The Ethical Dilemma of the Mad Bomber
Kody Meyer
South Tama High School
FA:15
This paper will be discussing the classic mad bomber scenario. If you are unfamiliar with it, it goes like this. A man has threatened to detonate several explosives in very populated shopping areas.. He has been taken into custody; however the bombs have already been placed and are scheduled to blow up soon. Because of where these bombs are placed, people will most likely die. The man has not given up the location during interrogation, and is exercising his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to speak until his lawyer arrives.
One of your colleagues has suggested torture, due to the severity of the situation. Torture is, of course, illegal, but your colleague
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The first is a violation of a person’s constitutional amendments, which was also mentioned in the rights approach. The main amendments this scenario violates are the Fifth (self-incrimination,) Eighth (cruel and unusual punishment,) and Fourteenth (due process.) (Heritage Foundation)
By trying to force this man to talk without his lawyer present, you are taking away his fifth amendment rights. By torturing him, you are giving him punishment that is definitely cruel and unusual. By punishing his crime now without warrant, judge, or jury, you take away his right to due process. All people are entitled to these rights, even criminals of the harshest crime. By taking them away, you are giving him special treatment, even if that special treatment is not favorable.
The second way that the justice and fairness approach applies is that this scenario sets a precedent. If you torture this man now for a crime that may cause deaths, do you not have to torture every time someone threatens the lives of innocent civilians? Where is the cutoff point for
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Be a hero. However, by saving those lives, you are condemning the bomber to torture and all after effects. One might recall a similar scenario from Volume I of Les Misérables, where Jean Valjean must choose between abandoning the factory of hundreds of workers he owns, or letting a stranger admit to a crime that he committed.
The quandary of this scenario is whether it is okay to break the law in order to get results. Many people will die if we do not find out where these bombs are. But is that worth torturing a man possibly to the point of insanity?
When debating the death sentence, some of the people who are for it are also for the death being painful. After all, if someone has brutally murdered someone else, or raped them, or abused a child, why should they not feel pain?
These people are fine arguing this, because they are not the ones killing the prisoner.
The same can be said for this scenario. Anyone can say that they are for torture, because they are generally not the ones doing it.
Another way that the virtue approach can be used is with the virtue of prudence. To be prudent is to err on the side of caution. As mentioned earlier in this paper,
Who wouldn’t have agreed? Yes, torture is cruel but it is less cruel than the substitute in many positions. Killing Hitler wouldn’t have revived his millions of victims nor would it have ended war. But torture in this predicament is planned to bring no one back but to keep faultless people from being sent off. Of course mass murdering is far more barbaric than torture. The most influential argument against using torture as a penalty or to get an acknowledgment is that such practices ignore the rights of the particulars. Michael Levin’s “The Case for Torture” discusses both sides of being with and being against torture. This essay gets readers thinking a lot about the scenarios Levin mentioned that torture is justified. Though using pathos, he doesn’t achieve the argument as well as he should because of the absence of good judgment and reasoning. In addition to emotional appeal, the author tries to make you think twice about your take on
Rather, when torture is acceptable, and on which term should be it performed? The argument lest authorization torture his an advisor Sharde presumption that torture is currently happening and will be happening in the future hence the the. Plan of torture and. Dershowitz believes in a formal, visible, accountable, and controlled system of inflicting that would ideally leave torture as a last resort. The system would begin by granting the suspect immunity. Then suspect the be would compelled to testify; if the suspect were to refuse to exchange information, the next step would be acknowledging the possibility of torture while continuing to give the option of immunity. In a case of a suspect refusing to exchange information, even with immunity, a judicial warrant must be granted to proceed with purposely elicited
The act of interrogation has been around for thousands of years. From the Punic Wars to the war in Iraq, interrogating criminals, prisoners or military officers in order to receive advantageous information has been regularly used. These interrogation techniques can range from physical pain to emotional distress. Hitting an individual with a whip while they hang from a ceiling or excessively questioning them may seem like an ideal way to get them to reveal something, but in reality it is ineffective and . This is because even the most enduring individual can be made to admit anything under excruciating circumstances. In the Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights there is a provision (“no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself” ) which reflects a time-honored common principle that no person is bound to betray him or herself or can be forced to give incriminating evidence. This ideology of self-incrimination has been challenged heavily over the past s...
In his essay “The Case for Torture,” printed in The Norton Reader 13th Edition, Michael Levin argues that torture is justified and necessary under extreme circumstance. He believes that if a person accepts torture to be justified under extreme cases, then the person automatically accepts torture. Levin presents weak argument and he mostly relies on hypothetical scenarios. There is not concrete evidence that torture solves problems and stop crime but rather the contrary. Under international law, torture is illegal and all the United Nation members have to abide by those rules. The use of torture does not keep people safe, but rather the opposite. Torture has a profound effect on democracy. As the use of torture becomes normal in society, the right of the citizen will suffer greatly.
From the moment an innocent individual enters the criminal justice system they are pressured by law enforcement whose main objective is to obtain a conviction. Some police interrogation tactics have been characterized as explicit violations of the suspect’s right to due process (Campbell and Denov 2004). However, this is just the beginning. Additional forms of suffering under police custody include assaults,
In this essay I will consider the objections to Virtue Ethics (VE) raised by Robert Louden in his article entitled On Some Vices of Virtue Ethics which was published in 1984. It is important to note at the outset of this essay that it was not until 1991 that the v-rules came up in literature. So Louden is assuming throughout his article that the only action guidance that VE can give is “Do what the virtuous agent would do in the circumstances. ” I will be addressing Louden’s objections with the benefit of knowing about the v-rules.
Torture: the action or practice of inflicting severe pain for punishment or to force them to say or do something (Oxford Dictionary). Torture can be mental or physical , but is it alright to use torture at all or is it inhumane? If a terrorist knew where the bombs placed throughout America were located. This man is refusing to give any information to any of the interrogation techniques. Just hours away there will be an explosion killing millions of people throughout America alone. Every detective working (secretly) on this case has tried every interrogation technique they were ever taught, even some they made up their self. Although there is one that they have not done. Would torture save the lives of millions of innocent men, women and children? This essay is going to state the reasons why torture should be acceptable in certain situations.
These scenarios are logical and highly effective since they also relate to similar issues, such as 9/11, that society has overcome (McCrisken 792). This stance is incredibly valid and in the long run could have resolved a lot of issues before some of these problems occurred. “Suppose a terrorist has hidden an atomic bomb on Manhattan Island which will be detonated at noon on July 4 unless… (here follow the usual demand for money and release of his friends from jail). Suppose, further, that he is caught at 10 a.m. on the fateful day, but preferring death to failure, won’t disclose where the bomb is. What do we do? If we follow due process, wait for his lawyer, arraign him, millions of people will die” (Levin 95). This quote indicates that the legal and more ethical way of handling things terroristic acts could result in the death of thousands rather than resolving the
First, the ticking-bomb scenarios are cases in which torturing the terrorist will save many innocent lives at the cost of non-lethal suffering to one individual. Torturing the terrorist would thus produce the most happiness/well-being. This approach has great strengths but also creates complex questions: is torture still the lesser evil if it only saves one person? Is it morally right to torture a person’s children to extract a confession? Is it morally right to torture ninety-nine people in an attempt to save one-hundred others? In theory this type of thinking can justify extreme inhumanity as long as it is calculated as the lesser evil. Secondly, one ought to do what produces the most happiness/well-being. Despite the wider case against torture, a person confronted with the immediate choices in the ‘ticking bomb’ case is unlikely to take these issues into account; ‘interrogators will still use coercion because in some cases they will deem it worth the consequence. Few people would be unable to see a moral basis for torture if it was carried out in a reasonably clear ‘ticking bomb’ case and if the intention of the torturer was to ‘do the right thing.’ The difficulties of the immediate choice between carrying out torture and allowing deaths make it difficult to morally condemn the unfortunate person charged with deciding. Therefore, one ought to torture terrorists in such scenarios. The only pragmatic concern would be that torture does not
Now, let’s say you do choose to torture this man, not only are the people directly in this situation going to be affected, but also the rest of the nation. We need to ask ourselves, what is going to be the true outcome? This includes thinking about how the enemy is going to react and how the nation is going to react. Torturing this man shames our nation as a whole, scars our repu...
Although this is a view seen by many people there is also those like me that believe it's a necessary evil, necessary in ways that can save countless lives in return for a little inhumanity shown against those that are showing no humanity themselves to others. According to Author of “The Ethics of Killing”,Jeff McMahan “Torture can be morally justifiable, and even obligatory, when it is wholly defensive – for example, when torturing a wrongdoer would prevent him from seriously harming innocent people”. Author Jeff McMahan agrees with those that believe torture is acceptable in a few situations. Commentator Charles Krauthammer from MLive media group argues the same that there are times when torture is the only choice. “Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy...The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives”. Another formidable lawyer and commentator, Sydney Kentridge, came up with a more sinister plot. “The nuclear device is ticking, we have a member of the terrorist group but we have also found his wife and children, may god forbid this situation ever arise but we would not only have the right to torture but we would have the duty to do
Virtue, then deals with those feelings and actions in which it is wrong to go too far and wrong to fall too short but in which hitting the mean is praiseworthy and good….
The offender’s rights and well-being is also greatly considered when determining a route of punishment. Not only does the constitution protect offenders from cruel punishments, double jeopardy, and unlawful searches;
From a moral standpoint, torture is wrong and unacceptable. Many religious people are against this act of violence because they see it as a violation of the dignity of a human being. Humans have the right to not have intentional harm upon themselves from others. The ban on torture furthermore supports this certain right. Not only does torture violate people’s rights, but they also violate the demands of justice. In the past, many of our nation’s people have been tortured and we have had a problem with it; but when it’s not you the one that is being tortured, it seems to be fine. Have you heard of the golden rule, “Treat others only as you consent to being treated in the same situation? (7)” This applies very well to this problem.
It must be remembered that criminals are real people too, which have. life and with it, the feeling of pain, fear and the loss of their loved ones and all the other emotions that the rest of us feel. There is no such thing as a humane way of putting someone to death. Every type of execution causes the prisoner physical suffering, some. methods perhaps cause less than others, but be in no doubt that being.