James Rachels

If torture, which I take to mean ‘to inflict extreme pain or physical punishment on somebody’, is bad because of the kind of suffering involved, then presumably any being that can experience this kind of suffering ought to be considered relevant in discussions about torture.

Furthermore, if it is because of the kind of suffering involved that a ‘right’ to be free from torture is conferred, versus something abstract – ‘dignity’, for example – then, again, presumably any being that can experience this kind of suffering has the ‘right’ to be free from torture, or none do.

Now is there something about a ‘normal’ adult human being that makes torture bad? Is her capacity for higher cognition the relevant characteristic? Is it the case that since she can do mathematics, she is the kind of being that can be tortured and therefore she has a ‘right’ not to be tortured? To put it another way, is one’s elevated mental ability that which makes for the kind of suffering that is torture?

I think we can reject this argument because it would follow that an infant cannot be tortured, or that conferring the right not be tortured to a mentally challenged human being isn’t coherent because they both lack these cognitive abilities.

As a matter of simple logic this seems wrong. Regardless of one’s mental ability, at its core torture is about inflicting physical and emotional pain, which is a capacity equally relevant to all sentient beings. This may come in degrees; however, we get into a rather grey ethical area when we start deciding which would be worse:  torturing a baby or an adult.  

The burden of proof is shifted then, to those who would disagree. They must show why, assuming that the severely senile can be tortured and that, therefore, they have the right not to be tortured, why this group of human animals has this right while nonhuman animals, equally sentient and capable of suffering, do not.

If this is true, and all animals have the right not to be tortured, it may be reasonable to better define what this means by reference to what we believe would constitute torture if we had to experience it. Within this framework, much disagreement would certainly arise. However, I suspect some actions would unquestionably be considered torture and therefore wrong. For example:

Female cows are impregnated only to have their babies taken from them shortly after birth to prevent bonding and subsequently sold to the veal industry.

PETA:

More than 285 million hens are raised for eggs in the U.S., and nearly all of them spend their lives in battery cages, stacked tier upon tier in huge warehouses. Confined seven or eight to a cage, these birds don’t have enough room to spread their wings.

Each year, millions of day-old male chicks are killed – usually in high-speed grinders called “macerators,” which shred them alive – because they are worthless to the egg industry. [Many are also simply thrown out like garbage to suffocate under the bodies of others.]