Torture as an absolute wrong: if waterboarding works, does that make it morally acceptable?

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Columns - Column

AFTER THE Senate Intelligence Committee released a summary of its torture report in December, NBC's Chuck Todd asked former Vice President Dick Cheney if he was "OK" with the fact that a quarter of the suspected terrorists held in secret CIA prisons during the Bush administration "turned out to be innocent." Todd noted that one of those mistakenly detained men died of hypothermia after being doused with water and left chained to a concrete wall in a cell as cold as a meat locker.

Cheney replied that the end--to "get the guys who did 9/11" and "avoid another attack against the United States"--justified the means. "I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective," he said.

Charles Fried, a Harvard law professor who served as solicitor general during the Reagan administration, and his son Gregory, a philosophy professor at Suffolk University, offer a bracing alternative to Cheney's creepy consequentialism in their 2010 book Because It Is Wrong. They argue that torture is wrong not just when it's inflicted on innocents, and not just when it fails to produce lifesaving information, but always and everywhere.

That claim is bolder than it may seem. As the Frieds note, most commentators "make an exception for grave emergencies," as in "the so-called ticking-bomb scenario," where torturing a terrorist is the only way to prevent an imminent explosion that will kill many people. "These arguments try to have it both ways," they write. "Torture is never justified, but then in some cases it might be justified after all." The contradiction is reconciled "by supposing that the justifying circumstances will never come up."

The Senate report, for instance, argues that the CIA's brutal methods did not yield useful information that could not have been obtained through other means. In fact, it says, waterboarding and the other "enhanced interrogation techniques" were often counterproductive, eliciting false information or discouraging cooperation. Maybe that's true, but it's awfully convenient. If torture is never useful, eschewing it entails no tradeoffs.

The Frieds' argument requires no such assumption. They acknowledge that torture may save lives but reject it anyway, arguing that...