Torture is sometimes morally permissible.

Torture can be morally justified in rare circumstances. In the case of a ticking time bomb that could destroy a city and potentially kill millions of people the use of coerced interrogation to extract information can be justified. I am not arguing that torture should be made legal. Torture, like theft, could be ethical under certain parameters and still be against the law. Nor am I arguing that a general practice of torture can be made from the scenario I outlined above. What I wish to argue is that torture, as unsavory as it may be, has utilities that in rare situations far outweigh its negative attributes thereby rendering it moral. Perhaps ticking time bombs seem too impersonal. Imagine that you have a daughter. And further imagine that a madman has taken this daughter of yours captive. He has set her in a special room where he has rigged a machine on a timer, which would slowly dismember her before ultimately killing her once it goes off. For the sake of the argument let us assume that the room can only be accessed by a security code on a door that is impregnable. As luck would have it you manage to capture this madman. As he sits in custody he happily gloats about how your child will die in 30 minutes once the machine timer goes off. A wry smile creeps across his face as he informs you that even if you found the room where your daughter has been held captive it would still be impossible for you to save her. As luck would have it another breakthrough happens. A police officer radios in to inform you that they have found the room where your daughter is being held. Unfortunately the officer cannot enter because, after all, the door is 100% impregnable. However the door does have a keypad and if the right code were entered it would unlock the door thereby allowing you to save your daughter. At this point your only options would be to wait and let your daughter die. Or you could torture the man and try to get the security code from him. Let us also assume, for the sake of convenience, that he is unreasonable and will not respond to your pleas for mercy. I am one of very few people I know who has publicly advocated for the use of torture. As a result this has put me at odds with many deeply ethical people. These people speak in a manner that would lead one to conclude that an argument with the aim of categorically repudiating torture is readily available. However, in the few times I have debated this issue in school such an argument has never been produced. Many people have objected to my argument, on emotional grounds, but they have consistently failed to demonstrate any flaws in my thinking. Many readers will be tempted to dismiss torture as categorically evil but this position is impossible to square with our willingness to wage modern warfare. When we as a nation choose to engage in war, for either offensive or defensive purposes "collateral damage"—the maiming and killing of innocent noncombatants—will be unavoidable. It is truly one of the great ironies of liberal discourse that the thought of waterboarding someone like Osama Bin Laden raises more ire than the thought of maiming and killing defenseless children in air raids. At the eve of the war with Iraq it was superficially easy to predict that many men, women and children would be maimed and killed as result of our endeavor. There are, of course, complete pacifists that are opposed to fighting wars under any circumstances. If this view were applied to our foreign policy then we would be left with something very similar to the absolute pacifism of someone like Ghandi. While pacifism can in certain instances be moral it has a very limited range of usefulness. Where pacifism is not applicable it can come off as blatantly immoral. We would do well to reflect on Gandhi's remedy for the Holocaust: he believed that the Jews should have committed mass suicide, because this "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence." If this view were taken to its logical conclusions we would be left with a world in which thugs, criminals and other rabble would inherit the Earth. http://ambivablog.typepad.com... There is another option to war though. It guarantees that we never, under any circumstance, kill civilians or otherwise innocent people. We can simply choose to never engage in war. Schools cant accidentally be bombed if we aren't bombing anyone; apartments wont accidentally be hit if we aren't lobbing mortar shells etc. This position may be appetizing to some peaceniks but it is ultimately untenable and may even be deeply immoral. Collateral damage is unavoidable only once a war has begun. But it can easily be avoided if we simply refuse to fight. To assert that civilian casualties are unavoidable is simply fallacious because it fails to recognize pacifism as a possible option. The decisions to wage war and use torture are both options that inevitably violate human rights. Torture, at least how I'm advocating for it, is designed to save possibly millions of lives which is what war is also designed to do. However torture is the far more ethical choice of the two because unlike war it doesn't necessitate that anyone innocent is killed. Opponents of torture will be quick to assert that the confessions elicited under torture have been notoriously unreliable. Considering what can be at stake in a world where nuclear proliferation is still ongoing this argument seems to lack its usual force. The odds that our interests will be furthered in an act of torture need only equal that occasioned by a single bomb dismantling an organization like Al Qaeda. What are the odds that one of our bombing raids will kill Osama Bin Laden? They have to be pretty slim and undoubtedly many innocents will be killed and maimed in our failed attempts. Insofar as our use of torture carries with it the same amount of success as our more lethal tactics for saving lives we can deem it morally permissible. Further it should be obvious that a failed torture attempt isn't going to leave children orphaned and women disemboweled. If there were even one chance in a million that someone like Osama bin Laden could tell us something under torture that could lead to the dismantling of an organization like Al Qaeda or Hamas, then it seems we should use every thing in our disposal to get him talking. So we must now ask ourselves the obvious, if we are willing to act in a way that guarantees the misery and death of a considerable number of innocent children, why spare the rod with known terrorists? The deaths of the children that have been killed in Iraq were even easier to predict than the trajectories of the missiles and bullets that killed them. And yet we deem these accidents morally permissible, insofar as we regard the justification for any given war to be truthful. Torture need not entail that its recipient is killed or even physically harmed in any way, whereas modern warfare guarantees innocent children will be killed, blinded, orphaned and severely disfigured in the act of war. If we are willing to accept the fact that bombs and rifle rounds will eventually yield civilian casualties we should be willing to torture a certain class of suspects and military prisoners; If we are unwilling to torture then we should also be unwilling to wage modern warfare. My argument would utterly break down for three of the following reasons. 1.Complete pacifism can be demonstrated to be a viable moral alternative to war under any circumstances. 2.The existence of viable alternatives to torture, with the same results, would render my argument moot. 3.If my collateral damage analogy were inapplicable then that would be quite a heavy blow to my side of the argument.