On Monday the AAAS held a half day forum on torture as “part of a series of international activities to observe the United Nation’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.”

One speaker, Martha Huggins, the Charles A. and Leo M. Favrot Professor of Human Relations at Tulane University, observed in her presentation that there are “political, social, and cultural facilitating conditions that promote, encourage, and excuse” torture.
 
According to a AAAS story on the event:

“During a question and answer period, one person in the audience identified himself as a former military policeman and suggested the panel was presenting only one side of the argument. But what should happen, he asked, if terrorists warned of a nuclear device set to detonate in New York in two hours? If they apprehended suspects, might it not be justified to take extreme measures to induce them to talk if that might save millions of lives?  But [panelst Robvert K.] Goldman [of Washington College of Law at American University] insisted that torture would not be justified, and he said the question itself marks the top of the slippery slope. ‘If you authorize the use of torture in the case of the ticking bomb,’ he said, ‘then it will eventually work its way down to protected persons.’”

It seems to me that even if social science may provide useful information about prison and detainment conditions that foster torture, there is nothing that any type of science can tell us about if and when torture might be justified (though, perhaps the humanities can shed some insight). In its forum and report on the forum the AAAS does not appear to have made any distinction between what science can and can’t offer to thinking about torture, and that creates conditions ripe for a misuse of science (in our taxonomy, arguing politics/morals through science).