A Response to Sam on Torture

In End of Faith and subsequent online articles, Sam has offered a kind of reductio ad absurdum against those who believe torture can never be ethically justifiable. The argument runs like this, in skeletal form:

1. Everyone apart from hardline pacifists believes that waging war is sometimes morally justified. 2. Waging war inevitably involves killing innocent people; even children will be made to die horrific deaths. 3. The suffering inflicted by some forms of torture (e.g. waterboarding) pales by comparison to the types of harm inflicted by waging war. 4. It makes no sense, morally speaking, to be open-minded about waging war while being categorically opposed to torture. "\[I\]f we are willing to drop bombs, or even risk that rifle rounds might go astray, we should be willing to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners; if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern war.

I think this argument fails to account for the value of simply *retaining established conventions*. As a matter of historical happenstance, the prohibition on torture is (some credible voices have claimed) as close as we have to an *absolute* prohibition; that is to say, it does not admit to the kind of balancing or proportionality testing that applies to so many other verboten government actions (e.g., violations of basic rights and freedoms). Conventions like this are hard won, and if we knock them down they may never be rebuilt. Consider other strong conventions--like the convention against chemical weapons, or nuclear weapons, or against that technology he mentioned the recent doomsday episode, that would surreptitiously render soldier permanently blind.

We can frame the torture debate in two different ways:

(A): Is torture uniformly worse than other forms of violence, such that a categorical prohibition is justified?

(B) Is the *convention* against torture, now that it's established, worth retaining?

My answer to (A) is 'no', but my answer to (B) is 'yes'. And on the whole I think framing (B) is the more salient question. Welcome any thoughts/critiques.