The ticking time bomb scenario is a thought experiment that has been used in the ethics debate over whether torture can ever be justified.
Simply stated, the consequentialist argument is that nations, even those that legally disallow torture, can justify its use if they have a terrorist in custody who possesses critical knowledge, such as the location of a time bomb or a weapon of mass destruction that will soon explode and cause great loss of life. Opponents to the argument usually begin by exposing certain assumptions that tend to be hidden by initial presentations of the scenario and tend to obscure the true costs of permitting torture in "real-life" scenarios—e.g., the assumption that the person is in fact a terrorist, whereas in real life there usually remains uncertainty about whether the person is in fact a terrorist—and rely on legal, philosophical/moral, and empirical grounds to reaffirm the need for the absolute prohibition of torture.
Read more about Ticking Time Bomb Scenario: Background, Views in Favor of Accepting Torture in Emergencies, Views Rejecting Torture Under All Circumstances, Effect of Fiction
Famous quotes containing the words ticking, time, bomb and/or scenario:
“And this thy harbor, O my City, I have driven under,
Tossed from the coil of ticking towers. . . . Tomorrow,
And to be . . . . Here by the River that is East—”
—Hart Crane (1899–1932)
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 6:9-13.
““... There, there,
What you complain of, all the nations share.
Their effort is a mounting ecstasy
That when it gets too exquisite to bear
Will find relief in one burst. You shall see.
That’s what a certain bomb was sent to be.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“This is the essential distinction—even opposition—between the painting and the film: the painting is composed subjectively, the film objectively. However highly we rate the function of the scenario writer—in actual practice it is rated very low—we must recognize that the film is not transposed directly and freely from the mind by means of a docile medium like paint, but must be cut piece-meal out of the lumbering material of the actual visible world.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)