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serious evil, to come on another, even to spare more people the same loss. It seems to define a kind of solidarity between human beings, as if there is some sense in which no one is to come out against one of his fellow men. 6
     
    If there are certain moral absolutes—rules that tell us certain actions are always wrong and can never be sanctioned—then one of them, surely, is the prohibition on torture.
    Clocks and Clichés
     
    Browse through one section of the moral philosophy literature and you’ll hear a cacophony of ticking clocks. The ticking-clock scenario is a favorite among ethicists debating the permissibility, or otherwise, of torture. A terrorist has been captured: you know that he has planted a small atomic bomb in a major city that is due to detonate in two hours. The terrorist will not tell you where the bomb is, and unless you use torture to obtain the information from him, thousands of people will die. What should you do?
    Post–9/11, when it became evident that there were people in the world bent on the goal of mass civilian murder, the ticking bomb of ethical debate took on a practical and public reality. A distinguished law professor, Alan Dershowitz, scandalized liberal opinion by writing a book in which he proposed the idea of a “torture warrant” that would be given to interrogators by governments in certain extreme circumstances. 7 Since then there have been well-publicized torture scandals, such as the water-boarding of al-Qaeda operative, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, thought to be a mastermind behind the 9/11 atrocities.
    In response to the ticking-bomb case, deontologists respond in one of five ways.
    First, there are those who deny that the ticking bomb reflects any possible empirical reality. In reality, threats are not usually imminent: there is no specific deadline, nor is the threat inevitable. In reality, we couldn’t know for sure that lives would be lost. What’s more, torture may prove ineffective or, worse, counterproductive—producing false confessions. And there may be alternative and legitimate ways to extract reliable information or in some other way resolve the crisis. 8
    Second, some deontologists are prepared to swallow the logical conclusion of an absolutist position—they continue to deny the permissibility of torture, regardless of how many lives would be saved.
    Third—and this is perhaps the standard view—there are deontologists who argue that if the consequences of not torturing somebody are truly calamitous (leading, for example, to the deaths of thousands), then the constraint against torture can be overridden.
    Fourth, a few deontologists maintain that a terrorist who has planted a ticking bomb is morally liable to be tortured if that’s the only way to obtain vital information. In other words, there is no constraint on torturing this person. It’s not that the potential consequences of the explosion outweigh any constraint; rather, the terrorist has, by his actions, forfeited his right not to be tortured, and his torture is acceptable even if the bomb for which he’s responsible threatened only one life. 9
    Fifth, there are those who determinedly refuse to engage with the scenario, who believe the justifiability of torture should not be up for discussion at all: merely to raise the possibility reflects a sickness of the mind, and a contamination of the culture. As one philosopher puts it: “Society is to some degree defined by what is undiscussable in it. For example, in our society, it’s undiscussable whether we should enslave our black population … the things we find undiscussable are things that we treat as having no two sides.” 10 Torture is one such subject, it is said: a subject with only one side.
    The Gäfgen kidnapping was about as close to the ticking-bomb cliché as real life gets, though even here the parallels are far from exact: since, as it turned out, torturing the kidnapper would have been futile. Jakob had already been killed, and thus