From Case vs Rule - David Friedman’s Substack; the rest of the post is more political than technical:
A terrorist has planted an atomic bomb in New York City, set to go off at midnight. The police have caught him but do not know where the bomb is. They torture him until he tells them, locate the bomb, disarm it, save a million lives.
That is an example of an imaginary situation where it seems clear that the use of torture is justified, one sometimes offered in defense of real-world torture, such as water boarding. The answer to the argument that many people, myself among them, find convincing distinguishes between case and rule:
I don’t trust government agents to abide by any reasonable set of restrictions on torture so don’t believe they should be empowered to use it at all. (Comment in a recent thread online)
There might be rare cases where the use of torture is justified but a rule permitting torture is not, since there is no way in practice of limiting it to only those cases.
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