Fountainhead

 America is abuzz on the issue of torture, and everyone is talking past one another.  The left blanketedly admonishes that torture is never appropriate and always ineffective. The right is reactionary, arguing that torture may have prevented mass American deaths and that the left is therefore wrong when it claims torture is never justified. 

These arguments miss the appropriate issue, which is whether it is appropriate for the American government to sanction torture.  The answer is no.  But it is dishonest to claim that under no circumstance could torture be justified. Certainly, torture is justified if one has in possession someone who knows the whereabouts of a villain with the capability of destroying all of mankind, would one not? Torture is justified under less dire circumstances too, and it is dishonest to argue that such circumstances can happen only on television.

So, under some circumstances torture is justified.  But, that does not mean that the American government should ever sanction it.  When the government sanctions torture, as it seems to have done under the Bush Administration, it absolves the individual torturer from responsibility for his or her actions.  The responsibility is spread out amongst the many layers of bureaucracy, executive opinions, legal memos, etc.   Everyone can point a finger at someone else and nobody is to blame. Stated eloquently by the protagonist in Ayn Rand’s The Foutainhead: “Who permitted them to do it?  No particular man among the dozens in authority.  No one cared to permit it or stop it.  No one was responsible.  No one can be held to account. Such is the nature of all collective action.”  If nobody is to blame for torture, then you will generate instances of torture that are unnecessary--under the cover of your American flag.

So, how do we reconcile the suggestion that America should not sanction torture and the truism that torture may be justified sometimes? I believe that we must criminalize torture and prosecute anyone who engages in it.  If the circumstances are so dire that the government agent honestly believes that breaking the spirit of another human being through physical force (i.e. torture) is the only mans to prevent the doomsday event, then that agent should be willing to sacrifice his or her own liberty to prevent the doomsday event.  It is much greater sacrifice to put one’s own liberty at risk to save other human lives, than it is to trample another person’s human rights. This higher threshold will reduce instances of torture and better ensure that it will be used only when absolutely necessary. As a safety valve, the President has the power of pardon if the criminality is unjust under the totality of the circumstances.