ABSTRACT

One reads in the press that the agents of many countries, and, indeed, many private individuals, engage in torture to coerce others into performing certain actions, frequently the divulging of information (“interrogational torture”). Sometimes this is undertaken for a good end, such as the saving of lives by the disarming of a ticking time-bomb, or the rescue of a kidnap victim. It will be argued in this paper that such torture and, more generally, interrogational coercion are never morally permissible. This will be a specific application of a general moral principle that will be proposed:

Disagreement with this absolute rejection of interrogational torture could come from several directions. Act utilitarians would assert that it is fairly easy to imagine circumstances in which the ends would justify the means of torture: if it were known that many would be killed or suffer extreme pain as a result of a bomb’s exploding it would surely be for the greatest happiness of the greatest number that one inflict some not-too-extreme pain on a single individual with the knowledge of the whereabouts of the bomb-provided, of course, that one knew there to be no danger of setting a precedent that would lead to abuses that would outweigh the happiness of the lives saved and pain averted. The key word here is “imagine”: many of those that assert that it is possible to imagine circumstances in which torture would be justified also assert that in real life such circumstances will never obtain.2 It should further be noted that many suggest that our intuitions concerning imaginary cases are not reliable.3 This point will not be argued against here, however (even though the argument of this paper depends heavily on

R E A D I N G

intuitions), since those opposed to the thesis of this paper-i.e., those that argue that interrogational torture is sometimes permissible-defend their position on the basis of intuition, so this is not a disputed point in this context.