Here's an interesting piece on torture and the ticking-bomb situation:
[T]hat's perhaps the ultimate problem with the scenario. Its facts are so stylized as to be fantastical: You know there really is a bomb; you know you have the right man in custody; you know torture would elicit the crucial information. Elaine Scarry, a Harvard English professor and scholar of torture, has suggested that while we're making up such artificial rules, why not add just one more: You also know where the bomb is. Problem solved!The piece also summarizes compelling responses from David Luban, Jeremy Waldron and Michael Walzer to attempts to justify torture by reference to the ticking bomb.
As he [Luban] puts it, the ticking bomb is invariably presented as an extremely rare event, at the edge of human experience. ''But it's always used to justify changing the rule,'' he says. ''And once you change the rule,'' he adds, ''torture is used all the time.''Some moral rules are absolute or all but absolute. The prohibition of torture is one of them.