Based on this thread which unfortunately choose a poor example that was too emotionally charged and too close to reality, but is based on a question that I’ve been meaning to put before the teaming masses.
To what extent should our morality be based on outcomes rather than intermediate states. Here is my scenario:
There is a new invention called the mind probe. This can be used in law enforcement situations to read the mind of suspect and determine whether he his guilty or innocent of a crime. It does so by electrically testing the suspects synapses which is inherently excruciatingly painful, but at the end of the procedure it re-writes his brain so that it is identical to what it was before the procedure. He has no memory of the procedure, suffers no trauma from it and has no adverse effects from it. Further, since there is no evidence that of pain or trauma, those administering the test or undergoing it have no idea that there is pain, and so will not be affected by the knowledge of the pain. The only person who knows about it is you the inventor of the test.
To attempt to keep this debate tuned to the underlying question I wish the posters to accept the following assumptions (even if they don’t actually agree with them) if you want to debate them that’s a separate thread.
In and of itself being able the guilt or innocence of a suspect is a moral good, so if the mind probe existed without but caused no pain, there would be no question as to it morality
Using torture to get information is bad. If we left out the final procedure to re-wire the brain at the end, there would be no question as to the immorality of the mind probe.
Don’t fight the hypothetical. There is no question that the procedure has no consequence to the suspect after it is finished. Not even in his subconscious and not even a “yeah but how can you be sure”.
So the question is whether you consider the use of this test ethical. Is the existence of subjective suffering that ends without consequence real?
If I torture someone, and they then die, am I guilty of torture and murder, even though the person isn’t remembering the torture? I say yes. And the parallels to this procedure are close enough that I consider your hypothetical test unethical as well.
If the inventor of this test lets others use, and be victims of, this test without telling them of the suffering aspect, then that inventor is acting immorally.
I do not think that erasing the memory of the act undoes the act, so no, this would not be ethical. However it would be ethical to offer it to people as an option to prove their innocence - they could choose a painful way of proving their innocence, and if they did so it would the ethical to carry it out on them.
(The way we would then assume that anyone who rejected the optional procedure was guilty would not be ethical.)
See also “The Dead Past” by Isaac Asimov. That story involves a device called the “chronoscope” which allows one to literally see into the past, much less invasive than reading someone’s brain.
My response to Buck Godot’s scenario that this sort of sci-fi technology itself destroys the secret which you imply makes the act moral to begin with. Should our victim simply use the mind-probe device on the law enforcement officer, they will discover all the nonphysical harm heretofore unnoticed.
Then we are back to the base question of how to evaluate the morality when there is a risk, not a guarantee of harm: in-the-moment or after-the-fact? see my [POST=21597286]post #29[/POST] in the linked thread. Different systems of morality have different answers, and there is no consensus. But with such technology there will never be an after-the-fact unless the perpetrator dies; with the chronometer, there will never be an after-the-fact period.
If we are to assume the suspect consented to this test and knew about it, but nobody knew it caused pain, this begs a much graver question: does the suspect cease to be a person while the test is administered?
They don’t know how they feel. We don’t know how they feel. Therefore they have no feelings, therefore they are not a sentient being.
This line of questioning is related to the debates on whether animals and infants feel pain.
How about this: a married couple is trying desperately to conceive. One night while the husband is away, the woman is having drinks with a trusted male friend. She gets very drunk, and the friend has sex with her. She has no memory of his assault and in his mind it wasn’t assault. Now she’s pregnant with the assailant’s child and the couple is overjoyed.
There would be a foul as soon as someone realizes the father isn’t related to the kid. Either by looks or hereditary disease or DNA test. The husband might feel betrayed.
Doctors would assume the kid is related to his father and factor that into the medical decision making, possibly with adverse effects.
There is also the risk of the friend talking about having sex with the wife, possibly inadvertently.
Even if nobody knows for generations, people today are learning that their family tree isn’t quite so accurate. Time dampens the emotions but it can hurt to learn the truth.
Whether such an act would be moral or not depends on when and how you evaluate morality.