Utilitarianism and Torture

While I was going through my collection of links worth revisiting, I came upon a piece by Daniel McInerney, ” ‘Quantitative Judgments Don’t Apply’: Foyle’s War, Series Seven” (The Imaginative Conservative, October 2013). McInerny opens with this:

At the beginning of the third volume of Evelyn Waugh’s masterful World War II trilogy, Sword of Honor, Guy Crouchback, a British Catholic officer entering a disillusioned middle age, has a conversation with his elderly father in which he disparages the Lateran Treaty. Gervase Crouchback rebukes his son’s irascibility. ““My dear boy,” he said, “you’re really making the most terrible nonsense, you know. That isn’t at all what the Church is like. It isn’t what she’s for.”

Later, Gervase Crouchback writes Guy a letter trying to explain more clearly what prompted his rebuke:

When you spoke of the Lateran Treaty did you consider how many souls may have been reconciled and have died at peace as the result of it? How many children may have been brought up in the faith who might have lived in ignorance? Quantitative judgments don’t apply. If only one soul was saved, that is full compensation for any amount of loss of “face.”

His father’s anti-utilitarian phrase, Quantitative judgments don’t apply, hangs in Guy’s mind, and through his interior monologues it becomes the leitmotif of this third volume. Quantitative judgments don’t apply: when it comes to evaluating the pearl of great price, one doesn’t weigh it against purely material considerations.

I have elsewhere criticized utilitarianism: here, here, and here. In the post at the third link (“Utilitarianism vs. Liberty”), I say that

strict utilitarianism requires that all decisions — not just governmental ones — must yield “the greatest amount of happiness altogether.” For example, if I fail to take your happiness into account when I buy a new car, I might make you less happy by my acquisition (because it makes you envious). And, in the utilitarian calculus, your unhappiness might outweigh my happiness. Ergo, less happiness altogether.

The foregoing example make it easy to see how modern “liberalism,” with its strong appeal to envy (among other unattractive traits), is an outgrowth of utilitarianism. (For more in that vein, see “Inventing Liberalism.”) . . . .

. . . [U]tilitarianism compromises liberty because it accords no value to individual decisions about preferred courses of action. Decisions, to a utilitarian, are valid only if they comply with the views of the utilitarian, who feigns omniscience about the (incommensurable) happiness of individuals. Agreement among various utilitarians about the desirability of a particular course of action signifies nothing more than a shared prejudice about the way the world ought to be.

As a critic of utilitarianism, can I properly defend torture? Is it not utilitarian to suggest that a supposed wrong (torture) can be weighed against an unquestionable good (saving innocent lives)? It might seem so, given the statements that I (and others) have made with respect to torture; to wit:

In sum, torture is moral — and therefore justified — when it becomes necessary for the purpose of eliciting information that could save innocent lives and the lives of those whose job it is to defend innocent lives. I do not mean that torture must be used, but that it may be used. I do not mean that torture will not have repulsive consequences for its targets, but that the thought of those consequences should not cause the American government to renounce torture as an option.

Such a statement could be taken as a utilitarian response to the trolley problem:

There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. Unfortunately, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person . . . .

. . . A utilitarian view asserts that it is obligatory to steer to the track with one man on it. According to simple utilitarianism, such a decision would be not only permissible, but, morally speaking, the better option (the other option being no action at all).

Whatever the merits or defects of the trolley problem, it isn’t analogous to the terrorist-victim problem. To make it analogous, it would be rewritten as follows:

A trolley driver who is in full control of his vehicle sees, ahead of him on the tracks, five persons who are tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five persons on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it may derail because of its speed, thus injuring or killing the homicidal trolley driver . . . .

The problem, in other words, isn’t a choice between killing one innocent or five innocents. The choice is between harming a killer or allowing the killer (and his compatriots) to take many innocent lives. To put it another way, it’s a choice between faux morality and self-defense.

Faux moralists of the “liberal” ilk often criticize the execution of murderers and the torture of terrorists because capital punishment and torture aren’t “civilized.” And yet most of those same faux moralists defend abortion, which is nothing better than the torture and execution of innocents. What could be less civilized?

* * *

Politics and Prosperity

“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.”

Utilitarianism and Torture

Share this:

Like this:

Related