Torture and the Norm against It

Why has torture persisted into the twenty-first century despite long-standing normative and legal prohibitions? Especially strange is torture’s occurrence at the hands of liberal democracies, which are supposed to uphold human rights. Perhaps we should not be surprised by democratic hypocrisy in war—realists and rational choice theorists expect all states to violate norms if doing so holds instrumental promise. Yet torture is likely to yield inaccurate intelligence, harm valuable detainees’ memories, stress interrogators, invite retaliation, and encourage the enemy to fight on rather than surrender. In short, torture is both ethically and efficaciously questionable—and its recurrence is puzzling.