Torture Hypothetical (Logic Not Adqeuate For Real Life Situations).

Great Debates
101

I think we are agreeing - sorry if I sounded a bit snarky.

I think the OP is a fairly transparent straw man to justify using torture in extreme circumstances to gather intelligence to save lives. I’ve given two valid reasons why I think this is a stupid waste of time.

I’ll give one more. The FBI used ‘clean’ interrogation techniques on the guys we’re trying for terrorism who’ve been in Gitmo. other than the obvious ‘fruit of a poisoned tree’ defence which would have these guys free in about 15 minutes in a normal court, the FBI got the same information out of them as the CIA did with torture. That tells me is that not only is torture ineffective on the ‘wrong’ people, but uneccessary on the ‘right’ people.

So let’s count up. Torture is:

  1. Immoral.
  2. Ineffective as intelligence gathering tool - can’t determine who is the true bad guy
  3. Easy to game, especially in a ‘ticking clock’ situation, and finally
  4. Unecessary.

Why do we do this then?

102

I just don’t get why you’d want to torture people, it doesn’t seem like it would work. If the evil scientist has already resigned himself to an awful one week death by his own virus, is there really any torture that would be effective? Also, how could we be sure that our torture methods would not kill the scientist before we’re able to extract the information? If we only have until March, can’t the scientist just give us false information until we run out of time?

I can’t really understand torturing people for information, it doesn’t seem reliable at all. I would be more comfortable with the idea of drugging our scientist heavily and interrogating him. You’d be amazed at what people are willing to tell you after taking a few tabs of Ecstacy.