Torture has been a tool of coercion for nearly all of human history, whether to instill fear in a population or force people to convert, but almost all contemporary attempts to justify the use of torture revolve around torture as a means of extracting information from a victim. Used in this context, torture has a number of prominent advocates, despite the fact that ample historical and experimental evidence suggests that torture is a particularly ineffective way of extracting information (Cole, 2008, p. 375). Despite its inefficacy, torture was a central element of the United States' response to the terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001, and its supporters frequently invoked the image of a high-value target refusing to provide time-sensitive information. Regardless of these dramatic scenarios or even the question of torture's efficacy, it is possible to definitively demonstrate that torture is not acceptable under theories of ontological, deontological, utilitarian, or...
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