"torturer" is a correct word in written English
The word can be used to refer to someone who inflicts torture on another, either physically or psychologically. For example: "The dictator employed a private team of torturers to interrogate his political opponents."
By "physically powerless" two things are meant: the victim is defenceless, i.e., the victim cannot prevent the torturer from torturing the victim, and the victim is unable to attack, and therefore physically harm, the torturer.
One reason is that torture victims typically tell the torturer whatever they think he wants to hear, e.g. they are happy to implicate others who are in fact innocent in order to bring an end to their own agony.
But equally during the period a person is being tortured (and in some cases thereafter) the person's world is almost entirely taken up by extreme pain and their asymmetrical power relationship to the torturer, i.e. the torture victim's powerlessness.
Sussman implausibly holds the latter to be definitive of torture: "The victim of torture finds within herself a surrogate of the torturer, a surrogate who does not merely advance a particular demand for information, denunciation or confession.
It is logically possible that torture could be undertaken simply because the torturer enjoys making other sentient beings endure extreme physical suffering, i.e., quite independently of whether or not the victim suffers a loss of autonomy.
The person being tortured is for the duration of the torturing process physically powerless in relation to the torturer.
Victoria is hell, the Shakespeare Satan's torturer-in-chief, but salvation lies just two minutes' walk away.
Notice, for example, that if a unified collective values a healthy community, but also values luxuries whose production or use promotes a carcinogenic environment, it can find itself in a situation that is structurally similar to the situation of the self-torturer.
And, according to Bratman, given this condition, his conception of rationality gives intuitively plausible guidance in cases of temptation like the case of the self-torturer or the retirement contribution case.
The self-torturer is hooked up to a machine with a dial with settings labeled 0 to 1,000, where setting 0 does nothing, and each successive setting delivers a slightly more powerful electric shock.
In particular, if, each week, the self-torturer follows his preference over the pair of settings he must choose between, he will end up in a situation that he finds completely unacceptable.
