Learning by Teaching a Class on Intergenerational Ethics — Lesson 7
October 23, 2009Daniel No Comments »Read the following questions one by one and answer “yes” or “no” before moving to the next question. Just go with your gut response and don’t over-think it 
1) Is it ever okay to torture another human being?
2) You have a terrorist in custody. There is a ticking time bomb that is going to go off in the middle of the city within the next 24 hours. 10,000 lives are in danger. This terrorist is the only person who knows where the bomb is. In this case, is it okay to torture him in the hope that he will tell you where the bomb is?
3) Should we hold those who authorize torture accountable, even if the torture is carried out to save lives?
4) The Obama administration says that, with regard to all the torture-related issues, they want to move forward rather than dwell on things in the past. Do you agree with this approach?
The topic of discussion was the ethics of justice, and these are four of the many questions that were asked during class.
I’m not sure what your answers were, but if you think like me, here’s how you might have responded:
1) No
2) Yes
3) Yes
4) Yes
Pretty interesting questions, don’t you think?
Answering “no” to question 1 is in contradiction to answering “yes” to question 2; answering “yes” to question 3 is in contradiction to answering “yes” to question 4.
In fact, when confronted with question 2, I answered “yes,” and immediately asked– with a big grin– if I could withdraw my earlier response to question 1
I think that many, if not most, people would answer “no” to question 1 because they associate the word “torture” with punishment– and torturing someone as a form of punishment is something that most of us find repulsive. For me, the first image that comes to mind when I hear the word “torture” is one of a parent burning a young child’s arm with a lit cigarette, which I definitely find repulsive!
But question 2 specifically defines torture as a means of extracting information rather than punishing someone. Making that distinction explicit is probably why many people would answer “yes” to this question.
I think that the apparent contradiction in my answers to question 3 and 4 demonstrate the power of words.
What if question 4 read like this instead:
4) The Obama administration says that, with regard to all the torture-related issues, they want to run away from the mistakes of the past rather than deal with them head-on. Do you agree with this approach?
I know that’s a pretty extreme re-write of the question, but I think you get my point?
Thinking about my initial responses to those four questions over the past four days, I felt rather troubled. Am I not clear about what I truly believe?
But writing this post has helped me to see that not all apparent contradictions are signs of incongruence (although I’m keenly aware of the fact that we often find justifications for our own bad behavior), but instead are indications of issues which are steeped in nuances and which a gut feeling is not able to immediately make sense of.
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