Why is torture such a dirty word?
Posted September 1, 2007
on:I’ve been intrigued by the recent posts at Overcoming Bias on the topic of torture. The proposal is that torture could replace imprisonment for many offences. While my initial response was repugnance at the idea, that may reveal my biased perspective of imprisonment.
As James Miller points out
…both prison and torture impose costs on criminals. Why is one type of cost crueler than the other? If a convicted criminal is indifferent between …torture or being imprisoned …then why would it be excessively cruel to torture but not to imprison?
In New Zealand we distinguish between preventive detention for those who pose a risk to society, and imprisonment as punishment for a crime. Could it be that torture is a cheaper and equally effective way to achieve the goals of our justice system in the latter case? It certainly achieves the goals of punishment and retribution for the crime. The sticking point for me is that torture does not aid in rehabilitation of a convict. However, I’m not persuaded that the current justice system does much of this anyway. It seems to me that people are more likely to find it hard to lead an ‘honest’ life after a long period of imprisonment than after a brief bout of torture. This is particularly so when the money saved in running prisons could be spent on genuine rehabilitation programs.
Is this a case where economists are as guilty as anyone of shying away from an efficient solution because of the moral biases involved? Or is there a real reason why torture is shunned by our society while, simultaneously, calls for harsher prison sentences grow ever stronger?
18 Responses to "Why is torture such a dirty word?"
For most people, imprisonment is the lesser ‘evil’ to torture, therefore it is going to be the more palatable alternative. Dont forget, this isnt a one way street, for every punishee there is a punisher. You also need to consider the effect on the person administering the punishment.
The simple reason we don’t do it is the same as the reason we don’t allow people to rape children no matter how willing they are to pay for the privilege: because it is immoral. Which is a roundabout way of saying that there are some things other than economics which affect decision-making.
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster… when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you… ”
-Friedrich Nietzsche.
As an atheist, I think discarding well established morality without proper analysis of the roots of such morality would provide an incomplete assessment of it’s implications. After all, religion, “belief”, morals, are all products of human sociological evolution, and such ideas would have perished to natural selection if they did not have some real use.
What society would benefit most from is rehabilitation, and people learn by mimicking others. The idea that, “violence begets violence” is not a concept that should be restricted to religion, after all, all religion is a product of sociological evolution. The ideas it promotes that remain relevant to our day in age should remain in our society, in spite of our realisation that there is no objective evidence for the concept of god (nor free will, for that matter).
For an encore I invite Matt to explain the position that child sex is wrong, from an economist’s perspective.
“Easy, although the person perpetrating the crime may gain some satisfaction, there is an externality from his consumption decision, which is the damage to the child. There is a value judgment that the size of the externality is greater than the benefit of consumption in all cases, and thereby we regulate the consumption of it, by setting a quota of zero.”
You do seem to be saying exactly what Idiot/Savant accuses you of…
Given a theoretical situation where the world was going to be destroyed unless the only person who could save it was allowed to rape a child, it seems like economists would agree that the benefits of saving 6 billion people would far exceed the “externality” of the rape of a child.
However it would still be wrong to let this happen.
[…] people at no right turn are unhappy with our discussion on torture as an alternative to imprisonment. That’s fine; however the last sentence of their post interested […]
I hate to lighten this discussion, but has anyone considered that some types of torture may be enjoyable for some people. Think about the incentives.
Of course as an economist I refuse to make a moral judgement on such people…
[…] people tend to attack us in emotive terms. When my colleague (James) discussed the way people view torture, he was berated for being ‘immoral‘. More recently, supporters of the labour movement […]
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1 | Matt Nolan
September 3, 2007 at 10:51 am
I guess the argument against torture is a ‘slippery slope’ type one. By allowing torture the state is allowing physical violence as a form of punishment for things it does not approve of. As a result, it would be hypocritical for the state to punish people for physical violence in cases where they view something as inappropriate.
Now I hate slippery slope arguments, and I think the one I just wrote down is dumb. After all, we currently lock prisoners up, but its not justifiable for a citizen to lock another citizen in a cage for ‘inappropriate’ actions. As a result, that argument doesn’t hold.
We could say what happens if we discover that the person was innocent, how can we reverse the damage of torture. Of course the argument against that is that, if a person is in jail for 20 years and we discover they are innocent, we can’t give them 20 years back either.
However, introducing torture would ‘normalise’ physical violence to some degree. This could change the structure of the social game we play in a suboptimal way. To some degree, violence breeds violence, any society that is willing to have torture admits a willingness to accept some degree of violence.