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S C Donnelly, Torture—if it doesn’t work—why use it?, QJM: An International Journal of Medicine, Volume 111, Issue 2, February 2018, Page 71, https://doi.org/10.1093/qjmed/hcy015
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Philosophically, the utilitarian view of torture is that is justified on the basis that the suffering of the few is outweighed by the needs of the many. Conversely, the Kantian position is that it is morally wrong and can never be justified. If the primary role of torture is to extract information—what if—its just not very good at doing that?
In a review by Professor O’Mara, an eminent neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, he analyses the scientific evidence of whether torture works. He examines scientifically the claim that imposing extreme stressor states on individuals facilitates the retrieval of voluntarily withheld information.
After forensic analysis, he concludes torture substantially degrades signal-to-noise ratios of information yield and substantially increases false positive discovery rates. In short—as an efficient information retrieval system—it doesn’t work.
But then historically we have always known this—Napoleon Bonaparte stated ‘having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished … it has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men by putting them to torture produces nothing worthwhile’. If we have already known that torture does not work, why does it continue? President Trump during his election campaign, commenting on torture and specifically waterboarding, stated ‘Believe me, it works, and you know what, if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they’re doing’. And there crystallizes the main reason for torture—societal revenge. Let’s call torture for what it is—its societal leadership, causing individual pain and suffering, in our name.
