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

discovered by Sir Thomas Newton and disprove the reliability of the technology of 'spectral evidence'
were the authorities willing and able to bring the proceedings to a halt. By that time, however, 24
individuals had died and the magistrates responsible found their legitimacy seriously weakened.
The value of this case also comes from how it showcases the ways in which the deceptive cycle
is maintained: the magistrates, afflicted, and accused alike all found their incentives militated against
challenging the accepted belief in the conspiracy. For the judges, once the fact of a witch conspiracy
was accepted, the trials offered an opportunity to do battle with Satan himself, and to purge the
community of those who would bring that community down (no matter where they hid, or who they
appeared to be). For the afflicted the trials offered an explanation for their apparent suffering – one that
placed them in a position of extreme (if unofficial and temporary) power over others. For the accused,
the process of the trial itself offered a slim hope of survival if the accused could make themselves
integral to the hunt by naming others – or at least an opportunity to put off the hour of execution as
long as their testimony was needed by the courts. Importantly, there was always someone to be
accused: in the absence of actual witches, individuals (afflicted and accused) could use their position to
attack personal and factional rivals, seek revenge, or even challenge the elites themselves. In other
words, the deceptive cycle can easily take on the forms of political violence identified by Kalyvas
(2006), where the informant makes use of the state's lack of information to benefit themselves.
Finally, I argue that this explosion of denunciations did not result solely from deep-seated
divisions in Salem society, although these divisions most certainly existed. Instead, the Salem trials
offered a means for those divisions to become activated in ways that previous trials had not: once a
conspiracy of witches was accepted as a fact, the pre-existing tensions between factions and families
provided the raw material for a spiral of accusations and counter-accusations as local actors made use
of larger macro-level issues to enact revenge against enemies, in the name of God. Furthermore, this
analysis does not depend on malevolent individuals (although these did exist) or on callous authorities
(although they too existed), but instead argues that they were a logical outgrowth of the beliefs of the
relevant actors – the trials, while irrational in their outcomes, did not depend on individual irrationality.
In the Salem trials we have an example of an authority using coercion in order to discover vital
information, fully aware of the danger of false confession and accusation, nonetheless instigating a
nightmare of violence and terror to its own detriment. And this ironic process not only harmed the
authorities (by demonstrating that pious belief and holy intentions were no bar to doing Satan’s
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