Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror
Charles Fried and Gregory Fried
2010
W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN-10: 0393069516
ISBN-13: 978-0393069518
Because It Is Wrong is an inquiry into the legitimacy of torture and the expectation of privacy in the age of terror (although I cringe at the moniker ‘age of terror’). The father-son duo frame their debate of torture on the concept of deontology, which comes from the Greek word deon, “it is necessary” or “it must be done.”
An ethics based in deontology lays down commands: it says that we must do a certain thing for no other reason than because it is the right thing to do, and it commands we not do other things for no other reason than because they are wrong. For deontology, the standard of action is not that the result of a particular act may be good or bad, but that the act itself, apart from any consequences, is inherently right or wrong.1
The authors argue that torture is wrong based on the intrinsic, inestimable value of human life and dignity and they frame that argument using the tenet that man was made in the image of God. “[T]he image of God is invoked to explain a prohibition: to kill a human being is to attack the image of God; as the image of god is inviolable, so are we.”2 In secular terms; human beings are sacred and as such, torture is never justified, not for any reason. “The human form has a worth and divinity we do not want our action, our intelligence to be directed at defacing. This is the kind of judgement–moral or aesthetic or both, take your pick–that men and women live their lives by and may even give their lives for.”3
I think think this best sums up their statement against torture:
Torture grossly offends the bedrock premise that every human being is a locus of inestimable value: a being with plans, emotions, rational and aesthetic or spiritual capacities, and the capacity to form relations to other persons. Altogether, we would call these aspects of a person her soul. Torture offends that premise because it distorts, destroys, or impairs the physical envelope that contains, enables, and expresses the person’s soul.4
The root of the authors’ privacy debate is the privacy dilemma; man’s “inadequacy and our finitude.”
We are liable to be unjust, and so to be investigated. But our powers of knowledge and interpretation are limited, and so we may misconstrue what we find. To grant human investigators the powers of the divine is to give them a warrant that necessarily exceeds their abilities and will be misused and abused. The right of privacy is, admittedly, a second best, an acknowledgement of human imperfection. But it serves as a hedge against the worst excesses of that imperfection when it is married to political authority, even legitimate authority. Human beings should never stand absolutely naked before human authority.5
The authors argue that citizens have a reasonable right to privacy in that states must be authorized to violate our privacy, within legal limits, in order to protect the greater society. This caries them into the debate of the Bush era ‘terror surveillance program’, the key argument against which is the fact that it didn’t comply with FISA. Though both authors agree that the program was outside the law, they differ on how to deal with it’s illegality. One argues that by prosecuting the Bush administration, the law becomes a sword wielded by those in power against their opponents and thus a perversion of the law:
Thomas More was right that unwavering insistence on the law is a shild against tyrannical power; but in prosecutions and punishment, the law works not as a shild but as a sword. The decision to swing that sword, the decisions whether to prosecute or punish are questions of prudence, discretion, Aristotle’s epieikeia.6
In conclusion, I find the book extremely relevant to the debate on torture (or enhanced interrogation) and privacy and it has helped shape my opinions on both subjects, tremendously.
1Charles Fried and Gregory Fried, Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010) 14-15
2ibid. 39
3ibid. 48
4ibid. 55
5ibid. 98
6ibid. 169
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