pumpkinstrokemarrow

I start with a thought experiment. On the one hand I have a terrorist and on the other a large bomb which is ticking. If the bomb goes off millions of people will be killed. I know that the terrorist knows the magic number which will stop the bomb ticking. Is it right to bash the terrorist until he tells me the magic number?

I think the answer to this question is yes. I am also sure that that would be the answer of more or less every customer of TB.

This albeit rather improbable example suggests to me that there might be circumstances when torture was the right thing to do. That is it not obvious that we should try to enforce a blanket ban on torture in any circumstances whatsoever. Or throw up our hands in horror at the very thought.

In this example, the fact that you might not be able to extract the magic number by torture would not be a reason not to try. In any event, I continue to believe that good quality torture would extract the magic number. It may well be, for all I know, that torture is getting better and better, along with everything else. Perhaps there will come a time when pain and fear are not necessary ingredients.

The next difficulty is that you might make a mistake and torture the wrong person. Which is going to happen from time to time in the best regulated system. One might regard this as part of the price one has to pay for saving the world most of the time. I believe that when summary hanging justice was routinely administered in the territories of the land of the free, it was understood that there would be mistakes. But the subjects of those mistakes would be compensated by fast track entry to heaven, so it would all work out OK in the end. However, an argument which is not available to me. (I am also reminded that in the olden days it was quite OK for the deity to torture you for millions & millions of years, until such time as your worldly sins had been purged).

Another is analogous to that we have with nuclear weapons. It is OK for proper countries like the US and Israel to have nuclear weapons but it is not OK for improper countries like Iran and Pakistan to have them. In the same way one might trust countries like Sweden or the Netherlands to operate a torture regime in a responsible way but not countries like Russia or Costa Rica. Perhaps the answer here would be to entrust such matters entirely to the UN. No one else allowed. Affirmative vote of the security council needed before anyone was tortured, an arrangement which would mean, inter alia, that one did not do it very often.

Another is analogous to that we have with capital punishment. Someone has to do it. What sort of a somebody is that likely to be? Would one want such a person on the government payroll? And then we might have the whole media circus that went with it - assuming that is, that we did not trust the UN or anybody else to do this sort of thing in secret.

Another is deciding where to draw the line. How horrible a secret am I allowed to hold before you are entitled to drag it out of me?

All starting to sound rather difficult; certainly too complicated & tricky a subject to be dealt with in this casual fashion. It is going to be difficult put in place an acceptable regime and given that UN is not going to be doing anything on this front any time soon, I do not think I want my government to have an established (in the civil service sense of the word) bunch of people empowered to torture its citizens or anyone else. And I certainly would not want such powers to be delegated to, for example, individual police forces.

But I still draw back from a blanket ban.