Status Updates From How to Justify Torture: Ins...

In colonial situations, it is much easier (and more politically effective) for colonial police and military forces to represent violent resistance to colonialism as an expression of the inherently dark and uncivilized nature of savage native peoples than it is to concede that anticolonial violence may be a manifestation of legitimate political and economic grievances against exploitative colonial powers.

Those who frame ticking bomb fictions also have to show torture as producing useful, verifiable, and actionable information, because without this torture cannot have the utility value that is required for a utilitarian argument to justify it. It is one thing, after all, for torture to make people confess, but it is quite another for torture to solicit reliable information.

It might be framed as a question, but the conclusion that framers of the ticking bomb scenario want respondents to reach is never really open or in doubt. It is designed, like other rhetorical thought experiments, to guide us to a predetermined conclusion.

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