Abstract
Balfe argues against enhanced interrogation. He particularly focuses on the involvement of U.S. healthcare professionals in enhanced interrogation. He identifies several empirical and normative factors and argues that they are not good reasons to morally justify enhanced interrogation. I argue that his argument can be improved by making two points. First, Balfe considers the reasoning of those healthcare professionals as utilitarian. However, careful consideration of their ideas reveals that their reasoning is consequential rather than utilitarian evaluation. Second, torture is a serious human rights abuse. When healthcare professionals become involved in enhanced interrogation, they violate not only human rights against torture but also human rights to health. Considering the consequential reasoning against human rights abuses, healthcare professionals’ involvement in enhanced interrogation is not morally justified. Supplementing Balfe’s position with these two points makes his argument more complete and convincing, and hence it can contribute to the way which shows that enhanced interrogation is not justified by consequential evaluation.
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Notes
As Sen (2000) mentions, his view is about consequential evaluation, which is “seen as the discipline of responsible choice based on the chooser's evaluation of states of affairs, including consideration of all the relevant consequences viewed in the light of the exact circumstances of that choice” (477). And he also thinks whether “consequential evaluation should be called by the name ‘consequentialism’ or not is a subsidiary and rather uninteresting issue” (477–478). For simplicity, I use these two terms “consequential evaluation” and “consequentialism” interchangeably in this paper.
For simplicity, the version I discuss here is the classical utilitarianism (i.e., hedonist utilitarianism). A particular important point is that the classical utilitarianism assumes that happiness means pleasure, which means it identifies the good with pleasure. For other versions of utilitarianism (especially a comparison between hedonist utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism), see Lazari-Radek and Singer (2014, 200–284; 2017, 42–52).
Both Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights state: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
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The author would like to thank Dr. Isaac Chun-Hai Fung, Ms. Calista Lam and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper.
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Research related to this article has been funded by the Early Career Scheme from the University Grants Committee, Hong Kong S.A.R., China (No. 22611516) from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2019. The project title is “A Philosophical Investigation of the Ethics of Human Rights to Health.” This article does not represent the official positions of the University Grants Committee or Hong Kong S.A.R. Government.
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Chan, B.S.B. Enhanced Interrogation, Consequential Evaluation, and Human Rights to Health. Bioethical Inquiry 16, 455–461 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-019-09927-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-019-09927-z