Are there times when we have to accept torture? / Are We Really So Fearful?

"Are there times when we have to accept torture? // Are We Really So fearful?": Torture is justified by those who apply and perform it. This is the price, it is implied, that needs to be paid by the suffering few in order to guarantee happiness for the rest of society, the enormous majority given security and well being by those horrors inflicted in some dark cellar, some faraway pit, some abominable police station. But is this statement true? Are there times when we have to accept torture? Are we really so fearful? These are questions the playwright, novelist and essayist Ariel Dorfman asks in two essays.