Essay On Ethical Use Of Torture

The Useless Brute Historically, States have used torture for everything from fear-mongering to legal punishments. In the modern United States, debate on the usage of torture by the State has focused on the morality of using torture to extract information, generally from terrorists or suspected terrorists held in US, or allied, custody. However, there are no realistic scenarios in which the application of torture against prisoners of the United States is ethically permissible. One of the more common scenarios devised by proponents of the usage of torture is the Ticking Time Bomb, which posits that there is a time bomb which a terrorist in US custody has the information necessary to defuse. From a Utilitarian perspective, it might look like this would be a good case for the use of torture. If torturing a prisoner saved any number of people then because more people are being helped then harmed it would be moral. Indeed, in an …show more content…
However, two poor …show more content…
One of the foremost issues is that information extracted by torture is not particularly reliable. Furthermore, the American judicial system is centered on the principle of innocence until proven guilty, and torturing a terror suspect without trial is a clear violation of this principle and the rights of the suspect. Although some legal protections may be waived in the case of foreigners, this can be considered unfair discrimination and by international law it is illegal to torture irrespective of citizenship. Torture is simply too morally damaging to justify its use even in extreme and highly unlikely scenarios, not to mention the existence of serious doubts regarding its