{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03148057058534186, 'fraction_numerical': 0.023610427939006393, 'mean_word_length': 4.778409090909091, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 1, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Personhood, Utilitarianism, and the Limits of Torture

Can torture ever be morally justified? In the United States, 15 to 20 years ago, this wasn’t a question on many peoples’ minds because the issue seemed settled: of course torture couldn’t be justified. It was what other people did—the kind of people who run tinpot dictatorships and totalitarian countries. Then, of course, 11 September 2001 happened and we entered a brave new “ticking time bomb” world where the gloves came off; where Jack Bauer on 24 became the moral teacher of the moment; and where stout-hearted undergraduates in favor of torture got their buddies to pour water over their face to show the world on YouTube that waterboarding wasn’t really a big deal. All that mad, fearful, non-empathetic passion is the fire that lights the fuse of this brave new moral world in which torture is now acceptable— and all that passion is absent from this searching and insightful but, finally, hermetically rational book that justifies the agony of torture by traveling too long in the unreal, dispassionate world of logic. That fatal flaw in the book can be traced to two, related philosophical mistakes. The first is the assumption that the normative status of torture can be determined by thought experiments that studiously avoid the complexities of the real world. The second mistake is the over-reliance on a utilitarian mode of moral reasoning to carry the weight of the book’s argument. Assessments of pain and suffering common to a utilitarian calculus can certainly shed light on a complex question like torture. And the author is anything but a reductionist in how he devises that calculus. He’s clear about its limits and *David E. DeCosse is the Director of Campus Ethics Programs at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, California, USA, where he is also Adjunct Associate Professor of Religious Studies. Email: ddecosse@scu.edu Criminal Justice Ethics, 2013 Vol. 32, No. 3, 258–261, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0731129X.2013.861183