When Torture is Necessary

There's an alarming article in the Northern Virginia Journal (http://www.jrnl.com/PDFs/nva/wednesday.pdf) this morning. Stephen Barlas, in an article entitled "When Torture Is Necessary", argues that government sanctioned torture in some cases is both justifiable and advisable. He argues that when many lives are at stake it's only reasonable to engage in torture if that act has a good chance of preventing the loss of life. (To look up the article I'm afraid one has to download the PDF, and then search on 'Barlas' or go to p. 13 of the document; also, the naming convention suggests that the pdf for today's paper won't last more than a week) I'm certain that this argument is the same one used by Israel and totalitarian regimes that Amnesty International (and the U.S.) have typically denounced as human rights abusers.

What kind of torture is justified according to Barlas? He argues that it has to go beyond this girly-man torture that they performed at Guantamano Bay. He writes, "The ACLU complained last week about torture used at Guantamano Bay, which included grabbing prisoners' genitals and bending back their fingers. Oh my! Worse than that happens every day in the pickup basketball game I play in" (he must play basketball at Ryker's or something.)  He goes on to suggest that anything short of murdering the person should be permissible if the threat is serious enough.

I'm alarmed because this is a fairly mainstream newspaper. Granted, it's no Washington Post or NYT but it's also not a Larouche pamphlet or Hare Krishna literature. I wonder if this opinion is finding wider acceptance among the punditry.

Barlas seems to be using a classic utilitarian argument for the legitimacy of torture. The basic (implicit) argument is that the negative utility of torture experienced by a small number of bad guys is swamped by the negative utility that would be generated in society if they aren't tortured; hence, when a bit of torture has a reasonable probability of saving a lot of people, then torture is okay.  Contrary to Barlas, I think this is just a  reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism. In other words, if utilitarianism forces us to this conclusion than the basic premises of utilitarianism must be flawed. I suppose that a utilitarian might attempt to denounce government torture and still save the theory by arguing that when a person is tortured by government it generates a vast amount of negative utility because of the widespread fear and loathing that it generates towards the torture perpetrator. Hence, utilitarianism does not support government torture even in extreme cases in which performing torture might save a large number of people. But if one wants to save utilitarianism this way, then if we want to continue to embrace utilitarianism, aren't we still forced to accept the conclusion that torture is okay as long as it is kept secret?