Torture Ethics Quotes

I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror.

Assuming you get useful information from torture, then why not always use torture? Why stop at the bomb that’s already been planted and people who know where the explosives are? Why not people who are building the explosives, or people who are donating money, or transferring the funds for the explosives? Why stop at the victim himself? Why not torture the victims’ families, their relatives, their neighbors? If the end justifies the means, then where would you draw the line?

I mean... mankind has for hundreds of years known that torture is not a very smart way to get information. It's horrible that we're going back to medieval times.

The issue is not whether there are serious moral and practical costs to employing torture—of course there are for torture is evil. That is precisely why the choice of whether employ it to avert a greater evil is a tragic one.

Even if torture works, what is the point of 'defending' America using a tactic that is a fundamental violation of what America ought to mean?

Torturing a human being is almost always wrong, but it is not absolutely wrong.

I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.

Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution?