The Ethical Dilemma of Torture in Interrogation

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Ethics It is morally and ethically unjustifiable to resort to torture, no matter what the scenario might be. In this case, if you are not getting reliable information while interrogating the prisoner; then you are most likely not going to get reliable information while torturing the prisoner. The prisoner is most likely going to give you information that you want to hear, so you will stop with the torture. The decision to not torture the prisoner might leave thousands of lives at stake if he still refuses to give reliable information during interrogation. Then again, if you torture the prisoner and he gives us unreliable information, thousands of people are still going to die. Immanuel Kant said that we should never treat other human beings …show more content…

If we torture just one prisoner for information on the next terrorist attack, then we could save thousands of lives. One life vs a thousand lives, more good vs less harm. We torture one terrorist to save a thousand lives, so we are doing the most good with the least amount of harm in the views of Utilitarianism. Potential consequences of this could be the possibility that we do not stop with torturing just one prisoner, but we torture that prisoner’s family or multiple other prisoners in our blind approach to getting the information we want. This would mean that we would be doing more harm and less good, and go against the views of the Utilitarian Approach. In the case of the Virtue Approach, which of the options between torturing the prisoner or not will lead you to act as the sort of person you want to be? This would lead to you to not torture the prisoner, because it could destroy your moral character if you do choose to torture the prisoner. It is morally unacceptable to torture a human being according to a virtuous person, so if you act in accord to a virtuous person you would share the same view. Potential consequences of this could be that what you do could be lawfully right, but you refuse to do it because it is virtuously wrong in your

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