Want to bet?
No. I would die rather than torture someone. I would see you die. I would see my wife die. I would see my kids die. I would see the whole of humanity burn, before I torture someone. So where does that leave your argument now?
You’ve all watched too many episodes of 24.
Would you rather see your wife and children tortured or torture someone to prevent it?
How do you know that torturing someone will prevent anything?I Its not like its an electric circuit, where one action can complete it.
Not very likely that one would had the chance, even in the very few cases that were pointed out as “successful” it was the authorities or the military that resorted to torture not the parents. And then this points indeed to the biggest flaw on attempting to justify torture. It is then like the lottery, you know that some one will win somewhere, but it is called the “fool’s tax” for a reason. Torture is very unlikely to give you what you want and the proponents of torture conveniently forget about the many failures.
What it can give you, and IMHO is the main reason why torture is employed by the powerful, is to get plenty or false or misleading information that governments look for because they need to justify very bad policies or to escape blame for failures. The now dead dictator from Libya knew why torture was useful, it gave him a target that “confessed” to be responsible for an AIDS outbreak in Libya. The European tortured doctors and nurses got the blame in Libya. Of course no one in Europe and the USA took those confessions obtained with torture seriously.
And of course, many in the USA never learned the lesson from that.
I’m not sure, but if you would rather sacrifice the lives of every single man, woman, and child on this planet rather than water board the terrorist threatening to kill them all, then I’m not sure where it leaves you either…
And, of course, the whole of humanity includes the terrorist himself. So are you saying you wouldn’t water board him to save his life? That’s a level of moral confusion I’ve never encountered before.
I think you run into problems partly because the hypothetical is too removed from reality, and people’s moral intuitions are based on their experience.
Can I easily imagine a case where I might have to divert a runaway train to save some people, and might that action cause other damage or loss of life? Sure. I’ve seen that in movies. I understand how physics works. I can think it through.
Can I easily imagine a case where I have to waterboard someone to stop a runaway train? Well, no, not really. I guess I could have to torture someone who has some necessary information. But who’s to say it will work? There’s no such thing as 100% effective torture, which means I might end up in the case where I’ve tortured someone and a bunch of people are dead.
You can assert that your hypothetical doesn’t work that way all you want. It’s not going to change how people reason. I’m not convinced that it should, either. If you can’t come up with a realistic hypothetical scenario that proves your point, I’m not sure you’ve got much of a case.
[Quote=Tithonus]
The send point is that it’s false to say that torture never works. There are well documented cases of it working. A good one can be found on the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy page here. It’s a long page so I’ll briefly summarise:
There was a case in New Zealand where a woman went into a garage to pay for her petrol, leaving her infant son in the back seat. While she was inside, a man stole her car. When he noticed the kid, he ditched the car and the kid. The cops caught the guy very shortly afterward. They knew they had the right guy. He had items from the car in his pockets, and he was caught on the garage’s CCTV (he was a 300lb Samoan with a huge blonde afro, so he was easy to recognise). They could not possibly have had a stronger case.
Here’s the catch. It was a scorching hot day, and that car was like an oven. The cops knew they had a very limited time to find the kid before he cooked. They tried everything; appeals to reason, to decency, threats of a harsh prison sentence, and he just kept telling them to fuck off. Eventually, the cops just beat the piss out of the guy and within a minute he told them everything. They got to the kid just in time. Torture worked.
In other instances, the mere threat of torture has worked. There was a case in Germany where a guy kidnapped a kid and held him to ransom. The cops found the guy, but not the kid. Unfortunately, the psycho had already killed the kid but the cops didn’t know that. For all they knew, the kid was trapped and starving. So they interrogated this guy for like two whole days, to absolutely no avail whatsoever. They threw everything but the kitchen sink at this asshole and he just kept denying everything. Eventually, in desperation, the chief investigator threatened to beat the shit out of the guy unless he told them what he knew. He immediately confessed. The mere threat of torture worked.
I go to the trouble of recounting these unpleasant stories to pre-empt those people (and I’ve encountered plenty elsewhere online) who just continually and obstinately state outright that torture never, ever works. For those people, here are two explicit cases where it has, so you can’t make that argument.
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I hope you’ll entertain my skepticism for a minute. I’m one those persons who just continually and obstinately states outright that torture never, ever works, because I know of no instance in which it’s worked.
You have two stories in which torture (or threatened torture) worked. Why should I believe these stories are true, rather than fictional?
Both stories have no names, no identifying details, no location more specific than a country. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides no proper citations for either one. There’s no way to verify that the events actually occurred. The stories look exactly like we’d expect a fictional pro-torture story to look like. (The villain likes to murder children; gee that’s original.)
Since there are many fictional stories about unicorns and elves, but no true stories about same, most people are justifiably skeptical of anyone who claims to have seen an elf or unicorn. By the same reasoning, most people are justifiably skeptical of anyone who claims to have seen torture that “worked”.
I agree that it’s completely irrational to be against the waterboarding but ok with the killing in the hypothetical, but for the record my own issue with torture is that it’s not only immoral, it’s incredibly unreliable as a tool for getting legitimate information.
Being a physical coward of epic proportions myself, I know that if you hurt me I am TOTALLY your bitch, and I will tell you anything I think will work in order to get you to stop hurting me, including telling any lie imaginable. And if you need the information so damn bad, you don’t have it already and you can’t possibly know what is a lie and what is the truth.
[Quote=Tithonus]
The fact that so many people seem to find this argument abhorrent can mean only one of two things:
…
2) There’s a flaw in the argument. In which case, I would be genuinely indebted to anyone who could point it out.
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Okay, let me point it out.
You say that for waterboarding to be morally permissible, several things must be true, including this:
It must be when we have a reasonable expectation that the successful extraction of useful information via water boarding can prevent a planned military operation (i.e. a bombing raid or ground assault) that is certain to result in a loss of civilian life.
There has never been any real-life case where this was true. There never will be. So your argument is akin to arguing that torture is never morally permissible, in reality.
You may argue that there are fictional cases where torture would be morally permissible if they were real rather than fictional. Most people care more about reality than fiction.
Dammit do I ever get to contribute to a thread before some awesome asshole has already said exactly what I would say better than I would have said it?
[quote=“Tithonus, post:1, topic:729098”]
Anyway, onto the moral case for torture in certain very limited situations. Specifically, water boarding, since that seems to be how it’s done nowadays. Now, remember, what I’m arguing is that water boarding is morally permissible in CERTAIN SITUATIONS. Those situations, in my opinion, must fulfil the following criteria:
[ul]
[li] It must be during a time of war in which we have already decided to resort to aerial bombardment of populated areas in order to achieve our military aims, like in Iraq and Afghanistan.[/li][li] It must be when all other interrogation techniques have failed.[/li][li] It must be when we have a reasonable expectation that the successful extraction of useful information via water boarding can prevent a planned military operation (i.e. a bombing raid or ground assault) that is certain to result in a loss of civilian life.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Your criteria state that torture can only be used when it is not going to work, and is more likely to be directed against people who should be treated humanely. You gave two examples of torture working, but both were lowlife scum without a cause. They had no mission or allies to protect by resisting torture, only their own sorry hides.
Well I’ll be, I do assume that somewhere the “lottery” was won but the point stands that in reality even if once in a blue moon torture worked it is not really a good idea to employ something that virtually fails or worse, that it gives the powerful a justification to do more harm.
But that was a good catch, a quick search tells me that in other discussions in the internet many do doubt about that incident taking place. And then one wonders that if it happened if there was luck involved and the tortured guy in reality did not know and told the police a lucky guess or that the police suspected already where the car was.
One should wonder too about the year that took place, as a critic in the Guardian puts it the possibility of an Innocent man making time for something he did not do is a very fearful possibility when in the past minorities had little recourses.
Having just read the linked cite, two things strike me about this example. First, as ITR champion has already noted, there’s no way to verify that this really happened as described. The story is attributed to John Blackler, former New South Wales police officer, but Blackler doesn’t say he was personally involved or that it even happened in New South Wales. What’s more, it does say:
It sounds like even if we had the information necessary to dig up the court records for this case, there’d still be no evidence that the police had actually beaten life-saving information out of the suspect. So I have to wonder whether this might be some sort of urban legend or possibly even a lie invented to cover up police misconduct.
Second, in your summary of this case you describe the car thief as having a more distinctive appearance than your source does. You said he was “a 300lb Samoan with a huge blonde afro, so he was easy to recognise”, but your cite says this man “appeared to be a heavy set Pacific Islander with a blonde-streaked Afro”. That still sounds like an unusual-looking man (although given how little we know about when and where this happened, maybe it was an area with a large Pacific Islander community and blonde streaks were a fad in at the time) but not as unusual or specific as your version. According to Blackler the man wasn’t hugely obese, he was merely heavyset. He wasn’t identified as a Samoan, he just appeared to be a Pacific Islander. He didn’t have a huge blonde Afro, he had an Afro of apparently unremarkable size with blonde streaks.
Now, I don’t see any reason for you to be dishonest about this, so I’m assuming you genuinely misremembered the description of the man. But that’s the thing – despite having no strong motivation for doing so, you altered the details in such a way that the actions of the police seemed more justified (the more unusual-looking the suspect, the more certain they could be they had the right guy), and you presumably didn’t even realize you were doing this. If this story was in fact based on something that really happened, then it seems all too plausible to me that Blackler and/or whoever told him this story also exaggerated the details to make the suspect seem more obviously guilty.
Here’s a cite for the story of the German kidnapper: NYT: Kidnapping Has Germans Debating Police Torture.
The second story comes from the book “Police Ethics” by John Blackler and Seamus Miller. Both men are employed by the Centre of Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics and, as far as I can tell, are both highly respected in their fields. “Police Ethics” is required reading in some university courses. As such, I’m perfectly happy to accept Blackler as a reliable witness. YMMV.
Yes, I’d rather see them tortured than torture.
It leaves me not a torturer.
Yes.
I think you’re confused as to what “confusion” means.
Civil libertarian and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz had considered the question in some depth. He argues that, just as searches and seizures are illegal but can be made legal by getting a judge to sign a search warrant, likewise torture should be permissible by first getting a judge to sign a torture warrant.
The judge will require some argument be made or evidence be presented, to convince him that torture is necessary and sufficient to accomplish some desired goal. If the police or prosecutor or inquisitor can convince the judge, he gets the warrant. Otherwise he doesn’t.
Here’s an op-ed from about a year ago by Dershowitz arguing for a law to allow torture warrants to fight terrorism (essentially, the ticking-time-bomb argument).
Google the keywords Alan Dershowitz torture warrants to find umpty-ump more articles, editorials, and discussions about this.
No. It just leaves you guilty of privileging the sanctity of your own conscience over the lives of everyone else on Earth. That is, quite possibly, the single most immoral position I have ever encountered. The egotism necessary to sustain such a stance is simply mind-boggling. It’s both appalling and utterly fascinating. Is there really no limit to the number of people you would let die just so you could sleep at night? Even if you knew you were torturing the right person? Even if you had tried every other method at your disposal to prevent his atrocity without success? Even if you had no other choice? Even if you knew torturing the terrorist would definitely save innumerable innocent lives? You still wouldn’t water board him?
What on earth would you do in that situation? Just sit there?
[Quote=MrDibble]
Yes, I’d rather see them tortured than torture.
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Just out of interest, have you asked them how they feel about that?
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