Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb

If you are a civil libertarian I strongly urge you to drop everything and read David Luban's essay "Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb" from the October 2005 Virginia Law Review. Harper's published an excerpt in the March 2006 issue, which is where I first found it.

This is an amazing piece. Luban eloquently dissects liberal reliance on the so-called ticking-time-bomb scenario, used to justify torture despite centuries of liberal disgust with dehumanization tactics.

Reliance of the sort is not uncommon in civil liberties debates. When the debate was about government access to encryption keys, officials kept asking "what happens if a little girl was kidnapped and we can't save her because we cannot decrypt the email messages that we know contain her location." Privacy advocates couldn't well say "let the kid die," yet that was the only available answer if you wished to retain a principled position on the issue.

Luban explains why liberals should reject these doomsday scenarios if they want to remain true to liberal tradition. I think civil libertarians would serve ourselves, and our tradition better if we take Luban's message to heart.