 Torturing the guilty in self-defence is arguably something of a misnomer. Firstly, it is not really self defence per se, but rather the saving of the lives of others. After all, generally the would-be torturer’s life is not at risk, and even if it is at risk in a particular location, as in some terrorist bombing scenarios, then presumably the risk can be averted by the torturer simply abandoning his immobilised victim and fleeing the area. Note that on many accounts self defence is a more readily acceptable moral justification or excuse for killing an attacker than is defending the lives of others (at least, others who are not members of one’s family or close friends). Secondly, torturing in order to save life is inherently unreliable by comparison with killing in self-defence. This is because killing an attacker is directly connected to the desired outcome of removing the threat; indeed, to kill the attacker is to remove the threat. This is not so with torture. Rather torturing is one action and removing the threat (e.g., disarming the ticking bomb) is another act necessarily at some causal remove from the first action. Moreover, the putative (necessarily indirect) causal connections between the two actions may well not obtain. Thirdly, torturing the guilty to save innocent lives does not typically involve an imminent threat, as typically must be the case in instances of lawful self-defence in well-ordered jurisdictions. For the threat posed by (say) a terrorist-bomber is either imminent, as in the case of a suicide-bomber, in which case there is no time to torture anyone; or the threat is not imminent in which case there is time to pursue other options, such as intercepting the communications of other members of the terrorist cell and, thereby, locating the bomb. Again, consider typical kidnapping cases. Either the kidnapper is not in custody in which case he or she cannot be tortured; or the kidnapper is in custody in which case the threat to the kidnapped child from the kidnapper in custody is not imminent (the child is either dead or is alive and no longer under threat from the kidnapper in custody). Naturally, as we saw in the last section, there may well be a very small number of exceptional cases in which the threat is more or less imminent and torture is, nevertheless, a realistic option for removing the threat (and, indeed, the only option). Accordingly, this small number of exceptional cases might be analogous to killing in self-defence. Moreover, in some torturing the guilty scenarios the all things considered morally best option might be to torture the guilty party; indeed the general argument for the latter proposition was outlined in the last section. However, this does not demonstrate that justified torturing of the guilty to save the innocent they threaten is essentially a species of justified self-defence and that, therefore, it ought to be legalised.