Marvin Olasky set off some vigorous discussion over at Worldmagblog by quoting Thomas Sowell, and asking what people thought. Some of it spilled my way, with someone writing and asking what I thought. Here is how Marvin framed the question:
“Re. the recent Senate debate on banning torture, Thomas Sowell writes, ‘If a captured terrorist knows where a nuclear bomb has been planted in some American city, and when it is timed to go off, are millions of Americans to be allowed to be incinerated because we have become too squeamish to get that information out of him by whatever means are necessary? What a price to pay for moral exhibitionism or political grandstanding!’ What is a biblical worldview concerning the use of torture in extreme life-saving circumstances?”
The problem is with how Sowell’s question is framed. If we would feel pressure to torture a terrorist to get info out of him (because millions of lives are at stake), then we would also feel pressure to use whatever means would actually get him to talk. And as torturers with no scruples know, one of the best ways to get a bad guy to talk is to threaten others who are dear to him instead of threatening the bad guy himself — say the terrorist’s four-year-old daughter. If we tortured her we would probably get the information quicker, and would not have to race it down to the final seconds, down to the red wire/green wire moment in bad action movies. Of course, if we tortured her it could not be to “keep the bad guys from winning” because we have then become the bad guys trying to win. This is why the ethical problem cannot be solved by means of calculus — one life for millions. The reason it cannot be done this way is that in a world like ours, that one life could easily be the life of the Lord Jesus, as Caiphas famously argued.
So the question should not be “how much pressure would we be under in such a scenario to break God’s law?” Setting cases up this way is a bad way to proceed. This is how the “situation ethics” guys of a few decades back used to argue. Suppose, they would say, a woman could get out of a concentration camp, save the life of her child, and her husband, and all she had to do was commit adultery with the camp guard. Two guards? Difficult cases make bad law. If we form our ethical boundaries under pressure (which is what such extreme cases encourage us to do), then the first thing you know we are suddenly three guys in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean drawing straws over which one gets eaten. But you don’t jump into the middle of some gnarly circumstance and then figure out what you might want to do. Rather, you ask the question simply, in the clear light of day, answer it from Scripture, and then try to live that way regardless of what happens. “Is cannibalism okay in the Bible? No.”
The Bible is a book full of godly warfare, and full of situations where you might think torture would be “appropriate.” If you think drastic circumstances should drive this sort of thing, then the Bible has drastic circumstances. But it is notable that we don’t have any torture (in the thumbscrews sense) in the Bible. And that should be sufficient for us.
Of course, this also has to be balanced against the fact that many liberals are defining torture at Gitmo as being forced to eat chicken pilaffe [my wife tells me, dictionary in hand, that this is supposed to be spelled pilaf. I leave my original attempt here as an incentive to humility] for three nights running. But the war against these jihadists isn’t bean bag, and nothing said here should be construed as advocating color television in each terrorist’s cell, along with daily backrubs.