Unpalatable Realities (2) - Torture

Following on from my post on terrorism being justified in certain situations, I thought I'd make it into a little series taking a look at the horrible things we do to our fellow man for various reasons.

Justification, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and rather than take a binary look into nasty things I much prefer to consider why people would do such a thing, and whether or not they're effective. So today I'll turn my beady eye upon torture, something human history is replete with - pretty much any nations history will introduce you to all kinds of inventive devices, dreamed up by the cream of utter bastardy across mankind's blood-soaked history, with the express purpose of extracting information from someone through the medium of excruciating pain.

From the Chinese spit-roasting thieves to near-death, to heretics being sat on a big, sharp, spike and getting weighted down, to waterboarding Al Qaeda suspects we do have a rather disturbing psychopathic streak running down our information-gathering activities...

Humans, along with many other hominids, have what is known as Mirror Neurons - these fire when recognize an emotion on others allowing us to feel a measure of empathy. It's a very good way of baselining a form of biological ethics, where seeing something we don't like being done to us, being done to someone else, causes a measure of sympathy and disgust for the cause of the action.

We don't like pain, so we generally learn that causing pain is bad via these mirror neurons. Of course, they can be overridden, but by and large being disgusted by torture indicates you're a good human being and your biologically-based morality compass is working well.

That is one argument against torture. There is also the fact that it generally doesn't give good results, although thats more to do with the torturers than the torture.

For example, if someone doesn't know what you're asking and you're not believing them, they will eventually tell you something to make the pain stop - who can blame them? Which is why you ensure you already know they have the information beforehand.

Torture is pretty useless for fishing expeditions - you'll get a load of false data, but if you've caught the guy with the information, they will give it up when there are no more lies in them.

The question is whether it's right or wrong, and well, I guess it depends on who you are, and what you're doing.

Ask yourselves this, if your kid had been taken and you had someone who knew where they were, but wasn't interested in telling you, where would your line be drawn?

Next up, our species biggest pastime and something of a biggie; War.