Torture, an evil means to a utilitarian end, will be wrong because we choose it so not because of a moral law.

Cultural morality is too plastic a foundation as it only pertains to the people of that culture and not humankind as a whole. Only humanity based on evolution has the facility to banish torture unequivocally because it results in a more evolved being. This perspective opens to consider the entire specie and forgoes the cultural, geographical, or religious boundaries that ferment an us-against-them rational. The ticking bomb scenario is simply out of context. Humanity that has evolved to shed torture would function on a different setting all together. Such a community would be shameful to know a terrorist has plotted against them rather than vexed by it. If the terrorist is not mentally ill, the community leadership would huddle around that terrorist trying to learn how to compensate for a camouflaged wrongdoing, or fix the misunderstanding to remedy the fundamental cause of the terrorism. How utopian or silly this vision appears to be is a reflection of how far we are from that stage in our evolution. Until then, whenever a society is desperate enough we can predict that their sentimental self would seduce their logical self long enough to let their barbarian self access to torture. As for the reliability of the information gained by torture, Samuel Jackson’s character in Unthinkable takes 97 minutes to demonstrate that reliability of the information is in direct relation with torturer’s commitment to go the distance.