There are very particular things that a person doesn’t like. Pain is one of them. Whether it is physical pain from a punch, or mental pain of depression, we don’t want any of that. Torture has been used as a method of punishment as well as to gain information from a suspect for personal desires. It has been used since ancient times . Now, the question arises, that is torture permissible, or morally ethical in any circumstances? In my opinion, the acceptability of torture depends on circumstances and situation.
Before talking about different situations and acceptability of torture, we must first understand what torture exactly is, because we often misinterpret torture. Torture, is the act of intentional infliction of extreme pain, physical or mental, on a person to punish one for one crimes, or for personal desires. Some examples of tortures are boiling, blinding with light, breaking bones, burning a scar or ornamental pattern on body, removal of male testes, cold cell torture, Chinese water torture, etc. The worst type of torture though, is Scaphism, also known as “the boats”. It is said to be used by Persians in the ancient times. It involves trapping someone between two tree trunks or two boats, and covering him/her with a mixture of milk and honey, allowing one to be devoured by insects and vermin over time. Thankfully, Scaphism isn’t used anymore. This may be very hard to accept, but it is the truth; All of these torture methods have been used in human history, and some of them are even used in present time. We’ll discuss different situations for torture in the following paragraphs.
The most common situation is the ticking bomb, which is a hypothetical situation. “Someone posts on social media that a flight from location x going to location y has a bomb concealed somewhere in the plane which will explode in a particular amount of time. The police is able to arrest the suspect who posted this information on the social media. Should the suspect or suspect’s family members be tortured to tell where the bomb is?” This situation is problematic even for the most virtuous people. Everyone their own opinion. My opinion is, that the suspect, and his family members should be tortured. My opinion has a very simple explanation. one’s family should be tortured, because they could be the real perpetrators, forcing the suspect to act like he/she is the actual bomber. If one’s family isn’t the master mind behind this bombing, I’m pretty sure one would tell the location of the bomb, because even if anyone hates their family, we would find a very minor amount of people who’d want to see their family get tortured. In the case of disliked family, the suspect won’t even be blackmailed, which means the bombing won’t even take place in that situation. The suspect should be tortured, because even if the suspect didn’t want to do it, one was blackmailed to do it, and the real perpetrator behind the bombing is someone else, one would tell the location of the bomb. Because, why would anyone want to kill innocent people? In my opinion, only two kinds of suspects can be in that situation. Ones who were blackmailed, and ones who actually wanted the bombing to take place, as known as terrorists. The blackmailed people know the results of both the actions they take. That is, if they tell the location of the bomb, something precious to them (probably their family) will be taken away from them. In simple words, their family will be murdered. The other action, where they don’t tell the location, one’s parents gets to live, while they die. Although, in most cases, after the suspect dies, his/her family is already dead. The blackmailer already kills the suspect’s family. The suspect knows that neither one of the action has a positive outcome. A sacrifice is made, and either one or one’s family has to die inevitably. This is the situation of the blackmailed people. Now for the case of terrorists. I like to distinguish the terrorists into two types. The ones who are scared of being tortured and will probably tell the location, while the other category is of maniacs, who have a completely different psychology. Maniacs aren’t distracted by pain, aren’t even bothered by pain they get from torture. That’s right, torture won’t work on them. Because, either the maniac has experienced pain of much higher level, much severe pain, or their brain is completely focusing on the the bomb explosion, the death of many innocents. Why? Because something must have happened to them in their life. Something terrible, something horrible, something traumatic that made them crazy, and even if the suspect gives the information of the bomb location, there is no way to know 100% that the information is accurate, in which case, the torture would be meaningless, because the suspect found a way to let the bombing continue, and a temporary relief from pain, until the interrogators found out that the information was wrong. For which, the suspect would be tortured even more.
Another situation, which is actually real, is the prisoners of war. In this case, I believe torture shouldn’t be used. Even if they are killing innocents of other countries, they shouldn’t be tortured. “Survival of the fittest” is a phrase from the Darwinian evolutionary theory. If we take a more thorough look on soldiers, we see that they work accordingly to this phrase. That’s why the armies only take men and women that have particular features. Not everyone can join the army. A big mistake we make when joining the army is that we only focus on the pros, we never think about the cons. We don’t think even for the slightest of a moment that we could be captured as war prisoners, we could be tortured, and because we don’t think about both the pros and cons, I believe that majority of the people that join the army, don’t have enough courage. If only we thought about pros AND cons both at the same time, and then made a decision. Back to the main topic, even if soldiers kill innocents of the enemy country, the soldiers of the enemy country are doing the same. Fun fact, soldiers aren’t doing this according to their own will. They are told to do so. A gruesome fact it is, that innocents are killed by people who don’t even want to kill them. However, countries still do it. Prisoners of war are tortured, even when they don’t deserve it. A country has it’s right to have secrets, because we live in a world where countries don’t live together as the citizens of Earth. It is a sad, but realistic world. But, leaders don’t allow it. They torture soldiers gruesomely, degrade them, use all kinds of torture devices on them, until every bit of information is spilt, and then, they are killed. Leaders are always in hunger of information. They want to know everything, committing the deadly sin of gluttony. Not for food, but for knowledge, and information.
The situations where I consider torture as punishment is crime. If one commits a crime, one should pay the price of it. Everything has a currency, and the currency of crime is pain. The punishment of one’s crime could be from an hour in jail, to death penalty, depending on the severity of the crime committed. I believe Saudi Arabia creates a very simple example of it. The country is so safe, that store owners don’t even close stores when they go for prayers. In Saudi Arabia, if anyone tries to steal anything, even a piece of cloth, their right hand is amputated, the hammer of justice is actually struck down, punishment is actually given to the ones who commit crimes.
We have finally come to the end of a long, arduous journey. We got to know what torture is, and my opinion on it’s usage, that torture acceptability depends on circumstances and situations. I believe I have provided enough reasoning for my opinion and I hope, that you were satisfied by my opinions and reasons.
