The Ethics of Enhanced Interrogations and Torture: A Reappraisal of the Argument

O’Donohue, William; Snipes, Cassandra; Dalto, Georgia; Soto, Cyndy; Maragakis, Alexandros; Im, Sungjin

doi:10.1080/10508422.2013.814088

Cited by 13 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…But the real ethical consideration would say…by producing pain or questioning of somebody, if it does the most good for the most people, it’s entirely ethical, and to do otherwise would be unethical.” (“Military Psychologist Says Harsh Tactics Justified,” 2009; see also Richey, 2007) More recently, a group of six university-based psychologists presented a similar view based on consequentialist ethics, deontological ethics, virtue ethics, and efficacy. They concluded “that psychologists, in order to behave consistently with their moral obligations to the community, to their ethical duties, in order to minimize harm, and to act virtuously may, in certain circumstances, need to participate in torture” (O’Donohue et al, 2014, p. 121; see also O’Donohue, Maragakis, Snipes, & Soto, 2015; for critiques and sharply opposing views, see Arrigo, DeBatto, Rockwood, & Mawe, 2015; Eisenhower, 2017).…”

Section: Ethics Effectiveness Euphemisms and Ambiguitymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Human Rights and Ethics Crisis Facing the World’s Largest Organization of Psychologists

Pope

2019

European Psychologist

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A crisis of human rights and ethics has engulfed the American Psychological Association (APA). The APA acknowledged "this stain on our collective integrity." What caused this continuing crisis? How did the APA become so ethically lost that the president-elect announced the need to reset their moral compass? This article documents decisions and policies that address those questions. It reviews factors that weaken our defense of human rights and ethics, such as confusing the map with the territory, legal duties with ethical duties, guild ethics with professional ethics, and effective methods with ethical methods. It considers cultural, racial, and religious aspects of the crisis. It examines the dangers of euphemism and ambiguity and maps the failure of prohibitions, policies, and public pronouncements. It traces organizational tendencies to point fingers elsewhere, outsource ethics, and roll back reforms. It highlights our responsibility to search actively for opposing views and disconfirming information to help us overcome confirmation bias, GroupThink, WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) bias, optimistic bias, and false consensus. It discusses the APA's crisis in the context of the rollback of human rights in most countries and the US's growing public support for torture. It notes current controversies, including reform rollbacks, subordinating ethics to the power of the state, and three lawsuits alleging false and defamatory statements made with malice. The article suggests six principles to help bring APA's continuing crisis to an end and prevent future crises.

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Section: Ethics Effectiveness Euphemisms and Ambiguitymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Human Rights and Ethics Crisis Facing the World’s Largest Organization of Psychologists

Pope

2019

European Psychologist

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“…Psychologists' purported involvement in socalled enhanced interviewing and its association with torture, however, has led to contemporary debates about psychologists' role and the use of psychological knowledge during interviews and interrogations (see, e.g. Arrigo, DeBatto, Rockwood, & Mawe, 2015;O'Donohue, Maragakis, Snipes, & Soto, 2015;O'Donohue et al, 2014;Suedfeld, 2007).…”

Section: Society's Use Of Law and Coercionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral Challenges for Psychologists Working in Psychology and Law

Allan

2018

Psychiatry, Psychology and Law

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States have an obligation to protect themselves and their citizens from harm, and they use the coercive powers of law to investigate threats, enforce rules and arbitrate disputes, thereby impacting on people's well-being and legal rights and privileges. Psychologists as a collective have a responsibility to use their abilities, knowledge, skill and experience to enhance law's effectiveness, efficiency, and reliability in preventing harm, but their professional behaviour in this collaboration must be moral. They could, however, find their personal values to be inappropriate or there to be insufficient moral guides and could find it difficult to obtain definitive moral guidance from law. The profession's ethical principles do, however, provide well-articulated, generally accepted and profession-appropriate guidance, but practitioners might encounter moral issues that can only be solved by the profession as a whole or society.

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“…Drones and electricity provide the same utility and, so, decisively make-difference in the possibility of enacting violence. It is only through these forms of material agency that, for example, psychologists have felt able to defend their involvement in US torture by suggesting that ‘the military’s concern to find enhanced interrogation techniques that are effective but cause minimal harm may be seen as … virtuous’ (O’Donohue et al, 2014: 120). Likewise, US public support for ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ has always been measured in opinion polls as limited precisely only to materially mediated ‘clean’ torture techniques and so we might infer that a reversion to less ‘clean’ and more ‘visible’ tortures would radically challenge self-conceptions of ‘civilization’ and, it follows, the validity-cum-stability of world political binaries (Gronke and Rejali, 2010).…”

Section: The Materiality Of Death or Detentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

We have never been civilized: Torture and the materiality of world political binaries

Austin

2016

European Journal of International Relations

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This article demonstrates how world political binaries (democratic–autocratic, civilized–barbarian, etc.) are materially, as well as ideationally, constructed. By drawing on the analytical sensibilities of Actor-Network Theory, it is shown that differences in the actions, practices and/or behaviours of states usually situated at one or another extreme of socio-political dichotomies are sometimes dependent only on the availability of, and/or global inequalities in, mundane material ‘allies’, such as airplanes, sedatives and military bases. Empirically, the article evidences this claim by constructing a comparative case study of the Argentine torture regime and ‘Death Flights’ programme (c. 1975–1983) and the post-9/11 US-led ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme. By describing the contours of each case in microsociological detail, I suggest that differences in the forms of violence enacted in these two cases (both involving torture but one resulting in death and the other indefinite detention) were not related to the democratic or ‘civilized’ status of the US and the authoritarian or fascist-cum-barbarian status of Argentina (and the subjective motivations that we attribute such binary signifiers), but, rather, to differences in the agencies of the non-human object of the aircraft available in each case. These empirical findings allow the article to affirm the value-added of Actor-Network Theory’s ‘reconstructive’ method in International Relations for: 1) ‘mangling’ power-saturated world political binaries without relying on critical ‘deconstruction’; 2) revealing the ever-present material-semiotic fragility of those dualisms; and 3) unveiling the ideational ‘purifications’ that sustain dichotomies in spite of their often lacking an empirical basis through a refusal to engage with materiality.

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The Ethics of Enhanced Interrogations and Torture: A Reappraisal of the Argument

Cited by 13 publications

References 13 publications

A Human Rights and Ethics Crisis Facing the World’s Largest Organization of Psychologists

A Human Rights and Ethics Crisis Facing the World’s Largest Organization of Psychologists

Moral Challenges for Psychologists Working in Psychology and Law

We have never been civilized: Torture and the materiality of world political binaries

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