Torture: Is It Morally Acceptable?
Part 1: Introduction

Is torture morally acceptable? In the U.S., arguments have been made both for and against the use of torture in fighting terrorism. Enhanced interrogation technique is a term that has been supplemented in the place of “torture” to make practices like waterboarding seem more acceptable to the public—but in spite of the name applied, the same questions persist. Depending on one’s ethical perspective, torture may or may not be justified. There are several practical problems with torture—namely that confessions made under duress do not even hold up in a court of law, so to assume that any information obtained under duress would be authentic is to go against reason as used in courts of law. However, this paper will look at the morality of torture using the deontological position. First, it will explain the deontological position. Then it will show that from the basis of duty to prisoners of war, torture is immoral. From there it will discuss the counter-argument from the utilitarian position. A response to the utilitarian objection will also be given, and summary will conclude the paper. The argument this paper makes is that torture is neither morally acceptable from the deontological position nor from the utilitarian position from which one might object to the deontological argument.

Part 2: Ethical Argument

The key ethical issues in this topic are that prisoners of war or suspects of any crime are protected by law (both national and international) and have rights as human beings that must be respected. When a nation abuses those rights and violates them, they send a message to the international community that they neither respect the law nor respect human rights. Such a message is an offense to justice and can rouse the righteous anger of many in the international and national community, which can in turn lead to blowback in terms of more aggressive and hostile behavior from those who are opposed to the doctrines and actions of the nation doing the torture. Nations have a duty to protect and respect the rights of prisoners of war and of suspects who are detained for whatever reason.

The moral argument here can be supported by deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics. Deontology supports it, obviously, because of the nationally and internationally recognized duty that states owe to prisoners of war and suspects in criminal cases. Utilitarianism supports it because the greatest good is neither served by using torture nor possible by using torture, as the risk of blowback is likely and the fact that torture does not yield authentic confessions under any court of law. From the virtue ethics position, torture is immoral because it stains the good character and reputation of the country doing it. The most important argument, however, is that a nation that acts with any respect for the law is duty-bound to honor the law by protecting the rights of suspects and prisoners of war—otherwise, that nation surrenders its right to command respect and...…people back home any safer. If anything, it makes them less safe. So from the utilitarian’s own moral perspective, the argument is wrong. However, from the deontological argument it is also wrong because the state has a responsibility to honor international law when it is acting internationally. A state that does not honor international law is a state that must be considered rogue and immoral.

Part 5: Conclusion

In the first section, this paper described the moral issue at stake by asking the question of whether torture is morally acceptable. It stated that from a deontological position, torture is not morally acceptable—and it also stated that torture is immoral from any ethical perspective, including utilitarianism and virtue ethics. In the second section, it described the key ethical issues at stake regarding torture, which are that: 1) it violates the prisoner’s human rights, 2) it does not work in obtaining authentic information, and 3) it risks blowback on the nation that applies it. In the third section, the ethical position of deontology was described and applied to this moral question. It was shown that a state has a moral duty to respect national and international law and human rights. In the fourth section, the utilitarian argument of maximizing the welfare of the state by applying torture to stop terrorism was discussed and shown to rest on invalid premises, and that whether one uses duty-based ethics or pragmatic-based ethics, the conclusion is the same: torture is immoral.