The morality of torture

[Sojourner]

[url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/25/AR2005102500860.html"]There's increasing pressure from the White House to weaken a proposed ban on torture[/url].

Are there situations in which torture of prisoners of war would be appropriate? Is torture always inherently morally wrong in the hands of the state?

[Semalsia]

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster."

[White Knight]

Its Wrong Torture isn't ever right.

[Era Might]

[quote]The varieties of crime are numerous: all offenses against life itself, such as murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and willful suicide; [b]all violations of the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture, undue psychological pressures;[/b] all offenses against human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children, degrading working conditions where people are treated as mere tools for profit rather than free and responsible persons: [b]all these and the like are criminal: they poison civilization; and they debase the perpetrators more than the victims and militate against the honor of the creator.[/b]

--Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, "Gaudium et Spes" #27[/quote]

[Sojourner]

I'd agree that torture is never right, and I'm fully in alignment with Gaudium et Spes on this ... I'm just baffled by the administration's stance on it. Why in the world are they pushing for covert agents to be allowed to torture? What possible justification could there be for this? It seems clear that there's very widespread public support for a ban on torture -- witness the response to Abu Ghraib. And given Bush's already low approval ratings, it seems odd that he'd go against a strong public consensus on a topic such as this.

[Semalsia]

[quote]What possible justification could there be for this?[/quote]

They see it as useful. You are searching for morals where there is none.

[Sojourner]

[url="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/02/politics/02detain.html?ei=5088&en=770c7f87ec864426&ex=1288587600&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1130958872-qVRtLDxAqraNkEnIWco93w"]Another article on this topic ... [/url]

[quote]The Bush administration is embroiled in a sharp internal debate over whether a new set of Defense Department standards for handling terror suspects should adopt language from the Geneva Conventions prohibiting "cruel," "humiliating" and "degrading" treatment, administration officials say.
...
Their opponents, who include aides to Vice President Johnsonville brat Cheney and some senior Pentagon officials, have argued strongly that the proposed language is vague, would tie the government's hands in combating terrorists and still would not satisfy America's critics, officials said. [/quote]

Haven't yet found the actual proposed language.

[homeschoolmom]

Torture denies the dignity of the human person.

[tojo]

Torture is bad.

[Sojourner]

Then why would we want CIA folks to be able to do it?

[cmotherofpirl]

For many people the end justifies the means.

[Socrates]

Torture may be justified in some cases - for example, if it is necesarry to obtain information to protect the lives of innocents.

HOwever, torture should not be excessive, and should never be done for its own sake, or out of mere sadism.

[cmotherofpirl]

The end does not justify the means.

[Era Might]

[quote name='Socrates' date='Nov 2 2005, 06:29 PM']Torture may be justified in some cases - for example, if it is necesarry to obtain information to protect the lives of innocents.

HOwever, torture should not be excessive, and should never be done for its own sake, or out of mere sadism.
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[/quote]

According to whom? The Church makes no such exceptions.

[quote]The Church and believers cannot remain insensitive and passive, therefore, before the multiplication of denunciations of torture and ill-treatment practiced in various countries on persons arrested interrogated or else put in a state of supervision or confinement. While Constitutions and legislation make room for the principle of the right to defense at all stages of justice, while proposals are put forward to humanize places of detention, it is obvious, nevertheless, that techniques of torture are being perfected to weaken the resistance of prisoners, and that people sometimes do not hesitate to inflict on them irreversible injuries, humiliating for the body and for the spirit. How can one fail to be troubled when one knows that many tormented families send supplications in vain in favour of their dear ones, and that even requests for information pile up without receiving an answer? In the same way we cannot pass over in silence the practice, denounced on so many sides, which consists in putting on the same footing those guilty, or presumed such, of political opposition and persons who need psychiatric treatment, thus adding to their pain another motive, perhaps even harder to bear bitterness.

--Pope John Paul II, 1978[/quote]

[philothea]

[quote name='Socrates' date='Nov 2 2005, 05:29 PM']Torture may be justified in some cases - for example, if it is necesarry to obtain information to protect the lives of innocents.

HOwever, torture should not be excessive, and should never be done for its own sake, or out of mere sadism.
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[/quote]
Torture doesn't work as a means of gaining information. People make stuff up to get the pain to stop. It's well known.

The only thing torture is "good" for is terror, revenge, and intimidation.