In his book The Lesser Evil, which is about the ethics of responding to terrorism, Michael Ignatieff defends the view that we (in particular, democratic politicians) shouldn't treat moral principles as absolutes which permit no exceptions. The principles he's specially concerned with are those which require us to protect the lives of our citizens, and those which require us to defend their (other) human rights. So his view is that in responding to the threat of terrorism, we shouldn't go all out to increase public security at the cost of abandoning our support for human rights, but neither should we treat human rights as totally inviolable if doing so exposes us to a greatly increased threat to our security. He thinks we should engage in something like moral trade-offs, allowing some strengthening of security at the expense of respect for rights, but also insisting that we have to accept some insecurity - maybe even some lives lost - in order to preserve core aspects of our democratic rights.
Although there are some theoretical problems with Ignatieff's position, I find this a pretty persuasive view, though that's partly because treating moral principles as exceptionless absolutes seems to me to be a hopeless enterprise in all contexts, not just the one created by terrorist actions, since the problems of conflict of absolute principles are so intractable. But of course the truly interesting work remains to be done in explaining just which trade-offs, in which circumstances, are the morally permissible ones to make. Perhaps the most terrible of these problems arises in the case of torture, and here Ignatieff gives a clear account of his position, which is that torture (construed as the deliberate infliction of physical cruelty and pain) is always wrong, since it's the ultimate violation of human dignity, and basic respect for that dignity is a core value of liberal democracies; it shouldn't be sacrificed even under threat of imminent attack. However he does think that there are forms of psychological duress, such as sleep deprivation, disorientation, or disinformation leading to stress, which may legitimately be used by liberal democracies in order to gain information that will save lives.
Ignatieff's position here is of course contentious, as are all views on this hellish issue. But what doesn't seem contentious to me is that his view is morally serious, worthy of consideration and debate, a genuine attempt to solve the dreadful problem of how to give full and proper weight both to the need to protect human life and to the need to respect (other) human rights. Some people, however, do not agree with this assessment: in particular, Conor Gearty (in Index on Censorship) declares that Ignatieff counts as a member of the 'cerebral praetorian guard' which protects and supports those who do truly endorse torture. He is a 'hand-wringing, apologetic apologist' for the torturers, and his willingness to argue that liberal democracy is morally superior to the alternatives has helped create a situation in which anything goes, including torture.
Which aspects of Ignatieff's views generate this extreme hostility? What is it that Gearty particularly objects to? There seem to be, in Gearty’s eyes, two main features that are especially objectionable (though there are many subsidiary ones as well): first is Ignatieff's view that we should treat principles enjoining respect for human rights as non-absolute, to be weighed against other important considerations, and sometimes to be overridden by them; and second is Ignatieff's use of the categories of good and evil, and his claim that terrorists are (sometimes) evil people, and that their success against democracy would be a greater evil than the lesser evil of some rights-violations.
Gearty, in contrast to Ignatieff, seems to think that we should never countenance any violations or infringements of human rights. But then he needs to tell us how we are to handle conflicts between different rights, such as the right to life and the right to liberty, in a way which doesn't involve anything like trade-offs. It's no good saying that our rights must never be violated if respecting one right involves infringing another - and respecting your right to say what you please may very well infringe my right to live in safety, especially if what you want to say incites violence and hatred against me. And though there are some very sophisticated ways of handling this problem, they're not going to be any less complicated, or less open to concerns about abuse, than that which Ignatieff proposes. So on that first count, it's entirely unclear why Ignatieff's position is any more open to the charge of supporting torture than any other way of handling the problem of conflicting moral principles, particularly since Ignatieff explicitly says that torture shouldn't be countenanced.
The second objection is to Ignatieff's deployment of moral categories such as good and evil. Gearty seems to think that these categories are objectionable in themselves (since they involve 'pre-modern... certainty'), and also that they lead us to dreadful places, since (he writes) 'the moment human rights discourse moves... into the realm of good and evil is the moment when it has fatally compromised its integrity... If we are good and they are bad, then of course equality of esteem as between all of us is ludicrous'. The deployment of such concepts, Gearty thinks, will make us slide down a slippery slope to a state in which anything, including torture, goes.
There is so much wrong with Gearty's second objection that it's quite hard to know where to begin. For a start, his claim that judging some people to be bad is incompatible with serious human rights discourse is desperately unconvincing - if it were true, it would mean we couldn't seriously assert that bad people nonetheless have human rights which others should respect. But that's a claim that many supporters of human rights very much want to make.
Another and more profound problem with Gearty's objection comes into view when we notice that both he and Ignatieff are using 'evil' to mean something like 'very bad' or 'very wrong' - they don't seem to differ about that, and therefore that must be the very concept which Gearty thinks Ignatieff shouldn't be deploying. But Gearty does not, of course, really want to give up on these moral categories himself. He thinks that torture is 'in post-post-modern terms plain wrong'. Why pre-modern moral certainties are objectionable but post-post-modern ones aren't is left quite unclear, as is the very distinction between pre-modern and post-post-modern, which seems to be doing the work. This encourages the ignoble thought that what's really going on is that Gearty finds other people's moral certainties objectionable but views his own as beyond reproach. And this sceptical thought is further encouraged by the obvious fact that Gearty thinks that torturers are very bad indeed (brutal, bullying, self-serving, savage) and that unwavering respect for human rights is very good (it involves integrity, decent conduct, being civilized). Even though he doesn't use the term 'evil', his whole piece is saturated with the language of morality, which he deploys quite as vehemently as (though less clearly than) Ignatieff does. The difference is that Ignatieff knows he's engaging in moral discourse, whereas Gearty appears not to do so.
Gearty's objection to the use of moral categories can't really be taken seriously, since he uses them himself. (Much of his criticism of moral language is purveyed in a particularly plodding and flat-footed sarcasm which is an aesthetic offence in its own right, but I'll stick to the moral arguments for just now.) So the substantial bit of his objection to Ignatieff's view must be the slippery slope worry, that permitting any violations of respect for human rights will inexorably lead us to torture. Now, that is a serious worry, one of which Ignatieff is very much aware. But slippery slopes come cheap; they're all over the place, and we can construct a slippery slope from practically any morally permissible action to some terrible practice or other. (Be kind to a prisoner and give him a cup of tea? In no time at all you'll be excusing mass murder!) What Gearty has to show is that the slope from psychological duress to full-blown torture is irresistible, so that there's no way of avoiding the terrible descent, and that there's a better way of handling the tension between security and (other) rights which doesn't generate a comparable slippery slope to the same dreadful terminus. (See here for some incisive commentary on this.)
Gearty never actually says that protecting the lives of the innocent from terrorist attack is morally unimportant, so we should give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is an issue he takes seriously. But he says nothing about how it's to be addressed. What he needs to do, to make his objections cogent, is engage in a substantive dispute with Ignatieff about the specific content of his proposed trade-offs, rather than complain at a more general level about Ignatieff's use of moral language. This general complaint is really a way of avoiding the down-and-dirty ethical work of sorting out how to protect the lives of the innocent while respecting the rights of suspects, and as so often happens with this complaint, the person making it can't sustain the non-moralized discourse to which he's supposedly committed.
Torture is morally wrong, and shouldn't be used. Ignatieff endorses this view explicitly and overtly. Claiming that he's nonetheless a friend and apologist for torturers, on the basis of his willingness to infringe some liberties in order to preserve lives, to permit (though reluctantly) some psychological pressure on suspects, and to use the language of morality (which Gearty himself also uses), is a piece of hysterical overstatement of a kind which debases the currency of serious moral criticism. It makes it harder rather than easier for us to work out how to handle the conflicts of moral duty which terrorist actions raise for liberal democracies. (Eve Garrard)