Torture is a troubling subject and this is a troubling book. Its aim is to use game theory to figure out whether the pragmatic justification of torture stands up. Non-sadistic proponents of torture argue that it can be a useful way to get information about, for instance, future terrorist attacks, and that its use can therefore be justified in certain circumstances. Schiemann’s conclusion is that this argument does not work. But it raises other questions without answering them anything like as clearly.

Game theory models real-life situations as games in which each player has a limited number of options and tries to maximize the satisfaction of his or her preferences. As long as the options are identified realistically, the preferences are identified and ordered more or less correctly, and the real-life agents behave more or less rationally (tending to maximize the satisfaction of their preferences) then game theory can tell us what we should expect to happen in the real world. Schiemann works hard to capture in his successively more sophisticated models the way that interrogational torture is supposed to work according to its supporters, so as not to skew the theoretical work unfairly. Innocent people with no relevant information are not supposed to be tortured, for instance, and torture should be used only to the extent necessary to coerce prisoners to reveal what they know. The bulk of the book, roughly chapters 4-12, consists of Schiemann’s showing and explaining his calculations, although here and elsewhere in the book he tells the stories of real-life cases of torture as well.  

His theoretical work seems both to do justice to the pro-torture case and to demonstrate that game theory shows that case to be badly flawed. It is not hard, though, to imagine readers on both sides of the debate being dissatisfied. Schiemann concedes that torture might produce valuable information, and surely some of its defenders care more about this than about there being some innocent victims and cases in which an informant is tortured despite having already given up all the knowledge he or she has. What the book takes on is what might be called the respectable, or publicly acceptable, defense of torture and shows it to be flawed. However the relevance of the demonstration of these flaws not only depends on acceptance of a particular model (acceptance which I think ought to be forthcoming given Schiemann’s care in setting it up, but which cannot be taken for granted) but also on the respectable case’s being the actual case that motivates support for torture.

On the other side, it will be claimed that the dispassionate application of game theory to torture is not only inhuman but precisely the kind of inhuman consequentialism that leads to torture (and terrorism too) in the first place. To apply such theory to this case is to give serious consideration to torture, which some would insist is already to show one’s thinking to be corrupt. What ought to be unthinkable has been allowed into our thoughts.

Schiemann tries in a way to steer between these two horns. He wants to take the pro-torture side seriously enough to be able to refute it, but he also takes the anti-torture side seriously enough to fall back on its way of thinking when the going gets tough. The result is slightly awkward, and there is a tone of something like nervous laughter in the first few chapters, although this could be simply a somewhat clumsy attempt to reassure the reader that what lies ahead will not be unbearably technical or dry. There is relatively little here to assure the reader that what is to come will really be worthwhile. As early as page 8 Schiemann concedes that there is an “absence of sufficiently reliable and systematic evidence to convince” those who support torture on pragmatic grounds. This lack of empirical evidence is the reason he gives for turning to “reason and logic,” by which he means game theory. Game theory, he explains, allows us to see what would happen if a detainee and an interrogator with certain incentives and strategies were to interact. But of course much depends on building the right incentives and strategies into the model. Any model that produces an undesired outcome, one embarrassing to the pro-torture side, say, can always be rejected as unrealistic in one way or another. Schiemann’s modeling is plausible and painstaking, but it lacks the undeniability of mathematics or pure reason and logic.

Having shown that once torture is allowed it is likely to be more widely used than anticipated, that innocent people are likely to be tortured, that “enhanced interrogation” is likely to produce false information, and that sorting the potentially useful information from the false or irrelevant information will be hard or even impossible, Schiemann concludes that, “Interrogational torture does not work” (p. 249).  On the very same page, though, he says that, “It can work. Under conditions that hardly ever obtain in the real world it can work (but only if we’re willing to torture innocent detainees).” It is hard not to suspect that the people Schiemann is trying to convince are quite willing to do this, and to do so for the limited gains he predicts they will get. In response to this he has nothing much to say beyond vague talk of going against the grain of our character and staining our national honor. He does not claim to demonstrate that torture really is against the grain of our character (it is something we have done, after all) nor to explain why going against the grain of one’s character (whatever exactly that might mean) is necessarily bad.

Despite its limitations, though, the book is basically successful in doing what it sets out to do. For that it is valuable.        

© 2015 Duncan Richter

Duncan Richter, Department of Psychology and Philosophy, Virginia Military Institute