Justifying garden-variety torture

12 July 2012

'The use of torture is anathema to a civilised society. We decry the Spanish Inquisition yet tacitly accept or ignore the use of torture, both physical and psychological, in many of our closest trading partners. Do the panellists follow the rule that the ends justify the means?' Trevor Robey, Q&A audience member

Greg Sheridan's work as a journalist is impressive; a veteran of 30 years in the field, he has written five books, hundreds of articles, and regularly comments on television and radio. He is also a man of culture; in the first few minutes of an episode of Q&A this year he revealed he 'loves' Jane Austen, is reading George Eliot, and likes to cite Henry James on the importance of love.

He also allows, with vague qualifications, the use of torture.

None of this would matter very much if he were not also, at least in the judgment of Newscorp, Australia's 'most influential foreign affairs analyst'.

Like other intellectuals in politics he must accommodate his views to his (Catholic) religious convictions. He'd be aware that Pope Benedict xv1, in December 2005, condemned torture in the war against terrorism and that eminent legal scholars, including natural law philosopher John Finnis, believe the right to be free from torture in the Universal Declaration of Rights is categorical — it is not qualified by limitations which apply to other rights to meet the 'just requirements of morality, public order, and the general welfare in a democratic society'.

One might imagine he is also conversant with the Russian classics and Dostoyevsky's famous question, posed by Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, on the nature of evil:

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature — that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance — and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth?

With the possible exception of Kant, no philosophical theory has put a more forceful case against torture; certainly none has put a more eloquent argument against the 'serpentine wanderings of the happiness theory', and the idea that the end justifies the means.

Perhaps so, but what has this to do with the fact that

MEDIA

Justifying garden-variety torture

Subscriber login