Torture By Uwe Steinhoff: Article Analysis

The subject I am looking into is torture and the first article I am looking at is Torture-The Case for Dirty Harry, written by Uwe Steinhoff. Uwe Steinhoff is arguing that torture might just be more justifiable and morally okay than what most people may think. Steinhoff’s first argument towards this point is that people kill other people, and some killings are justified. Therefore, considering that torture is seemingly better than being killed, torture should be justified in that way that some of these killings are justified. A man by the name of Henry Shue counters this argument by basically saying that killing someone in combat may be do them greater harm than torturing them, but killing someone could remove the possible other harm that

I feel as if the pain that a criminal would feel from being tortured, without any moral or ethical considerations, is worth it if it saves a life that would otherwise be lost. One response to the Dirty Case is that interrogative torture, such as the technique used by the officer on the kidnapper, is not effective. Steinhoff argues that this is incorrect because sometimes the torturer does get what he is looking for as in the Dirty Harry case. To further defend against this response, Stein a One-Million-Pains-To-One-Kill-Gun argument. With this argument, essentially a person is being shot at by an aggressor and is eventually going to be hit unless they were to fire a gun with a 1 in 1 million chance of immediately stunning the aggressor to avoid being killed. The other 999,999 will not stun the aggressor quick enough so the assault victim will die and the assailant will suffer a lot of pain after the fact. Steinhoff argues that even though the chances of survival are only 1 in 1 million, someone would still take that chance even if the could cause pain to the assailant. Tying that into a scenario such as the Dirty Harry case, even though the chances of the kidnapper actually giving up the girls location are