5. Is torture ever acceptable?

Torturing someone involves inflicting pain and misery on the victim in the hope of obtaining something he or she is unwilling to give up. The purpose can vary from simple cruelty, as when youngsters on the playground torture one of their kind to see the reaction, to seeking information from the victim that may save the life of some innocent person. The current concern with, for example, water boarding falls within the second category.
In either kind of cases torture as a rule must be avoided. That’s just part of civilized conduct. But is it always morally wrong? In very rare cases it would not be. This is when it’s used against someone whose information could save innocent people from carnage.
In a civilized society, however, there is no room for torture as official public policy, even when someone may deserve to be punished for a vicious crime or fails to help the authorities to rescue innocent victims. This latter is, of course, the sort of situation when it is most tempting to make official use of torture. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to make use of the method even then. It is a basic feature of a civilized human community to prohibit the use of physical force against someone other than in certain rare cases of defending innocent people. No offensive use of physical force is justified.