Political Theory Is Not a Game: On the Dangers of Detached and Inhuman Normative Theory

According to Howes, my article is "a wildly inappropriate application of game theory" and so constitutes a project that is "dubious at best and dangerous at worst" because it "invites policy makers and social scientists to use formal models to improve or perfect torture," making it "conducive to bureaucratic violence" (Howes 2012, 21, 20, 23). I respond to each set of claims, starting with the former, before reflecting very briefly on what these considerations have to say about the place of formal models in normative political theory.Human Agency and Interrogational TortureThe application of a formal game theoretic model to interrogational torture is dangerous in Howes's sense only if game theory is even applicable to the question of interrogational torture and its effectiveness, something Howes rejects in the course of the first section of his reply and later in his discussion of the will.1 Following Scarry (1985) and others, he asserts that the pain and domination in torture are so agency destroying, reason destroying, information destroying, strategy destroying, even world destroying that they preclude any reasonable conception of choice, preference, calculation, or strategy. As a result, the torture victim does not even possess the "ability to know what game is being played" (Howes 2012, 21) and so "rational, strategic interaction is, by definition, made impossible" (Howes 2012, 24).This model of "utter domination" (Howes 2012, 24) by the torturer is almost precisely the caricature of interrogational torture presumed by its strongest proponents.2 Torturers know how to inflict pain so that all room for agency, calculation, strategizing, and choice is removed. The torturer controls the environment so completely, breaks the victim down so thoroughly, that he or she does exactly what the torturer desires. The will of the torturer becomes the will of the tortured. This is exactly what the designers of the Bush interrogational torture program believed: they would "break" detainees who thought they were strong and could hold out into weak detainees who would talk. Such a model, whether in the guise of the television program 24, in the mind of Dick Cheney or SERE psychologists, or in a work of political philosophy such as Howes's here, is a fantasy. As a result, both perspectives "obscure the fundamental character" (i.e., what actually happens empirically) of interrogational torture (Howes 2012, 20).3In addition to beatings, burning, and waterboarding, Henri Alleg was electrocuted during his interrogation by French paratroopers in Algeria in 1957. Variously attaching the clips to his finger, chest, ear, groin, and the palette of his mouth, they caused in the last instance his jaw to lock for a time and his eyes to feel as if they were being pushed out of his head from the inside (Alleg [1958] 2006, 56-57). And yet, he recalls, "stupefied as I was by the blows and the tortures I had undergone, one single idea was still clear in my mind: 'Tell them nothing, don't help them in any way.' I didn't open my mouth" (Alleg [1958] 2006, 63).Now although Howes does not say what is left to a human being after the comprehensive destructive effects of torture, nor can it be inferred from his alternative model of human action, since he offers none, he characterizes resistance to interrogational torture as "the sheer force of will" (Howes 2012, 22). I return to this point in a moment. I first want to point out that it is clear from torture victims' own accounts that they value things-avoiding pain, protecting information, convincing the interrogator that they are innocent- and order them in particular ways. The fact that "torturers may want to elicit some words or behaviors from their victims" (Howes 2012, 28), as Howes is grudgingly willing to acknowledge, indicates they have goals too. Victims by their own accounts think of themselves as having at least two actions, opening or not opening the mouth, to paraphrase Henri Alleg. …