Better for whom? To me it's perfectly obvious that it's better for me to have someone else tortured, and I would choose that. I would only choose to be hurt myself if the tradeoff was very unequal (a speck in the eye for me, ten hours of torture for him), and even then I would soon stop agreeing to be hurt if I had to face such a choice repeatedly.

If someone were to mount a campaign to stop your entire torturing project, and if I could participate by being hurt (but not by endangering my life), then I would agree to pay a much higher price. But that's because such participation is a form of social capital and also helps enforce social norms elsewhere (this is both an evolutionary and a personal reason).