There possibly could be an extreme case where torture would be a 'necessary evil'. But it is, and always will be, just that -EVIL! Yeah, you could draw a hypothetical situation where someone was holding a gun to your head and threatening to blow up Borneo if you didn't eat a live baby, or whatever-but you can never use the word 'justified' in such contexts. It's not 'justified' even if someone were forced to do it, and it will never be the right thing to do.

So what it all comes down to is it's not about them and their evil. It's about us. Accepting a little evil is accepting it all. Saying it's okay in certain situations just leaves the lines too grey for a society to go apeshit with it. We haven't come that far along from torturing heretics, burning witchs, and throwing people concentration camps, even if we believe we have. In the scheme of things this is recent history folks....

If we're ever going to evolve above the barbaric we've gotta cut the crap and behave like evolved beings.
Hamlet Reviewed by Hamlet on . The Case for Torture In light of today's headlines about the arrest of 24 terrorists, I think that a fresh look at this article from almost a quarter century ago is appropriate. Michael Levin is a Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York and the Graduate center, City University of New York. He is well known in Libertarian circles and has written much about social issues in the US, especially feminism, race, crime, and other politically incorrect topics. The Case for Torture was written in 1982. Rating: 5