Maybe my previous answer would have been cleaner if I had said “I don’t think I can procure useful information by torturing someone when time is short.” It’s a relatively easy choice for me, since I doubt that even with proper tools, that I could appropriately gauge the level of pain to the necessary calibration in order to get detailed information in a few minutes or hours.
When I think about other people who might have more experience, it’s hard to imagine someone who had repeatedly fallen into the situation where they were the right person to perform the torture so they had enough experience to both make the call, and effectively extract information. Do you want to argue that they could have gotten to that point without violating our sense of morality?
Since my question is “What should the law be?”, not “is it ever conceivable that torture could be effective?” I still have to say that the law should forbid torture, and people should expect to be punished if they torture. There may be cases where you or I would agree that in that circumstance it was the necessary thing to do, but I still believe that the system should never condone it.
My point wasn’t just that I wouldn’t make a good torturer. It seems to me that ordinary circumstances don’t provide many opportunities for anyone to learn much about torture, (other than from fictional sources). I have little reason to believe that inexperienced torturers would be effective in the time-critical circumstances that seem necessary for any convincing justification of torture. You may believe it, but it’s not convincing to me. So it would be hard to ethically produce trained torturers, and there’s a dearth of evidence on the effectiveness of inexperienced torturers in the circumstances necessary to justify it.
Given that, I think it’s better to take the stance that torture is always unethical. There are conceivable circumstances when it would be the only way to prevent a cataclysm, but they’re neither common, nor easy to prepare for.
And I don’t think I’ve said that it would be ethical, just that individuals would sometimes think it was necessary. I think we are all better off if they have to make that choice without any expectation that we will condone their actions. Otherwise, some will argue that it’s useful to have a course of training in how to perform torture, which would encourage its use even though we don’t have evidence of its usefulness. It seems difficult to produce evidence one way or another on the efficacy of torture without violating the spirit of the Nuremberg Code. I don’t see an ethical way to add to the evidence.
You seem to believe that sufficient evidence exists. Can you point to any?
You wanted an explicit answer to your question. My response is that I would be unhappy that I didn’t have effective tools for finding out the truth. But my unhappiness doesn’t change the facts of the situation. There isn’t always something useful that you can do. When I generalize over all the fictional evidence I’ve been exposed to, it’s too likely that my evidence is wrong as to the identity of the suspect, or he doesn’t have the info I want, or the bomb can’t be disabled anyway. When I try to think of actual circumstances, I don’t come up with examples in which time was short and the information produced was useful. I also can’t imagine myself personally punching, pistol-whipping, pulling fingernails, waterboarding, etc, nor ordering the experienced torturer (who you want me to imagine is under my command) to do so.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t believe the arguments I’ve heard for effectiveness or morality of torture.