Torture as a Last Resort

In late 2005, columnist Charles Krauthammer (2005) published a defense of the use of torture in specified exceptional situations wherein the actual conduct of the torture would be restricted to "highly specialized agents who are experts and experienced in interrogation, and who are known not to abuse it a" (p. 2). Krauthammer (2005) defined exceptional situations in the jargon of terrorism interrogators as (a) "the ticking time bomb" and (b) "the slow-fuse high-level terrorist" (p. 2).

In the former contingency, a person being interrogated is presumed to have knowledge of an imminent attack with the further assumption that access to that knowledge could allow the people seeking such knowledge to act to effectively prevent carnage and massive physical destruction. In the latter contingency, a person being interrogated is assumed to possess knowledge of future events that could cause carnage and massive physical destruction (Krauthammer, 2004). While Krauthammer (2005) cites these contingencies as justifications for the use of torture, the ideas are not his own. Each contingency has long been offered as a justification for torture. Krauthammer (2005), however, incorporated these contingencies in to a set of rules to govern how and when torture would be practiced.

As indicated above, another of the rules provides that only "highly specialized agents" would be permitted to conduct

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Utilitarian philosophy attempts to solve this dilemma through the criterion of the greatest good to the greatest number. This approach tends to attempt to reduce a philosophical question to a type of accounting exercise. In just such a way, the United States justified the use of nuclear weapons against the civilian population of Japan in the Second World War. The justification was that the over 100,000 thousand of Japanese civilian deaths caused by the nuclear weapons shortened the war, and, thus, saved the lives of thousands of soldiers. The winners of the war made that utilitarian assessment, not the losers. The Japanese did not accept the utilitarian justification of the mass annihilation of civilians, and that refusal points up another two additional dilemmas associated with utilitarian evaluations. First, one person may consider an event as a good outcome, while another considers the same event as a bad outcome. Second, to many people, a net positive outcome cannot justify what is, at its root, an unacceptable act. Another significant problem affecting utilitarian evaluation is the identification of the consequences of an act. It is often difficult to the point of impossibility to identify all of the consequences
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Approximate Word count = 1901
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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