 Whether or not torture is likely to be institutionalised once legalised, or is even likely to be institutionalised if not actively resisted on an ongoing basis, is partly a matter of the the motivational drivers in play. And unfortunately, even in liberal democracies, when the threat to the community is regarded as substantial, institutional actors (such as police and military personnel) have been willing to engage in routinised extra-judicial killing (India, today) and more than willing to engage in routinised torture (use of the third degree by police agencies world-wide). In doing so, they have typically appealed to a self-defence moral justification (‘We had to torture/kill in order to save lives’). Moreover, in the case of the extra-judicial killings they have typically helped themselves to and often been aided by the legal justification of self-defence – ‘the Naxalites (in India) shot at us first and we fired back in self-defence’ (albeit what has also been revealed over time is a culture of ‘shoot first and ask questions later’). Torture is much more prevalent than killing in part because (as Steinhoff argues) torture is rightly regarded as not necessarily as bad as killing (criminals tortured by police are typically able to carry on with their lives, even if in prison) and perhaps also in part because torture is less susceptible to the available accountability measures (you cannot hide corpses, at least in liberal democracies). In short, there is good reason to believe that legalizing torture in contexts in which there is a substantial threat to the community will lead to its institutionalization.