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

forcing the already convicted to reveal the names of accomplices – exactly the situation Parris now
faced. If Parris did not torture Tituba, then we are presented with a puzzle even more disturbing than
explaining Tituba's confession – for he certainly had the power and the legal authority to torture, as
master of this woman, and he would have had to believe that she would only reveal the information he
needed under threat of extreme coercion.
That slavery and torture are intimately linked can be seen from the written beginnings of the
institution in ancient Greece. Torture and other forms of corporal punishment were part and parcel of a
slave society: because slaves do not own property, and so cannot be fined, and are owned by masters
who rely on them for labor, and so internment imposes costs on the master rather than on the slave
alone, torture becomes the sole method of imposing discipline and inflicting punishment. 66 Torture was
a marker of social status, the watchman on the walls separating freedom from slavery. Slaves could be
tortured, citizens could not. 67 This distinction between those who could be legally tortured continued
into the Middle Ages with the rediscovery of the Roman Law in Europe: the aristocracy was exempt
from (most form of) torture, while the peasantry would be subject to the full fury of the law. As already
noted, the lack of a jury trial and the requirements for two eye-witnesses or a confession for execution
led many states in Europe to focus on judicial torture in order to generate those necessary confession.
(Langbein, 1798) With the reintroduction of a slave-based society in the New World, torture and
corporal punishment became a sine qua non for maintaining control over a coerced labor force – and
the forms of torture changed to reflect the new realities of a market-based economy.
Many of the forms of torture used today that do not leave scars in fact derived from the
incentives faced by marketized slave holders: leaving scars on a slave would hurt their market value,
since these scars would testify to potential buyers that the slave was a troublemaker. (Rejali, p. 314) To
be a slave owner was per force to be a potential torturer – one with the (at least tacit) permission of the
authorities. To keep a coerced labor force under control meant establishing the physical domination of
the owner over the owned – a fact attested to by the fact that, while slave owners were not legally
allowed to torture or murder their slaves in Pennsylvania, and occasionally cases arose of owners being
tried for the murder of their slaves, the likelihood of being punished for exceeding an owner's authority
66 Reuthven, 1978. p. 41
67 The ambiguity reflected in the writings of Aristotle on the usefulness of tortured testimony is appropriate in a nonracialized
system of slavery: any free man might be made a slave, if captured in war, while slaves might become free
through manumission. In such a society, where freedom is never entirely assured, torture was a way of reifying the
distinction.
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