The intrinsic immorality of torture: still not convinced?

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 18, 2014

Many readers continue to write with arguments against my condemnation of torture. I have already tried to answer the most common objections, so I will not belabor the matter. Let me just make one simple point:

If torture is intrinsically wrong, then it is wrong under all circumstances. We cannot argue that torture is justified in an emergency, any more than we can argue that abortion is justified in extreme cases.

So is torture intrinsically immoral? Don’t ask me; ask the magisterium:

Pope Benedict XVI, speaking on September 6, 2007, said: “I reiterate that the prohibition against torture ‘cannot be contravened under any circumstances.’”

Pope Benedict was quoting from the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (404):

In carrying out investigations, the regulation against the use of torture, even in the case of serious crimes, must be strictly observed: “Christ's disciple refuses every recourse to such methods, which nothing could justify and in which the dignity of man is as much debased in his torturer as in the torturer's victim.” International juridical instruments concerning human rights correctly indicate a prohibition against torture as a principle which cannot be contravened under any circumstances.

That document, in turn, cites a speech given by St. John Paul II to the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1982, in which he said: “Of their own accord, disciples of Christ will reject torture, which nothing can justify, which causes humiliation and suffering to the victim and degrades the tormentor.”

There is an argument abroad that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA cannot be classified as torture because they were used to extract important information. The Catechism teaches that torture is wrong when it is used to extract a confession, my critics admit, but the Catechism says nothing explicitly about the use of torture to extract information.

Frankly I have trouble taking this argument seriously. Pope Benedict made the above remark in a talk to prison chaplains, who would be concerned with confessions; but Pope John Paul II was speaking Red Cross officials, who would not. The two Pontiffs reached the same conclusion.  

In either case, torture is used to force someone to say something that he would not willingly say. Whether it is used to gain a confession or some other information, torture is designed to strip the subject of his freedom of choice, which is essential to his human dignity. It is noteworthy that a theologian who once defended the confession-vs.-information distinction, Father Brian Harrison, later changed his position and said that he “would not defend any proposal, under any circumstances, to use torture for any purpose whatsoever-– not even to gain potentially life-saving information from known terrorists.”