The first example offered, coming from the book Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II, written by Michael Bess, is the political decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II.
“We are presented with an impossible decision among courses of action that are all totally abominable,” . . . . “Either way we choose—kill 200,000, kill 340,000, kill 850,000, kill 1.8 million—we are in effect giving our assent to an abomination in which hundreds of thousands of innocents will suffer and die.
“Either way we choose, we cannot but be morally lessened, spiritually wounded, by the choice.”
Almost immediately, we come up against certain facts, unmentioned but pretty important. First and foremost, there was no real ethical debate over the use of the bomb, except for the insistence of the scientists who had both built and witnessed the test in New Mexico. Because the entire project was secret - even Harry Truman only learned of its existence after the death of Pres. Roosevelt - deliberations centered on the President and his military advisers, with input from the scientists being, for the most part, discounted. There were alternatives considered to actual combat use - a truce with a detonation to be witnessed by Japanese officials who could then decide whether or not to face such destruction was the only serious alternative offered, then discarded as unworkable - but in the end, the rationale for using the atomic bomb spiraled down to one point: we built it as a weapon, we might as well use it. The idea that ethical debate after the fact, whether by secular or sectarian ethicists, has any meaning whatsoever is ludicrous. We are faced with the terrible reality, and burden, that we Americans are the only ones to ever use a nuclear device as a weapon.
In the face of the reality that the circle of those who discussed whether or not to use the bomb was extremely limited, ethical agonizing two generations later is really quite meaningless.
Fast forward, and the article makes some other, equally wrong, observations.
The moral complexities involved in confronting a foe willing to employ mass murder of non-combatants to achieve its ends confront the United States once more as it responds to the threat of terrorism.
The temptation is to stand on the extremes of the left or the right, and escape from the difficult realities on the ground by condemning and judging those who would depart from ideals of human behavior. So, some liberals toss around the word “torture” with little discretion for the interrogation techniques involved or the underlying aims, and some conservatives see nearly all human rights concerns as secondary to national security.
--snip--
In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, when thousands of civilians were murdered on U.S. soil, Americans know the seriousness of the terrorism threat. Real people have to make decisions in a way that often balances competing principles, such as the mandate to protect innocent life and the right of detainees to humane treatment.
--snip--
Sometimes those decisions seem impossible. Is it right, for example, to slap or push prisoners or make them stand in uncomfortable positions if it could prevent a suicide bombing? Is simulated drowning, or waterboarding, allowable if there is strong reason to believe it could disrupt a terrorist plot where hundreds of lives would be at stake?
But someone has to make those decisions. And those of us from religious traditions that prize the free will of an informed moral conscience, and have rich resources in Scripture and tradition to guide us along with experience and our capacity for reason, cannot avoid getting in the middle of these questions where the human condition leaves us with no good alternatives.
First of all, the framework within which such choices are to be made already exists - the legal statutes governing interrogation, including treaty obligations, which under the Constitution, are "the law of the land". Moral agonizing can be set aside precisely because it is only the breach of these legal standards that has created the moral questions examined.
Second, the fable of the ticking time-bomb, presented here, is a non-sequitur of the worst sort, a false choice offered that allows us the comfort of believing we are actually "saving lives" in the process of destroying others. Since there is not a single piece of evidence in the public record that torture has saved a single life, the idea that we are actually face with a real choice on whether to use it is nonsense. Furthermore, anyone with even a modicum of understanding and learning and access to information understands that torture, no matter whether it is named "enhanced interrogation techniques" or not, is outside the acceptable bounds of moral choice. Precisely because there is abundant evidence that it is actually counter-productive, producing worse evidence than other interrogation techniques, it should not even be on the moral radar at all. That we have recently shrugged off a political regime in this country morally vicious enough to offer it as a choice is does not mean, as the article suggests, that "real people have to make these difficult choices." Rather, it means that we as a nation have much for which to repent, including the thought that moral choice includes the immoral treatment of other human beings.
I would suggest that any Christian who believes that we have to face squarely the possibility of torture as a serious moral option needs to sit back and look at all the facts of the matter before offering moral cover to monsters.
