he point is that many tortures do not see a problem because they do swallow the propaganda that they are doing the right thing, not many problems for them but their bliss is based on ignorance.
And so the goal posts are moved, really, the hypothetical was really ridiculous and once again even this one here is very unlikely, the authorities will be ones more likely to end in this situation.
I don’t. I’m cool with euthanasia and suicide.Killing someone against their will is wrong. No exceptions.
Breaking Sabbath is not the same as rape and murder.
Although even there it’s OK if God says it is, or used to be, so I don’t particularly hold up religious moral codes as some kind of high standard.
Didn’t say it was its fault. Just that it’s not worth saving.
It isn’t the child’s fault, but it is a judgement of the child’s worth all the same - that the child’s well-being is worth more.
Of course it does.
Personally, I think it’s nonsensical to attempt to base a serious argument on what people think they might do in a hypothetical situation so ridiculous that it’s effectively impossible.
If I truly believed that the only way to save the world was to torture one person then I might very well do it, but 1) this doesn’t mean it’s truly the right thing to do and 2) this is a scenario so unlikely that it doesn’t even make sense as an analogy for something that could plausibly happen to me. If I ever believed myself to be in such a situation then the most likely explanation by far would be that I was suffering from a delusion, in which case I could only hope that I’d still be rational enough to seek psychiatric help before I hurt someone.
No doubt that is true. But what does that have to do with anything I’ve said? I’m sure there are people in ISIS who think that beheading and raping is the right thing to do, and they are wrong. Their existence doesn’t make rape and beheading any less immoral.
(a) what goalposts?
(b) in this hypothetical, YOU are the authorities. You have caught the bad guy, you know with 100% certainty that he planted the bomb and that the bomb will destroy the world, and that if it can be found it can be disarmed. Is torture one of the options available to you in this situation? (Obviously if this particular bad guy has a character which your profilers think is more likely to yield to persuasion than torture, it would be ridiculous to torture him rather than use persuasion…)
So you don’t allow killing in self defense?
There are innocent children in Africa who are innocent. It would be a shame if they died. If a madman on the other side of the world is threatening to set of enough nukes to cause an ice age and wipe out the entire human race, how does that reflect on the innocent children in Africa one way or the other? You seem to be saying that they have moral responsibility for the fact that they are being held hostage, without even realizing that this is occurring. (Or am I misunderstanding?)
Clearly. But I’m not trying to base a serious argument on this. I’m not saying “well, it’s clearly right to torture someone if that would save the world in a crazy hypothetical, therefore by an inescapable connection of logical steps, we see that it is perfectly OK to torture prisoners of war whenever we want”, or something.
Rather, I’m responding to Mr Dibble’s claim that even IN the preposterous hypothetical he would still never ever torture ever never ever ever ever. A claim that you yourself are clearly not making.
The point I made was in reference to your idea that torturers can be healed later, in practice they usually do not need to.
You came in talking about the whole world being saved, since it is clear that many logical flaws are with that you have to move the goal post to a terrorist.
In your previous post you referred to to a more realistic situation, but once again you can not let go of the very ridiculous “save the world” one.
The problem is precisely why the OP failed, there are many, many real life examples of authorities that thought that they were doing the right thing and believed that it was proper to torture. In a position of authority it is likely that I would follow orders and that torture will happen, but I would be aware of the many times authorities used torture to influence the opinion of the people and to justify evil intents. I would make sure to make a record of the ones involved in the torture. Because to your hypothetical I will tell you that in the end it is almost certain that it will come up later that many did lie and that the super weapon was not there to begin with and I would be then the first to testify against the ones that ordered or gave us false information to make us do the torture.
If you’re not trying to make a serious argument what difference does it make what Mr Dibble says he would do in a crazy hypothetical situation that he knows he’ll never actually be in? I don’t see how his answer is any worse nonsense than the question itself.
I don’t want to speak for him, but he may feel that if one can’t stick to one’s moral beliefs in a crazy hypothetical that’s never going to happen then these beliefs aren’t worth much. As for me, the main reason I’m not claiming I’d refuse to torture someone even to save the world is because I’m not confident in my ability to make the most rational choice when I’m under extreme pressure and most likely suffering from a delusion as well. But the “torture to save the world” scenario is so far-fetched that IMHO the most rational choice would be to treat it as a trick or delusion and refuse to torture.
With a bomb that would destroy the world. No goalpost-moving was intended, but I may have miscommunicated.
But once we’re already in the land of contrived hypotheticals, it’s fairly easy to construct a contrived hypothetical in which the evidence that (a) the device exists, and (b) this is precisely the guy who stole it are ironclad beyond belief.
See, what I think is interesting about this discussion is that to me it’s clearly possible to construct a ridiculously contrived hypothetical in which torture is OK. And I absolutely recognize how ridiculous and contrived the hypothetical has to get before it’s pretty unambiguous that torture is OK in that situation. And of course in the vast majority of situations, torture is NOT at all OK. So there’s at least an interesting conversation to be had about where the line is, and how possible it might for a non-ridiculous hypothetical to cross the line. Refusing to engage at all with an attitude of “well, your hypothetical is just a hypothetical” seems to just be sidestepping the point somehow… as if you would be betraying the anti-torture side (as if there’s a “pro-torture” side) by ever even giving the slightest tiny bit of ground ever!
I dunno, what difference does anything make? He made a statement that I thought was ridiculous, I asked him about it. There’s no point beyond it being something I’m interested to discuss on the SDMB.
Interestingly, I think exactly the opposite. It’s super-easy to be told that something is a rule, and just say “well, that’s the rule”, and never question it. It’s much more interesting and difficult to actively be aware of the reason behind the rule and then continually reevaluate whether the rule applies in any situation or not.
I would kill in self defense. Does that mean that I don’t really believe that killing is wrong?
And I think “I would be very very suspicious of the situation and demand extremely high levels of verification and certainty” is an entirely reasonable response to the hypothetical. Although I can certainly imagine someone making a completely different but still arguably ethically sound choice, something along the lines of “if I’m only 15% sure that the situation is real, a 15% chance of THE WORLD ENDING is still so terrible that I believe I would be willing to engage in torture, due to the overall Expected Value calculation”. But a response of “torture is SO EVIL that it’s better to let every human being on earth die in screaming agony than engage in torture” is one that I just can’t understand or agree with.
Nope, the scenario as it was shown many times does have many flaws and it is so unlikely that it is essentially useless to the purpose of finding that line.
Besides the line was already described: The best way to see this is to take it as one looks at a lottery, we all know that it is likely that very few will hit the jackpot, but for all the ones that follow the usual is almost virtually guaranteed: you will lose. And the ones in power do not care about gaining good information from torture, for them the objective of torture is to find justifications to follow an evil path.
It’s unclear to me what you’re saying. Are you saying it is ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE to describe a scenario that fits the hypothetical? Or just that it’s vanishingly unlikely? Because of course it’s vanishingly unlikely, that’s why it’s described as a “contrived hypothetical”.
Not sure how that applies to a situation where you are literally trying to keep the world from ending… because if you don’t try you will certainly lose.
I’m sure that happens. But just about any intelligence-gathering technique could be used by evil and amoral people to come up with pretexts to support their evil plans… so that doesn’t really say anything about torture one way or the other.
And basically useless then.
Again this was dealt with, if a deity is involved I deal with it like one deals with Pascal’s wager, I bet that a deity will not be that evil. If that hypothetical was coming from a mad man then it is more likely that I would deduce that in that situation the world is really safe, and I’m doomed regardless of how I do in the test.
Now that is indeed missing the point, in reality what you are recommending here, to dismiss it, does lead many to kowtow to the powerful who clearly used (and will use) torture to justify their bad ends.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Mr Dibble is just refusing to play your stupid game of “let’s pretend that the world will explode if you don’t rape a baby to death. So much for your no torture stance! Hah!”
Are you man enough to rape a baby to death to stop the terrorist from exploding the planet? How many innocent babies would you rape to death to save the planet? One? Twenty? A million? Remember, you have to actually have an orgasm just as the baby dies, or it doesn’t count. Now who’s the tough guy who makes the tough decisions?
I mean, if you’d rape one baby to death to save the planet, but won’t rape a million babies to death, aren’t you a big fat hypocrite? The terrorist has the babies lined up and he’s waiting for you to rape them to death, or he blows up the planet. But he’s patient, a million babies can’t be raped to death in day, he’s reasonable.
Remember, you’re absolutely certain he’s got the bomb, and you know for a fact the world will klablooey if you don’t rape those babies. I know you were hoping for a more heroic torture scenario, where you get to torture a really bad guy for a really good cause. But no, in this case you’ve got to torture a million innocent babies to death, and have a orgasm every time you kill one, or good bye planet Earth. What are you, chicken? Not man enough to save the Earth, because of your puny hu-mon moral standards that don’t matter a hill of beans in the larger sense?
Your hypothetical is stupid. You won’t torture unless you’re absolutely sure the torture victim is a bad guy who deserves it. You won’t torture unless you’re absolutely sure it will work. You won’t torture unless it involves saving millions of people. You won’t torture unless there’s no other option. You’re a fucking hero. Except in real life, torture doesn’t work that way. In real life all the above are impossible to know.
So when people declare that they won’t torture even to save the planet, they’re just pissing on the stupid hypothetical. When people say they won’t throw one fat guy in front of the runaway train to save 5 skinny people, what they’re saying is that they reject the hypothetical. I reject the idea that there’s this terrorist who’s going to blow up the world in an hour, but if you torture him he gives up the information right away and you save the world. In real life most people will eventually crack. But after only one hour of torture? And when he knows that all he as to endure is one hour of discomfort and his troubles are over?
See, what makes people break under torture is the realization that the torture will continue forever, until the victim performs the action the torturer wants. Sign the confession. Give the combination to the safe. Tell us the location of the safe house. But your terrorist is such a pussy that, after all his work building a world-exploding planet-buster, he’s going to cave in just a few minutes. If he’s such a fucking pussy, maybe you could just try talking to him first.
In real life that’s how cops and interrogators get information from people. They talk with them. Turns out people will spill their guts just because they want to explain themselves to someone who appears to want to understand why. And so the best interrogators aren’t inhuman sadists, they are caring empathetic people who can at least fake sympathy, even for horrible people who’ve committed horrible acts.
So back to the baby raping. How many babies are you willing to rape to death to save the planet? How many dead babies does it take before the planet isn’t worth saving?
Personally, no, I don’t.
Yes. It would also be a shame if non-innocent people died, too.
The lengths you are willing to go to to save them reflects on your views of their worth, basically. I believe no individual human life is worth becoming a torturer, any more than it’s worth become a killer or a rapist. I also believe that that kind of thing doesn’t scale - if it’s wrong to do it to save one, it’s still wrong to do it to save lots. Or all.
No, I specifically said they don’t:
This is precisely right.
Sure, that’s useless for practical advice. But it’s quite useful for a theoretical discussion. Even if the conclusion you come to is “in every situation I can ever imagine actually happening in real life, torture is wrong”, there can still be something learned by showing what is different between those situations and a contrived hypothetical in which you would torture.
You seem to be fixated on a “someone is offering you a choice” type of hypothetical, as opposed to a “ticking doomsday device” hypothetical, which does not need to involve sadistic madmen, deities, aliens, or any other untrustworthy, unknowable, pascal’s-wager-relevant actors.
(bolding mine)
What are you saying I’m dismissing? Are you saying that I’m saying that I’m OK with torture, or endorse torture, or do NOT think it was a terrible blot on our national conscience that we water boarded a bunch of guys? Because none of those things are true at all.
What I’m saying is that I think people are overstating as “never” what should be “likely never, but possibly in extraordinarily unlikely circumstances”. Why do I care, then? Well, partly just argue-y orneriness, but partly because I think it weakens the anti-torture position for it to be overreaching. If someone is truly uncertain about their position on torture, telling them “torture will NEVER work”, because it is so bizarrely absolute, strikes me as less likely to be convincing than “torture will never work, excepting possibly in extraordinarily rare and unlikely circumstances, which are so unlikely that I don’t believe we should modify our laws and policies to account for them”, or something like that.
Still useless anyhow.
No, you are missing one important thing, you are maybe correct about the “extraordinary circumstances” but we already found that the evidence is dubious, **but reaching for hypotheticals to counter that is silly when real life already has showed us why one should not torture. **
My argument isn’t that torture never would work, BTW, just so we’re clear. It’s that I, specifically, will not torture even if it did.
That’s a strawman. I’ve stated repeatedly that someone saying “yes, I would torture in (extreme hypothetical)” does not in any way mean that they aren’t really against torture. It’s not some stupid gotcha. It’s a genuine curiosity about the positions people hold and why the hold them. MrDibble’s position strikes me (and others in this thread) as peculiar, and I wish to explore it further.
My posting history on this board shows that (a) I’m generally liberal on basically every topic, and (b) I don’t engage in dickish gotcha debating.
And to answer your question, well, I don’t honestly know. First of all, as GIGObuster has argued, a situation with a powerful alien saying “you must do X or I will destroy the world” is a difficult one to respond to for reasons such as your own ability to trust your sanity, your ability to trust the aliens, etc.
However contrived a ticking-doomsday-device scenario is that would require torture, at least in that context there’s a direct connection between torturing the guy for information (as to where the ticking doomsday device is) and saving the world (disabling the doomsday device). So that may be (and in fact is) contrived and unlikely in the extreme, but it’s still a world more plausible than “powerful alien will destroy earth if I don’t rape a million babies”.
That said, if you do manage to come up with a situation where my raping a baby really absolutely positive will save the world, well, if I decided that I would do it, that in no way means that I’m not really against baby raping. When one is stuck choosing between two evils, and one chooses one of the evils, that doesn’t mean that one doesn’t really actually dislike that evil.
And if I was in the we-caught-the-doomsday-device-planter-and-there’s-time-left-on-the-clock scenario, i certainly wouldn’t say “well, clearly the right thing to do is torture him”. Presumably there are people in the world who are genuinely expert in knowing how best to get other people to cooperate, based on their personality, etc. For any individual, it might be persuasion. It might be bribery. It might be guilt trips. It might be drugs of some sort. It might be threatening their family. It might be sleep deprivation. And it might be torture. But there’s no way that saying “you can use any technique to get this guy to talk… EXCEPT torture” gives a true expert (not a guy who just likes torturing people) a better chance of extracting the information than “you can use any technique to get this guy to talk”.