Responding to Sam Harris on Torture

In The End of Faith, Sam Harris challenges the reader to consider situations in which we might find torture to be a morally permissible course of action. Famously, he gives the example of a nuclear bomb having been dispatched in a crowded metropolis, which will detonate in an hour; we've captured the person responsible, and unless he reveals the location of the bomb in time for it to be defused, millions of people will die. In such an extraordinary scenario, Harris argues, torture is an acceptable course of action.

This passage provoked a knee-jerk reaction from some of Harris' critics, who subsequently mischaracterized him as favoring torture. He recently authored a response to his critics, which he posted on his own blog, in a post titled Why I'd Rather Not Speak About Torture. He reflects,

I believe that there are extreme situations in which practices like “water-boarding” may not only be ethically justifiable, but ethically necessary—especially where getting information from a known terrorist seems likely to save the lives of thousands (or even millions) of innocent people.  To argue that torture may sometimes be ethically justified is not to argue that it should ever be legal (crimes like trespassing or theft may sometimes be ethical, while we all have interest in keeping them illegal).