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

powerful themselves. 21 While historical records are obviously lacking, estimates of those killed in the
course of the witch-hunts between 1484 (the year when Pope Innocent VIII reversed the Church's
traditional stance that witch-craft per se did not exist, opening the flood gates on witch-hunting) and
1660 range from some 50,000 to half a million innocents. (Golden, p. 413; Nachman, p. 328) The
witch trials in Scotland provide an excellent example of how even supposedly clean forms of torture
can feed this vicious circle: in the course of some 90 years (1590-1680) around 4,400 people were
consigned to flames by confessions procured not through the rack, or the thumb-screws, but by sleep
deprivation. (Rejali, 2008)
What set the inquisitions against heresy and witchcraft apart from other examples of judicial
torture was the fact that these were crimes whose evidence could only exist in the minds of the
malefactors themselves, and where the belief in a conspiracy meant that anyone, no matter how
virtuous seeming, could be guilty of the crime. Furthermore, in many cases the inquisitors and
interrogators themselves possessed a financial incentive to ensure conviction, since the property of the
accused was often used to pay for the expenses of the trials. Finally, in contrast to the English jury
system, which relied on individuals bringing private actions against suspected witches, the inquisitions
were empowered to sniff out witches at their own discretion. Consequently, the demand for witches
created its own supply, as the witchcraft trials throughout the continent and in Scotland led to a
widening circle of denunciations which not infrequently touched the wealthy, and even those in the
elites who were too publicly against the trials, or not considered zealous enough in their prosecution.
(Currie, 1968) There are two major implications regarding how the deceptive cycle of torture for
information operates: firstly, the search for information that – by its very nature – could not be judged
empirically provided the opportunity for the use of torture to spread virally; secondly, the incentive
structure of these inquisitions made this cycle a necessity, as the confiscations that attended confessions
enriched both torturers and authorities alike.
The end of judicial torture is often credited to the authors of the Enlightenment, who quite
strenuously objected to torture as a medieval relic in an era when man's control over nature through
science had far outstripped his previous capacities. The names of Voltaire and Beccaria in particular
21 See Currie, 1968; Somans 1978. A similar phenomenon is reported to have occurred during the great purges in the
Soviet Union: the case of the Doctor from Kharkov is modeled by Grossman (1994) as a repeated prisoner's dilemma
where the game is transformed by implicating some group too large to be done without in society: in the good doctor's
case, this meant naming every doctor in the city of Kharkov. When the interrogator balked at rounding up the entire
medical community, the doctor wrote a letter to Comrade Stalin, denouncing the interrogator as a counter-revolutionary.
18