The United States population is now comprised of 70% petty law breakers. People park on sidewalks, litter like mad, play loud music and annoy their neighbors, break speeding laws, and so on. The remaining 30% are nice, fully law abiding citizens.
The lawbreakers cannot be cajoled or compelled to obey the law except by a one-day long torture session with a magical device that leaves no physical or mental traces of the torture. After such a session, they are convinced to follow the law for an indefinite period of time, perhaps a year or two. The treatment is 100% effective and 100% safe.
Is it right to torture on a roughly annual basis 70% of the population of the United States to stop the runaway epidemic of petty crime so that the remaining 30% of the population do not have to live with millions of social degenerates?
In other words, should be torture people to stop littering?
I understand, but I don’t care. This, for the last time, is a thought experiment. I am asking if people would torture a guilty man in order to elicit information from that man for the sole purpose of saving a great many lives. It is a simple utilitarian caculation, yet it provokes a great deal of defensiveness from those to whom it is addressed. I ask again, in the situation I described, would you torture?
Cervaise, with all due respect, the only reason this thread exists is because people were constantly fucking up The Controvert’s thread with comments like yours. To be honest, I would rather not have posted this thread. I would have rather let The Controvert handle it. But, his pertinent question was ignored and mocked and then forgotten so here we are. Again.
I’d rather not start a third thread.
I am assuming that killing the baby would directly, by means unknown, save 100 million lives. I am also assuming that saving the baby would, again by means unknown, consign 100 million people to death. I am also assuming the 100 million people are ordinary men, women, and children and not mass murdering dictators or aliens or whatever.
In that case I’d bite the bullet and burn the baby. What the hell else am I supposed to do? Let 100 million people die instead?
Hey, everyone, did you see that? Did you see what I just did? I took a hypothetical question, an utterly ludicrous one at that, and then I considered it on its own terms and gave a straightforward answer.
From my answer you can gain some small measure of insight into the ethical perspective I bring to my own little corner of the world. You can see that I consider ethical questions in terms of happiness and suffering, and when faced with two evil choices, I choose the lesser of two evils by weighing up the options.
It is my belief that the vast majority of people do not consider the ethics of torture in the same way. They instead consider a blanket prohibition of torture to be an unambiguously good thing in much the same way as a prohibition against cold blooded murder. However, I also believe that the vast majority of these people can be convinced to view the question of torture (indeed of more or less anything, baby burning being just one example), in strict utilitarian terms. As I said in my OP, I believe the question of torture can be phrased in such a way that would awaken the Grand Inquisitor in all of us.
This thesis is complicated by the existence of people who have gone on record as saying that nothing would force them to consider the question of torture in anything other than deontological terms. I posted this thread (A) to see if that were true and (B) if true, to converse with those people in order to learn more about their own personal ethics.
To say torture is wrong in all conceivable circumstances and to believe torture is wrong in all conceivable circumstances are not the same thing. One who would act “pragmatically” would not truly believe that torture is wrong in all conceivable circumstances. To such a person, your pragmatism would be reprehensible. I’m interested in understanding why this is.
I know you’re being facetious, but I think that’s a genuinely interesting question. Although I would respectfully request it be asked in a different thread. Thanks.
Actually, although I was being facetious, I also did recognize that there was something interesting to that question. But the interesting aspects of that question are entirely the same as the interesting aspects of your question, I think, a commonality which has little to do with murder or torture in specific, and just with “To what extent do moral facts gain their truth contingently?”. The elements of my question having to do with murder specifically are, I think, like the elements of your question having to do with torture specifically, not terribly substantial. In both cases, the answers to the questions reveal very little which is significant about (the answerer’s views on) the status of murder/torture; the insight gained is just into more abstract points about one’s conception of the nature of ethics.
Okay. First of all, thanks for responding candidly to my OP.
It seems to me as though you hold that torture can never be condoned. I’ve concocted the starkest scenario I could and it has failed to sway your judgement on this issue. I guess my first question is do you view all ethical dilemma’s in this way? For instance, do you hold that it is always wrong to lie even when lying could spare someone’s feelings at no personal cost to yourself or anyone else? Do you believe theft is always wrong, even if the thief is on the brink of starvation? If you’ve got any questions for me feel free to ask.
See, the problem is, when people say “X is always wrong”, they generally mean it the same way they might say “Gravity is always an attractive force”. We could imagine a hypothetical world in which certain physical assumptions were drastically altered, with the consequence that gravity caused objects to repel instead of attract, but it has no bearing on what was actually being argued by the speaker who held that gravity was always an attractive force; his statement could be more explicitly laid out as “Gravity is always an attractive force, given the basic schemes of operation of the universe which we implicitly take as necessary (i.e., as circumscribing the particular set of possible worlds of counterfactual relevance).” The same thing is presumably at play when one says “X is always wrong”.
I embrace a moral code that does not permit me to commit torture, even in the situation you describe. You can argue that in that situation that is the wrong decision, and the situation justifies deviating from my moral code. However, I would argue that by insisting that I will hold to my principles even in a situation like you describe, I am much less likely to waver on my principles in more realistic situations. If I entertained the possibility that there could be some occasion when torture would be justified, I’d be more likely to talk myself into committing torture in situations where it really isn’t justified.
In other words, I’m saying I think there’s a value to having some moral rules you won’t violate no matter what the situation. When looked at in the context of one particular extreme scenario, it might look unjustified, but on the whole it leads to more moral behavior. If you entertain too many exceptions to your basic rules of right and wrong, you’ll eventually have no sense of right and wrong left. Obviously, there’s also a danger of having a sense of morality that’s too lacking in nuance. But if my moral code is sufficiently nuanced to deal appropriately with any realistic scenario, that’s good enough for me.
So in short:
I’d never commit torture, not even in the situation you described, because I think that giving myself permission to commit torture in that situation would lead to too great a temptation to commit torture in less extreme situations.
My sense of morality has to accommodate the fact that I’m a fallible human being, not a computer that can dispassionately assess any possible scenario independent of all others.
(Of course, in saying I’d never commit torture, what I’m really saying is that according to my moral code I should never commit torture. Obviously, I can’t guarantee I’d actually adhere to my moral code in some extreme high-pressure situation I’ve never been in – I can only tell you what I would do if I did follow that code.)
Things might work out better if someone committed torture in that situation.
But in realistic scenarios, we aren’t better off that someone would be willing to commit torture in that situation. Because it’s easier for such a person to talk himself into committing torture in other situations.
Better for someone to be opposed to torture in all situations. I’d gladly take a chance on being screwed over in the unlikely event that torture is someday the only way to save the world, if it means that in the meantime we’re not torturing people.
[QUOTE=George Kaplin]
T
[li] Each of these conditions and constraints is inflexible and, for the purposes of this thread, cannot be contradicted, ignored, or even questioned. They are as certain as the most immutable laws of the universe. [/li][/quote]
You began to address the unrealistic nature of your scenario in some of your "FAQ"s. But significantly, you’ve entitled this thread “Logic not adequate for real life situations.” To give the thread that title, and then give an explicitly, blatantly unrealistic scenario, seems strange. It makes your point unclear.
This point has probably already been made somewhere in this thread, sorry about that if so.
You don’t think there are situations where cold-blooded murder is the lesser of two evils?
The reason people are reluctant to play these hypothetical games is because this discussion isn’t happening in a vacuum. The United States has tortured real people in real circumstances that are far more ambiguous that what you lay out in your OP. People are wary of the rhetoric trap such hypotheticals pose. If they answer “Why yes, if you put it that way, in some situations torture is the lesser of two evils,” then they expect a follow-up alone the lines of “Well I think terrorism is a very great evil , so torturing terrorists is moral.” People can see where this line of reasoning leads and they simply refuse to step into the trap, particularly when they know how the argument can be twisted to justify a particularly heinous practice that is really occuring right now.
If you’re interested in this topic as a purely abstract moral exercise why use torture as an example? It just makes people think you have an ulterior motive.
You know why everyone is resisting the hypothetical? Because it isn’t hypothetical. You’re just trying to get people to haggle over the price, as the old joke goes.
So let’s turn the tables on you.
Would you drop a baby in an incinerator if you were 51% sure it would save 2 people?
The logic of utilitarianism demands you drop the baby in the incinerator. If you refuse to burn the baby to death for a 51% chance of saving 2 people, you’re a monster, right?
The reason no one wants to debate the exact point at which torture becomes acceptable is that it’s an exercize in studding our moral code with asterisks and special cases and caveats. And as Tim points out, if you believe your moral code is studded with asterisks, then you’re going to find yourself in lots of situations where that just might apply. You’re constantly looking for loopholes. The means always justifies the ends.
You know else thought the means always justifies the ends, George? Hitler, that’s who.
Why is the situation in the OP more complicated than self defense? Is beating someone in the head with a stick torture? If someone were to legitimately threaten my life, say by pointing a gun at me, would I beat him in the head with a stick to stop him? Hell yeah. Doesn’t make torture OK.
Would I do the same in defense of millions of people? Err, yep. It still isn’t torture. It’s self defense.
You really don’t seem to understand the difference between torture and self-defense.
If you were walking down the street and someone pulled a gun on you, you’d try to waterboard them? Someone pulls a knife and you’d try to attach a car battery to their nuts? A guy takes a swing at you so you’d pull out their fingernails with pliers?
Perhaps we can all agree to this: torture is just as acceptable as incinerating a baby, in the sense that, if push came to shove and it was the only way to save billions of lives, we would be hard pressed not to do it.
(Some of us will say they can resistant that hard press and some of us will say they can’t, which is to say some of us will feel the weight of it more than others, but I think everyone can agree on the sentence above. And, having agreed on that, they can see just how little insight has been gained into the status of torture via the OP’s hypothetical; to the extent that there is a legitimate question extractable from it, there is almost nothing torture-specific in it. The force with which it compels us to stop saying “Torture is never morally justifiable” is no less or greater than that with which it compels us to stop saying “Incinerating babies is never morally justifiable”.)
If getting a happy ending from a Thai masseuse was the only way to keep your marriage together, isn’t it the moral thing to do to visit that Thai masseuse?
If pushing a seven year old kid into the gutter and laughing at him brightens your day, and therefore your interactions with everyone else throughout the day are more pleasant for them, isn’t it the moral thing to do to push the kid into the gutter?
If sending 12 million people to death camps is the only way to save civilization from Jewish Bolshevism, isn’t sending those people to the death camps the moral thing to do?
Here’s another hypothetical. Would you allow yourself to be incarcerated for ten years if you knew that doing so would save the lives of 100 million people?
I would.
If the situation is so dire that torture is the only alternative, then the people doing the torturing won’t be bound by the law anyway: “I don’t care if they lock me away for the rest of my life … I’m going to do whatever it takes to save those people!”
One of the reasons for making torture illegal in ALL CIRCUMSTANCES is that it forces someone who is contemplating doing it to consider the moral calculus very carefully. “Is this situation so dire that I’m willing to go to jail in order to do the right thing? And if it’s not that dire, then how can I justify torturing someone in the first place?”
If that’s in response to my post, I never endorsed (or dis-endorsed) consequentialist ethics; I just said we would feel a heavy weight upon us to incinerate the baby to save the billion lives, whether or not such action actually is moral, in whatever sense you consider relevant. Surely this is an uncontroversial fact about human psychology?
But Pochacco… what if something was so bad that it justified using torture to prevent it, but not quite bad enough that its prevention justified using torture AND spending time in jail? You know, what if some potential catastrophe lay just in that tiny middle ground…
(I’m not seriously advocating that such things exist, but I guess this is another situation where I’m being facetious, but not entirely so…)
Explain it to me then. Can you torture someone by hitting him in the head with a stick? For torture to be torture, does it have to include all forms of torture?
I asked a serious question. These scenarios seem, at best, sarcastic. How can I waterboard someone all by myself? Am I walking down the street with waterboard paraphernalia in my backpack? If I am in my car, why do I care if someone pulls a knife on me? Or do I have a car battery in my backpack too? How do I get the guy to sit still so I can grasp his nails with my pliers?
On second thought, your questions are more stupid than sarcastic.
To torture someone is to make them feel pain in order to get them to do what you want them to do. If getting hit in the head with stick didn’t hurt, it would not work as a method of preventing my murder. If hitting someone on the head with a stick prevents millions of murders, why is it not self defense?
I do not approve of torture. Especially government sanctioned torture. But the OP describes a situation where we know that causing pain will prevent millions of deaths. When the government tortures, it does so to *obtain *information.