Anti-Climacus

WELL: Amanda Butler (who's on this crazy good-theoretical question-tear lately) asks about the comparative ethics of torture to prevent further injury to soldiers versus that to protect civilians from further injury. It's an interesting post. My thoughts:

Obviously, I'm not a utilitarian, so the moral status of torture is constant for me--it's always wrong (which is not to say it should never be done). That being said, I think the differentiation works this way: torturing anyone from the opposite side is something of a crapshoot, ethically speaking: sometimes the circumstances suggest that it's okay to do (such as when large numbers of civilians are threatened) and sometimes it's not okay (when the comparative advantage to be gained is small), but, significantly, there's no hard and fast rule to determine when to torture and when not to torture (this is presumably exacerbated by the fact that no one knows what the potential torture-ee knows, if anything). This suggests, in a purely game-theoretic sort of way, that it will always make sense to torture someone from the other side: the potential for information gain is great, and the marginal increase in inhumanity that would occur in the war would not really be that great.

But, of course, it's one thing if it's someone else's people being tortured, and another thing entirely when it's your own. Civilian leaders would (hopefully) feel that exposing their men and women to any more risk than necessary is unacceptable, and thus would agree (because this logic would apply to most every government everywhere) to artificially and irrationally* move the acceptable behavior. This seems to me to be a good explanation of where the convention against torture comes from.

The difference between situations (that is, the troop-saving versus civilian-saving) is because soldiers, in some sense, sign on to the fact that they may well end up dying as a part of their service, and because behaving rationally** in this situation would have a result, generally speaking, worse than if there were no torture***.

*in the sense that it makes far more sense to torture if there's going to be any potential benefit from it
**in the same sense as above
***because we can easily construe the hypothetical in which an armed forces tortures all of their prisoners and comes up with no information, which seems to fail morally on either a utilitarian or deontologist system of morality