What’s strange is that so many people have insisted that there is a difference but not one person has been able to articulate what the basis for that difference is.
That’s been done multiple times. Inflicting severe pain when this pain is part or all of the purpose of the action is wrong.
Are you asking about the basis of morality? 'Cause that’s a much larger question – probably deserves another thread.
That’s not a distinction. That’s just an empty assertion.
Question again is: why “Inflicting severe pain when this pain is part or all of the purpose of the action is wrong”, when “Inflicting [death] when this [death] is part or all of the purpose of the action is [not necessarily] wrong”?
For the same reason that shooting people at random is wrong, but shooting people who are actively trying to kill children is not wrong. For the same reason that enslaving someone is always wrong, but imprisoning someone is not necessarily wrong. Because morality is a human construct that requires one to make decisions, assumptions, use logic, etc., and my moral system is based on the assumption that human life is valuable and one should strive to avoid actions that cause suffering, and the like.
Wouldn’t a discussion about the basis of morality deserve another thread?
From what I’ve read so far, the torture in this case was entirely worthless, so that hypothetical may be useful for some other thread, but not for the thread on the Senate Torture Report. The torture done by the US in our name was entirely useless in extracting information. It was completely unjustified from a moral perspective. They hired clueless people who didn’t know squat about interrogation to do it. Utterly awful.
If you want to open a thread discussing a hypothetical case where torture may be useful (a locked safe that you can try right away upon getting the key from a torturee?), go for it. In this case, where you had guys in custody for months and years before the enhanced interrogation began, and the answers would not be verifiable, we’re wasting time discussing whether it’s justified. There’s no way any of the CIA’s torturing would have worked since they couldn’t verify anything. Completely unjustified, proven worthless, utterly immoral.
Here is the dictionary definition for “pain”. I only copied the noun form definitions, since the word is used as a noun and not a verb in the quoted text. Please explain how none of them, in your opinion, apply to what was done to Mr. Zubaydah.
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I once read on Fox News that Barack Obama was President. Clearly I shouldn’t trust this piece of information.
Jeez, for the purpose of this thread, who cares? What the CIA did was definitely wrong, definitely useless. You’re just providing a distraction from the underlying crimes we’re discussing here.
For the CIA, the point of inflicting the pain was inflicting pain. They never got anything useful, and they couldn’t, since they were dealing with information that was already months or years old.
I’m glad the report is out and it’s really fucking awful. This shit should never have happened.
ISTM that you’re avoiding the issue by just bringing up a bunch of other issues that have nothing to do with the specific comparison being made here.
Which is what I said earlier. A lot of people are insisting that there is a distinction to be drawn between between the morality of inflicting death and torture when facing a parallel hypothetical trade-off, but no one can articulate any basis for a distinction.
About the entire basis for the concept of morality? Sure, other thread. About the basis for declaring one act to be immoral while declaring other seemingly-identical acts to be moral, no that belongs right here.
The reason it’s relevant here is because the Senate report claims the torture was completely ineffective, as you note, but others disagree. My position is that the morality of this particular program could be dependent on whether in fact the specific program was effective. Others have insisted that the effectiveness of the program is irrelevant. (I believe this began with Little Nemo’s post #12).
You know that this is not the view of a majority of Americans, right? I mean, I agree with you, but the vast majority of people seem to have no problem with the concept of inflicting severe pain on someone in order to get them to do what they want. If this wasn’t true, the manufacture and use of tasers would never have happened and would cease immediately.
F-P - I don’t agree with you, but you are making your point poorly. This is how I would lay out your case:
Premise: Intentionally killing someone is morally worse than torturing them.
Therefore if intentionally killing that person is okay, then torturing them should also be okay.
I don’t subscribe to this.
I’m asking myself what they would do if they held me prisoner. And I’m getting this very faint answer that sounds like cut my head off. Kind of makes me not give a crap about any of this. Not that it’s right, but it’s not going to keep me up at night either.
I disagree, and this will be my last response to what I consider a hijack, but here’s why. I can imagine a situation where torture could be effective. That is a situation where the intelligence can be immediately verified, such as the combination to a lock with a ticking time bomb, the location of the dirty bomb ready to blow, the location of the hostages currently being threatened. If one of those hypotheticals existed, then we could discuss whether torture would be justified. Again, torture can only possibly work when the information is immediately checkable – “Bill, he says the combination is 10-2-4 – try it out. Didn’t work? Ok, Bob, apply the anal feeding again!”
However, the CIA was never dealing with information they could immediately check, so they could never differentiate between real information, misleading bullshit, and desperate attempts to stop the pain. So, in the case of what the CIA is up to, it was never, and could never be effective. They had no way to know if KSM was telling them something real. If fact, if they could verify his info, then they didn’t need his info anyway. So, in the case of what the CIA does and did, it would never be useful. That’s what thinking people realized years ago and it’s what the report verified today.
Now, would it be morally justified if you could immediately check the intelligence? Maybe? Should it ever be legal? No. If the agent finds herself in a situation where torture is necessary to shut down the bus filled with orphans hurdling toward the cliff, she could make that decision and face the consequences. She should say “I did this terrible thing, but, here, directly due to my actions we saved the orphans. I would do it again.” Then, we can decide (or the judicial system could decide) if that was justified.
Nothing the CIA does or did remotely resembles that. With that, I end my hijack. Apologies to the OP.
I don’t think that’s his point. He seems to be saying- “In war, you kill innocent people. Why is that worse than torture?” To which the answer is obvious: killing innocents is undesirable but unfortunately unavoidable. Torture is avoidable and therefore must not be practiced.
Scenario: Enemy parks a tank next to a school. You bomb the tank and the shrapnel enters the school and kills three kids and injures 20. Regrettable, to be sure. But any pain these kids endured is not intentional. It is far worse, by several thousand orders of magnitude, to inflict pain for its own sake by torture.
The relevant function of the taser is supposed to be its disabling effect. Inflicting pain is a side effect which may be acceptable to many people in many cases, but that’s not what it’s for. A device that inflicted as much or more pain, without stopping people, would clearly be less useful.
Also, the taser was intended as a less lethal weapon of defense. It should not be used to gain compliance.
Not as a sex toy?! :o
I may be missing something here but if we have a group of people willing to commit mass murder indiscriminately on civilan populations and getting information from these people just might save a lot of innocent lives then I have no problem with it.
If a kidnapper was holding a loved one of mine and I only had so much time to rescue my loved one. I would not hesitate to do anything neccessary to save my loved one. The last thing I would be worring about was how much pain I was inflicting on the kidnapper.
Now this would only hold true if I was dealing with enemies that did have access to the knowledge I needed quickly to save lives. Beyond that I feel torture is very very wrong.