At Any Cost

The scenarios are played out in mental practise sessions on morality. Is it ever a legitimate device in the search for vital information that might serve to forestall a dreadful tragedy, to extract needed warning data from an unwilling source by the use of torture? Novels are full of dramatic scenes where those with knowledge of impending disaster to be perpetrated on unwitting, innocent people, are exposed to violent threats and/or violent actions to impress upon them the need to divulge what they know.

Invariably, and without fail, the sensitivities of the viewer are with the fate of those who will be dreadfully harmed by the violent event to be unfolded in its horrific reality. There is total unconcern over the treatment meted out to the individual, seen as sinister and balefully prepared to have people suffer, when he or she is submitted to a routine of physical extortion meant to break their insistence on ignorance of needed details to avert tragedy.

We identify with the innocent and care little for the suffering of the guilty. After all, they have chosen to ally themselves with a conspiracy to harm others, and having done so, deserve themselves to come to harm. On the other hand, society in general detests the very prospect of causing harm to others, particularly the kind of deliberate harm devised to create pain. Our humanity is pained by the prospect.

So as a society we agree that inflicting torture on anyone is a degradation of our shared humanity. And it is an easy agreement to come to, for it is on the side of the angels. Nevertheless, we also agree, as a society, that what we don't know will not distress us. In reading the excellently informative book "The Brain That changes Itself", by Norman Doidge, M.D., one is directly confronted with the fact that medical science continues to experiment endlessly on animals.

These are mice, in large part, used as laboratory devices to extract data that is held to be useful in learning about how our physiognomy works, and in the case of the book's premise, how the brain interacts with the body in animals and in humans. And monkeys also are used. We are aware as well that pigs, dogs, cats, rabbits and other animals are used in laboratory experiments by corporate interests.

We commonly use products whose formulation is based on data received through animal experimentation. Causing great suffering. Because it is forbidden by humane ethics and the law, to experiment directly on humans, we use animal models.

Animals are sensate creatures, who feel pain and who suffer no less than do humans. But we hold ourselves to be animals of a higher order, with a bigger brain and as such in control of everything whereas animals are merely animals, to be used or abused by the higher order of animals on the evolutionary scale. Besides which, valuable knowledge is being captured by their experimental use.

Curiosity and a wish to further the advanced knowledge of medical science was purportedly behind the Nazi-era use of humans whose heritage decreed them to be sub-human, thus usable for laboratory experimentation. All manner of torture was inflicted on men, women and children, helpless to defend themselves, because they were, as Jews, held to be inferior creatures, not fully human, thus their use as experimental organisms, quite acceptable.

This use was for the extraction of data to presumably further science's knowledge about human endurance, disease, pain tolerance, and any other number of indices of medical science enquiries. The grotesque decision-making on the viability of human experimentation because the test subjects were inferior, sub-human genetic types is shunned by the world. Yet the end findings of some of those experiments are held to this day to have value in some instances.

Our distaste for the very concept of inflicting pain and suffering on others through the use of torture speaks well for our values and our notions of justice. But justice can sometimes be a mite more complex than merely sparing misery and extreme discomfort to vile forces intent on causing the ultimate pain to others. There is the conundrum of whom do you care for most ... the source of information that might aid in sparing the lives of countless others, or the prospect of saving those lives?

It shouldn't be an either-or decision-making situation, and it really isn't. Torture, the deliberate use of pain to convince someone that it will continue until he/she divulges all, is, or should be an extremely rare device. But when enough hangs in the balance, when it is possible to save countless lives through the extraction of details enabling the cessation and apprehension of a catastrophic event, perhaps it makes sense to allow for it.

It's just as well to keep in mind that while most human beings would quail in distress and disgust at the very prospect of causing pain to anyone, there are those in any society whose pathology of hatred for others is so remorseless and hatefully extreme that they have no compunction whatever at the slaughter of others. It is these psychopaths that we arm ourselves against, at any cost.

Their existence is no mere figment of our overheated imaginations. We see the results, hear the news and view the carnage of what they create in societal turmoil and mass bloodshed on a continual basis. Much of those horrible events occur elsewhere and remain the concern of those to whom it is directed. But occasionally events transpire that directly impact us as well.

And it is on these occasions when we are challenged to be moral and passive, or reluctantly permissive and determined.