The Torturer's Dilemma: Analyzing the Logic of Torture for Information

situations (France in Algeria and Viet Nam, the US in Viet Nam, the British in Kenya), in cities where
the underlying populace is distrustful of the police and unwilling to supply information voluntarily, and
against targets such as insurgencies and conspiracies whose very organization is predicated on secrecy.
The failure to use torture against civilians generally cannot be explained solely by the political costs
that torture provides: non-scarring torture has been adopted nearly universally precisely because it
attenuates these costs for states that use them. If torture works, then it should work best when the
authorities have a strong information environment – but it is precisely these environments where torture
is not used.
The evolution of the use of torture provides further clues into how torture works. It is not
enough to argue that torture must work, otherwise states would cease to have used it. Institutions can
continue in existence indefinitely, even when they are suboptimal or actively harmful, as long as there
is no evolutionary pressure for their replacement. 116 The use of torture may not be useful for society at
large – and may even be positively harmful – but it is not society at large that places pressure on
institutions. Social and governmental decision-makers may benefit from an institution that undermines
society at large, and maintain it even in the face of considerable evidence of its toxic effects – the elites
of the American South preferred the maintenance of slavery (and later sharecropping) to free-labor and
industrialization, even as that choice allowed the Northern and Western sections of the US to overshoot
the South in terms of wealth and population (and thus political influence). For this reason, it is
instructive to notice which evolutionary pressures have affected the institution of torture. As noted
above, torture has not evolved in the direction of greater scientific effectiveness – methods of torture
are not adopted according to their proven track-record, but rather according to historical memory, taste,
and even fashion. 117 And yet torture has evolved – the shift from scarring to non-scarring methods of
torture came in response to the political imperatives of the Cold War, and the rise in the 1970s of an
international human rights regime which was able to leverage significant costs against leaders and
states seen to be engaged in torture. Torture is not immune to evolutionary pressures, and the ways in
which an institution evolves provides insight into which purposes it serves to the elites whose choices
allow it to persist. That torture has evolved swiftly in the face of pressures towards non-scarification
116 An excellent example of this evolutionary survival in the world of anatomy is the human appendix: it long ago ceased to
serve any purpose, but can easily threaten a person's life once it becomes inflamed.
117 This is Rejali's craft hypothesis – torture methods are equivalent to styles of furniture, where the shape of a chair may
differ from city to city or from era to era, but all serve the same essential purpose of providing somewhere to sit.
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