Is torture ever morally justified?

Is torture ever morally justified?

The argument is that there are, or could well be, one-off acts of torture in extreme emergencies that are, all things considered, morally justifiable. Accordingly, the assumption is that the routine use of torture is not morally justified; so if it turned out that the routine use of torture was necessary to, say, win the war on terrorism, then some of what is said here would not be to the point. However, liberal democratic governments and security agencies have not even begun to exhaust the political strategies, and the military/police tactics short of the routine use of torture, available to them to combat terrorism.

The most obvious version of the argument in favour of one-off acts of torture in extreme emergencies is consequentialist in form. For example, Bagaric and Clarke (2007: 29) offer a version of the ticking bomb scenario in the context of their hedonistic act utilitarian theoretical perspective. A standard objection to this kind of appeal to consequentialism is that it licenses far too much: torture of a few innocent victims may well be justified, on this account, if it provides intense pleasure for a much larger number of sadists. As it happens, Bagaric and Clarke insist that they want to restrict the practice of torture; only the guilty are to be subjected to torture and only for the purpose of extracting information. However it is far from clear how this desired restriction can be reconciled with consequentialism in any of its various permutations, let alone the relatively permissive version favoured by Bagaric and Clarke. Why, for example, should torture be restricted to the guilty, if torturing a small number of innocent persons would enable the lives of many other innocents to be saved (as presumably it might). Again, why should under-resourced Indian police not torture—as they often do in reality—a repeat offender responsible for a very large number of property crimes, if this proves to be the only available efficient and effective form of retrieving the stolen property in question and, thereby, securing the conviction of this offender, reducing property crime and making a large number of property owners happy? The essential problem confronted by consequentialists participating in the torture debate is that their theoretically admissible moral barriers to torture are relatively flimsy; too flimsy, it seems, to accommodate the strong moral intuitions in play.

Faced with the slippery slope, as they see it, of one-off acts of torture in extreme emergencies transmogrifying into institutionalised torture, and/or simply appalled by the inherent evil of the practice of torture, many theorists (Davis (2005); Luban (2005); Brecher (2008); Matthews (2008)) have opted for the opposite extreme and argued that torture can never be morally justified. Obviously these theorists avoid the problems besetting consequentialists such as Bagaric and Clarke, and they are on strong ground when providing counter-arguments to consequentialist perspectives and/or views that seek to justify torturing the innocent. However, their moral absolutism is not without its own problems: specifically, in relation to torturing the ...