[QUOTE=ArchiveGuy]
…or feed the interrogators a potentially endless amount of false information.
So as long as we’re talking about dream factory hypothetical scenarios: “If you fucking beat this prick long enough, he’ll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago fire! Now that don’t necessarily make it fucking so!”
[/QUOTE]
Except in the OP, it states the information can be easily verified.
[QUOTE=Hogwash]
If we can write-off several thousand lives a year in return for the freedom to drive automobiles, then allowing a handful of innocents to die at the hands of a serial killer in order to preserve law, justice and the higher principles of a civilised society seems like great bang for buck to me.
[/QUOTE]
If one person is murdered every minute, that adds up to over 500,000 deaths in a year. This is about 12 times the deaths from automobiles.
[QUOTE=The Controvert]
If one person is murdered every minute, that adds up to over 500,000 deaths in a year. This is about 12 times the deaths from automobiles.
[/QUOTE]
You can make up crazy hypothetical scenarios that would result in being able to justify having sex with your mother. That doesn’t make incest right, or moral.
[QUOTE=ArchiveGuy]
…or feed the interrogators a potentially endless amount of false information.
[/QUOTE]
What if there is a large TV screen behind the interrogators? Whenever the prisoner provides false information, a giant red “X” appears on the screen, signaling that the torture must continue. Also, Richard Dawson is probably one of the interrogators.
As to the OP: torture is not acceptable in any scenario you can think of. It’s not even acceptable in any scenario you can’t think of. Period.
[QUOTE=Mosier]
You can make up crazy hypothetical scenarios that would result in being able to justify having sex with your mother. That doesn’t make incest right, or moral.
[/QUOTE]
What if he thinks his mother is really hot? What if his father once told him his mother gives really great head? What then? WHAT THEN?
[QUOTE=The Controvert]
Except in the OP, it states the information can be easily verified.
[/QUOTE]
If it can be that easily verified, then the world’s best torturer (er, sorry, “interrogator”) is being assisted by the world’s worst Intel agents.
Then I would say we should bring Batman into the interrogation room with his trusty sidekick Robin. He can handle any situation, if duly prepared.
Please note that as outlandish as my response might be, it’s still more rooted in reality than your OP is.
[QUOTE=The Controvert]
If one person is murdered every minute, that adds up to over 500,000 deaths in a year. This is about 12 times the deaths from automobiles.
[/QUOTE]
Let’s look at this statistic in a little more detail. I presume you’ll agree that even the most energetic hitter is only gonna be able to whack one or two people a day without getting caught, maybe three or four on a really good day. I mean, we’re assuming that every one of the actual murderers remains free until the mastermind gives up his magic bit of information, right? So, to meet the quota of 500K murders a year, at a generous three per day, you would need:
500,000 / 366 (it’s a leap year, isn’t it?) / 3 = 455 murderers
And that’s if they’re working flat out, 24/7. Realistically, you’re gonna need relief crews for nights and weekends, and you just know some days some of the regulars are gonna call in sick. Figure at least half that number again to cover for the regulars, so 700 murderers, near enough. And that’s not counting all the administrative overhead. You’re gonna need an HR department to manage recruitment and hiring, someone to do payroll, someone to manage the weapons and ammo budget, equipment maintanence, and scheduling’s gonna be a bitch, given that you’re going to need to be flying the relief crews all over the country.
Lastly, concerning your field personnel, that’s a lot of skilled labor to recruit in a very specialized field. Supernaturally gifted button men who can carry out 2-4 hits a day while perfectly covering their tracks don’t grow on trees, you know.
So, I hope you brought your wallet with you, 'cause this thing’s going to be expensive.
Since the guy is trained to resist torture, why not try something different? Like trickery?
[QUOTE=Cervaise]
Also:
[/QUOTE]
Fantastic! I was going to suggest that the answer involves attaching Hitler to your kid with non-flammable glue, but this is even better. Kudos!
I’m with Revenant. Torture should always be illegal. I’ll go further and say that nobody should ever receive a pardon for torture, no matter how effective it was. That said, if I found myself in the wild scenario that was described, I’m not a monster: I’d undergo several years of prison as punishment for torture in exchange for saving lives. What kind of horrifying monster would trade a few years of his own freedom for the lives of countless innocent strangers?
Daniel
[QUOTE=Gala Matrix Fire]
Since the guy is trained to resist torture, why not try something different? Like trickery?
[/QUOTE]
Yes, that is allowable, if you think it would work.
So did it work? You’re the one writing this “Chose Your Own Adventure” book, not us.
I think we shouldn’t wander into the darkness, because we might be eaten by a Grue.
[QUOTE=The Controvert]
Yes, that is allowable, if you think it would work.
[/QUOTE]
How on earth can we know whether we think it would work? Scenarios like this are so far removed from reality that we can’t possibly know what other details would hold. For example, you didn’t mention whether this guy is named Larry, and is therefore extremely gullible.
The only sensible answer is to consider whether, absent all other possibilities, torture to prevent murder is acceptable, and whether torturing someone who’s guilty will produce an accurate confession. I believe the answer to both is “yes”: torture’s inefficacy is because it’ll produce confessions from the innocent and will also produce inaccurate confessions from the guilty when the confessions can’t be cross-checked; it’s also horrifyingly evil because its users have an awful tendency to start torturing everyone. There is no such person who can resist skillful torture, as I understand things.
Keep torture terribly illegal. Torture someone if that’s the only way to save innocent lives. It’s almost never the only way to save innocent lives. Understand that by torturing them, you’re sacrificing your own decency in order to save other people.
Daniel
[QUOTE=Two and a Half Inches of Fun]
[QUOTE=The Controvert]
A random innocent American citizen is being murdered every minute. The only way to stop this is to get a piece of information, which once obtained, stops the murders instantly and completely (without further consequence). Assume we can know the random murders are stopped, therefore the information can be reliably verified.
The only person who has this information has been captured and is in the hands of the best interrogator in the world (think “Jack Bauer”). The evil person has no allegiances nor family, and is trained to resist all forms of torture. Consider this person the world’s best at resisting interrogation and there is no other source of the information.
It is 100% known that this person has the information, but will make every attempt to avoid revealing it for as long as possible.
For this thought experiment, I pose the following questions:
Should the evil person be tortured and if so, how?
Will it work and if so, how quickly?
Can the info be extracted without causing permanent damage to the evil person?
[/QUOTE]
No. And the “world’s best interrogator” (who would bear no resemblance to Jack Bauer) wouldn’t consider torture in the first place.
No.
Yes, but not quickly.
[QUOTE=LilShieste]
What if there is a large TV screen behind the interrogators? Whenever the prisoner provides false information, a giant red “X” appears on the screen, signaling that the torture must continue. Also, Richard Dawson is probably one of the interrogators.
[/QUOTE]
Don’t forget Major Wolfgang Hochstetter. He’d be good at putting them in the cooler.
[QUOTE=Cervaise]
Now what do you do? Huh? Huh? NOW WHAT?
[/QUOTE]
You’re hungry, the grill isn’t open, and the evil mastermind that you’re torturing is a chicken… I’m beginning to see a solution… but I think a nice bottle of Chianti will be required. 
[QUOTE=The Controvert]
If one person is murdered every minute, that adds up to over 500,000 deaths in a year. This is about 12 times the deaths from automobiles.
[/QUOTE]
Death on that scale looks to me like a civil war, not some conspiracy created by an evil mastermind. The kind of civil war that gets waged against a government that, say, grabs citizens and tortures them.
In a real world situation, that kind of killing is HIGHLY unlikely to be stopped by anything you do to one person, or depend on one piece of information. And the odds are quite good that torturing someone will simply make whatever problems are causing the violence worse. And that’s assuming that torture isn’t the cause of the violence in the first place.
Really, this is like one of those convoluted scenarios where you can only stop a nuclear blast by shooting a six year old in the head. You can justify anything by creating an artificial enough scenario; that doesn’t make that scenario likely to ever happen, the basis of good ethics, or a good idea in any way.
I still think my tiger idea was the best…
[QUOTE=Gozu]
I still think my tiger idea was the best…
[/QUOTE]
It’s flawed. To quote :
[QUOTE=Gozu]
Put him in a cage with a sleeping tiger.
Wake up the sleeping tiger.
Wait for the prisoner to turn traitor or be eaten.
Eat the tiger.
Problem solved
[/QUOTE]
First, who going to eat a tiger that’s just eaten someone ? Not I. Second, you say “turn traitor or be eaten”; those are not mutually exclusive. And if the tiger jumps the gun, good luck interrogating a pile of tiger scat.
And what if they make friends instead ? Instead of having a terrorist, now you have a terrorist with a tiger. This is not an improvement. Especially if it becomes a trend. The Tamil Tigers are bad enough without including the real thing in their ranks.
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
It’s flawed.[…]
And what if they make friends instead ? Instead of having a terrorist, now you have a terrorist with a tiger. This is not an improvement. Especially if it becomes a trend. The Tamil Tigers are bad enough without including the real thing in their ranks.
[/QUOTE]
Ho-hum…you make a valid point there. Nobody can make friends with Piranhas though, eh? Smaller bites too. Food for thought.
The problem is my whole plan is to use the torture victim’s deepest fears to break him. Tigers are scary. Sharks also. Piranhas…less so. Too small.
I think that, ethically speaking, as least with my method, we can claim we are no more cruel than nature was (and is) to us. Lots of people got eaten by tigers and sharks. Granted, we ate our share of them too so I’m not saying we don’t deserve the occasional eating.
We’re still not in the clear because we organized the whole thing and conspired to commit murder but, hey, at least, if the guy dies, he dies quickly.
As far as eating the tiger afterwards, I don’t see what the problem is. we can let it fully digest the ex-torturee first, then we shoot it and we sell the meat to Japanese and argentinian tourists at a premium to cover the tiger cost (Can’t have a tiger with a taste for man working for you. Eating might happen before confession which would cause you to fail)
The only significant obstacle I see is that if the word gets out we’re doing this, torture targets will start training themselves by not being scared of tigers even if they are being eaten. This adaptation is why we cannot have nice, lasting torture methods. People, like viruses, adapt.
Fortunately, there are many more things that eat and scare man, so it’ll be like switching antibiotics and trying to keep ahead of the curve as the attacker adapts.