benlehman

So I've been thinking about this thing. When a protagonist contemplates torture in a literary work, it's almost always used as a literary device: a means to show how this protagonist reacts under pressure, how their ethics hold up, and so on. Thus, it's almost always a variant of the "ticking bomb" problem: Basically, there's a bomb hidden somewhere in the city that will go off in an hour, you have the person who set it in custody, do you torture him to get him to tell you (some piece of information that will defuse the bomb)?

The problem isn't that this scenario is childishly unrealistic in its set-up (although it is.) The real problem is that, in this scenario, torture always works.

Which, in truth, it doesn't. All torture serves to do is make the torturer feel good about themselves.

I'd like to see the ticking time bomb scenario where the protagonist tortures someone, they spill incorrect information (as happens under torture), which leads to the deaths of the city's bomb squad and, say, 500 people, because the protagonist was fucking around with sadism so he could make his dick feel bigger rather than doing the hard work of busting out serious police research.

I'd like to see a protagonist confront failure in that scenario.