BBC: Torture and Human Dignity

What this lecture covers

This excerpt from the BBC documentary "Justice: A Citizen's Guide to the 21st Century" examines a real case from Germany: police threatened to torture a kidnapper, Magnus Gafgen, to find his abducted victim, Jakob von Metzler, and the officer who made the threat was later convicted for violating the kidnapper's rights. Sandel uses the case to stage a debate between a Kantian, who insists that even a kidnapper's dignity forbids using him purely as a means, and a utilitarian, who argues that failing to act to save a life is itself a moral failure.

After watching, you should be able to explain both the Kantian and utilitarian positions on this case and articulate why the debate becomes harder as the numbers of potential victims increase.

Key ideas

• Human dignity as inviolable: German constitutional law, shaped partly by Kant's influence, holds that human dignity can never be compromised, even to extract information from a criminal.
• Using a person as a means: the Kantian objection to torture is that it treats the kidnapper purely as an instrument for obtaining information, denying his status as an end in himself.
• The utilitarian reply: a utilitarian frames the failure to torture as a choice with consequences, since not acting to save the child amounts to responsibility for the child's death.
• The numbers problem: the discussion presses whether the Kantian position holds even as stakes rise, testing whether the interviewee would sanction torturing an innocent person if it could save many more lives.

Before you watch

• This clip connects directly to the Harvard course's lectures on Kant, and works best if you're already familiar with the Kantian idea of treating persons as ends rather than merely as means.

Check your understanding

1. What happened in the Jakob von Metzler kidnapping case, and why was the police officer later convicted?
2. What is the Kantian objection to threatening the kidnapper with torture?
3. How does the utilitarian in the discussion respond to that objection?
4. Why does raising the number of potential victims put pressure on the Kantian position?