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

substitute for intelligence gathering will be of crucial importance when we consider how torture's
effectiveness can be modeled.
As we have seen from the use of torture in this brief historical survey, coerced intelligence has
tended to be used where information is difficult to come by otherwise. The ancients tortured in order to
find information in court cases that citizens could not be trusted to reveal on their own, because it was
assumed that slaves were generally incapable of lying under torture: this assumption however was
betrayed by the fact that slaves often did lie under torture, as was recognized even by Aristotle.
(Rhetoric, Book I, Chapter 15) Judicial torture was far more alive to the possibility of false confession,
and gallons of ink were spilled over the centuries trying to limit that outcome – enough that torture in
general cases appears not to have led to convictions in large numbers. Where the use of torture was
tied to the investigation of conspiracies, however, with their resultant lack of empirical half-proofs and
need to discover unknown accomplices, these restrictions quickly went out the window, leading to
widespread torture and confessions in a vicious cycle that would only end when elites called a halt to
the proceedings, generally as the instability caused by large numbers of denunciations began to become
unbearable. Torture was eradicated as a normal part of judicial proceedings only when the state's
ability to gather empirical evidence made confessions unnecessary. In modern times, we have seen that
torture has been utilized as a substitute for investigation in situations where this ability is hampered by
a lack of community cooperation, a police force that places more emphasis on confessions than on
empirical investigation, or where the crime under investigation is secretive to the point that empirical
evidence is hard to come by.
Therefore, torture has tended to be characterized by the following dilemmas: firstly, torture
relies on the guilty and/or knowledgeable victim being more likely to confess or reveal information in
the face of pain than the innocent/ignorant victim, but the point of torture is to make everybody talk;
secondly, torture is often used as a substitute for empirical investigation, but when the fruits of torture
cannot be judged empirically the captive is free to say anything. These dilemmas strike at the heart of
torture for information, and make its use not only unstable, but potentially exceedingly dangerous for
the state that uses it: the state's investigative capacity alone provides the necessary leverage to make
the knowledgeable victim speak the truth, and prevents the state from believing the necessary
falsehoods of the ignorant. Furthermore, even in cases where the state can make use of its investigative
capacity, it faces potentially insurmountable pressure not to do so – even if we assume (heroically) that
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