Torture is Always Wrong

There is an H-bomb hidden in New York. It is going off in 12 hours. One of the terrorists is caught. The terrorist has a terrible aversion to nails on the chalk board. The FBI sets up 118 chalkboards and conducts a symphony of screeching. Terrorist confesses. Bomb found and dismantled.

A silly and extreme example. But it points to fallacies of the question. Is solitary confinement torture? The semantics is politicized. Barack Obama gives Hugo Chavez and Ahmadinejad fodder to shoot back at the U.S. (and these leaders are pure and pristine).

All blanket statements are wrong!

is torture permissible?

Posted by: Paladin7b

NO! Unequivocally not.

Thank you for your wisdom and example.

The accomplishment of ANY desired end - no matter how laudable - is NEVER justified when the means employed to accomplish that end are questionable at best. I am a christian and I am sickened to learn, according to a recent Pew Research Poll, that there are many American christians who apparently deem the use of torture appropriate in some instances. It is the torturer who loses his/her own soul and it is an indictment of any society that supports its use as an instrument of public policy. This president has got it exactly right: the use of torture has a corrosive effect on the soul of a nation. Democracy is frequently a messy and inconvenient enterprise. But Lincoln was exactly right, for all time and forever, when he said: " Let us strive to learn that it is right that makes for might." God help us all, if we succumb to the temptation to take some convenient "short cuts" in the search for the "evil doers" and attempts to bring them before the bar of justice. For in the doing, we will have become just like them! The moral high ground is the only viable position for us to take as a nation, seeing as how we have been crowing about our own exceptionalism for a very long time.

The tortured person is tortured forever. It is he, not the torturer who is pursued by the furies.

For the torturer, there is only one thing: justice.

But let us ask if torture is morally justified if torturing a German engineer in 1943 is necessary to show us how to disable a train to prevent 1200 Jews from being taken to Treblinka? There may still be an actus rea which would normally be criminal but for the unusual and unique circumstances (e.g., imminent attack on Los Angeles) which excludes criminal mens rea. If torture was necessary to prevent a greater harm, is torture permissible?