In an article I wrote for today’s Daily Standard, I took note of the problem posed by so called “ticking time bombs” for absolutist critics of the use of torture in the war against terrorism.

It seems that even those most vociferously opposed to the use of torture seem to permit an exception in cases in which a terrorist incident might be imminent, for example, if the authorities know that a terrorist hid a nuclear weapon somewhere in New York City and they had 24 hours to beat it out of him.

Andrew Sullivan, one of the shrillest critics of harsh methods of interrogation in the war on terrorism, has a solution to the ethical quandary here.  As I wrote in the Standard, he would permit torture in such a case, but only if we “know–not just suspect–but know that a detainee knows where [the nuclear device] is” (Sullivan’s emphasis). But Sullivan calls this a “one in ten million, never-happened-in-human-history, infinitesimal chance” scenario. What is more, he still believes that the officials who engage in and/or authorize torture in such an incident should be convicted of war crimes (although he allows that if their decision “were retroactively seen as the correct judgment, their sentence might be commuted”). In other words, if he is making an exception, it is narrow to the vanishing point.

A reader by the name of SDB has written me with a brilliant dissection of Sullivan’s position and the moral cowardice entailed in it:

Sullivan’s approach seems to want to make the best of both worlds in dealing with interrogation policy. But his approach is not so much an objection to use of harsh interrogation techniques as an ethically surreptitious ticket to use them in rare cases.

This solution is morally suspect, on Kantian grounds, in that it tacitly endorses using people of good will merely as tools for the production of both international amity, and national security. It not only uses them, but intentionally dehumanizes them in order to make that use palatable. The very act of putting them on trial makes them exiles from the moral community, a special class of scapegoat.

Sullivan’s approach says to the employees of the intelligence community, on the one hand, that we expect them to use these techniques when they deem it necessary (make sure there really is a ticking time bomb on their hands using guidelines that we will not codify for fear of giving the impression that we legally and morally approve use of these techniques). On the other hand, it also says that we expect them to be willing to sacrifice or risk their good names and freedom in so doing, or at the very least, that we expect them to endure a sort of scapegoating for doing so, not only by their own country, through its legal system, but by the international community.

This approach, quite frankly, would be inexcusable moral cowardice. We should have the moral courage either to legally allow interrogations of the kind we have been discussing, or absolutely and in no uncertain terms divest ourselves from them. There should be no ‘nudge-nudge-wink-wink’ encouragement of torture while we also at the same time and with much fanfare declare to the world that we are morally set against such practices. This does smack of disingenuous grandstanding.

Neither should we fall prey to the easy and comforting fiction that these sorts of scenarios and this sort of compromise (if we can call it such) just allows us to act in those rare circumstances in which we must make use of bad people for good ends. To assume that only “bad” people will use the coercive methods in ticking-time-bomb scenarios, and that we are thereby excused in letting them hang out to dry as we put them on trial, and then that by convicting and pardoning them we can acknowledge and make use of their supposed moral depravity while at the same time exhibiting our moral enlightenment and rectitude to the world, is, to say the least, an ethicist’s attempt at squaring a circle, and evidence of a baroque moral preciousness that is worthy of condemnation.

Such a practice is in essence a pathetic case of: encouraging “others do the dirty work,” blaming them for doing so, condemning their character for doing so, making vain attempts at absolving ourselves from responsibility, and reaping the benefits of their acts. It allows “us” to emerge morally unscathed, while the scapegoats take on our sin of cowardice in the guise of a legal prosecution.

Too precious. Too precious. If we are going to admit that there are times that require use of water boarding and other techniques, we should be grown up about it, codify use, create a responsible professional cadre for the purpose and dispense with moral duplicity and prevarication.