Moral Permissibility of Torture

Henry Shue begins his article discussing torture with constraints which allows the victim to “surrender” and comply with the demands of the torturer. According to the Constraint of Possible Compliance (CPC), “the victim of torture must have available an act of compliance which, if performed, will end the torture” (Shue 427). With the aim of interrogational torture being to extract information from a person with holding it, this torture appears to satisfy the constraint of possible compliance, since it offers an escape, in the form of providing the information wanted by the torturers, which affords some protection against further assault.

In practice there are evidently only a few pure cases of interrogational torture. For the most dominant type of torture that occurs today is considered to be terroristic. Terroristic torture is meant to put fear in not only the victim, but also all those who oppose that government. The victim’s suffering is being used as a means to end over which the victim has no control over.

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Terroristic torture 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. If terroristic torture were actually to be justified, the conditions would of course have to be met. The first condition Shue defines is the purpose being sought through the torture would need to be not only morally good, but also supremely important.

These purposes would then have to be selected by criteria of moral importance which would themselves need to be justified. The second condition described is that the torture would presumably have to be the least harmful means of accomplishing the supreme goal. With the terrible pain and harm that is associated with terroristic torture, this condition could rarely be the case in this type of torture. The last condition Shue defines is it must be absolutely clear for what purpose the erroristic torture was being used, what would constitute achievement of that purpose, and when the torture would end.

Henry Shue believes these three conditions will never be met primarily because terroristic torture tends to become a routine procedure in methods of governing and once it is set in motion by that government it would gain enough momentum to become a standard operating procedure within the government. Shue also describes how governments to choose to try and prove themselves to other nations, over eliminating themselves from the fight.