The ticking bomb problem

In the most famous treatment of the dirty hands problem, Walzer reaches a similiar conclusion, with an interesting (but unargued for) twist. Walzer endorses Camus’ view that those who stain their hands in a good cause should be, and should be prepared to be, punished – apparently, in order that the rules be rightly valued. Here’s the twist: when we impose the punishment, Walzer suggests, we get our own hands dirty and therefore must pay the price ourselves. As I said, he doesn’t argue for that claim; perhaps the thought that if someone performs a necessary ‘dirty’ act, in our name, their punishment is necessary but undeserved. So the punishment itself is a justified moral wrong, like the original dirty act itself.

Slavoj Zizek made more or less the same points in a LRB essay:

I can well imagine that, in a particular situation, confronted with the proverbial ‘prisoner who knows’, whose words can save thousands, I might decide in favour of torture; however, even (or, rather, precisely) in a case such as this, it is absolutely crucial that one does not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle: given the unavoidable and brutal urgency of the moment, one should simply do it. Only in this way, in the very prohibition against elevating what we have done into a universal principle, do we retain a sense of guilt, an awareness of the inadmissibility of what we have done.

In short, every authentic liberal should see these debates, these calls to ‘keep an open mind’, as a sign that the terrorists are winning. And, in a way, essays like Alter’s, which do not openly advocate torture, but just introduce it as a legitimate topic of debate, are even more dangerous than explicit endorsements. At this moment at least, explicitly endorsing it would be rejected as too shocking, but the mere introduction of torture as a legitimate topic allows us to court the idea while retaining a clear conscience. (‘Of course I am against torture, but who is hurt if we just discuss it?’) Admitting torture as a topic of debate changes the entire field, while outright advocacy remains merely idiosyncratic. The idea that, once we let the genie out of the bottle, torture can be kept within ‘reasonable’ bounds, is the worst liberal illusion, if only because the ‘ticking clock’ example is deceptive: in the vast majority of cases torture is not done in order to resolve a ‘ticking clock’ situation, but for quite different reasons (to punish an enemy or to break him down psychologically, to terrorise a population etc). Any consistent ethical stance has to reject such pragmatic-utilitarian reasoning…

Moral dilemmas are so much easier when you have no morals, isn’t it?

Jef Raskin has a good piece on this very topic, “The Flawed Calculus of Torture“.

Quote: “In the commentator’s calculations he balanced one guilty party killed against hundreds of innocent lives saved. However, that is not the right equation. For each such success, there are thousands who are tortured or murdered on the guess that they will reveal valuable information. More often than not, as history shows, they do not possess the information sought or do not have the power to do what the torturer wishes them to.”

it should be punished in all cases, and severely punished in nearly all cases, as a matter of public policy.

Rather than providing a plausible solution to the extreme “ticking bomb” dilemma, a blanket proscription of the kind advocated above seems far more likely to provide an invitation to jury nullification.

The practicality (as opposed to the moral tidiness) of such a proscription, after all, depends entirely on the presumption that average citizens will consistently agree to punish defendants who resorted to torture and thereby saved lives. (Begging the question of how those citizens ought to feel about that dilemma, which of course is the point of the dilemma.) Merely saying “There oughta be a law!” shortcuts the entire debate, replacing argument with a sort of sui generis legal fiat.

Like far too many romantic legal pronouncements which fail to admit the input and behavior of actual human beings (various international laws and UN resolutions come especially to mind), the above solution seems to assume that juries will enforce an objectionable law simply because they’ve been righteously instructed to do so.

So it fails for me, I’m afraid.

‘If the situation is grave enough to warrant resort to torture, it’s certainly grave enough to oblige someone to take actions that will result in losing their job and going to jail.’

Yes- and if the person who turns himself in is then acquitted by the jury on the grounds of justification for his actions? Given that it is a well-established point of law that you can have ‘justified homicide’ to protect your own life or others, I would have thought that this is a very real possibility. And the consequences of such an acquittal would likely be to increase the chances of further torture.

There are two distinct questions here (of course) — what should the torturer do after, and what should be the consequence. To the first, yes, he or she should submit to the rule of society, and if he has acted illegally or immorally, pay the appropriate price. But, to the second, if we agree it is right to torture another person in order to prevent yet greater harm, how can it then be right to further harm the individual who, by our own standard, did the right thing?

The “ticking timebomb” problem bears about as much relationship to reality as the Cretan paradox (“all Cretans always lie, etc.”) Like the Cretan paradox, the timebomb problem makes unrealistic assumptions about truth-telling: it assumes that a captive will lie (“I don’t know”) when not being tortured, but will tell the truth (“it’s at Grand Central Station”) when being tortured. This assumption has not been demonstrated.

Let’s posit a slightly more realistic version. We hold 10 captives and we have reason to believe that some — but perhaps not all — know the location of a ticking timebomb. Do we torture all ten? If one tells us that the bomb is at Grand Central Station, do we torture the other nine in order to gain corroborating- or perhaps conflicting- information? Perhaps we torture the one who gave us the information as well, in order to make sure he’s not lying. After all, time is short and millions of lives are at stake.

Now try the problem with 100 captives, or 1000, and not one known timebomb, but an uncertain number of dimly perceived threats.

The morality of torture is that you must be willing to torture innocent people. The ticking timebomb problem is not set up to help us think clearly about this fact; it’s designed to make clear thinking difficult.

As I said elsewhere, I think that the “ticking bomb” question is a deliberate slippery slope, intended to break the taboo on torture. No one intends for it to be limited only to the extreme case hypothetically given, or believes that it will be.

The solution proposed here sounds too much like it will lead to the kind of jury nullification that happened in our Sourth with lynchings. Nice try, though — I’ve toyed with the idea myself.

My understanding is that the Israelis believe that torture is a flawed but useful tool. Rather than renouncing torture, they’ve just acknowledged what it can and can’t do.

In the other thread I suggested a Mohs Scale for hypothetical examples. 10 would be a bomb set in a preschool. 0 would be a bomb directed at violent, homeless heroin addicts who do not have the excuse of mental illness. I would put mouthy, Beavis-and-Butthead-type middle school students at about 5.

I believe this question has been discussed in series 2 of “24”, when President Palmer authorises torture on a member of his own staff who was plotting with the terrorists and knew where the bomb was. It worked. Ditto when Jack tortured Sayed Ali.

Of course it always works with Bauer. Cause he’s a torturer with a conscience and a good cause.

And he’s not real.

I have no idea how to answer that question in reality. It shouldn’t be necessary, if intelligence and police do their job properly.

Torture still rightly remains a crime in spite of having been used countless times even by countries who consider it a crime.

But there is still a difference between torture for interrogation ends, and the gratuitous sadism at Abu Ghraib.

Would you shoot your wife in the head to save your child? It’s a bullshit, contrived question to rationalize evil.

Torture is to be condemned, and should always be prohibited. Unless the alternative is something worse.

The problem is that there can be no one, single answer that is always ‘right’. If socially conscious and well-meaning individuals are looking for that ‘right’ answer, then they’re going to be massively disappointed.

This is a decision of situational ethics, and can only be answered by the person who legitimately has to make that decision. It’s not an easy one, and it’s not a decision between right and wrong, but between wrong and wrong. Hobson’s Choice, as it were. And making no choice is a choice in and of itself. I hope like hell that I never have to make such a choice, but if I do, then I will make what I believe to be the best one and then live with the consequences. Including all those armchair moralists who will sit and smugly condemn me no matter what decision I make.

That’s the difference between reality and living in a fantasy world where no one gets hurt and everybody lives happily ever after.

My only consolation is that in the afterlife, if there is one, that I will be accountable for my own actions and decisions, and that those armchair moralizers will be irrelevant.

“My answer is that the torturer should immediately turn themselves in, and plead guilty to the relevant criminal charges.”

We desperately hope that someone will do the right thing, but we disapprove of anyone who does? This seems contradictory to me. Why is it right to punish someone who did nothing wrong?

Perhaps such punishment will reduce the number of illegal tortures in the future. Is it okay to punish an innocent to prevent others from committing crimes? This also sounds worrying; it is similar to punishing one innocent person for another person’s criminal acts (another standard consequentialist conclusion).

“Other theories will, I think, give the same answer.”

I don’t think so; consequentialism has a notoriously difficult time providing convincing answers to these kinds of questions (see above), and needs to provide a lot of defense for its positions.

If the results are sufficiently catastrophic, deontological theories will allow such balancing of good vs. bad. However, I’m not sure that the amount of torture we are talking about is sufficiently catastrophic (I am not an expert on either the amount of illegal torture in the world or how much would be prevented by John’s suggestion).

If not, we might override a categorical prohibition against torture in a ticking time bomb case, but not be able to override a categorical prohibition against wrongful imprisonment against the innocent torturer. So here would be a deontological argument against your position.

I don’t know what virtue ethics would say about this; punishing innocent people isn’t a particularly good habit to fall into, so that might be an argument against it. However, torturing people isn’t such a good habit either :-)

There is never any excuse for torture as a method for obtaining reliable information. *Because it doesn’t work.* Not in the ticking bomb scenario, not in any others.

Seriously, read Terry Karney.

The answer is that prosecution would be required by law.

The secondary answer is that no jury on earth would convict and if it did, no President would pass up the opportunity to issue one of the most popular Pardons in history. A smart constitution doesn’t trust lawyers all the way.

Minor edit to my comment above – the remark “sorry to disappoint” reads as too uncivil; apologies. However, I do feel that the previous commentors are working with an unexamined prejudice that “some good outcome is always possible in the terms of the original problem, if only we philosophize effectively enough”. … with the possible exception of those who (rightly) attacked the problem statement. But, I would suggest that true moral clarity has a straight answer even for unfairly-worded questions.

That’s pretty close to my opinion as well as torturing a terrorist to get information to save lives is no more morally problematic than executing a murder or overthrowing a socialist government as each by the evil of their own actions has already forfeited their moral claim to their rights. [my emphasis]

Cool. When do you plan to invade Sweden?

The entire point of an exceptional situation is that one cannot write legislation to account for it. Perhaps a presidential pardon would be a way of handling the situation you address.

Those who say that torture doesn’t work, however, ultimately have the strongest argument: since torture doesn’t work, torture is always ipso facto committed for immoral ends (such as the ones Zizek points out in the quote above).

Adam Kotsko wrote:

Those who say that torture doesn’t work, however, ultimately have the strongest argument: since torture doesn’t work, torture is always ipso facto committed for immoral ends (such as the ones Zizek points out in the quote above).

Trying to stop a bomb that may kill millions of innocent people is an “immoral end?”

This is an easy case for me – if I were on the jury in a case where a government agent is accused of using torture to extract information about the location of a ticking bomb, I’d vote to acquit, regardless of the judge’s instructions on the law. As you move on the continuum away from those facts, to situations where the bomb may or may not exist or whether the suspect is one of many who may or may not have information, my willingness to acquit against the law would depend on whether I thought the agents were acting reasonably in the circumstances.

Or perhaps a better analogy (to fit the specific case) would not be between torturing a terrorist versus executing a murder but rather in torturing someone to protect an innocent life versus a self-defense killing to protect an innocent person. The torture in this circumstance is intended not as punishment for the crimes of the terrorist but rather as a means of protecting the lives of others – similar to killing someone in the defense of others.

Randy Paul wrote:

I read your whole paragraph.

Which means then that his omission of the sentence in which I stated that the decision was contingent on whether it “is more likely to lead to a better outcome than if we did not” was deliberate on his part. Hence a strawman argument.

If you cannot see the “moral problem” in overthrowing a popularly elected socialist government, then God help you.

There’s isn’t a moral problem since socialism is a violation of individual rights regardless of whether it is created by a majority voting to steal the property of a minority or imposed by a dictatorship. Either way, anyone has the right (but not the obligation) to work to overthrow a socialist government just as they would any other group of thieves.

Nothing strawman about that.

The “strawman” reference was to how you removed the early qualification of my original post in order to distort its context.

Of course considering the tone in such statements like this,

Sort of like the sort of moral idiocy embraced by pacifists and thsoe who oppose capital punishment in every circumstance.

one can only imagine why you choose to engage anyone.

Because thankfully not everyone I engage with is a moral idiot who thinks that violence is automatically bad without regard to its context. The number of people who actually think that all war is bad regardless of the stakes or consequences or that it is always wrong to kill someone regardless of what the person has done or will likely do are thankfully few and far between.

I would no more find it no more offensive than for someone on the Left to decry the “moral idiots who think we should nuke every country that we don’t like” as it is an equally stupid position. Unless they tried to set this up as a strawman argument to distort the views of those who do find violence acceptable under certain (but not all) circumstances.

_socialism is a violation of individual rights regardless of whether it is created by a majority voting to steal the property of a minority or imposed by a dictatorship_

Could someone please put up some sources on this:
1) where individual rights are defined
2) definition of property
2) definition of socialism

A handsome guy meets a pretty girl and asks her: “If I give you one million dollars, will you make love to me?” She ponders the question and answers “Yes”. Then he asks, “What about ten dollars?” She snaps back angrily, “Do you think I’m a whore?”. “Well, that matter was settled with my first question. Now we’re just discussing the price.”

So a guy goes into a police station and announces that he’s just planted a bomb somewhere in the city. Crack FBI Information Gatherers discover that he is a very tough nut to crack. Is it wrong to drag his mother into the room and start chopping off her fingers? The only reasons I can see for a yes answer smack of rank sentimentality.

So a guy goes into a police station and announces that he’s just planted a bomb somewhere in the city. Crack FBI Information Gatherers discover that he is a very tough nut to crack. Is it wrong to drag his mother into the room and start chopping off her fingers? The only reasons I can see for a yes answer smack of rank sentimentality.

So now laws have become a matter of rank sentimentality too? Nice.

It doesn’t matter anyway, whatever answer one may give to that question, because unlike moral dilemmas like euthanasia, situations where the terrorists turn themselves in, or are caught, and then tortured to extract ticking-bomb information, and that information turns out to be accurate, which one can’t know beforehand but only after finding the bomb… only happen in action movies and tv series.

In reality, historically, torture has always been used for intimidation purposes, most often by dictatorial regimes, against political dissidents. In that, it has sadly worked very well to its intended effect.

I doubt, even if it had been as extensively used in anti-terrorism, it was ever proven to be working for its (supposed) intended effect in that context. When the purpose is not to crush dissidents, or just for the sheer sadistic “fun” of it, but to extract information, you’re just as likely to get useful intelligence by consulting a oujia board. Anyone would say anything when under torture. They got nothing to lose. Especially if it’s suicidal terrorists.

I may be naive or optimistic, but I think the bulk of intelligence work very rarely involves getting info directly from terrorists. It’s the kind of boring work that doesn’t make for exciting movie plots or hypothetical dilemmas, that seems to have proven more effective.

Most of the torture advocates on this thread, who so happen to be the same adovcating the war

Sort of like how the same people self-righteously decrying the thought that torture of a terrorist to save innocent lives might even be justified or moral were the same ones who opposed overthrowing the dictatorship in Baghdad who thought it was great for laughs?

Thorley:

“How many human lives must be saved to justify a moral agent’s abandoning their humanity?”
That question presumes that there is something akin got “abandoning their humanity” in inflicting pain in every circumstance.

Context, friend. We are talking about representatives of the state *torturing* terrorists to uncover dangers. That sort of torture is “abandoning humanity” in my view. But your claim that I equate torture with “pain in every circumstance” is the product of your imagination. It is fully human, for example, to punch people in the head who triumphally refute tendentious misreadings of others’ blog comments. (Joke)

Matt:

What objection is there to capitalizing the words “Right Thing” in the sentence “doing the Right Thing doesn’t mean you will always like the outcome”? Surely we can agree on this without claiming to be able to identify the Right Thing. Also, I agree with you that the phrase “true moral clarity” just sounds awful. You don’t know me, and people who use such phrases around tend to be overconfident crackpots, so I can’t blame you for reacting as you did. I probably shouldn’t have written it that way. However, the sentence as written: “true moral clarity … has straight answers to hypothetical situations” should be uncontroversial, since it is a tautology. If you are clear on your morals, you can give clear answers to moral questions, i.e. “no torture under any circumstances” — furthermore, if you are clear on your morals, you are not going to be buffaloed by outrageous hypotheticals into imagining that there are boundary cases. Hypotheticals such as this are more tests of whether the moral agent has fully thought his position through to the end (and will hold it when confronted with disagreeable entailments) than they are tests of the validity of the position. A rhetorical trick, not a dialectical one.

Having said that, I agree generally with your comments. :-)

But will no one respond to my suggestion that philosophical tidiness is a chimera here? I am a Kierkegaardian scholar and a fan of Camus. Which means in brief: some (obviously bad) moral choices can be rejected outright on the basis of argument, but none can be positively *chosen* on grounds other than subjective.

Thorley, you (and others) may now slander these gentlemen or my alleged misunderstanding of them at your leisure. :-)

Joe wrote:

Context, friend. We are talking about representatives of the state torturing terrorists to uncover dangers. That sort of torture is “abandoning humanity” in my view.

Based on what standard other than you own emotions?

But your claim that I equate torture with “pain in every circumstance” is the product of your imagination.

A claim that is the product of Joe’s imagination or misreading of my previous comments. If you have a definition of torture (I’m open to one other than the “intentional infliction of pain”) that you prefer, let’s have it. If you have a situation more compelling than trying to protect the lives of millions of innocent people (the hypothetical case in question), let’s hear it. Otherwise this seems to be Joe trying to skirt the actual issue.

No

Thorley: “No”

OK then. My morality says that “torturing” another person is equivalent to “sawing my own legs off”, cuz we’re all brothers and sisters, man. (Really.)