Ethics of Torture

In Mirko Bagaric’s piece about ethical torture, he makes a false analogy when he compares torture to a bone marrow or organ donor.  He claims that torture has “the same moral justification as other practices where we sacrifice the interests of one person for the greater good.”  This is not a true statement, because we are not the ones who do the sacrificing in the context of an organ transplant.  In addition, I would argue that most people who donate organs or bone marrow have an interest in keeping the other person alive, so voluntarily accepting pain is not sacrificing their interests at all.

Bagaric counters by saying that the idea of giving consent is irrelevant, since we have no problem killing enemy soldiers without their consent.  However, if the idea is really irrelevant, as he says, then we should be able to just grab a random person off of the street and take their bone marrow to save someone else.

Bagaric would probably say that that this would be different because this person is innocent, in which case he would have to concede that consent applies to one part of his analogy but not the other, making it a false analogy.

Even if Bagaric is a hardcore enough utilitarian to say "yes, consent really is irrelevant in both cases.  We should chop up Sean and take his organs and bone marrow," this is not the case he is using for his analogy.  Switching to this perspective makes his argument much weaker.  Either way, the way he has phrased it to begin with is intentionally misleading.