Is torture acceptable if it helps save thousands of lives?

This week’s Senate Report on the CIA hasn’t settled the question of torture once and for all, as Bruce Anderson has pointed out. When we talk about the heroes of the Resistance, our deepest admiration is reserved for the fighters who didn’t give away their secrets under torture, so the claim that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques did not result in any useful intelligence is rather surprising: it’s too morally neat.

British law has never condoned torture (though the Tudors found ways round that), and when the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria was trying to reform the European criminal justice system, Britain was already setting a good example:

When Beccaria published his famous treatise On Crimes and Punishments in 1764, there were, it is said, only three European States in which prisoners and important witnesses at criminal trials were not examined under torture; they were England, Sweden and Prussia. Elsewhere the system was more or less taken for granted.