Moral Justifiability Of Torture Essay

Since the 911 attack in New York, there have been serval reports state the CIA carried enhanced interrogation to torture suspect in black sites. For example, President Obama, as commander in chief, publicly admitted in August 2009 “we tortured some folks”. Because torture can be used as a method to extract information, a BBC survey of 27,000 people in 2006 shows one out of three people considered a degree of torture acceptable if it saved lives. The rest of the paper will discuss the moral justifiability of torture under two ethnical traditions — moral skepticism and consequentialism, along with a practical approach to determine whether the CIA should be condoned to use torture toward terrorists. Moral skepticism includes two variants — amoralism

Likewise Anthony Ellis introduced in “Traditions of International Ethics”, utilitarianism focuses on maximizing well-being and utility (Ellis 158). This means an action can be morally justify if it promotes the best consequence in public good. Truly, this is the reason why so many people consider a degree of torture acceptable if it saved lives even torture seems to be a totally immoral and uncivilized action to them. For example, if you are a employee of the CIA, and you catch a terrorist who places a bomb in a city. The terrorist is the only person who knows the bomb location and torturing him would have a great chance to extract information about the bomb. So will you torture him to save thousands of lives and justify your action? Similar to Ellis states in his article that there will be no ultimate moral significant in distinction between killing someone and simply allowing them to die because they both produce the same outcome (Ellis 175), this emphasizes that the action of not torturing a terrorist and allowing him to kill thousand of innocents is also immoral because it would be just like you kill those innocents, if someone argue that torturing a terrorist is immorally