grown-ups have to live in a world in which many things defy definition or transcend it altogether: foremost among them God (we cannot even say that God *exists* univocally with our own existence), but also concepts like life, consciousness, reason, cruelty, and torture. The fact that definitions are of limited use in pinning these things down does not mean that nothing true about them can be said, nor that we can never recognize them when we see them.
3. Yeah, Mark Shea has gone after the Obama administration. But, on the one hand, that’s too obvious, and can be left for the Rush Limbaugh’s of the world. Besides, anyone who is really behind Obama on all these counts won’t be won over by any argument. On the other hand, most of the people who read him are already at least somewhat “social conservatives” who already agree with Shea on gay marriage, abortion, etc., but as the response above has shown, many still favor torture.
4. Shea is no closet liberal, as I’ve mentioned above. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met one of those; the rewards are too great for being either a “nuanced conservative” (Scott Brown, for instance) or going over full time to the other side (Arlen Specter, who went from being a *very* “nuanced” conservative (OK, a liberal Republican) to being a run-of-the-mill liberal).
. . . . . . .
I will say this, though: Responding to the pro-torture wing of Republican Catholics has made Shea into a grumpier, less persuasive apologist. I got tired of his juvenile attacks on Sarah Palin (which were motived by who knows what, but probably a desire to get back at Republican commenters, and he really ticked me off by hurling insults when I tried to explain JPII’s statements on the death penalty in the context of continuous Catholic Tradition. It was his willingness to throw insults that made me realize that reading his blog is a near occasion of the sin of wrath for me, and I’m much happier now that I’ve given it up. But however poor his presentation, he’s usually dead on in presenting what the Catholic Church teaches.
It might be good to remember the last verse from this “folk song upsetting“:
The moral of this story please attend to very well: \\
Exactly who the Devil is is often hard to tell. \\
He may be short and ugly or he may be fair and tall, \\
He may just be the man for whom you voted in the fall.
Howard:
My sincere apologies for upsetting you. I’m very grateful for what you write above in debunking the rubbish put forward in defense of torture. I hope we can be reconciled.