Where do you draw the line? Anyone … feel free to take your best shot. I gladly invite your finest effort, McDuff. Please give it the old college try, minty green. You might know my answer but I’m not sure you know me whatsoever.
SCENARIO
You are abducted by infinitely more powerful alien life forms and our Earth’s singular chance for survival utterly hinges, both critically and solely, only upon yours and no one else’s, one time, never-again-to-be-repeated chance whereby the the solitary and all-time historically singular use of irrefutably excruciating and agonizing physical TORTURE shall correctly and reliably extract valid and certifiable information that would preserve all life on this planet.
QUESTION
Would you do so, only one time in your entire life without repetition in all of humanity’s history, in order to save all organisms on this planet?
Well, first the obligatory statement that I think it’s a really stupid scenario.
That being said, I would use torture without question. I’d hate myself for it, but that wouldn’t stop me. I’m not going to take a moral stand if it’s going to cost that many lives; it wouldn’t even need to be the whole world - I’d be willing to do this for substantially fewer, although I can’t say exactly how few.
Obviously the only sane response would be to upload a computer virus into the aliens’ mothership, thereby destroying it.
Seriously, if placed in a situation like this, I’d have to quote Bruce Campbell: “So, aliens… am I your little monkey?” Because if they’ve come all the way to Earth just to present this ridiculous choice, there’s no guarantee that tomorrow they won’t show up again and demand that we all torture our closest relatives, or our planet will be destroyed. Rather than jump through endless hoops, I’d rather go down while giving the aliens the biggest finger imaginable.
And I think I’ve seen enough **Twilight Zone ** episodes to know how this one comes out, anyway. The guy agonizes over it and finally decides to go with the torture, at which point the aliens look sorrowful and say: "Our hope was that you would prove yourself a species capable of living – or dying – by your moral beliefs, and thus worthy of a place in the Galaxy. Since you have demonstrated that you value survival more than compassion, your species shall be imprisoned in darkness…forever." As a look of dawning horror appears on the guy’s face, Rod Serling steps out from behind a shrub and intones:
“We pride ourselves on our moral fiber; believing that our values and ethics make up what it means to be human. But what if others hold us to the same values we hold ourselves? Here, one man has been judged, and all of humanity has been found wanting…in the Twilight Zone.”
What an interesting little hypothetical conundrum.
Given the obvious gravity of this decision, as apparently the whole of the planet Earth depends on my choice, I’m afraid I can’t make any armchair decisions without having more information.
For example, if this alien force is so much more fantastically powerful than us, how can I torture them? Am I going to play Tom Jones at them so that their superintelligent heads explode? How can I be certain that Terrafel’s Twilight Zone theory is wrong? You need to give me some more clues here, if I’m going to make this absolutely once in a lifetime everyone depends on it decision, aren’t I?
But, before you clue me in, can I just ask: what does this have to do with anything?
Actually I don’t think it’s a fallacy unless you are trying to infer some sort of double standard on the part of the answerer. It’s a legitimate question though I don’t think it’s very useful.
