18th May, 2005

JIM REIHER

What an uproar Deakin University academic Professor Mirko Bagaric caused this week when it was revealed that he argued in an article to be published in a US law journal next month that it was morally acceptable to use torture for the greater good.

So - is it ever OK to use torture? What about the scenarios that Professor Bagaric suggested? What if we might just be able to stop a September 11 from happening if we torture a suspect (even to death)?

TORTURE CENTRE: An image from Toul Sleng, a former high school that was taken over by the Khmer Rouge as a interrogation and torture centre to purge Cambodia of perceived dissidents. Now a museum. PICTURE: Simon Gurney   "Making it acceptable for modern governments to use torture for the greater good opens up a hornet’s nest of issues. Any move to do so will result in a slow process of compromise as the term 'greater good' is stretched and changed over time." - Jim Reiher

The short answer has to be no. It is never acceptable to use torture. If it is suddenly morally acceptable to use torture, then it is acceptable to do anything cruel and evil - so long as we can persuade ourselves that ‘greater good’ will come out of it.

Using evil to bring about good is something that non-Christians might be divided over, but it is not something that should confuse a Christian. Paul made it emphatically clear that “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal” (II Corinthians 10:4). James pleaded in his epistle that Christians must not be “friends of the world” because in doing so - in using the methods and wisdom of the world to fight injustice - we become “enemies of God” (James 4:4; see all of 3:13-4:4).

We cannot accept that the ends justify the means. And that is the issue after all. The ends do not justify the means. They never do. Why not? Because every means is an end. Every means might not lead to the end they are suppose to lead to. Every means is vulnerable and tenuous. It will have unpredictable outcomes. And none of us is all-seeing and all-powerful.

Making it acceptable for modern governments to use torture for the greater good opens up a hornet’s nest of issues. Any move to do so will result in a slow process of compromise as the term “greater good” is stretched and changed over time.

It might be arguable that it would be for the greater good to torture a suspected terrorist and possibly prevent another September 11. If that is so, then it is probably acceptable to torture a suspected murdered who might kill again. Or a suspected child molestor who might offend again. Or a suspected house robber who occasionally attacks old people and steals from them. Or a suspected petrol station robber who scares people with knives and needles. Or a suspected mugger who robs people in the street at night. And if extreme, horrible Christians win power and believe in the right to use torture, then maybe it is OK to use torture on people who might hurt others spiritually. Perhaps we can torture people of other faiths, and help save their souls from eternal damnation. And maybe we can even torture less passionate Christians - the liberals and compromisers who don’t hold true doctrine or practice. It might be the way to save their souls too.

And what do you know? We have become the medieval Catholic Church again, carnal and worldly to the core. Powerful, cruel, torturers of heretics, burners of books, inspirers of crusades, and completely opposite to the Christ they claimed to follow. No - Christians should have learnt the lesson of history. It is never acceptable to copy the ways of the world to advance the Kingdom of God. It doesn’t work. If there are apparent results, they are incidental to the truth of the Kingdom. They are illusions unrelated to the real work of the Kingdom.

Torture undermines another Biblical truth: that all people are made in the image of God. It is sin to torture another human being. It is evil against not just the person, but against God Himself.

Some might like to say that there is, even in Scripture, a place for governments to rule with strength. There is a place for governments to make hard decisions and sometimes they have to do somethings that individual Christians are not meant to ever do themselves. Take as an example the fact that governments have police forces that keep law and order. Sometimes the police have to use violence to restrain violent people. Sometimes they have to shoot evil people who are harming others. If that is acceptable, then why isn’t torture acceptable too?

The answer to that is that just because we allow governments to do some things individual Christians should in theory not do, it does not mean governments can or should be allowed to do all things evil. To open the door to legal torture would be the first step to turning our democratic and free countries into extreme right-wing Nazi-like regimes.

Only the very worst governments use and justify torture. And they will say it is like police using guns to prevent bad things from happening. It is a tool of the state. But we know from history that such tools of state are never kept for just “the greater good.” They get used for all sorts of totally unacceptable reasons as well. Personal enemies of the state can be silenced. Vendettas can take place. Evil does reign. The onus is on Professor Bagaric to show even one case in all of history, where a government used torture only for the greater good! How quickly any noble theories have deteriorated into regimes of fear and oppression. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, and dozens of others remind us that evil people use torture. It is not a tool that can be tamed “for good".

Is it ever acceptable to use torture? No. God help us if we drift down that tragic pathway.

Jim Reiher (BA (double major in history), BA in Theology, Dip Ed. MA in Theology (Hons)) is a full time lecturer for Tabor College Victoria, lecturing in church history and New Testament; and also has speciality interest areas in women’s ministry, creative ministry, and the New Age movement. His views are not necessarily those of other Tabor faculty members or of Tabor College.

Got an issue you're struggling with? Simply send an email to editor@sightmagazine.com.au.