You seriously need to get a dictionary and look up the word “torture.” And check out “self-defense” while you’re at it.
So, to be clear, you accuse me of a lack of understanding, but are not inclined in the slightest to enlighten me. What was the point of your post, then? Just to call me ignorant? Good job, mate! Are you happy now?
I’m saying your arbitrary redefinition of the term “self-defense” to include torture cannot be taken seriously.
Explain it to me. This is my second request. With the OP in mind (This is what keeps it from being arbitrary, by the way. That should have been clear in my first post.) what is the difference between threatening to hurt someone to keep them from hurting me, or a loved one, and threatening to hurt someone to keep them from hurting millions of people? As I noted, when the government tortures someone, it is to obtain information, not to prevent an imminent crime on the part of the suspect.
Why is it not torture to hit a guy who is going to kill me, and yet is torture to hit a guy who is going to kill someone else? Surely torture is not defined by the specific act, but the intent. Plenty of folks willingly and consentingly do stuff to each other every day that to me would be torture.
The point was to get information out of him. Did you forget that in your zeal to make him suffer as much as possible?
In order to claim self-defense you have to be able to demonstrate that you were in immediate and unavoidable danger. If someone is charging at me with a knife, I’m justified in shooting him to stop him. If I overhear him plotting with his friends to kill me next week and I ambush him in advance, that’s not self-defense.
In virtually every situation where torture is proposed, the threat is neither immediate no unavoidable.
Um, I agree 200% with everything Pochacco has said thus far.
I had this argument with friends the other day, and how I feel is as follows:
Torture is always a morally wrong thing to do, and should be treated as such.
In the event of an extreme hypothetical in the eyes of the potential torturer, he or she of course must make a choice. Is the committing of one specific moral wrong (torture) the right choice given the circumstances. That is a very individual choice.
After the fact, if someone did use torture towards some purpose, I have faith that society would absolve the torturer of most if not all legal responsibility, assuming the situation was deemed dire enough, and the methods appropriate enough by society.
Because something can be morally wrong but still be the right choice (being less wrong at the time than whatever the alternative is). And so in any case, unless something is at absolute wrongness (which doesn’t exist), one could always find something farther down the spectrum, thus justifying any horrific act. I don’t think that that proves any sort of point, however.
Another point is, even if I were in the situation described by the OP, I don’t know that I physically could torture someone effectively. I honestly don’t think I have it in me to, say, break someone’s fingers one by one until they spilled the location of the bomb, even if I knew that I needed to extract that information or people would die. I don’t think that that is a moral failing, but following the logic of the OP it would be a moral failing, because torture might be the ‘right’ thing to do in some circumstance.
I figure he would crack before being put in the situation. If he doesn’t, ah well.
I’m not sure it makes sense to ask that question. Or in any case, it makes as much sense as asking “He’s a bachelor, but is he really not married?”
If it’s a moral wrong, it is by definition not the right choice. If it’s the right choice under the circumstances, then under the circumstances its not a moral wrong.
-Kris
I think something can be morally wrong, and the right thing to do. That is, the ends to not justify the means, but they might require them.
Ergo, I think that in that situation it would seem to be be situationally correct for the person to torture the world-killing criminal, but the torturer should still suffer the full penalty afterwards, if they do so. So, no absolving of guilt, no declarations of being in the right and that torture isn’t actually wrong, none of that. You torture the guy and then you go to jail if at all possible, and if the cheering crowds won’t let you, you at least punish yourself by bearing the weight of guilt for your deeds.
Or you don’t torture the guy for fear of the punishment…in which case your otherwise willingness to torture probably wasn’t coming from the right justification, was it?
Eh, I don’t know. I think if you have a purely utilitarian perspective on morality (whatever actions give the most positive outcome in the moment are inherently good while all other actions are inherently bad) you might be right, but I think there are more sides to most situations. From one angle an action can be right, but be wrong from another.
Somewhere upthread someone made an example of saving the world by horribly raping ones own mother. If that actually happened I might say, “well, he did what he had to do,” but that doesn’t mean that I approve of raping mothers to solve problems.
I guess what I mean is, I don’t think you can add up the good and bad in a situation, see which way leaves you with a net of goodness, and then treat that net goodness as meaning that there is no underlying badness as well (ifthat makes sense).
But that’s not what Frylock is saying. He’s saying that if you make the claim “Well, he did what he had to do”, it seems reasonable to take this to mean something like “Well, I don’t generally approve of raping mothers to solve problems. Generally, that would be morally wrong. However, in this specific case, it was what he had to do, and therefore, in this specific exceptional case, it was not morally wrong.” This is as opposed to the incongruous-seeming alternative “Well, he made the right choice, but it was the morally wrong choice.”
Why is this an incongruous-seeming statement?
I mean, clearly when a person says a choice was “right”, he actually means “right by some specific preferred standard”. All this statement says is that the standard being used for the overall assessment isn’t morality.
I think that in this case it is just an extreme example of asking the question “Do you feel that the killing of fellow human beings is wrong?”
Surely we would all say, “yes”, but what if you are defending yourself from imminent serious harm, or fighting in a war? Then we could agree that while it is generally wrong to kill people, that there are certain out of the ordinary scenarios when it is justified.
Now torture is similar, but in even fewer circumstances would it be acceptable. If we are talking about a doomsday, end of the world scenario like the OP described, then one would be silly to say that we wouldn’t torture the guy. I’m not saying his scenario is likely, or even possible.
Torture doesn’t work most of the time anyways. You put a person in enough pain, he will tell you where D.B. Cooper is and where he hid the money; it doesn’t make it so. You need to be asking the torturee a verifiable fact. He will break, no matter how crazy he is. Everyone will.
That’s true, and certainly this is how we would put ourselves in position to understand such a statement. But all the same, it seems like normally, when we say “Action X was the right choice” when discussing these sorts of ethical dilemmas, we implicitly mean “right according to the standard of morality”. Hence the apparent (though possibly resolvable) incongruity.
I’m one of those who would walk away from Omelas.
What is not “immediate and unavoidable” about this danger? :
If God came to you and asked you to kill your son as a show of loyalty, would you do it?
If so, why do you hate your son?
If not, why do you hate God?
First of all, in defense against any crime, the violence is justified by the fact that an individual is in the process of taking a real action that threatens either yourself or others. The proportionality of the response is measured against what it takes to stop the real action which is threatening to harm someone, and the necessity of the action is clear because there are no other factors limiting the bad guy from doing what he is doing, as all actors within the scenario are all more or less on the same playing field. (For example, someone pulls a gun on you in the street, the bad guy is actively doing something that is threatening, not simply setting in motion a chain of events or implying something sinister, and there is no other outside agency or force between you and him that gives you an opportunity to defuse the threat.)
In torture, it starts off with an unfair playing field. One individual is captive by a greater power and without any means to defend himself. By definition, the captive is not capable of presenting an actual threat, which is why I referenced the absurdity of one person torturing another on the street. While in the OP he has hidden a bomb or something, the bad guy is not actually in the process of doing anything threatening, as he has completed that physical act. There is no sense of proportionality in torture. Pain is inflicted with the direct intent to cause suffering, not to deescalate or bring an end to an immediate threat. Despite the stupid scenario presented, the measure of success may not be clear: sure, the guy is talking, but is he telling the truth? Since the metric of success – getting someone to tell the truth – is so vague, the justification of proportionality in the use of force cannot be measured in any meaningful way. Finally, the only compelling questions of torture for most people involve a false dilemma, in which there is no other avenue but morally abhorrent violence. In reality, there are generally other actions to be taken that go outside of the binary choice presented in strawman scenarios.
Finally, let me break this down into a very simple point: even if we exclude the psychopaths who actually enjoy inflicting suffering, there are countless places in the world which routinely use torture as an instrument of law enforcement. It is routinely justified as a means of protecting either the state or innocents from wrongdoing by bad people. These horrible places essentially use the same justification that you do: it isn’t torture if you’re protecting people. And we know that the regimes that do such things are morally abhorrent.
Torture is torture because its very intent is to cause suffering, no matter what the aim. Self defense is a concept governed by stopping an individual from completing an act he is immediately carrying out by using the least force necessary to stop that immediate act. The similarity between the two is superficial, and not unlike saying it must be okay to eat humans because we also eat chickens.
No, I don’t think you do see what people mean because you’re fundamentally missing the point. Torture is wrong not only because it is unethical, immoral, and possibly evil, but most fundamentally because IT DOES NOT WORK!
People will say anything they think the torturer wants to hear just to make it stop. The things they say don’t have to be true, and if I was Mr Evil Genius who went to all this trouble, I would simply tell you things I thought you wanted to hear (“The virus bomb is at 11 East 50th Street, New York, I PROMISE! No more wild goose chases like the last 5 I sent you out on, no matter I know the time is ticking! I swear on my mother’s name!”) just to get you to leave me alone for a little while. You’ve already said in your scenario there is no way you could guarantee information other than torture, but I would argue the opposite is true - there is no possible way to get someone to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth by torture. Ask any graduate of SERE school - torture will make you say anything, whether you know anything or not, just to make it stop. And jerking around an interrogator is not the most difficult thing to do, especially if you’re a supergenius as you’ve already posited.
I would not torture, in this situation or any other similar, because it does not work.
I might torture for revenge - anyone who harms my family better watch their ass, in other words - but I wouldn’t delude myself into thinking that torture fulfills any other purpose.