How to Justify Torture by Alex Adams

Author:Alex Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media

THREE

PROTECTIVITY:

TORTURE AS PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY

Your baby is tied to a timebomb. You have the terrorist. He tells you you have 1 hour. Do you #torture him to find your baby or let it die?1

— Lee Hurst

In 2017, right-wing British comedian Lee Hurst tweeted this brief and emotive version of the ticking bomb scenario. Though it is crassly framed, and rendered faintly ridiculous by the hashtag, in some ways this example reveals the distilled essence of the ticking bomb scenario. It is bold, it is unrealistic, and it is clearly intended to require its respondent to agree that torture is the right thing to do. Torture is presumed to be an effective action in the circumstances, and the cartoonishly evil terrorist seems to invite it by boasting about his guilt.

A very important aspect of why torture seems right under these conditions, however, is not simply that it is the right thing to do in the face of evil, but also that it is framed as part of parental responsibility. It reveals that ticking bomb torture is not only a military or civil obligation, a matter of defending the nation or the city; sometimes it is a private, personal matter, folded into the fabric of parenthood. This is politically effective and emotionally compelling because of the way that it makes the question intimately personal. Whereas the philosophical concerns of the previous two chapters may feel abstract, the way that this tweet frames the ticking bomb scenario strikes at the heart of the family, at the heart of the private. The appeal to the impulse to protect the family is one of the most reliably relatable forms of sentimentality that is embedded into many types of contemporary popular culture, because protecting children and the vulnerable is, of course, an incredibly important cultural value and a responsibility that is beyond dispute. To align it with a rationale for torture is an extremely effective way of justifying ticking bomb torture, because it makes torture seem legitimate by association. This chapter examines the way in which a varied range of texts represent torture as a natural, obvious aspect of paternal responsibility.

Though the maternal figure is interesting in action movies for the way in which the defence of children legitimates extreme violence — think of Ellen Ripley from the Alien series, Sarah Connor from the Terminator series, or Lisa Brennan in Never Let Go, all of whom go to extreme lengths to protect innocent children — most often ticking bomb torture texts feature masculine torturing protagonists. This is because there is something particular about social expectations of fatherly protectivity which invites men to draw upon aggression — the will to violence that is generally presumed to form so important a part of masculinity — and to use it against anybody who threatens the family unit. Many feminist scholars have pointed out that masculinity (and gender more broadly), rather than being natural, innate, or deterministic, involves a complex and differentiated network of socially determined learned obligations, performances, and expectations.2

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