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
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“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)
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—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“There are no accidents, only nature throwing her weight around. Even the bomb merely releases energy that nature has put there. Nuclear war would be just a spark in the grandeur of space. Nor can radiation “alter” nature: she will absorb it all. After the bomb, nature will pick up the cards we have spilled, shuffle them, and begin her game again.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
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—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)