Utilitarian Arguments Against Torture

Terrorism and Torture In the threat of national security, the debate on torture is confronted with legal and moral dilemmas of permissibility. In the hypothetical case of the ticking-bomb terrorist, torture is perceived as either an advantageous means of national security, or a violation of human rights. Although it is a “slippery slope,” in order to preserve the balance between national security and civil liberties in a democratic society, torture should be prohibited. Considering terrorist attacks that harm or potentially kill at least thousand(s) of people, torture may seem justifiable. Torture, defined in these instances as physically non-lethal, has been generally used to extract information from terrorists that may lead to the prevention of massive terrorist attack.
Alan Dershowitz details Jeremy Bentham 's utilitarian justification as a means to protect the greater good, maximizing societal benefits (Dershowitz, Blackboard pg. 1-2). In the ticking-bomb scenario, torturing the terrorist to gain information for the location and/or disposal of the bomb would be permissible because it is all in the efforts to protect the thousands of people in danger. But under this theory, the justification for torture comes at the cost of violating the terrorist’s rights and possibly providing precedence for torture to be carried out in instances that are not necessarily considered acts of terror, or even on individuals who are not terrorists themselves but related to one. Also, this scenario is prescribed with the assumption that torture is effective in ascertaining valuable information from terrorists. However, there is not a law that permits torture under any circumstances, which leads to the consideration that torture is ineffective, more or less. Nonetheless, ensuring national security is of the utmost importance as