It is never justified to torture terrorists.

The UN declaration of rights says clearly "do not torture". it is one of the obvious statements on the document. I wish to provide multiple reasons to justify this. I shall base my work of an older essay on the subject, though, written by a teammate and I when I debated this issue years and years ago. Like many, I feel strongly about torture. But sentiment alone amounts to nothing. I feel strongly about racism. Racism is not wrong because it offends my sensibilities. It is wrong because it violates reason and human dignity. Similarly, if we cannot offer a reasoned account of the error of torture especially given the wide public support for it - then our impassioned opposition, indispensable though it may be, will still be, pragmatically speaking, valueless. It matters because one cannot fight effectively for a cause one does not understand. Is it but mere coincidence that torture's remained so popular in such an impoverished public discourse? When the facts are presented, torture becomes a horror that should not be permitted. I hope to justify how it is immoral, through a three pronged attack: first, I will show it is philosophically immoral, then I will show it is politically unjustified, then finally conclude with how it is unjustified. What torture isUsually, we expect a definition here, but it is unnecessary. Torture is well known: a 'know it when I see it' approach suffices. However, for this debate's sake, I will provide one: "the forced exchange of information for the relief of unbearable pain knowingly and intentionally inflicted". It's abhorrance is intuitional and a priori. But it is a difficult thing to explain why. To be more effective, I shall try to give some reasons why it is so immoral.Torture is immoral because, firstly, it does not work. The case which my opponent uses as his crux is famously the ticking time bomb scenario. In the scenario my opponent suggests, he is creating something intrinsically and inherently impossible. In all scenarios, where a terrorist has planted a bomb and the evidence 'points towards him' - a loose claim at best - does not exist. The only evidence my opponent can be talking about without the weapon in question is the idea that he has been talking about how he did it: but if he does, he's either talking in such vague terms or the evidence can be used to detect where the bomb is. But even this is unnecessary: nuclear warheads can be detected through many means[1]. Torture is unnecessary. Secondly, torture does not get the right information. What would the torturee say? He'd make stuff up as soon as he deems it sensible. Hang on for an hour, don't say a thing, then make up locations. A wild goose chase is all that this torture leads to. And in a day? Well, the answer is to change the situation into a month. To be perfectly honest, you could turn NYC inside out within a day, knwowing for certain in the hypothetical. The truth is, there's always a better alternative, and I am yet to see an example where torture should be used.This brings us to deontology. Do we recoil from torture because it treats a person only as a means to an end? It is a principled view that might account for our rational rejection of torture. Kant's Categorical Imperative is a good explanation: it explains our revultion to the use of others as a means to an end. In his paeans to torture, Dershowitz, a renown ethicists and promoter of Kantian ethics, actually appeals to Bentham and, beyond it, the reigning utilitarianism of our time (Peter Singer), which, from conditional welfare to advertising, routinely compliments Kantian ethics. And yet, is there a doubt that the wrongness of torture finds its source, not in a holy book or in the final link of a chain of observations, but deep in humanity's moral intuition? On this we all agree. Few would argue that the torture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was worse than shooting him in the head: the pain he suffered through the years was excrutiating. And yet killing the man does not make us wince the way torture does. Why? Could it be the excruciating pain? Baby Mohammed lost both legs during Shock-and-Awe and, over a 10-hour period, bled to death stuck in the debris of his home, a horror entirely foreseen in its outline, if not its particulars, by the architects of the war. The baby's pain vastly exceeded that of his namesake. The horror of this image suggests that we inherently know torture is wrong. Thus, torture is immoral. Maybe there's something else, though, to justify the torture? It could be the mix of fear, humiliation, abandonment, and blatant sadism that the practice connotes. Indeed, "The torturer never says, "I go home at 5." Torture stirs in all of us the age-old anxiety of a cruel deity that keeps us forever conscious to suffer an endless agony. Pain, like relativity, distorts time. (A root-canal patient can tell you all about eternity.)" After a certain point, the victim's fear is no longer that he will die but that he won't. Torture is a window into hell, with the role of the satanic puppetmaster played by human sadist. I believe one cannot grasp the role of torture in the imagination without integrating its metaphysical resonance. Torture rehearses eternal damnation. And that's not a good thing, because hell scares the hell out of everyone, even those who don't believe in it. Moreover, the torturers reflect back to us, the people, in a magnified image of what repressed sadism we have hidden away in all of us. This did not always bother us. "God gave Moses not one but two commandments against lust, and not a single one against cruelty; likewise, Augustine deemed cupidity a more serious offense"[4]. It was not until Montaigne and Montesquieu that cruelty acquired a special status in moral philosophy.[3] "Our revulsion toward torture is hardly universal—children can be astonishingly cruel to animals—but, rather, the sign of a certain liberal disposition. Torture offends us through its frontal assault on human dignity. Beyond subverting free will into "anti-will"—your being tortured does not simply violate you: it makes you violate yourself—it denies something even more fundamental than freedom: personhood. It dehumanizes not only the victim and the torturer, but society as a whole. Or so our modern liberal sensibilities tell us."[2]. That concludes my arguments. To summarise, Kantian Ethics is against torture, as torture is unjustifiable in society. Torture does not work. Finally, we are naturally inclined to be against Torture. Thank you. 1 - www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/R40154.pdf2 - Richard Posner, In Torture We Trust?,.3 - Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb, by David Luban, citing Judith Shklar, The Torture Debate in America" 4 - Terrorism and Torture: An interdipliscinary perspective by Werner G. K. Stritzke (Editor), Stephan Lewandowsky (Editor), David Denemark (Editor), Joseph Clare (Editor), Frank Morgan (Editor)