Torture by state agents, in certain circumstances, is necessary and valid.

My contention (and I play my own devil's advocate here) is that the torture of select people at certain times - and these may only appear every decade or even century - can be justified on a number of grounds. Whilst the practice is most often reprehensible, it is not definitively so. Indeed, the preservation of good - or at least relatively preferable - societies can be said to depend on the ability to commit violence to the bodies of individuals so as to garner information about hostile criminal and/or military activities or persons (and therefore, torture is necessary and valid). My first debate. ---- Definition of torture is 'to purposefully subject a person to pain', with the assumption that the larger part of the state-agent's motivation for doing so is instrumental, rather than 'pathological' or for pleasure. Necessary in the sense that the torturing society plausibly views its own existence as threatened, if only putatively, by the to-be-tortured or her/his cohorts (and, given the torturing-societies relative merits, therefore valid). Each of these are up for dispute. Lastly, as stated, my first debate, so comments or criticism on any aspect of challenge very gratefully accepted. ---------------- I should make it very clear that I will not hence argue for the goodness or validity of any historical act of torture, but instead will attempt to argue for the possibility for (correctly) describing an imagined or conceptual act of torture as potentially morally valid. This argument therefore, I claim, opens up the space for historical acts of torture to be properly described as moral, although this is not is not the chief aim of the larger argument. To put this simply: the people in Guantanamo Bay are being tortured, allegedly, to extract information about an enemy that poses an existential threat the the US, its' allies, and modes of governance ('the Western project'; 'our way of life'; 'democracy', etc) underpinning these. I do not need to provide argumentation that suggests this torture is moral. Instead, I need merely show that torture taken abstractly is not a priori immoral and, more difficult, that it can be, given certain circumstances (which I will outline) moral. It may be, given further discussion, that these circumstances have not yet appeared, and that therefore no act of torture historically has been moral, without saying that no act of torture in the future is immoral per se. ---- (1) Imagine someone has planted a bomb in an office. Which is office is unclear to the authorities; the bomber is caught during a routine traffic stop with bomb making equipment, is found to have glycerin on his hands, and admits to having planted a bomb but, wanting first to cause panic (to feel powerful) and secondly for the bomb to detonate, refuses to say which one; "the fuse is set to one week, but I'll never tell you where it is". That is, there is a credible threat to a large number of innocent lives. The authorities spend six days attempting to retrace the bomber's movements, political persuasions, former employers, emails (etc), and find no clue as to where the bomb might be. I claim, given these presumably extremely rare circumstances - very credible threat, almost completely assured loss of innocent lives, almost no chance finding bomb via typical means, no possibility of evacuating every office block (the bomber does not say in which city or even country the bomb is in) - within the last remaining twenty four hours, the authorities would be acting morally if they first threatened and then committed acts of physical torture on the bomber. (As an aside, these techniques would have been designed not to exact as much pain as possible, but merely to be effective on their terms of extracting information; technique X (less painful or damaging, more effective) is used in lieu of technique Y (one, say, that debilitates the bomber's ability to communicate). (2) A somewhat similar non-abstract argument might be that if the allies in WWII found that on balance it seemed to be required that they torture Axis troops for information, then it would be valid, given that an allied success overall would/is preferable to an Axis victory. To restate, those abstract circumstances outlined in example one may found to have not ever appeared; this in of itself does not undermine my primary argument. ---------- Recapitulation: Torture has most often been cruel, immoral, unnecessary. However, that is not to say that torture per se is any of those three. Contexts are imaginable in which torture is the lesser of two wrongs, and therefore, a good. Good luck to my opponent. Again, any comments on any aspect of my inaugural argument will be very gratefully received.