ABSTRACT
My two primary research fields within the political science sub-field of International Relations are international security (the ways in which states and other international actors ‘secure’ their communities), and international ethics (the role of ethical considerations in influencing the behaviors of states and other international actors). The topic of torture is one that resides at the intersection between those two research fields, and debates over torture were reignited when I was in graduate school, after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent war-on-terror policies that were instituted in the early-mid 2000s. Torture is often defended as being necessary for the security of political communities, as important information that can be extracted from a tortured subject can then be used to save lives. When I first started researching torture in the mid-2000s (when more documents regarding the US’s practice of it started becoming available), most of the arguments against its use were ‘ethical’ or ‘legal’ arguments: that it was immoral to torture individuals, or that it was illegal in international and US domestic law. I teach an international
ethics course and most of the time the ‘pro-torture’ arguments fold into the former category, and the ‘anti-torture’ ones into the latter. However, as I have researched torture over the years, I’ve found quite a number of sustained arguments against not only the ethics (it’s morally wrong), but the efficacy (it just doesn’t work), of torture as well. Nevertheless, torture continues to be supported by majorities of US Americans in survey after survey. This led me to publish a series of studies investigating what factors may be responsible for its increasing popularity, including a chapter in an edited volume that specifically focused on the trend emerging in surveys, the results of which I focus on here in this chapter as well.1 While I oppose torture on both moral and strategic policy grounds, I am also quite interested in why it continues to be popular amongst US Americans.
