Justification for facilitating torture

The case of the APA and its members who participated in coercive interrogations.

When I read about psychologists who participated in the Bush administration approved interrogation/torture sessions, I recoil in contempt. The contempt is heightened when I read that, since 2002, the American Psychological Association (APA) has effectively condoned and offered justifications for its members’ participation. Is my attitude justified?

Some say no. They do so on the basis of a counterfactual claim: interrogations would have been worse for detainees had it not been for psychologists’ participation. This argument uses the following standard for ethical action: doing something is justified if doing it leads to better outcomes than not doing it. Applied to our psychologists’ participation in torturous interrogation, we can respond, Really? Their participation led to torture and the claim is that without them matters would have been worse. Really, worse than being tortured?

Even if we grant that there are degrees of torture and that psychologists’ participation mitigated the degree of torture, the counterfactual claim is specious because it uses the wrong baseline for comparison. If I torture you less than someone else would have, then that results in a better state of affairs; but, it obviously can’t be used to justify what I am doing. As an aside, compare a similarly specious argument often made for paying the minimum conceivable wage to third-world workers: if I didn’t bring my business over there, they would be unemployed; therefore, since $1/day is better than the nothing they would have gotten, that’s what I’m justified in paying.

At the very least, then, a comparative claim used to justify action must use as a baseline not how things are or would have been without the action, but rather how things would have been if I had acted in all the ways I could have acted. In the case of the torturer, assuming she can stop torturing, that would represent the best outcome (in the case of the entrepreneur, a better outcome would be to pay the just amount which is certainly more than $1/day), and what she does in fact do can be justified only if it is better than that. So, a better standard of justification would be this: my action is justified if doing it is better than anything else that I could have done. I’m not saying that this is the correct standard, but we can use it for our present purposes of evaluating justification for facilitating torture.

We can begin by looking at a brief history of the APA’s ethics code that is relevant to conflict between law and professional ethics. We can note that prior to 2001, the APA’s ethics policy suggested that conflicts be ‘responsibly resolved’ by the psychologist. This open-endedness left it open to the psychologist to follow her conscience in potentially violating positive law. Post 9/11, the policy was revised to read that obeying the law, irrespective of its content, would be sufficient for its members ethical standing. [For a more detailed discussion of the APA’s ethical standards, see Kenneth S. Pope’s, Ph.D., ABPP and Thomas G. Gutheil’s, M.D. article, here.]

Let’s now think of the culpability of individual psychologists and their role in torturous interrogations. If their participation is to be justified, they must claim that their participation leads to better outcomes than anything else they could have done. Is this plausible? The director of the APA’s ethics office, Stephen Behnke, argues for the presence of psychologists as follows:

APA frames a role that psychologists have unique training to fill: the role of observing interrogations in order to guard against ‘behavioral drift’ on the part of interrogators. Behavioral drift, which may arise in high stress situations where there is insufficient ethical guidance or oversight, involves a deviation from professionally and ethically acceptable behavior and so may lead to coercive interrogation techniques. Psychologists, as experts in human behavior, are trained to observe and intervene to prevent behavioral drift.

On this view, the chief benefit of psychologists’ participation lies in their ethical and professional competencies, which competencies can be used to thwart coercion by morally drifting interrogators. I don’t know why Behnke believes psychologists possess particular ethical dispositions and/or competencies, but even if they were uniquely trained in that regard, by the APA’s own ethical standards discussed above, if CIA interrogators ‘legally’ coerced information, no psychologist would have authority to intervene into or report such coercion. The official policy belies the individual justification. Now, if even if we are to imagine a heroic psychologist who bucked the law, this doesn’t absolve the other psychologists who not only ‘monitored’ interrogations but devised, shaped, and directed an entire interrogation regime. This describes the roles of Bruce Jessen and Col. Morgan Banks who are both believed to have deployed their expertise in evading interrogation to develop the C.I.A’s and military’s S.E.R.E interrogation program (survival, evasion, resistance and escape). Can we say of such a psychologist that his participation is better than anything else he could have done?

Suppose neither had participated at all, as surely was open to them, then an entire regimen of coercive interrogations would have been eliminated from existence. And surely that outweighs any conceivable benefit, if such there be, of their actual participation. Behnke might retort that the way the two devised their interrogation regime led to safer methods than would have been available without them. Even if this is true (I’m highly skeptical), it uses the specious comparative benchmark discussed above. Given that their methodology has been established to be torturous, then the correct standard of comparison is not whether without them the CIA would have invented more torturous methods, but rather whether they could have devised effective interrogation methods that shunned any hint of coercion. By the many accounts of experienced FBI interrogators, the most effective method does not involve coercion, and we can surmise that both Jessen and Banks could have built a program around that truth.

Let’s leave aside the case of individuals and turn to the topic of institutional responsibility for facilitating torture. We can note firstly that, in the context of political policy and as compared to individuals, institutions have a far broader range of counterfactual actions available to them. This is partially because they are responsible for many of the rules under which individuals must act and partially because of the great causal powers institutions have in the modern world. This is an often neglected fact and, in my opinion, it implicates institutions in a broader range of responsibilities than is normally acknowledged. We need to keep this in mind when we assess the APA’s actions and omissions.

We know that around 2006 after reporting made clear the coercive nature of U.S. interrogations, the Amercian Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association both issued prohibitions on its members from even being present at interrogations. Against this background, how should we assess the APA’s insistence on the benefits of psychologists’ participation. Given the existing ban by the AMA and the Am Psychiatric Assoc., the APA arguably could have put a stop to the whole sordid mess by following suit. Here’s why: as mentioned above, it is continually argued, both by the heads of the APA and military brass, that participation by psychologists is essential to keeping interrogations safe. Their absence, then, would entail unsafe interrogations. Therefore, at the very least, the APA’s prohibiting member participation would have put considerable political pressure on the administration to discontinue these, by their own lights, unsafe interrogations. So, this is a conceivable, even probable, counterfactual outcome, one which we can use to assess the goodness of the actual outcome. What was the actual outcome? Detainee deaths and psychologically broken human beings. By the standard set out above, the APA’s actions were unjustified, and it should be found culpable for torture.

The issue of individual and institutional culpability for the torture that took place under U.S. control is a complex problem. Nevertheless, the only argument I’ve seen defending the participation by APA members is specious, and the blame goes to the individual psychologists who participated in coercive interrogations but also, and perhaps to an even greater degree, the professional association which endorsed such participation.