ethics question. [is beating up/torturing suspects ok?]

Wait, why the hell would they need to "rough up" the person? How would "roughing up" save anyone?

Okay Lenny,

Your children have been kidnapped. They're being held hostage. You get to appoint the person who handles the case when one of the villains is captured.

The first candidate stands there talking about human rights and ethics and the ethical responsibility to treat villains who use children as hostages with respect and never compromise their physical or psychological integrity.

The second candidate thinks that childrens' lives are infinitely more important than any ethical imperative to treat the villain nicely. He/she brought along pliers, bamboo splinters, a soldering iron and sundry other goods, the mere sight of which might loosen the villain's tongue.

They're your kids Lenny. You get to make the choice. What'll it be?

People lie and tell the torturer what they want to hear. Lies are generally more plausible than the truth, so if you want to stop the torture, it's better to lie.

I imagine your character would rather have the truth than a plausible-sounding lie.

Which isn't to say he won't lose control and beat someone. But the chances of that actually helping anything are rather slim.

Polenth said:

Which isn't to say he won't lose control and beat someone. But the chances of that actually helping anything are rather slim.

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And running the risk of ending up in court - and losing their job - themselves.

I am guessing that the following is true in your story:

- The woman is doing something illegal (like smuggling)
- The baddies have her kids held hostage as assurance against her not doing this illegal thing.
- There is someone watching her (or accompanying her) while she does this to make sure she carries it out.
- the FBI/Police know that she is being forced against her will (somehow) and their intention is to make the arrest look convincing so that the observers don't think she is giving up voluntarily and kill her kids.

Is this right? IN which case, consider the following.

Police and other agencies often have procedures for extracting an undercover operative which do include arresting them (because it looks convincing... they want to have a quick chat/debrief with their operative so they pull them in for speeding or something have their chat and then let them go).

The bad guys are not nice people, right? I think their thought on seeing the woman arrested would be 'Well, she's f**ked that up, we told her we'd kill her kids if she didn't get the drugs through and she hasn't and may well be talking to the police about us...' and then carry out the threat. They aren't going to be thinking 'well, she tried. Not her fault she got arrested and beaten up. We'll let her kids go and call this a lost cause and try a new plan...'

Given the police know her children are at risk (and dead kids are a major PR disaster for law enforcement even beyond the compassion angle) I think they are more likely to 'wait and watch'. Let her complete the drop (keeping tabs on whoever she delivers the goods to) and get back to the badguys so she can reclaim her kids before moving on the whole organisation at once. They may even have some one working on finding the kids (chasing leads, tailing suspects, checking for appropriate places to hold some kids safely...) and could make a swoop to rescue them and report to the guys in the airport so they can swoop on the woman without endangering her kids.

With the above logical conclusions in mind, I beleive that it is therefore more likely that any 'arrest and beat up' plan is going to be carried out by the sort of maverick cop who exists only to break the rules and create plot that cop shows are made for. This means he is acting without authorisation and if it goes tits up his head is on the block... ethical concerns are not going to enter into it, at least not in the planning stage. He will move in without thinking about that (his more sensible partner may try to stop him with a few concerns but, goddamnit, we haven't got time to mess around with ethics, that woman is in trouble now!)

Er guys, I didn't think the question was "what is plausible" but "are they allowed" as in, "is torture permitted within police proceedings in the event that there are hostages or other special circumstances".

Which... isn't the answer pretty much "no"?

Of course it's okay to rough someone up. It's just not okay to get caught roughing someone up.

Torture is evil.

Rufus Coppertop said:

Okay Lenny,

Your children have been kidnapped. They're being held hostage. You get to appoint the person who handles the case when one of the villains is captured.

The first candidate stands there talking about human rights and ethics and the ethical responsibility to treat villains who use children as hostages with respect and never compromise their physical or psychological integrity.

The second candidate thinks that childrens' lives are infinitely more important than any ethical imperative to treat the villain nicely. He/she brought along pliers, bamboo splinters, a soldering iron and sundry other goods, the mere sight of which might loosen the villain's tongue.

They're your kids Lenny. You get to make the choice. What'll it be?

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Which is why family shouldn't be allowed to be involved with the case.

The line between harsh interrogation and torture can be debated, as well the usefulness 'harsh measures'; beyond that, different countries have different standards. It's only in the world of fiction that law enforcement regularly gets away with that kind of thing/gets the right target. Even if it's not, the law enforcement officers don't seem to get reprimanded too often.

If you're interested in the debate over such treatment, look up the 'ticking time bomb scenario', and the ethical/moral viewpoints on each side.

Lenny,

I think you are asking several questions in one:

Yes, it is illegal for LE to abuse someone...what counts as abuse is fairly well-published what with the issues at Guantanamo, and ploice rules are different than the rules for handling enemy combatants.

No, it is not terribly moral in my mind, and there is a lot of question about how useful it is....some of the leading CIA interrogators have come out pretty harshly on waterboarding and other methods of "torture", saying the info it pulls up tends to be much less reliable.

Some will find it morally reprehensible in your books, others will enjoy it as a sort of cathartic release....here we have an imaginary character with no real consequence doing what a part of us would gladly do in his shoes, and we can root for him while keeping our own hands "clean".

Because of the rules in place (cops can't strike someone, for example, although I"m sure this gets "fudged" on occasion) you will need to address the credibility of your scenario--a lone cop "accidentally" smacking a suspect's head into the door of his squad car is gonna be far more plausible than half the department taking turns cutting fingers off a guy to extract information.



so on the whole, no, the FBI would not be allowed to beat this woman, and that doesn't mean it couldn't happen anyway, but the farther you go, the harder it is gonna be for your reader to swallow. Ethically, I don't believe they should do such a thing, but ethics are subjective--many people will tell you the end justifies the means. And take my kid, I might become one of them.

Torture is never ethical. NEVER. Period.

In some places, it's legal; in others, not so much.

Whether you have characters do it or not isn't an issue of either ethics or law. It's a matter of being true to your story.

If you have your characters do it, there will be both ethical and legal ramifications, depending on many things.

You have to be true to your story.

Lhipenwhe said:

Which is why family shouldn't be allowed to be involved with the case.

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Exactly. Remember Michael Dukakis? He got asked if he'd still be against capital punishment if his wife were raped and murdered. The only possible answer to that is, "If that happened, I'd kill the guy with my bare hands. It would be the job of the police to stop me."

That's why it's so crazy to have victims' families observing and commenting on executions. What they have to say only tells us their feelings, not anything useful.

In fiction, in my experience, I can and do sympathize with characters who are unnecessarily rough in handling really bad people. I can't read with any pleasure books in which the character deliberately tortures or kills them.

Is it ethical? Certainly not. Is your character ethical? That's the real question.

If you do have torture, the one thing I'd be cautious about is making it about a real government agency. Starts to get into dubious territory there.

Whether it's ethical depends on your ethics. Many of us can sympathise with the idea that it's okay to cause a little pain to someone in order to avoid causing a great deal of pain to someone else. We call that 'ends justify the means'. If I saw someone pinning someone else down and raping them, would I hit them over the head with a shovel to make them stop? Very likely I would. Also very likely the courts might think that was excessive force. Both the courts and I could be right.

is 'basic writing questions' the best home for this thread?

Buffysquirrel said:

Whether it's ethical depends on your ethics. Many of us can sympathise with the idea that it's okay to cause a little pain to someone in order to avoid causing a great deal of pain to someone else. We call that 'ends justify the means'. If I saw someone pinning someone else down and raping them, would I hit them over the head with a shovel to make them stop? Very likely I would. Also very likely the courts might think that was excessive force. Both the courts and I could be right.

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There was a case in Minnesota a while back where a man ran after a thief who robbed and pistol-whipped an elderly woman and killed him; he wasn't reprimanded and didn't face charges for excessive force (although it created a debate about the issue). The issue seems to vary from judge to judge, and there can be a thin line between vigilantism and self-defense.

Lhipenwhe said:

There was a case in Minnesota a while back where a man ran after a thief who robbed and pistol-whipped an elderly woman and killed him; he wasn't reprimanded and didn't face charges for excessive force (although it created a debate about the issue). The issue seems to vary from judge to judge, and there can be a thin line between vigilantism and self-defense.

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The issue here is neither vigilantism or self-defense, but pre-meditation. The defendent did not pre-meditate the death [and as I can't know how he came to die, I imagine that it was accidental.]

Although I'm confused how you mention judges, if he didn't face charges.

Terie said:

Torture is never ethical. NEVER. Period.

In some places, it's legal; in others, not so much.

Whether you have characters do it or not isn't an issue of either ethics or law. It's a matter of being true to your story.

If you have your characters do it, there will be both ethical and legal ramifications, depending on many things.

You have to be true to your story.

Click to expand...

Exactly.

I have to third Terie.

I write Roman thrillers, and my MC [a spy for the Roman legions] uses torture to extract information. Now, this is not unusual for 2nd century AD. I didn't want to glorify the use of torture [I'm a member of Amnesty International], and I don't want to alienate readers either. It then occured to me, to make him an anti-hero [thinking of Jeff Lindsay's Dexter, here.]

What goes around, comes around. He finds himself on the wrong side of the equleuus at one point.

It's the only way I could deal with my modern sensibilities, while staying true to the story and history.

As far as whether it is permissible, it depends on who is giving the permission. If you want to have a book where the "good" guys torture to get information, there are an awful lot of works that feature that.

The problem is that reader or viewer often knows what the person being interrogated knows. They forget that the torturer doesn't know this. The author whips up anger in the reader or viewer, and they cheer for the torture. And of course, the person being tortured gives the torturer the infromation they want, not because it is realistic, but because that is the way the author wrote it.

Torture is very effective in extracting false confessions. It is poor at getting actual information, because the victim will tell whatever they have to to end the torture. The victim doesn't know the information, they will lie, and tell the torturer what they want to hear. If the victim has the information, but it isn't what the torturer wants to hear, they will still lie. And even if the victim has the information, they may still lie to lead the torturer on a wild goose chase.

The one thing you don't get from torture is actionable intelligence.

Torture is useful for:
1) Revenge
2) Warning

For anything else, forget it.

Using torture to get useful information is a cheap writers' trick--it works fine in books and movies because you can move the plot right along without having to do all that dull police work.

It's unethical, but that doesn't really matter. You should use whichever is best for the story and most appropriate to the characters.

It's such a grey area that I think it really depends on the character and the situation.

Ethics is a system of moral principles; What are moral principles? Basically rules that govern right from wrong. But what is right and what is wrong?

Is it right to let an innocent person die when torture could save their life? Is it wrong to shoot a man who's reaching for the detonator of a bomb that will blow up an entire city?


Ethics and morals are a very simple concept when everyone agrees to them. The problem is, in the case you state, the hostage taker isn't playing by the same rules. So now the decisions aren't so easy and at least in my opinion, there is so much grey area.

ETA: Many people bring up good points that torture brings up false intelligence. What I stated above is in regards to the torturer already knowing that the torturee has the information he needs. In your example, s/he knows that the bad guy has the kids hidden somewhere, and he isn't just grasping at straws.

QuantumIguana said:

Torture is very effective in extracting false confessions. It is poor at getting actual information, because the victim will tell whatever they have to to end the torture. The victim doesn't know the information, they will lie, and tell the torturer what they want to hear. If the victim has the information, but it isn't what the torturer wants to hear, they will still lie. And even if the victim has the information, they may still lie to lead the torturer on a wild goose chase.

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I agree, and for me there is a lot of scope right there for a writer.