To do a great right, do a little wrong. But where does it end?

VIEWERS of the recent BBC 2 dramatisation of life in ancient Rome will no doubt agree that the old town was a pretty rough spot to be born in.

Ancient Rome, according to the BBC’s own blurb, was a place where “mercy was a weakness, cruelty a virtue, and all that mattered was personal honour, loyalty to yourself and your family.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, talked about the Roman empire at Christmas. “Christ was born into a society we can hardly imagine in which any notion of the sanctity of every life was completely alien,” he said.

The archbishop went on to catalogue some of the worse excesses of the ancient empire. Some people were born only to die - handicapped children or, in some places, female children were exposed on hillsides to freeze or starve. Slaves existed only to serve every desire of their masters. Foreigners were not really considered human. Gladiators had to kill or be killed for public amusement.

Although we have moved away from that in western culture at least (female children, according to recent reports, are often murdered or aborted in India, particularly if no boy has yet been born), Dr Williams’ point was that we in the civilised west cannot look back on ancient atrocities with complacency.

He explained why: “A country (the UK) with our current rates of abortion cannot afford to rest on its ethical laurels; there is effective slavery among the poorest of our world; civilised societies have started flirting once again with the idea that torture might be acceptable.”

According to Dr Williams, we haven’t left Roman-style inhumanity entirely behind. What has changed, he says, is that no one can now take these evils for granted without being challenged by “the main imaginative and moral currents of our European and Middle Eastern cultural history.”

He’s saying we have a greater capacity now to think ourselves out of trouble. Our religious and philosophical heritage has given us the tools to fight off barbarism. But it’s a struggle all the same. The phenomenon of abortion is probably the most obvious example of how uncivilised western society can be. Its legalisation is often presented as a sign of modernisation. We don’t tend to associate abortion with the exposure of unwanted children in the ancient or uncivilised world. As a result, those people who tell us that our world is constantly improving don’t manage to see abortion as the regression to uncivilised behaviour that it is.

Rowan Williams’s reference to the flirtation of western societies with torture is all the more fascinating and revealing for that reason.

Torture is something we thought we’d moved away from in these parts. We’ve signed conventions against it. We look down on countries that practise it.

And yet it may be coming back into vogue. The debate about US ‘rendition’ of terrorist suspects to countries that still use the thumbscrew is marked by passionate arguments on both sides. When you factor out the opposition that is motivated primarily by hatred of America and its foreign policy, you find a lot of people taking the pragmatic approach. Many people, if they felt their security was threatened, would not close the door completely on torture if it gave them the information that would make them feel safe again.

The most common argument made for torture is the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario. A bomb is planted in a city. The police have the obvious terrorist suspect.

It’s a ‘Dirty Harry’ type situation where a little unlawful behaviour from the police might save a victim or many victims. Wouldn’t you allow torture in this case if it could save the lives of many innocent people?

Or, as Shakespeare’s Bassanio put it: “To do a great right, do a little wrong.” Of course, the first problem with such argumentation is its hypothetical nature. In the real world, there is never any certainty that the person concerned has placed the bomb, or that the danger is so imminent that humane methods of interrogation should be ruled out.

But let’s accept that such a situation could arise.

To allow this kind of State intervention in the lives of individuals, to permit actual torture in order to protect populations hypothetically under threat would be to release an uncontrollable force. In fact, this is exactly what 20th century totalitarian regimes used as a basis for committing horrible crimes.

IN 1917, the Bolsheviks held out the promise of a socialist paradise to justify the elimination of all opponents. And the persecution and murder of Jews, disabled people and other minorities in Nazi Germany was presented in terms of creating a better future for the majority.

The second problem with the ‘ticking bomb’ argument is that it is based on a ‘quantitative’ approach to ethics in politics. It’s not that the decision-makers are bad people. But their aims change. They no longer want to do good and avoid evil. Instead, they quantify the evil, and aim to do as little of it as possible. And so the breaking of a person’s spirit- for that is what torture seeks to do - is seen as less serious than not making every possible effort to save the lives of the city’s inhabitants. The Christian approach to ethics is rightly suspicious of the notion that your ‘good’ intentions are all that matter.

The bomb threatens the city, so the suspect may be tortured. But what if the ‘best’ way to torture the suspect is to torment the suspect’s child? Pretty soon, it becomes hard not to come up with good reasons to justify evil actions.

There are other reasons, of course, why torture isn’t a very good idea. Intelligence services generally admit that such methods of investigation rarely produce reliable results and even they say such methods should only be used as ‘a last resort’.

There is also the credibility factor. The US and British invasion of Iraq was presented as a moral cause - eliminating a threat against the west and freeing a people from the shackles of a brutal dictatorship. The US and Britain, in so far as they are implicated in torture, risk giving the impression that there is no moral difference between them and their opponents. They will also have to live with increased hatred, humiliation and thirst for revenge throughout the Muslim world which will be triggered by any acts of torture they condone.

These are but side issues, however. The real question is whether torture can ever be right in itself. The right answer to that question can be found by looking at what torture really is. In its essence it is the application of physical or psychological injury to human beings in order to reduce them to what the torturer wishes them to be. It attempts to break a person’s spirit - to make him or her talk or, as in many cultures, to make him or her shut up.

When you consider it in its essence, surely it makes no difference whether the torturer is a Chinese government official brainwashing a dissident to accept the communist ideology, or a well-intentioned US intelligence officer trying to extort information from a terrorist suspect in Guantanamo.

Even if torture could lead to short-term benefits, the citizens of a civilised society must ask if they can ever cultivate the fruit of that poisoned tree.