Nah. I think it works like this: Torture is illegal, but there are occations where we think it is supposed to be permitted. This means that the illegal torture is necessary, but we do not support breaking the law, so necessary torture is legal. Therefore, no illegal torture is sanctioned and will not happen either. Simple.

The amoral people are the ones who do illegal deeds because it is necessary, knowing at the same time that they are illegal deeds. They will be punished, and will probably have their impurity burned out in the lake of fire also. That's like "justice for all", or something.

no

only if they accept it as a punishment

first off: Abu-Ghraib was in my opinion torture out of sadism, disrespecting peoples believes in the most denigrating way they could think of. Not really hard to figure out the ethics there.

Isn't it true that any law operates in a grey area. That's partially why we have courts, because no law is without ambiguities.

A few points:

If someone knows something that can save many lives, he does not share the information and the people die, isn't he accessory to murder and punishable by law (in principle)? That's something to hold over his head (not that this will always work).

If we cannot punish someone without a trial, can we torture him without one? Who decides if torture should be used in a given situation?

If we cannot use physical punishment by law, can we torture anyone?

If we cannot throw someone in jail until after the crime, can we torture him before the crime?

Still in some cases (99%, millions of lives) it might be condonable/inevitable to use torture, so either we need laws to regulate the use of torture, (video) document each torture and always bring it to trial or we let some people play their own judge with the excesses that we see today. This is assuming that torture is the best way to get the information needed to resolve the situation.

Question: What would a law that regulates torture look like?

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Torture is torture......WRONG!!! Should never be allowed!! No acceptions!!

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GIGGLES

Ofcourse it's wrong, but there is this nuclear bomb, ticking away under youir city. You've found the blueprints. You found the plans. It's going of in 2 hours. The only thing you don't know is where the bomb is. You also found this guy with a copy of the blueprints on him. You ask him gently and a little less gently, he doesn't say anything. You threaten him with whatever you can think of. Still nothing. You have 1000 men searching for any clue. They find nothing. One hour left. Too late to evacuate. What do you do. tic tac tic tac tic tac ............

Still it might be better to keep it illegal instead of having (very strict) laws.

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If you have very strict laws regulating torture, when would it be allowed? When it will save 1 billion lives? 1 million? 1000? 10? 1? When? When you allow it when it saves 100 lives, and you've captured a person who can save 99 lives but won't, what will you do? And what if you're not sure the suspect knows something?

I think torture should always be outlawed. Offcourse when someone has saved hundreds of lives by torturing 1 person the judge who should punish that person should only give him a relatively light punishment... But if you don't ban it completely and allow grey zones the grey zones will only get bigger, and sooner or later you will be torturing 100 people who might know something to save just 1 person. And I think we can all agree we don't want that to happen.

And if you can prove he is responsible for the danger that one person is in? I am still not totally convinced. With strict I ment also only persons responsible for the danger in the first place, limiting methods (no permanent injury for example). Do you treat it as an necessary or unnecessary evil?

But I think you make a very good point and it is probably the best way to handle it, at least in the world we live in now (lately I have not been too optimist about the future).

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