Is Torture In Guantanamo Bay Ethical?

Is torture in Guantanamo Bay Ethical? While it may seem like an easy question to answer our country is vastly divided on this subject. There are countless parts to consider in order to truly be confident when answering a question like this. The circumstances alone can sway philosophers to debate on whether or not torture is right or not. I personally feel that torture is an unnecessary evil that has remained the same for ages. Throughout this paper I will demonstrate what has lead me to this conclusion by applying the modern problem of Guantanamo Bay to the famous philosophical ideas of Martha Nussbaum and Jeremy Bentham.

What is Guantanamo Bay, and why does torture play such a big role in its existence? Guantanamo Bay is a US military prison

located in Cuba. Established in 2002 by the Bush administration, Guantanamo Bay was designed to hold military prisoners from the war on terror.

However, this is unlike any other US prison. One of the main goals at Guantanamo Bay is to extract information from prisoners with any means necessary. This is done through various ways of making these prisoners lives horrible. Some methods include electric torture, sensory deprivation, and extreme exposure to the elements. This horrible treatment is looked at as legal by the US government because it is located on foreign soil therefore it does not apply to the same laws that we have in the US.

While people may see torture as a necessary evil in order to stop terror attacks, the ethical dilemma of whether or not this is morally right still remains. In the article “Compassion and Terror” written by Martha Nussbaum, readers are introduced to several ideas on how humanity faces and deals with terrible situations. Nussbaum believes that terror affects humanity based on its relatedness to every person. This means that if something terrible happens, it is more likely to have a bigger effect on somebody that lives near the tragedy, than somebody that lives across the world. An example of this is

the events that took place in the Rwandan genocide. Even when journalists were reporting mass murder, the outside world ignored it because it had such little effect on them. Nussbaum sees this human reaction as morally wrong and feels that we must treat every situation with equal compassion and effort no matter who is involved and how far away it is. She claims this in her article by saying “We are to recognize that all humans have dignity, and that this dignity is both inalienable and equal...The recognition of human dignity is supposed to impose obligations on all moral agents, whether the humans in question are conationals or foreigners” (Nussbaum 238). These ideas can be directly related and compared to Guantanamo Bay. Due to the fact that it is operating outside of the US border, Guantanamo Bay is operating with free will to torture and treat their prisoners without any mercy. This alteration of treatment goes directly against Nussbaum beliefs. The US government is treating people differently solely on the geographical location of where they are being held which is morally not right. Yet a large portion of our country demonstrated that they feel that this is ok by voting for the Trump administration, who has made it clear that they are fully behind Guantanamo Bay. In general, this mistreatment based on location is not acceptable and Nussbaum would be extremely against it.
While it is clear that Nussbaum would be against Guantanamo Bay, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham may have slightly different ideas.

In Bentham’s article “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation”, he introduces the philosophy of Utilitarianism. He believed that as humans our actions are driven to achieve the greatest amount of happiness and the least amount of pain. He demonstrates this in his article by saying “Start with the thought that it goes the whole way: the condition of the ward is exactly that of pure slavery. Now vary that by giving the guardian the obligation that turns his power into a trust; it is the obligation to act in the way that is most likely to bring to the ward the greatest quantity of happiness that his faculties and circumstances will allow (subject only to the guardian’s being permitted to care about his own happiness and obliged to care about the happiness of other men)” (Bentham 128). Using this idea, he felt that humans strive as a whole to achieve the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people. From this idea stemmed his Hedonic Calculus. Hedonic calculus assigns two different units to each action, hedons for a unit of pleasure and dolors for a unit of pain. With these measurements you are able to assign value to decisions and their effects, therefore, allowing somebody to more accurately decide what is the right thing to do to bring this greatest good. This compares to Guantanamo Bay because this calculus can

be used to determine if the actions performed at the prison are moral or not. The large amount of mistreatment associated with torture, sensory deprivation, and mass exposure to the elements are all horrible acts that rank up a large amount of dolors. While there are a lot of dolors associated with torture and the horrible treatment of the inmates, the argument can be made that more hedons do come out of the information that we receive and use to stop terror attacks. However, I believe that overall the amount of dolors that stem from this treatment do outweigh any potential hedons that come from gained information.
In conclusion, I believe that Guantanamo Bay’s existence and the treatment of the prisoners held there are morally wrong and the facility should be closed. By using Nussbaum’s ideas, it is clear to see the differences in the treatment of the prisoners based solely on their location. In addition to this, Bentham’s hedonic calculus gives numerical values to these acts and I believe that that the dolors that come from the horrible treatment vastly outweigh any hedons. Overall, the existence of Guantanamo Bay is morally wrong and should be a more pressing issue that the people of the US demand to be changed.