James Bond and Philosophy by James South

Author:James South
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780812698169
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2012-06-23T08:01:17+00:00

The Ethics of Torture

A part of the problem we have here is that ordinary morality—the moral standards that people typically hold—has both deontological and consequentialist components. Most people think that some actions are wrong in themselves, yet they also think that consequences matter a lot to the moral status of an action. These two beliefs can clash, and when they do, we’re sometimes left in a morally fuzzy place. James Bond is an assassin—he pre-emptively kills public figures without a trial. Currently in the United States, this kind of action is strictly prohibited. But should it be? This policy hasn’t always been in place, as the CIA’s failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro in the 1960s illustrate. Was that policy a good one, morally speaking, and were we wrong to change it, thus prohibiting the possibility of the double-0 agent? Or, morally speaking, is it a good thing that we now have a blanket prohibition on assassination?

This kind of moral puzzle is about James Bond, but it’s not only about him; it concerns other important real-world policy questions as well. Besides guaranteeing every person a fair trial, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights also strictly prohibits the use of torture in interrogation. Like the prohibition on assassination, this prohibition on torture is also the current policy of the United States government. But should it be? The Bond books and movies also address the morality of torture. Torture often conjures bad memories for the Bond fan; when torture comes up in the world of Bond, it’s often 007 getting the worst of it, and at the hands of some particularly nasty bad guys. In the very first Bond novel Casino Royale, Bond is tortured by having his genitals beaten, and the torture continues through the movie Die Another Day, where Bond endures months of physical and psychological torture at the hands of North Koreans throughout the title sequence. There’s no question that those incidents of torture are morally reprehensible, but other cases of torture might be less clear.

This question has received a lot of attention since the events of September 11th, 2001, because we can imagine a scenario where torture might be the only way to stop another similar event in the future. Imagine that we have very strong evidence that a similar attack is imminent and that, along with this strong evidence, we have very good reason to believe that a recently captured person is the only person with information that could conclusively stop the attack. The clock is ticking, the attack is minutes away, thousands of innocent lives are at grave risk, and the potential informant is saying nothing. What then? Is torture permissible, or is it not? This question is a difficult one, made cloudier by questions about whether or not the torture is likely to yield true information. As hard a question as it is, at least some people out there are open to the idea that, under just the right set of circumstances, torture might be the right thing to do, morally speaking.

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