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No Exceptions to Torture Ban Within the past month, a columnist for The
Philadelphia Inquirer voiced his opinion
on torture on the newspaper’s op-ed page. By using what have been
termed “special case scenarios,” Mark Bowden tries to rationalize
our country’s recourse to torture. He tries to claim that universal
laws against torture should have exceptions. The following column is written in the conviction that the very publication of
such articles has now become a tragic pattern, in itself. There are laws and there are laws. Some laws surely allow for exception-making. A man takes a loaf of bread from a parked car. His children have had nothing to eat for days. Taking what is not one’s own can be judged to be morally innocent, then, because of the circumstances. Evil in the very structure of the action But there are other moral laws that do not admit exception. The moral norm against torture is one of them. No consequences, however good, however life-saving, can justify doing such direct harm to another human being. There is something so deeply antihuman within the very structure of the action, itself, that the agent of the action cannot but directly engage in the evil, no matter what his or her further intentionality. The terrorized becomes the terrorist. A rightful and wide consensus For many years now; moralists of many religious and secular persuasions have spoken out of their different schools of ethics on this. Their schools of thought go by various technical names--Consequentialists, Deontologists, Situationalists, Objectivists. But somehow over these past decades, these ethicists of divergent faiths--even ethicists of no faith-- have always managed to hold together a unique consensus: Torturing another human being must retain its rightful moral taboo-- no matter what the reason, no matter what the consequences. It has been this very healthy human repugnance that has allowed torture to meet universal rejection in manuals of behavior for armed services and in international conventions of behavior in war. But now, suddenly and tragically, there emerges in our time a cave-in that can only be called ominous. What even secular moralists never dreamed of arguing is placed up for argument. One thinks of the famous historian of 20th century totalitarian despotism, Hannah Arendt, and her insight into the gradualism of evil: What once was deemed unthinkable becomes thinkable. What once was seen as monstrous, now becomes banal. Will we as Americans-- now some 67 years after Nuremberg--be the ones who turn the monstrous into the banal? Will the terror of our time corrupt us into becoming the terrorists? Not a political issue, but a moral and Gospel ethic Not long ago, it came to me that a priest was told by one of his parishioners that he should not preach against torture because such preaching would be “political.” How heartbreaking it is to think that such an attitude could begin to penetrate even Catholic thinking. To preach against torture is to preach from the very moral and theological center of the Church, from the very center of what it means to be a Christian. Such preaching has nothing to do with politics. The very idea that Catholic and Christian teaching against torture would be seen as only equal to a political opinion is sign of a deep deterioration of faith. Pope John Paul II put it very succinctly: “Christ’s disciple refuses every recourse to such methods (of torture) which nothing could justify and in which the dignity of the human person is as much debased in his torturer as in the torturer’s victim (Address to the Red Cross, June 15, 1982). Notice the way the Holy Father speaks his word: He does not say “Democrat or. Republican.” He says, “Christ’s disciple refuses every recourse to such methods.” It is sad enough that such a fundamental norm of morality has been suddenly placed up for debate in our country. It would be a spiritual tragedy beyond all reckoning if such a moral collapse enters into our Church. Let Catholics and all people of good will stand strong. Let not the monstrous become banal. Let not the terror of our time corrupt us into becoming the terrorists. Francis X. Meehan
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