Summary Of Torture By Henry Shue

Henry Shue's "Torture" adresses the notion of torture ever being morally permissible, and, if so, when. He argues that torture is rarely ever morally permissible by considering diverging arguments. One argument he considers is that torture might be morally permissible because killing is, however, he argues that it is indeed not, because murder is often justified, especially in combat, and torture is universally generally opposed, because torture strips the tortured of the means to defend oneself. He argues that while a soldier is afforded the dignity to defend himself in combat, torture robs the tortured of that dignity. Shue also explains that torturers never truly have a way of knowing if the tortured can provide them with the information
The former he characterizes as "torture for the purpose of extracting information.."(Shue 133). And when speaking of the latter, a form of torture where a victim is being tortured simply for the act of eliciting terror and obedience from constituents, he argues the following, "Terroristic torture, as we may call this dominant type, cannot satisfy the constraint of possible compliance, because its purpose (intimidation of persons other than the victim of the torture) cannot be accomplished and may not even be capable of being influenced by the victim of the torture. " (132). The aforementioned extract explains that while a person who is being interrogationally tortured retains some type of, albeit minuscule, control over their torture (the information they are being tortured for), and the possibility of the cessation of this abuse, a person who is being
However, torture will likely never be the least harmful means of accomplishing an, arguably, supremely important goal. Therefore, although different variables may vary in each situation, it is impossible to concretely determine the moral permissibility of such an exaggerated scenario.
Conversely, Shue also considers the following argument: that torture is morally permissible if it is for the good of many. He does this by illustrating the following scenario, "...suppose a fanatic, perfectly willing to die rather than collaborate in the thwarting of his own scheme, has set a hidden nuclear device to explode in the heart of Paris. There is no time to evacuate the innocent people or even the movable art treasures-the only hope of preventing tragedy is to torture the perpetrator, find the device, and deactivate it." (141). He follows by stating that, in this particular case, there is no logical, nor moral way to deny the moral permissibility of torture to extract life-saving information from the individual. However, he argues that creating a hypothetical scenario to formulate conclusions for non-hypothetical cases is unjust. Because due to its speculative nature, we can assume that this person has, without a doubt, planted a nuclear weapon, while in actual cases, the torturers have no concrete way of knowing if the tortured actually holds the information they