Public Affairs Quarterly Volume 27, Number 4, October 2013 311 DEFENSIVE INTERROGATIONAL TORTURE AND EPISTEMIC LIMITATIONS Bradley J. Strawser T he philosophical debate over the ethics of torture has taken on new vigor of late with the publication of several books on the topic by a handful of accomplished moral philosophers. In this review essay, I will discuss some epistemic issues surrounding the decision to torture and how those complexities should inform the debate over its moral permissibility in practice. To that end, I will focus on Frances Kamm’s Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War; Fritz Allhoff’s Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture; Uwe Steinhoff’s On the Ethics of Torture; and Stephen Kershnar’s For Torture: A Rights-Based Defense. 1 All of these authors defend that torture can sometimes be justiied, at least in principle. Most of them also go on to explicitly defend that torture can also be permissible in practice in some actual, real-world cases. At the time of this writing, a comprehensive six-hundred-page report has just been released by an independent, bipartisan review board on the torture practices of the United States government in the years following September 11, 2001. 2 Despite President Bush’s protests that “we do not torture,” the report concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.” 3 It shows that the practice of torture was not limited to a small handful of suspected terrorists, but that torture was widespread and committed against a large number of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and other CIA “black sites” across the globe. 4 Further, contrary to the assertions of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who claimed that the “enhanced interrogation” methods produced intelligence that “prevented the death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people,” the report concludes that there is “no evidence” that these torture prac- tices “produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means.” 5 While the report concedes that “a person subjected to torture might well divulge information,” it stresses that the information will not only be unreliable but, worse, that torture regularly produces false confessions and faulty intelligence that is actually counter-productive toward the aim of thwarting real threats. 6 The considerations I will offer here do not directly refute Kamm’s, Allhoff’s, Steinhoff’s, or Kershnar’s primary arguments regarding the permissibility of