Reason grounds Western morality, with its respect for the individual and her freedom at its center. The force of this system has created a moral industry in the West - with think tanks, politicians and journalists broadcasting its goodness - but the continued use of torture undermines it all, argues Kishore Mahbubani.

One of the greatest joys of my life was studying Western philosophy, absorbing the wisdom of great Western thinkers from Socrates to Wittgenstein. The dedication of all those great thinkers, over thousands of years, to the power of logical reasoning was truly inspiring. Hence, for me, the power of the West was always associated with this commitment to using reason to understand and improve the world.

Western logic was always irrefutable. Plain logic would create irrefutable statements. Hence if the premise was “all dogs are animals”, the consequence of the claim “Fido is a dog” was the irrefutable statement that “Fido is an animal”. A similar rigour applied to moral reasoning. Hence, if a human being called X said “Human beings should not torture other human beings”, the irrefutable conclusion was that X was obliged to also say “I should not torture human beings”. The rigour of this logic is absolute. No exceptions are possible. Anyone who made the first claim and denied the second claim would be justifiably accused of hypocrisy.

In theory, the West condemns hypocrisy. In practice, sadly, it indulges in hypocrisy massively.

In theory, the West condemns hypocrisy. In practice, sadly, it indulges in hypocrisy massively. A few major contemporary examples will illustrate this. For several decades, after the US Congress passed legislation instructing the US State Department to publish annual reports on the human rights performance of all states in the world (except the US), the US State Department would painstakingly record the cases of torture practiced in other countries [1]. For example, the State Department condemned “near drowning” and “submersion of the head in water” as torture in reports on Sri Lanka and Tunisia. By the logic of moral reasoning, the US was declaring that it did not practice torture.[

In 2001, after 9/11 happened, the US went on a global campaign against the radical Islamist terrorists that had attacked it. Under international law, this campaign was justified, especially since it was legitimized by a UN Security Council resolution [2]. However, after the US captured some terrorist suspects, it took them to Guantanamo and tortured them. By so doing, the US was clearly declaring that it had shifted its moral stance from “Thou shalt not torture human beings” to “Thou shalt torture human beings”. The US never said this verbally, but by the logic of moral reasoning, it had made this statement even more loudly with its actual behaviour.[2]

One of the greatest modern works of moral philosophy is the book “The Language of Morals” by the English philosopher, R.M. Hare (Note: as an aside, let me mention that he wrote parts of this book on toilet paper when he was a prisoner of war of the Japanese in Singapore in World War II). The opening line of this volume is very powerful. It says “If we were to ask of a person ‘What are his moral principles?’ the way in which we could be most sure of a true answer would be studying what he did.”[3][3]