Beyond Durkheim: A Comment on Steven Lukes's ‘Liberal Democratic Torture’

Extract

In a recent article, Steven Lukes offers a thought-provoking reflection on the apparently growing resort to torture by liberal democracies today. Professor Lukes aptly asks whether ‘torture is just another case of dirty hands in politics?’ – that is, the idea that in order to do the right thing or achieve the best public outcome in the circumstances one cannot avoid committing a wrong, such as deceit or cruelty. His answer is that torture differs from other cases of dirty hands in that it cannot be made ‘liberal-democratically accountable’, thus raising the question of ‘how should it be addressed in liberal democracies?’ Here he suggests we can learn from the sociologist Emile Durkheim and, especially, his conception of modern societies as being held together by a ‘religion of individualism’. Allowing state officials to violate basic rights of the individual thus profanes against the religion and threatens the ‘moral disintegration’ of society itself. Lukes argues that Durkheim's account helps us see both the folly in ‘certain ways of thinking and talking about torture’, such as construing it as a ‘lesser evil’ given the competing claims of risk and security, and the damage that liberal democracies inflict on themselves, in responding to the threat of terrorism, by so readily compromising their own principles.

There is much that is appealing in Professor Lukes's remarks. I also share his concern about the current erosion of civil liberties in liberal democracies. I wish, however, to raise some doubts about three key aspects of his argument: that torture is not susceptible to liberal-democratic accountability; that the ‘Durkheimian argument’ effectively precludes the practice of torture; and that we cannot rightly speak of torture as a ‘lesser evil’.