Ticking time bomb scenario

The ticking time bomb scenario is a thought experiment that has been used in the ethics debate over whether torture can ever be justified. As a thought experiment, there is no need that the scenario be plausible; it need only serve to highlight ethical considerations. The scenario can be formulated as follows:

Suppose that a person with knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack, that will kill many people, is in the hands of the authorities and that he will disclose the information needed to prevent the attack only if he is tortured. Should he be tortured?

The scenario can be better understood through the arguments of those who respond to it; the consequentialist argument is that nations, even those that legally disallow torture, can justify its use if they have a terrorist in custody who possesses critical knowledge, such as the location of a time bomb or a weapon of mass destruction that will soon explode and cause great loss of life. Opponents to the argument usually begin by exposing certain assumptions that tend to be hidden by initial presentations of the scenario and tend to obscure the true costs of permitting torture in "real-life" scenarios—e.g., the assumption that the person is in fact a terrorist, whereas in real life there usually remains uncertainty about whether the person is in fact a terrorist and that he has useful information—and rely on legal, philosophical/moral, and empirical grounds to reaffirm the need for the absolute prohibition of torture. There is also uncertainty about the effectiveness of torture, and much opposition to torture is based on the fact it is not effective rather than any moral issue.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham has been regarded as the "father" of the ticking time bomb argument. He wrote in his 1804 essay Means of extraction for extraordinary occasions:

Suppose an occasion to arise, in which a suspicion is entertained, as strong as that which would be received as a sufficient ground for arrest and commitment as for felony — a suspicion that at this very time a considerable number of individuals are actually suffering, by illegal violence inflictions equal in intensity to those which if inflicted by the hand of justice, would universally be spoken of under the name of torture. For the purpose of rescuing from torture these hundred innocents, should any scruple be made of applying equal or superior torture, to extract the requisite information from the mouth of one criminal, who having it in his power to make known the place where at this time the enormity was practicing or about to be practiced, should refuse to do so?

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