Hey, who thinks torture is never justified?
| Catholics | 26% |
| White Protestant | 31% |
| White evangelical | 31% |
| Secular | 41% |
| Total | 32% |
I won’t chew out all the Christians this time (because I take it for granted that religion, especially a death cult, is not a moralizing influence). Instead, I want to know what the hell is wrong with the 59% of my fellow non-religious people who think torture is sometimes acceptable!
I was also mildly amused by this quote at the National Catholic Reporter article:
During Lent especially, he [David Robinson of Pax Christi] says, the image of Jesus, who was tortured to death, should be powerful for Catholics, reminding them that “Christ is being crucified today through the practice of torture.”
After all, if it was good enough for Jesus…
(I was pointed to a post on this survey at Andrew Sullivan, who also has some pithy comments on it.)
I think what disturbs me the most is the number of folks who say “sometimes” across the board. That’s the most wishy-washy answer I can think of – worse than “I don’t know”. I mean, jeez, its not even “rarely” – which is that worst-case, bomb going off and just one terrorist knows where it is bill of goods that they try to sell people (like we live in an episode of 24 or something). “Sometimes”. And almost a third of those polled answered with it. I weep.
And what’s with those folks who answered “often”? 15% of people polled think its “often” okay to torture people for information? 21% of Catholics? Jeebus. How many think its okay to torture but not to have an abortion performed? I thought the cognitive dissonance among my fellow Catholics on the abortion/death penalty issue in this country was bad, but torture? That’s just crazy.
I’d want to know how ‘torture’ was defined. Was it left up to individual perception?
This goes back long before 9-11. Anyone who’s ever watched NYPD Blue would know that police go far beyond what the law permits when dealing with suspects they particularly don’t like, at least in our cultural fiction. I suspect that most people would say “torture is wrong” before 9-11 merely because it was expected that people consider torture wrong. Now that there’s a greater feeling that it’s socially accepted, more people will express their honest views.
I’m curious about the definition as well.
There’s some point where strong-arm interrogation or whatever becomes torture, and I’m not terribly sure where it is.
I imagine that the subgroup margins of error are quite high. But still, it is pretty disgusting that the plurality response is “sometimes” for most of the subgroups. Especially since the question asked about “suspected terrorists” — folks who could very well be innocent.
I was struck by the restriction to white religious groups. I wonder if minorities would be more sensitive to the abuses of power by a majority, and were more negative about the idea of torture?
Just to address the quote from the NCR: I think that’s actually meant to discourage torture … Christians find Jesus’ death a neccessary evil, not something to be repeated.
It’s sort of equivalent to “makes Baby Jesus cry”
So the church has become more enlightened, but it neglected to tell its followers?
forget about demographics, condoning torture in ANY fashion is apalling.
I’m not religous, I’m not very political, but torture is NEVER appropriate.
I find it appalling that ANY group would condone nearly any manifestation of torture.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!! ;)
Oh, the ironies of the Catholic Church teaching that torture is never justified…
I won’t chew out all the Christians this time (because I take it for granted that religion, especially a death cult, is not a moralizing influence)
Right. And you just did. And please note, these are people who identify themselves as Christian. Does this mean they are functionally Christian? That is another question, and when asked significantly alters the context of the results.
I beleive this points out how easily torture occurs by “normally sane community menbers” always during times of war or whatever. The “other” is always subhuman.
What does this even mean?
PEW seems to only offer breakdowns by gender and religious affiliations for whites. I couldn’t find the full breakdown on the results for the torture question. They asked the same question to various “elites” though (http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=1019 scroll down) and it is good to see that in all eight categories rarely/never are the vast majority. Ironically the highest number for “Sometimes” is for Religious Leaders, and not suprisingly, the highest number for “Often” is for State/Local Government officials.
The question was vague enough that I would have answered with a ‘sometimes’ or ‘rarely’ depending on how much brainpower I wanted to waste on a life-interrupting pollster.
The question did not specify government sanction. The question did not define what constitutes torture. Besides being vague, I never answer questions with a never. *grin*
The universe is way too vast for me to rule out extreme measures under any possible combination of circumstances.
The socially maladjusted twenty seven year old has been blubbering uncontrollably in the interview room ever since his arrival, “I’m sorry, sob, I’m sorry. Don’t tell my mommy!” No amount of talking, pleading threatening, intimidation, begging, bribing or chatting has even been noticed. The officer finally backhands the suspect as the deadline approaches. “Focus on me Jimmy, not your mommy. In what school did you place the bomb?”
“So the church has become more enlightened, but it neglected to tell its followers?”
No, it means that there are a lot of rank-and-file Catholics who don’t agree with all of the Church’s teachings. There’s plenty who don’t agree with the Church’s teachings on birth control and homosexuality. There are also plenty who don’t agree with the Church’s teachings on torture and the death penalty. The Church has no way of forcing its beliefs on followers, and that cuts both ways.
“Never justified” is the easy, politically-correct response. Less easy is defining torture and getting around those situations, which we can all imagine, when it is arguably justified.
what the hell is wrong with the 59% of my fellow non-religious people who think torture is sometimes acceptable!
It’s the word “never” that makes this a trick question. This survey would be more revealing about attitudes on torture if it wasn’t compounded by individual perceptions of moral absolutes.
Me, I think of torture as a crime by definition.
Why not ask “is murder ever justified?” The blubbering boy in this scenario is Stalin! All you have to do to save countless millions is to pull the trigger!
I am frustrated with the “24” morality quiz, there is a desire to seek some sort of crisis where everyone’s morals are situational. Of course, if everyone was actually moral, there would be no crisis that would require torture. The belief is that since there are bad people, we have to be bad people to stop them, which makes us good.
Arghhh.
Add another atheist respondent to that poll. Torture is wrong, even if the guy claims to be the messiah.
“Does this mean they are functionally Christian? That is another question, and when asked significantly alters the context of the results.”
For the past two-thirds of my (youngish) life, my disillusionment with Christianity as a human institution and as a faith I wish to be identified with publicly has only grown. The above is representative of one major reason for this. That, and the frequency of its use in defense of criticisms of the faith or its adherents.
Imagine a nuclear bomb were about to explode and the disarmament code were … implanted in a living child’s brain stem. I think it would be justified to kill the child to retrieve the code.
For similar reasons, I would answer “rarely” to the torture question, noting that the real-world circumstances justifying torture are about as likely as my hypo above. That is, I would support torture where:
(1) There is a certain, specific, and catatrophic danger;
(2) That danger is “imminent” in the strict sense there is no time for any other options or normal legal processes;
(3) There is near certainty that the suspect has the necessary information.
Obviously, such situations occur on 24, and “rarely,” if ever, in the real world. And none of these elements are present to justify the Guantanamo debaucle.
Moreover, there should be strict liability for whoever tortures of an innocent person. If we’re talking “ends justify the means,” then the ENDS must in fact be achieved. A hoped for “end” does not count, nor does a reasonable belief in the suspect’s guilt. As some blogger (I’m sorry I forget who) noted, if the situation really is so dire, a person inflicting torture should be willing to accept the consequences that he tortured an innocent person. And, if the situation is so dire, torturing the wrong person indicates a drastic screw-up, wasted time, and may allow the horrible event to occur anyway.
Qhoheleth: The Church has no way of forcing its beliefs on followers, and that cuts both ways.
Ironically, they used to. Of course, reinstating the Inquisition in a meaninful way would tend to weigh against enforcing an absolute ban on torture. Catch-22, Ratzinger!
demoman: And please note, these are people who identify themselves as Christian. Does this mean they are functionally Christian? That is another question, and when asked significantly alters the context of the results.
We should run a pool on every post concerning religion, betting on the post # that will first use the No True Scotsman argument.
Why not ask “is murder ever justified?” The blubbering boy in this scenario is Stalin! All you have to do to save countless millions is to pull the trigger!
Good analogy (although I would have picked Hitler). How many of the “Yes” respondants do you think really want legal institutionalized torture, and how many do you think are simply capable of hypothesizing such extreme situations?
Personally I think torture might sometimes be justified, but should never be legal – I can’t imagine a case in which I thought information was worth torturing someone for but not worth ending my life in prison or death row.
dc, torture very quickly becomes it’s own end, for purely entertainment purposes. The recent pictures demonstrated that with penis pointing and human naked pig piles.
Reading the Nazi horrors shows the same.
Words like ‘never’ and ‘always’ are hard to use right, at least not without definitional contortions to make the statement asserted mere tautology. It’s like murder is ‘always’ wrong, because every kind of justifed killing is – by definition! – not murder.
Anyway, to me this never-never-torture business is just one aspect of the species of moral reasoning that virtuously proclaims that no end ever justifies any incorrect means, the Hitler in your gunsights be damned. I mean, I’m willing to buy the idea that people ought to be treated as ends and not means and all that, but surely there must exist some circumstances where such rules are niceties that are hard to maintain.
I thought the Republicans were the black-and-white-no-ambiguities-whatsoever party. Why should you be able to kill practically indiscriminately in war – and you’d better believe you usually can – but never twist someone’s arm for intelligence?
Rocky – if you ask me the Abu Ghraib photos have less to do with torture, institutionalized or otherwise, and more to do with just a bunch of young twits being given far too much power. It’s like the prison experiment or those Milgram shock things.
Most of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were just people picked up, with no strategic or intelligence value whatsoever. They were just tortured because they were there and no one was watching over their captors.
I have to go with the people asking, “Please define it first.” For some people the worst torture might be locking them alone in a room, for example. A line needs to be drawn, before you can say conclusively when it has been crossed, and at least some of the BS the whiners call torture is shit their own job might do to them. We either a) never arrest anyone, for fear something we do might qualify as torture to them, b) run psych evaluations on them to find out what “not” to do (which… requires some torture to find out what will effect them anyway) or just draw some imaginary line in the sand and hope that next week the human rights groups don’t arbitrarilly decide the line is in the wrong place and demand we do X, because not doing X is bad or stop Y, because Z% of prisoners insist they are traumatized by it *OR* we try to draw said line in the sand, then tell everyone to shut up about it from now on.
Which do you think is the single least likely of those prospects? See, this is why 59% don’t say never. No one knows what the #$#$# is means and one week it might be Chinese water torture, the next it might be forcing the members of some cult that wear nothing but white to wear orange jumpsuits. And a lot of human rights groups, sadly, are about as rational and sane when it comes to ignoring the wackier shit people complain about as PETA is about animals and humans actually sharing the same planet. I.e., not rational or sane at all. My answer would also be “sometimes”, because a) no one can give me a definition that everyone agrees on as to what the heck I am supposed to be apposing and b) I *can* concieve of circumstances where it might not be any more avoidable than shooting someone is in certain cases. The real question is, a) should it be allowed in secret, b) without public input and c) without any necessity to validate it “before” the fact.
D, exactly my opinion also. Almost entertainment value at some point, and exactly like the Milgram shock experiments.
As the human animal, our thin veneer morals can very quickly disappear given the conditions that allow it. We always seem to question afterwards how the moral and normal guy next door can turn so quickly into a subhuman monster. It was always there.
I stick by the principle: torture should never be permissable. That should be an absolute and enforced rule.
If I were to find myself in that highly bizarre and improbable situation of a child in front of me with the nuke disarm code stuck in her brainstem, the proscription against torture is still in effect. If I choose to violate it to hack into her neck, then it has to be clear that it is my awful decision, my responsibility, my crime — if it were to save many lives, it doesn’t exonerate me, and I have to be regarded as also having committed a terrible and unforgivable crime.
And for the record, I detest the absurd scenarios people invent to justify torture. They rarely (perhaps never) apply, and they are games played to allow others to make excuses — if we allow situation X to justify it, then maybe a situation half as bad as X is a little bit OK, and pretty soon we’re talking about degrees of culpability.
I think, as others have already mentioned, we are seeing the results of a “24” mentality towards torture. People assume that the “good guys” will only torture someone they know for sure is a “bad guy” and is witholding information that would save many lives.
Even before “24” the majority of torture scenes shown on TV and in the movies were of this variety. “24” just brought it to the forefront and although it makes for compelling TV, it may well have contributed to this cavalier attitude towards torture.
If people really knew how often the “good guys” did not know for certain that they even had the right man in custody I suspect they would be shocked. We have already had several cases where the US government’s policy of “extraordinary rendition” has imprisoned and probably tortured (by proxy) the wrong men for months at a time.
John McCain (for once) said it best. He said that all torture should be illegal, but given the direst of circumstances (e.g. a nuclear bomb is about to be set off somewhere) then no one would second guess the president if he authorized extreme measures against a terrorist in order to extract the information to avert disaster. That’s how rare it should be.
Those people probably define torture differently. To them, it probably means “a boot or two to the head”. If people define words differently, of course you’ll get disparaties in the results of polls etc.
e.g. “Evolution” is also defined differently by scientists and non-scientists. There are still millions of people around who think it means “a reptile giving birth to a bird” etc. Ironically, the greatest torture is listening to such goons!
Ya know, I kinda dig Sullivan for his willingness to pile on hard religious types. He can be a jerk sometimes about certain issues, but he is generally a likable conservative when he’s on Bill Maher’s Real Time.
As to the torture subject, I agree the question is a bit vague in its questioning, while seeming straight-forward. Most people probably cannot dream up all the actual, insidious ways in which torture is actually “administered”, let alone give a thoughtful answer to such a question.
Maybe that sounds like pandering to right-wing thoughts, and I’d most likely answer in the “I don’t” category, but like a lot of things, it can be subjective.
I don’t really know enough about torture to answer fully. First, does it actually ever work? Is it possible for a skilled torturer to consistently get accurate intel? If not then imo torture is always wrong – you’re horribly compromising your morals for no gain.
If, however, we make the assumption that torture actually works, I’d consider it acceptable as a last resort. Basically, if a government authorises torture they should be up in front of a congressional hearing the next day. If it turns out that they ordered the wrong person tortured, their authority (if not their liberty) should be DOA.
Any other solution (whichever way you’d push the line of acceptability) appears to me to be asking for trouble.
Well, shame on all you “never justified” folks. Is there absolutely no possible situation where torturing an individual is possibily justified? You are a terribly arrogant fool (who thinks he/she has access to absolute truth) if you claim that.
Now, there is a quite different question. Should torture ever be officially sanctioned? I’d go a definate NO on that. Anyone, especially someone in an official position of power, who uses torture for whatever reason should be tried and convicted. There may well be some extenuating circumstances (most probably not nearly good enough, but I suppose it is actually possible that torture was the best course of action available).
This question allways makes me remeber a tidbit I read about Thomas Jefferson. Appaently he wrote (in a letter I think) that he thought that congress should have impeached him over the Louisiana purchase. After all, Jefferson clearly exceeded his power as president. Of course, Jefferson also though that congress should have found him guilty, left him in power, and thanked him profusely for making such a great decision and seizing upon the opportunity (which required him to break the rules.)
If you’ve got the actual Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot in your sights, then you have perfect knowledge of the future and the ability to change that future. If you have the ability to change the future by squeezing the trigger, then you have the ability to change the future by: injecting Hitler with antibiotics to cure his syphilis so that he never goes completely insane, and instead just stays an ordinarily bitter and angry man for the rest of his life; warning Lenin not to trust Stalin; or booing Pol Pot off the stage at his first public speech so that he gives up the idea of politics forever. So much for time-travel fantasies.
In the real world, moreover, you don’t have perfect knowledge of the future, and you don’t even have perfect knowledge of who lies in your sights or strapped to the ducking board. As we have seen, you may not even have accurate knowledge as to how that person came to be in your interrogation room.
This person knows the code to disarm the bomb that will destroy dozens of lives, you say? How do you know that? How do you know where the bomb is? How do you know that this is the right person? If you know all that, why do you need to torture this person at all? What do you do if you torture the guy and it turns out you’re wrong? That in your desperation to extract the information, you’ve blinded yourself to the possibility of error?
What if the guy turns out not to be a British-born Pakistani-descended terrorist setting off on a suicide mission, but a Brazilian electrician ambling off to work? Were the British police even slightly justified in killing de Menezes, even though their operational ignorance and vivid imaginations led them to fear he was about to blow up a subway train?
By accepting extreme measures it seems that one starts to see all situations as requiring extreme measures. Killing or torturing works, it says in the operations manual, so why dick about with half-measures? After all, if you kill the wrong guy, who is going to complain?
So, yes, I will not countenance torture as a legitimate tool of inquiry. It is too easy to mis-use, and there are better ways of finding the truth.
Anyone who’s ever watched NYPD Blue would know that police go far beyond what the law permits when dealing with suspects they particularly don’t like…
Are there two series with this title? Because the one I remember watching the first few seasons of never had any scenes of police brutality that I can recall. Instead, the detectives used guile, deduction and persuasion to find out the truth. They gathered evidence, constructed hypotheses, asked questions and usually presented the suspect with their conclusions, so as to add weight to their argument that the perp should ‘fess up.
Except for The Shield, I don’t think I’ve seen a police procedural for a couple of decades where the protagonists routinely use violence to secure convictions. And even in The Shield, it’s fairly clear that Mackey and his cohort are the Bad Cops, that their shields are tarnished beyond redemption, and that the Good Cops are the two detectives, Wyms and Dutch.
A columnist on the local weekly had an interesting perspective on it. Leaving aside the question of justification, he said that there should be laws against torture. And in case of a “24” situation, then those laws should be broken, but then whoever broke them should be prosecuted. Even if they did save the world.
so how many out there are having flashbacks to Dungeons & Dragons sessions with a Paladin in the party? Interminable debates on ends justifying means and what is the greater evil.
I see many here would gleefully play strict stick up the rear lawful good Paladins. Too constricting for my personal tastes and who wants to give the GM such a reliable method of controlling the party as a one hundred percent predictable character.
True neutral and proud of it.
I say torture is never justified, and my reason is simple:
Torture could only be justified if it’s for extremely vital information – all those “only one man knows where the bomb is” scenarios etc.
HOWEVER … it’s known that torture produces extremely unreliable information. If that terrorist lies to you about where the bomb is … you think you’ll be able to find out in time to go back and try again? I don’t.
Thus, the means are extreme, and the ends are extremely unlikely to be achieved. So … why bother?
Sean, just because you’re Lawful shouldn’t necessarily make you predictable. We know from chaos theory how few laws are necessary to produce unpredictable behaviour. It isn’t laws that make PCs predictable, it’s their players’ stereotypical behaviour.
If you think that “spirituality”,”religiosity” and “(this or that)religion” are three completely different things and that torture (of others) is linked to the political sides of religion (as a set of rules and manipulating factor in a given society, not as an everpresent spiritual need) you may understand why people think torure is somehow justified.
I was struck by the restriction to white religious groups. I wonder if minorities would be more sensitive to the abuses of power by a majority, and were more negative about the idea of torture?
It’s possible, but it’s also possible for the opposite to hold – that is, that blacks and Hispanics will be found to be more pro-torture than whites because they perceive opposition to torture to be a latte liberal’s privilege.
A columnist on the local weekly had an interesting perspective on it. Leaving aside the question of justification, he said that there should be laws against torture. And in case of a “24” situation, then those laws should be broken, but then whoever broke them should be prosecuted. Even if they did save the world.
Well, my own view is that torture should be allowed only if done by Jack Bauer with at least implicit support from Tony Almeida, Bill Buchanan, or David Palmer. And speaking of 24, I’d like to ask that nobody reveal anything about season 5, which I haven’t watched, except that it has 24 episodes and stars Kiefer Sutherland.
That’s odd, because I distinctly remember bodychecks, punches, and general physical harassment.
I won’t even go into what happened in the episode with the bomber suspect.
(because I take it for granted that religion, especially a death cult, is not a moralizing influence)
Alas, this doesn’t necessarily follow as a conclusion. It might be that religion tends to attract individuals who, without it, would be even less moral. That is, take the groups among which now only 26% or 31% always oppose torture, remove religion, and we find those numbers shrinking further — the individuals might become even more favorably disposed toward torture. Thank God for God!
How can a question like that produce any meaningful result? Using words like never and always just artifically slices off the section of your survey group who don’t believe that anything is never or always true.
If you get to think up any wild, improbable scenario you want, of course you can come up with one where torture is justified. Why would anyone answer “no”?
Well, in my case it’s because I also assume that the people asking the question are as stupid as I think they are, and didn’t mean what they literally asked, and before I can answer the question I have to figure out what they meant to ask, which is something like, “Should official U.S. policy allow CIA agents to stick bamboo skewers through the nipples of random people picked off the streets subsequent to unsubstantiated panic attacks by intelligence analysts?”
But that’s just my interpretation. What kind of sense do you expect a poll to make when the question as asked is so meaningless that the respondents have all had to make up their own questions?
As far as I am concerned, the question “Is torture ever justified?” has to be interpreted as either vague or have “No, by defnition.” as its answer. Better questions have to do with specific practices, though I am still here (and everywhere) puzzled by degrees of harm, risk, and so on.
I hear the Catholic Hierarchy is really busy right now – a new sin has been discovered – Wantonly Deviating from Holy Teachings In Answering Opinion Polls. Intense discussions are being held to determine the penalty for penitents at confession time…
I’m for torture in some cases. I admit it. In life and death instances, I have no problem with torture.
Sean, just because you’re Lawful shouldn’t necessarily make you predictable. We know from chaos theory how few laws are necessary to produce unpredictable behaviour. It isn’t laws that make PCs predictable, it’s their players’ stereotypical behaviour.
Sorry, not my intent to imply all lawfuls are such, thus my qualifier ‘stick up the rear’ before lawful good. *grin*
The point I was attempting to make was that some folks posting here strike me as being real life examples of stereotypical paladins. You know, the type played by those who take the one paragraph summary of lawful good as immutable gospel.
No really, I am a big fan of moral codes, just not ones which countenance use of the word ‘never’. I do not care if an imaginary scenerio where torture could save lives is absurd and rarely applicable. Until the universe cleans up its act and convinces me that rarely can be replaced with never…
I don’t think that this problem is cogently set up as a difference between atheists and theists on torture. PZ’s moral absolutism on torture is just as mystifying to me as the moral absolutism professed by Xians on other fronts.
I do understand if he’s making this point: “There has never been and there will never likely be an instance in which torture is justified.” I agree, but I don’t agree with the thought experiment detest that he feels. The purpose of the thought experiment is to figure out the nature and contours of the principles we live by, not to find ways to justify torture in any likely scenario. That would be a misuse of the technique. The purpose is to try to figure out what things we think are more valuable then others and how circumstances affect value.
I think the real story here is that Xians seem to be the utilitarians or moral relativists that they and their leaders usually profess to despise. That’s the nice thing about these kinds of surveys. They might cut through complex layers of self-deception.
PZ,
The scenario you describe is what a lawyer would call “extenuating circumstances”. You don’t get to kill someone just because you feel like it, but you can do so to defend your life. You don’t get to torture someone like Dennis Rader did, but if you do it to keep them from popping off a tac nuke at the superbowl, the jury will probably give you a walk.
This is why we HAVE juries, and why can ALWAYS acquit, no matter what the statute and the facts are before them. If the jury doesn’t want to condemn you, they don’t.
-jcr
Let me also say, that if I were facing the canonical, hypothetical situation, of having to choose whether to torture someone to prevent something like the 9/11 attack, I hope I would have the guts to do it, including taking whatever the penalty would be. I’d hope a Jury would spring me, but if I have to suffer the death penalty for taking extreme measures to save many people, so be it. Sometimes, you have to take one for the team.
-jcr
P Z Myers wrote:
What’s interesting is that most of the objections to torture here seem to be based on utilitarian arguments – that it doesn’t work. But how do we know? I very much doubt there’s been any controlled trials done on just how reliable torture is as a method of extracting accurate information but suppose, for the sake of argument, that it’s actually better than more humane methods of interrogation. Could any secret service afford to ignore a means of gathering intelligence that might be vital to protecting the state?
I think the cases where torture might be justified are few and far between. But a scenario like the one played out in the first Dirty Harry movie is not so far-fetched. And it poses a serious moral dilemma.
Torturing a suspect in an effort to make him reveal the whereabouts of a victim is illegal but is it morally wrong? If there is reason to think the victim is still alive but in danger of dying then failing to do everything possible to save her would also be wrong. Either course of action is problematical but it seems to me that the priority would have to be the welfare of the victim.
Remember that in Dirty Harry the victim was already dead when Harry Calahan tortured the kidnapper. And why are we pulling examples out of fiction anyway? In fiction when someone is tortured for information, the audience is nearly always given enough information to be sure that the tortured person deserves the abuse, so that they can stay on the side of the protagonist. I stopped watching 24 halfway through the second season, but as I recall Jack Bauer only ever manages to torture bad people. Remarkably prescient of him, really.
For a counter-example of fictional torture by the nominal good guy leading to a bad outcome, check out The Offence, starring Sean Connery.
I stopped watching 24 halfway through the second season, but as I recall Jack Bauer only ever manages to torture bad people. Remarkably prescient of him, really.
You should watch seasons 3 and 4, in which CTU ends up failing to extract information by torture, or torturing innocent people.
Portugal had inquisition for centuries (until 1821) yet abolished the death penalty in 1867. Religion is overrated in this, it had more to do with politics, in particular abolishing the death penalty came sometime after a change from absolute to liberal monarchy. There have been no pressures to change this in almost 150 years, and during this time people views on religion only changed considerably in the last decades. The fact that in the USA after all this time as a democratic country most people still favor death sentences and torture are puzzling to me, but must reflect the way local cultures view violence.
One of the things I never understood about America is why boxing, where two guys beat each other up for money, and endure beatings sometimes much more violent than anything they would experience in a torture session, is so popular. I know it is one thing accepting to be beaten and quite a different thing not be given a choice, but it’s still madness.
hmmm. so, 68 % of us are causal sadists… That explains a lot about why our world is such a bad place to live in.