Some people argue that the goal of saving innocent lives must overrule a person's right not to be tortured. This argument is presented in its simplest form in the "ticking bomb" situation: an explosive has been set to detonate that will kill thousands of people and a detained person is known to have information on where the bomb is and how to defuse it. Is torture acceptable in such a case to force the convict to talk? Those who say that it is, reason that governments should be permitted to choose torture as the lesser of two evils in such a situation. The global community, however, has forbidden the use of torture even in the "ticking bomb" case. Universal human rights laws, as well as U.S. law, do not have any exceptions to the barring against torture. …show more content…
There are practical as well as ethical reasons for not permitting a terrorist attack exception to the ban on torture.
Although such an exception might appear to be very limited, experience shows that the exception readily becomes the standard practice. How impending must the attack be to trigger the exception and justify torture - an hour, a week, a year? How certain must the government be that the convict actually has the necessary information? Under the utilitarian logic that the end justifies the means, saving as many lives as possible, torture should be allowed even if the disaster might not occur until some point in the future, and it should be allowed against as many people as is necessary to secure the information that could be used to deter the disaster.
In addition, this scenario offers no logical limitations on how much or what kind of torture would be permitted. If the convict does not talk when shaken or hit, why shouldn't the government move unto more severe methods, such as the use of electric shocks? Why not threaten to rape the suspect's wife or to torture his children? Once torture is allowed, setting limits is extremely
challenging. Torture is also as likely to produce false information as it is to produce the truth. Cesare Beccaria, observed that when a person is tortured, the "impression of pain…may increase to such a degree, that, occupying the mind entirely, it will compel the sufferer to use the shortest method of freeing himself from torment…He will accuse himself of crimes of which he is innocent." Present-day law enforcement experts agree that force is not effective; people will even admit they killed their family member just to stop the pain. Indeed, the undependability of forced confessions was one of the major reasons that U.S. courts originally prohibited their use. The ban on torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or demeaning conduct does not leave the government helpless before terrorists. Convictions in recent cases involving terrorism show that investigators currently have the means and legal methods to acquire the evidence necessary for successful prosecutions. Under U.S. law, victims of torture can sue in state or federal court for damages. But there are many practical obstacles to such lawsuits - including the difficulty of securing evidence of torture and the financial costs of legal representation - as well as legal and procedural barriers to a successful conclusion. Furthermore, even if a case is successful and damages are given, the financial reimbursement does not undo the harm done - the experience of torture and its often ongoing physical, psychological, and emotional costs. Officials who participate in torture - including those who give the orders as well as those who carry them out - can and should be prosecuted criminally as well as disciplinarily sanctioned. All these factors: determination of when it is expectable, to what extent, the possibility of false confessions, and law suits are the same for torture for criminal interrogations. Although these issues are on a smaller scale they are basically the same. In neither situation is torture legally expectable although the general public may believe that the government can choose to make an expectation for terrorism.
Who wouldn’t have agreed? Yes, torture is cruel but it is less cruel than the substitute in many positions. Killing Hitler wouldn’t have revived his millions of victims nor would it have ended war. But torture in this predicament is planned to bring no one back but to keep faultless people from being sent off. Of course mass murdering is far more barbaric than torture. The most influential argument against using torture as a penalty or to get an acknowledgment is that such practices ignore the rights of the particulars. Michael Levin’s “The Case for Torture” discusses both sides of being with and being against torture. This essay gets readers thinking a lot about the scenarios Levin mentioned that torture is justified. Though using pathos, he doesn’t achieve the argument as well as he should because of the absence of good judgment and reasoning. In addition to emotional appeal, the author tries to make you think twice about your take on
Rather, when torture is acceptable, and on which term should be it performed? The argument lest authorization torture his an advisor Sharde presumption that torture is currently happening and will be happening in the future hence the the. Plan of torture and. Dershowitz believes in a formal, visible, accountable, and controlled system of inflicting that would ideally leave torture as a last resort. The system would begin by granting the suspect immunity. Then suspect the be would compelled to testify; if the suspect were to refuse to exchange information, the next step would be acknowledging the possibility of torture while continuing to give the option of immunity. In a case of a suspect refusing to exchange information, even with immunity, a judicial warrant must be granted to proceed with purposely elicited
First, the ticking-bomb scenarios are cases in which torturing the terrorist will save many innocent lives at the cost of non-lethal suffering to one individual. Torturing the terrorist would thus produce the most happiness/well-being. This approach has great strengths but also creates complex questions: is torture still the lesser evil if it only saves one person? Is it morally right to torture a person’s children to extract a confession? Is it morally right to torture ninety-nine people in an attempt to save one-hundred others? In theory this type of thinking can justify extreme inhumanity as long as it is calculated as the lesser evil. Secondly, one ought to do what produces the most happiness/well-being. Despite the wider case against torture, a person confronted with the immediate choices in the ‘ticking bomb’ case is unlikely to take these issues into account; ‘interrogators will still use coercion because in some cases they will deem it worth the consequence. Few people would be unable to see a moral basis for torture if it was carried out in a reasonably clear ‘ticking bomb’ case and if the intention of the torturer was to ‘do the right thing.’ The difficulties of the immediate choice between carrying out torture and allowing deaths make it difficult to morally condemn the unfortunate person charged with deciding. Therefore, one ought to torture terrorists in such scenarios. The only pragmatic concern would be that torture does not
Capital punishment and torture are often looked down on in today’s societies because they are viewed as cruel and unconstitutional, but perhaps they would help in more ways then we would like to admit. They can be beneficial in many ways such as encouragement to be truthful, encouragement to live by the laws, and as a source of punishment. Capital punishment and torture are thought to be too painful, and the person doing the punishment is also committing a crime.
Because of the 9/11 terrorist, the U.S. have been able to limit the outcomes they produce by using physical and mental torture against their emotional torture they used on the Citizens. Its not the U.S. that started this battle over the use of torture, america had to protect itself from further hurt. “The suffering caused by the terrorists is the real torture (Jean-Marie Le Pen).” people argue that torture it is an inhumane act to deliberately beat a victim physically and mentally. The problem is that there are no other possible solutions to obtain information that are as effective as torture on such events other than force it out of them by using torture as their primary weapon (The Legal Prohibition). If the U.S. wants to pursue the safety of americans they have to take actions, As long as there are no bombs going off around the world, the U.S. will continue to use torture . Terrorism has become a much greater threat than before. regardless if the beating are too extreme, it is still the duty of the state to protect its citizens (Torture Is Just Means). Even if the interoges are suffering from severe torture, the U.S. is able t...
The notion that fear will make a human leak information is not a novel idea. Torture has widely been used throughout the world by many groups of people. After World War II, The Geneva Convention prohibited any nation from partaking in torture. The emergence of terrorist activity on American soil brought up the question whether torture should be advocated or prohibited from a moral standpoint. The US changed the definition of torture in order to forcibly attain potentially important information from captives. Even though the new clause suggested that many of the methods the US used were now legal, other countries still had an issue in terms of honoring the Geneva Convention and basic human rights. Advocates for torture promise that countless innocent lives can be saved from the information obtained from a single torture victim. Opponents to the advocates suggest that torture often results in misleading information. Morally, torture is not justified as it degrades humans and often leaves victims scarred for life and possibly dead.
Consider the following situation: You are an army officer who has just captured an enemy soldier who knows where a secret time bomb has been planted. Unless defused, the bomb will explode, killing thousands of people. Would it be morally permissible to torture them to get him to reveal the bomb’s location? Discuss this problem in light of both Utilitarian and Kantian moral theories and present arguments from both moral perspectives for why torture is morally wrong.
On the opposite side, there are people very much in favor of the use of torture. To them, torture is a “morally defensible” interrogation method (8). The most widely used reason for torture is when many lives are in imminent danger. This means that any forms of causing harm are acceptable. This may seem reasonable, as you sacrifice one life to save way more, but it’s demoralizing. The arguments that justify torture usually are way too extreme to happen in the real world. The golden rule also plays a big rol...
In Levin’s first instance, he depicts a scenario where a terrorist, who has placed an atomic bomb in the city, was captured. This atomic bomb is to explode in 2 hours if his demands are not met. Levin believes this is a situation in which torture is the only way of extracting the location of the bomb before it explodes. The idea of this statement is to cause the reader to challenge the constitutionality of disregarding the civil rights of one person to protect the lives of millions. With such an extreme example, the line of right and wrong can easily be blurred to the average citizen. Is the choice of when to torture someone or not so easy? Yes, Lucas Stanley says, “If I knew my friends were in trouble, and some guy knew were or how to help them, Dam...
The ticking bomb example is frequently used to justify the use for torture while its terms can be taken either as setting the bar too high to justify any actual torture or alternatively as opening the door to torture in other cases.
As Shunzo Majima describes it: “According to Kantian deontology, torture cannot be morally justified if an individual’s humanity and dignity are denied through torture and the torture victim is used merely as a means for achieving the purpose of torture” (Majima, 2012, p. 138). Because of the way torture gravely violates a person’s autonomy and treats them only as a means of getting information or for some other end, it is considered inherently wrong in the eyes of deontology. People who are tortured are no longer seen as human or respected as one; instead, they are seen only as tools that can be manipulated and used in order to achieve a certain result. This, to deontology, is morally
“You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.” This quote from Mahatma Gandhi talks about how torture can beat and bruise someone, but does it get results? Torture’s ethics are not always the clearest subject: there are many different sides to the argument but for this paper there will only be two discussed. The first viewpoint is that of someone who is for the use of torture, they believe that torture is moral because it provides results in times of war or when the nation is being attacked. Those for it believe that torturing another human being is the only quick way to get results in order to save lives. Then there are those people who are against the thought of torturing another person. Their reason for this belief is that when someone is tortured they may be willing to admit guilt or tell the torturer information that is not relevant because they want the torturing to stop. These people also believe that it is immoral to treat people like this. According to Dictionary.com, torture has multiple definitions these are the following: “The act of inflicting excruciating...
Around the world and around the clock, human rights violations seem to never cease. In particular, torture violations are still rampant all over the world. One regime, the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, establishes a strong elaboration of norms against torture. Despite its efforts, many countries still outright reject its policies against torture while other countries openly accept them, but surreptitiously still violate them. The US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia all have failed to end torture despite accepting the provisions of the Convention.
Instead, the torture is used to make Winston doubt “[his] own sanity”(Orwell, 330), and in a dark sense, for entertainment.The Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, of America also partakes in torture techniques illegally. It was reported that 136 individuals were extraordinarily rendered and various “enhanced interrogation techniques” were used such as walling, cramped confinement, sleep and dietary manipulation (Horowitz, 2013). These individuals were forcefully kidnapped, sometimes at random, and detained by government officials without a trial, breaking human right laws. One could also be accidently detained as they are mistaken for another person under suspicion and without proper legal processing, there is no prevention of this (Horowitz,
Torture is something that, when used properly, can help the situation at hand. This is a very touchy subject because who’s to say that the torture will even work. It would be hard for whoever is in charge of this matter, who has a duty to keep civilians safe from this potential threat, to sit back and do nothing in a situation like this. Its one thing to have to torture someone but to have to torture someone else because torturing him or her wasn’t enough.