Introduction Since the rise of terrorism in the wake of 9/11, numerous tactics have been tried in order to obtain information about where terrorists are hiding and where they might attack next. One of these methods is torture. From a utilitarian perspective, torture should be viewed as an unethical approach to problem solving. The main problem that can be identified from this approach is that it simply does not work. A person who is being tortured cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Confessions that are made under duress are not admissible in a court of law for the simple reason that when one is promised that the pain will stop if the individual will just “confess,” that confession cannot be counted on to be unbiased or objective. There is a clear incentive to “confess”—that is, to end the torture. Torture as a tool of procuring the truth, therefore, is a flawed approach to tackling the issue of terrorism, for which it has been re-introduced into the American playbook. If torture is not a useful device for obtaining information, then what is it useful at doing? This paper will answer that question by examining the issue using the ethical basis of utilitarianism. It will then identify the weaknesses in the utilitarian viewpoint and challenge this perspective from the standpoint of deontology. It will conclude with a defense of utilitarianism against the deontological counter-position with respect to torture.

The Utilitarian Position

The ethical basis of utilitarianism is that it is used to gauge the common good of society. In other words, ethical activity is predicated on whether or not it assists in obtaining the greatest good for the greatest number of people. While deciding on what this greatest good might be or who is to judge what the good is might require some considerable debate, the point to be made for now is that if something is not in the interests of the common good then it should it be avoided because it would be unethical from the utilitarian point of view, as Mill shows. Or, as Fox puts it: actions are “right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”

For torture to be considered ethical from the standpoint of utilitarianism, it would have to be shown that the torture of captives can help procure the common good of all. And on the surface one might think that torture actually could work to achieve the common good: for example, the captive has information about a potential terrorist attack. He will not divulge what he knows. Torture is threatened and used and finally the captive confesses what he knows. The information is examined and acted upon and a terror attack is thwarted. Hundreds of lives may have been saved in comparison to one person being tortured. If one frames the issue in this manner it would appear that torture should be thought of as entirely ethical: after all, it helped to save hundreds of people—that is certainly for the greater, common good.

The problem with framing the issue in this way is that an assumption is underlying it: the assumption is that this is the only outcome of torture. In fact, it is not: there are many other consequences of torture. For example, the captive may not tell the truth. Countless man hours could be spent investigating a false story concocted by the captive in order to temporarily...

In reality, the captive may not even know anything but feel compelled to give up the names of other people—friends or family members who are not even connected to terrorists. This style of interrogation was employed by the Soviets in the 20th century. Kulaks were rounded up by the thousands and forced to “confess” under the threat of a variety of different forms of torture—and confess they did. They gave up the names of everyone they knew because no number high enough was every really enough. The Soviets wanted everyone—and they rounded up everyone and put them into their labor camps, all based on the lies of false confessions that were beaten out of people who felt they had no other choice. The entire nation suffered as a result. An entire generation of young men and women were poisoned by the Soviet government’s mentality that if people had nothing to hide, they would not confess to anything and therefore they could take a little torture. The truth is the opposite. No one wants to be tortured, and human nature being what it is, people will say just about anything to make it stop. Their “confessions” can ruin the lives of others; they can waste so much time and energy; they can run people in circles, and harm the minds of those who are trying to sift fact from fiction. Confessions that are tortured out of a person do not correlate with what it means to obtain information honestly and ethical—not from the utilitarian point of view.
There is also the issue of the captive’s family and friends or peers and colleagues knowing that their friend is being tortured—and that can cause them to want to seek revenge. In fact, if one’s aim is to stop terrorism, torture could be just about the worst method to try and stop it. Terrorists want to fight the West because they hate Western hypocrisy—the idea that whatever the West does is good, but if someone else does it, they are bad. Terrorists might torture prisoners—and that would be wrong—but if the West does it, it is okay because the West has the moral high ground. The impression that is given off to the enemy and to disinterested observers when the West engages in torture is just the opposite: it says that the West has no moral high ground, no sense of where to draw the line. It sees only its own objective and it will stop at nothing to achieve that objective.

It must be shown, therefore, that from the utilitarian perspective torture does not work because it is like throwing a monkey wrench into the social fabric. Nothing that people do exists in a vacuum. There are no bubbles to which torture can be confined. Engaging in torture is like taking a sewage line and pumping it straight into the public sphere. It is like opening the spigots of waste water and letting them rain down on all the people on their way to work. Torture is an ugly and cruel method of communicating with human beings and it adds a foulness to the air that cannot simply be ignored. So on top of the fact that it does not actually work, torture is like a pollutant. It pollutes the ethical foundations and moral framework of society—and everyone knows and everyone feels it, but they pretend that it is okay because they believe that it actually does work—and their beliefs are based on the assumption that torture is a simple process with a start point and…