Ethical Use Of Torture Essay

Introduction The number of mass causality attacks, both those committed by terrorists and mentally ill people, have been on the rise since the 1990s. The international community has waged war against the states which sponsor terrorism; this has left many families without their sons and daughters who enlisted with the armies of their respective countries to defend their homeland. As seen by the Iraq and Afghanistan war, they have not been a successful mean of stoping terrorism. Utilitarian philosophers have argued that waging wars may not be the best way of responding to these threats. Supported by Jeramy Bentham, Charles Stuart Mill, and David Hume torture can be an ethical way in which a state could extract the necessary information, to stop the next terror, or mass causality, attacks. Bentham did so by introducing the world to what he calls the Hedonic calculus, which is other wise known as the utilitarian calculus. Mill by arguing that happiness, a notion introduced by Bentham which the calculus is based on, was to wide of a concept. And Hume by introducing the concept

The Bush Administration managed to argue that water boarding was not torturing, since it was not causing any lasting physiological pains. However, in order to defend the use of torture, I shall define torture as any voluntary act that causes physiological or psychological harm to another person, without the said person being able to defend him or herself, in order to extract information which could possibly lead to saving lives. In other words, the person who is being tortured has to be a detainee. With this definition, then what the Bush Administration was doing would have been torture, and by using Hedonic Calculus, one can justify the ethicality of using torture as a mean of information extraction that could possibly save