Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [18]
This is not to say that utilitarians necessarily favor torture. Some utilitarians oppose torture on practical grounds. They argue that it seldom works, since information extracted under duress is often unreliable. So pain is inflicted, but the community is not made any safer: there is no increase in the collective utility. Or they worry that if our country engages in torture, our soldiers will face harsher treatment if taken prisoner. This result could actually reduce the overall utility associated with our use of torture, all things considered.
These practical considerations may or may not be true. As reasons to oppose torture, however, they are entirely compatible with utilitarian thinking. They do not assert that torturing a human being is intrinsically wrong, only that practicing torture will have bad effects that, taken as a whole, will do more harm than good.
Some people reject torture on principle. They believe that it violates human rights and fails to respect the intrinsic dignity of human beings. Their case against torture does not depend on utilitarian considerations. They argue that human rights and human dignity have a moral basis that lies beyond utility. If they are right, then Bentham’s philosophy is wrong.
On the face of it, the ticking time bomb scenario seems to support Bentham’s side of the argument. Numbers do seem to make a moral difference. It is one thing to accept the possible death of three men in a lifeboat to avoid killing one innocent cabin boy in cold blood. But what if thousands of innocent lives are at stake, as in the ticking time bomb scenario? What if hundreds of thousands of lives were at risk? The utilitarian would argue that, at a certain point, even the most ardent advocate of human rights would have a hard time insisting it is morally preferable to let vast numbers of innocent people die than to torture a single terrorist suspect who may know where the bomb is hidden.
As a test of utilitarian moral reasoning, however, the ticking time bomb case is misleading. It purports to prove that numbers count, so that if enough lives are at stake, we should be willing to override our scruples about dignity and rights. And if that is true, then morality is about calculating costs and benefits after all.
But the torture scenario does not show that the prospect of saving many lives justifies inflicting severe pain on one innocent person. Recall that the person being tortured to save all those lives is a suspected terrorist, in fact the person we believe may have planted the bomb. The moral force of the case for torturing him depends heavily on the assumption that he is in some way responsible for creating the danger we now seek to avert. Or if he is not responsible for this bomb, we assume he has committed other terrible acts that make him deserving of harsh treatment. The moral intuitions at work in the ticking time bomb case are not only about costs and benefits, but also about the non-utilitarian idea that terrorists are bad people who deserve to be punished.
We can see this more clearly if we alter the scenario to remove any element of presumed guilt. Suppose the only way to induce the terrorist suspect to talk is to torture his young daughter (who has no knowledge of her father’s nefarious activities). Would it be morally permissible to do so? I suspect that even a hardened utilitarian would flinch at the notion. But this version of the torture scenario offers a truer test of the utilitarian principle. It sets aside the intuition that the terrorist deserves to be punished anyhow (regardless of the valuable information we hope to extract), and forces us to assess the utilitarian calculus on its own.
The city of happiness
The second version of the torture case (the one involving the innocent daughter) brings to mind a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. The story (“The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas”) tells of a city called Omelas—a city of happiness and civic celebration, a place without kings or slaves, without advertisements or a stock exchange, a place without the atomic