So that’s what waterboarding is like…


Someone was willing to try waterboarding on himself — he was in complete control, but he still found it a terrifying experience.

Now we just need to get all our representatives who claim it is not torture to try it themselves.

Comments

  1. Ichthyic says

    Now we just need to get all our representatives who claim it is not torture to try it themselves.

    since they don’t consider it torture, they must also not consider it illegal.

    why wait for them to do it to themselves?

    there was some indication in that thread that it is included as “training” in some US military camps. why not just send them there for some “training”?

  2. Ichthyic says

    also, I rather took notice when the self-tester stated afterwards that he would rather have all his digits smashed by a sledgehammer than go through it again.

    now THAT’S effective torture.

  3. Mena says

    We had a discussion about this over at Pam’s House Blend when Senator Bond claimed that it wasn’t torture. I’m convinced that the majority of the congress critters are mouth breathing wastes of space so I thought that perhaps he and the vast majority of them are confusing water boarding with kick boards. There just isn’t (aside for money) another explanation. Utter stupidity seems to win every time with these guys.
    (Yes, I’m still verrrry bitter about Fermilab funding being cut to “support the troops”, bah.)

  4. Ichthyic says

    I’m convinced that the majority of the congress critters are mouth breathing wastes of space

    having dealt with many directly over a period of about 10 years or so while working with NGO’s, I came to the same conclusion.

    not ALL, but enough to where it becomes a dicey proposition to think that it is worth spending effort on evidentiary discussion in order to get a large enough clique of these folk to support a particular bill. Most times, I and others I was working with got much further talking with Staffers than we ever did with the congressionals themselves.

    OTOH, I’ve also sometimes thought that the difficulties of lobbying might be a “blessing” in disguise.

  5. says

    Torture is about as effective in gathering information as the death penalty is in deterring crime. They’re both worthless.

    Torture is about power. Toss in a little bloodlust and eroticism as well, but power mostly.

  6. harley gee says

    that is a strikingly terrifying description of a procedure that doesn’t sound nearly so bad from the summary descriptions i’ve read before. A must read link that eliminates any doubts in my mind about whether waterboarding is torture.

  7. Ichthyic says

    Torture is about as effective in gathering information as the death penalty is in deterring crime.

    just to be clear:

    Torture is about power.

    was indeed what I was thinking when I said it looks like waterboarding is effective.

    obviously why it was used so often during the Spanish Inquisition, where the goal was most certainly not “the truth”.

  8. says

    Ichthyic, I wasn’t responding to you with my “effective” comment (I knew where you were coming from)…it was just a general comment.

    I’m just sick of torture apologists. They get their willies harming others. I also see it in the same folks “complaining” about how fundamentalist Islam treats women and gays, while their own writings barely disguise their own desires to be able to get away with similar activities. You can hear the heavy breathing, the erotic charge, in their descriptions of the hanging of gays or rape of women. They’re jealous.

  9. Matt says

    I can’t imagine how it’s possible to believe that torture is alway unethical. I, for one, can imagine scenarios in which ethics would positively require the use of torture.

    Add to that the fact that we as a nation seem able to accept civilian collateral damage during conflicts and it’s hard to understand how it would be unethical to torture someone who is almost certainly not innocent and possesses information which will save innocent lives.

    I don’t think torture should become a matter of policy, but I can’t imagine how a moral person can categorically deny that torture can ever be used ethically.

  10. says

    It’s mind numbing to me that the argument has turned to “is it torture or not?” Of course it is.

    Daniel Levin, then the acting Assistant Attorney General under Gonzales actually had himself waterboarded on a base outside DC. Before he was forced out by Gonzales, he wrote the “torture is abhorrent” memo.

  11. craig says

    Of course it’s effective torture. The effect of torture (and its intent) is to cause horrible pain and suffering. It works, it’s effective.

    Now, if you mean does it extract useful information, well… that’s different. Sort of like asking if throwing your remote control at the wall is an effective way to change the channel.

    It might work sometimes.

  12. craig says

    “I, for one, can imagine scenarios in which ethics would positively require the use of torture.”

    I can imagine a purple pony. Isn’t imagination fun?

  13. Janus says

    Of course it’s effective torture. The effect of torture (and its intent) is to cause horrible pain and suffering. It works, it’s effective.

    That’s like saying that the effect and intent of killing someone is to end his life. Well duh, of course it is, but there’s usually more to it than that. You can kill someone to defend yourself, or to defend a family member, or to steal the victim’s money, or to have fun if you’re a psycho, or for a hundred other reasons.

    But of course you know that. So why are you pretending that you don’t?

    Now, if you mean does it extract useful information, well… that’s different. Sort of like asking if throwing your remote control at the wall is an effective way to change the channel.

    It might work sometimes.

    Really. If you’re right, then I would say that the real crime here is incompetence, not torture.

  14. Matt says

    I can imagine a purple pony. Isn’t imagination fun?

    Well, here come the straw men.

    But just in case you weren’t being disingenuous, I’ll restate:

    It is conceivable that there may arise a situation where the consequences of not torturing are much worse than the consequences of torturing. In this case, morality seems to necessitate torture.

    I think that torture is awful and should never become routine. But to deny that there are some cases in which it would be required seems absurd to me.

  15. says

    It is conceivable that there may arise a situation where the consequences of not torturing are much worse than the consequences of torturing. In this case, morality seems to necessitate torture.

    Again, the Jack Bauer scenarios pop up.

    Torture doesn’t work as a mechanism for gathering information. It works as a mechanism for getting people to say anything to make it stop.

  16. craig says

    I’m not pretending I don’t know that. I’m realizing that the question is stupid.

    Let’s take you killing for money as an example. Is killing John Smith for his money an effective way to get money? It depends.

    1. Does John Smith have any money?
    2. Is this the right John Smith?
    3. Did John Smith’s friends lie when they said he had money?
    4. Is John Smith’s money actually of any use to you? (information that is not of any help, etc.)
    5. Does John Smith have counterfeit money that might confuse you? (false info)
    6. Does John Smith have $5 in his pocket to make you think you got all his money when in fact you did not?

    etc.

    Will killing John Smith get you money? Maybe. It is 100% effective in ending his life though, and 100% effective in making you a murderer.

    Torturing people is 100% effective in making the United States (and all of the citizens it represents) torturers.

    Personally its not worth it to me to be a citizen of a barbaric country even if there’s a miniscule chance that might result in my own death.

    Kinda the same way our justice system was originally designed to accept the risk of the guilty going free to minimize the chances of convicting the innocent.

    I know some people see things differently. Oddly enough some people are willing to be a citizen of a country that officially allows torture based on scenarios they’ve seen on tv. Based on their imagination. Some people imagine a lot of things that scare them and look to organizations and power structures that coddle their scary imaginations, take money from them and use it to build tall pointy buildings.

    I’ve never understood that.

  17. Matt says

    MAJeff,

    Just because 24 unrealistically exploits tourture for entertainment does not change its morality in the real world.

    It seems to me that you might refute someone arguing that police are sometimes justified in using deadly force by bringing up The Terminator or something along those lines. There actually is a serious ethical argument here that you seem to be willfully ignoring.

    ————————-

    I recently read this blog post by someone at The Economist. I recommend it to anyone interested in this debate, in particular, I recommend reading the interview with the CIA agent that is linked-to from there.

  18. Ferrous Patella says

    “and that brings up the question: how would you torture a sadomasochist”

    Masochist: Beat me! Whip me! Make me scream!

    Sadists: No!

  19. Tulse says

    It is conceivable that there may arise a situation where the consequences of not torturing are much worse than the consequences of torturing. In this case, morality seems to necessitate torture

    It is conceivable that if we performed vivisection and other medical experimentation on humans, we could learn how to cure many diseases, and save many more lives that such research would cost. Interestingly, most civilized societies don’t think that such pure utilitarianism is justified.

  20. craig says

    “Well, here come the straw men.”

    No, you started with the straw man. You posed the scenario in such a way that unless we can prove beyond a doubt right here and now that torture could never possibly save a life, then we must accept it as not only allowable but also ethical.

    I admit that my pony answer wasn’t very serious and wasn’t all that direct of an answer, but sometimes I choose fun over simply telling yet another amoral sociopath to go fuck himself.

  21. Craig Pennington says

    This one makes me think — forget torture, imagine a drug that made a person completely cooperative yet otherwise fully functional. You could give it to Osama Bin Laden and he would have an unnatural desire to answer any question you in a way would maximally satisfy you. And an hour later he would revert back to his original state with no lasting physiological or psychological effects. A side-effect free compliance serum (and to be explicit: while magical (hey, it’s a thought experiment,) this is not a truth serum, merely a compliance serum.) How much value is there in the systemic use of such a tool?

  22. Desert Dog says

    I was drafted in 1971. I was in AIT (Advanced Infantry Training), which came after Basic Training if you were chosen to be an infantry grunt. (As most of us were then). I went through a very serious waterboarding simulation experience after being “captured” by “Viet Cong” in AIT. It was quite real.
    Let me just say that had I gone through it in a “real” situation, I would have given out every bit of information asked for.
    It is clearly torture….no question about it. It just makes me sick to my stomach to read about people in our govenment who think this is not torture……
    They belong in hell.

    Desert Dog

  23. notthedroids says

    “I think that torture is awful and should never become routine. But to deny that there are some cases in which it would be required seems absurd to me.”

    I don’t think I’ve ever read a single true account in which torture has actually saved innocent people.

    I’ve read plenty in which torture has ruined innocent people.

    So there’s my stance toward torture. Some of you smart folk can set me right.

  24. craig says

    Here’s another little thing to think about.

    We forbid cruel and unusual punishment of people who have actually been convicted of a crime – who are proven guilty (supposedly) because we consider that to be uncivilized and barbaric.

    It would seem to follow that we wouldn’t allow it for people who haven’t even been charged with a crime let alone convicted.

    (And please remember that punishment of criminals is to a great degree intended to reduce future crime, so the situation IS comparable.)

    Incidentally, comparing your imaginary scenarios with 24 and Jack Bauer is absolutely fair game. The current pro-torture political rhetoric that is intended to increase acceptance of torture is FULL of references to “Jack Bauer.”
    Several of your presidental candidates have used that specific example. The platform of the GOP, or at least of most of its candidates, is openly based on a fantasy, a TV show. That’s the unreality of the current reality whether you like it or not.

  25. Kerry Maxwell says

    Water boarding is torture, and has been used as such for centuries! The whole question is absurd, but not surprising in a nation of superstitious, evolution-doubting dimwits. Whether it should be used is another issue, but from what I’ve heard from people who are experts on torture, is that torture simply is not a useful means of gathering information.

  26. Cat of many faces says

    What. The. Fuck?

    Are some people here actually using the stupid “what if he had info you needed” fantasy?

    OK get this the fuck straight:

    Torture.
    Does.
    Not.
    Get.
    Reliable.
    Information!

    Ok? got that?

    I bet not, as any rational human would see this right away.

    If i am causing you intense pain and distress till you will do anything to get it to stop (I.E. torture) then you are not going to tell the truth, you are going to tell ANYTHING to get it to stop.

    Anything.

    Now do you get it?

    The torturer asks what your next target will be. You haven’t picked one yet. They say, “yah right” and break your thumb slowly. You scream and start making crap up till they stop.

    This is how ALL torture works. there is no magical way to make someone only say the truth this way.

    Now then, I hope to heck, I never hear a statement of:
    “But to deny that there are some cases in which it would be required seems absurd to me.”

    Thank you and goodnight.

    P.S. sorry i’m ranting, but i hear this bullshit all the time and it’s so PATENTLY ridiculous.

    Very sorry.

    -A P.O.’d cat

  27. Heather says

    I’ve thought for awhile that if this abomination didn’t have such a sanitized name and people understood just what it was, nobody would stand for it. The thought of trying it for oneself is terrifying. The whole thing is abhorrent and I can’t believe I haven’t got off my butt and stormed the White House. And the Justice Department. And Congress. What is wrong with me? What is wrong with all of us? And now what do we do?

  28. autumn says

    Keep in mind that Solzhenitzyn (who I am willing to assume was familiar with torture) says that three methods of torture were enough to break nearly everyone who was ever arrested by the NKVD: isolation, stress positions, and sleep-deprivation. All of these methods are accepted by the US government as normal parts of interrogation, decades after they were exposed as ways, not to glean information, but to destroy a person’s ability to do anything but accede to their captor’s demands.

    Oh, and the first step in the creation of the Gulag was the establishment of “special military tribunals” for the trial of those deemed exceptionally dangerous.
    To quote “Easy Rider”, “This used to be a hell of a country”.

  29. Robert says

    There might be a situation in which torture is required (might is stressed here, has there ever been one that couldn’t have been resolved without torture? I don’t know of any… ever) to save civilian lives. But does that mean we need to actually make a legal exception? NO! Should such a situation arise, then the proper course would be to procede, and then attempt to justify your actions openly later, and take responsibility.

    As an analogy, speeding is illegal, but if you came across someone who was hurt and needed to get to a hospital, you would be justified in speeding to the hospital. We don’t need to write a legal exception to this, thats the point of an intelligent legal system.

    Also, torture is always unethical. Its just that there might conceivably be a situation where not torturing someone would create a worse situation (though no one has ever believably described such a situation to me).

  30. Matt says

    Its just that there might conceivably be a situation where not torturing someone would create a worse situation (though no one has ever believably described such a situation to me).

    Here is a believable situation: Based on good intelligence, the CIA has arrested a terrorist–during the arrest they find bomb building materials and schematics of hospitals and schools. He does not surrender any information under normal questioning. Despite lack of actionable intelligence, you know from interviews with him and others that an un-captured terrorist is soon going to attack a school or hospital.

    Admittedly, this sounds like an episode of 24, but I am summarizing the interview I linked to in comment #21. I don’t understand how torturing an admitted terrorist to get information to stop the deaths of many innocent children is unethical.

    I think I basically agree with you argument, and I can reasonably believe that the only way to prevent torture from becoming routine is to make it illegal. But I still don’t understand how it is unethical in these situations.

    The major difference between this and other ‘cruel and unusual situations’ (I don’t know what else to call them) is that there are real, defined victims, the person being tortured is admittedly guilty, and there is no other way to get the needed information in time.

  31. Some Guy says

    I disagree with physical interrogation methods (they DO work, but you’re just as likely to confess to riding in a UFO piloted by leprechauns as anything else), but nevertheless I call bullshit on the tale in the link. Just my opinion, but it sets off my Sagan2000 Baloney Detector.

  32. Ichthyic says

    I’d be more interested in knowing if it’s _effective_ torture.

    uh, suggest you read the man’s responses to it in that thread, where he out and out states he would sell his children before being exposed to the same thing again.

    IOW, he would say or do ANYTHING to avoid said torture again, which is exactly why it is so ineffective as a method to acquire accurate information.

    as a method of intimidating others into doing what you want, however, it’s typically pretty effective.

    so is holding a gun to a loved one’s head, etc.

    People who think torture might actually have a use in information retrieval might want to read the CIA’s own research into it sometime.

    …or maybe they should think about tracking down Terry Gilliam’s old movie “Brazil”.

  33. says

    I still stand by my assertion that Bush and Cheney sit around Friday nights in latex body suits watching these torture tapes while getting some sort of sick pleasure out of the suffering and humiliation before their eyes.

    Aside from that, I still can’t believe that there are Americans here on this blog actually advocating the use of torture. How hopelessly bent and twisted must you be to actually feel proud at the notion that your nation, a nation of laws and of freedom, commits atrocities so horrific they’ve been branded illegal and inhumane by our own fucking courts? People have been tried and convicted of this crime in the past. Has that law changed? NO!

    Then again, considering waterboarding was a favorite tactic of the Inquisition, perhaps that is what these morons mean when they puke out their tired old drivel that America is a “Christian Nation.”

    And, if that’s the case, perhaps it’s time to let some lions loose in church and bolt the doors from the outside. I, for one, would like my moral, law-abiding, secular nation back.

    Oh! And the first one of you gutless assholes who mentions 9-11, please, go kill yourselves now. Bush rendered that battle-cry irrelevant and worthless the second he stopped pursuing those responsible and decided to embark on this blood-soaked folly in Iraq.

  34. Ichthyic says

    I disagree with physical interrogation methods (they DO work, but you’re just as likely to confess to riding in a UFO piloted by leprechauns as anything else)

    exactly.

  35. Ichthyic says

    The major difference between this and other ‘cruel and unusual situations’ (I don’t know what else to call them) is that there are real, defined victims, the person being tortured is admittedly guilty, and there is no other way to get the needed information in time.

    indeed, you’ve been watching too many episodes of 24.

    *psst* it’s just a TV show.

  36. Ichthyic says

    What is wrong with me? What is wrong with all of us?

    we saw the failure of the hippie movement.

  37. Heather says

    Matt, your scenario does indeed read like a TV show. My imagination is pretty good, and I really think that anyone who would “need” to be tortured to give up information “in time” is likely to be beyond caring whether they live or die anyway. The “information” would be no more trustworthy in such a situation than in any other.

    Further, a lot of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that we as a society have been allowing our government to use in our “defense” are illegal, and they’re all pretty routine. Horrendous cruelty can always be justified in the minds of people who believe themselves to be absolutely right. I work hard every day to make sure I will never be that “right.”

  38. Sophist, FCD says

    I don’t understand how torturing an admitted terrorist to get information to stop the deaths of many innocent children is unethical.

    This may come as a shock to you, but there are ethical systems other that strict utilitarianism.

  39. Venger says

    Matt you seem to have confused right with expedient. Torture is never right or moral, it might be expedient, it might be the lesser of two evils, but it will never be right or moral. No matter what hypothetical scenario you create there will always be better and more reliable options than torture, but they might not be as expedient. Expediency is the main reason for using torture if you claim to also be civilized (and it is just as claim because a civilized nation does not torture), it is fast and easy and cheap, it punishes those you hate, and occassionally you might get useful information. But by and large torture is not a reliable way to extract information, it more often creates a situation where your victim will tell you anything they think you want to hear to stop, assuming you don’t kill them or shatter their mind in the process. If your main goal is to get more people and you don’t care if they are innocent or guilty to torture then it works great, but if you want reliable information then there’s much more effective means. They take longer, cost more, and require more effort, and most of them don’t punish, so they don’t get called for as often. I won’t deny there are scenarios where I might allow the use of torture, threats to my loved ones being an example, but that wouldn’t make it right, and I could in no way consider myself innocent again.

  40. autumn says

    Matt, given that I agree for the moment that a situation could arise in which a suspect in custody is known to have vital information which no legal interrogation could possibly ascertain, but which some form of force could draw out, it remains an issue of legality. If the interrogator is so certain, then the torture of the suspect will go forward, and the interrogator will subsequently be prosecuted to the extent of the law. There exists the possibility that, having extracted vital information (a long shot, but possible), a judge may see a mitigating circumstance, but in all cases torture as a means to extract information is a decision made by a legally culpable individual, and as such, that individual must be so sure of their conviction as to not fear their conviction.

  41. Sophist, FCD says

    Oh, and as to your little scenario:

    …during the arrest they find bomb building materials and schematics of hospitals and schools.

    Read the names of the schools/hospitals off of the schematics, genius.

    Also, lets say you do torture the chap, and he says the target is school Foo. You go and evaccuate the school, but the other terrorist never shows and you don’t find a bomb.

    Did he give you the wrong school on purpose? Did the other terrorist chicken out? Had they not picked out a target yet? Did the other terrorist see the cops evacuating the school, and change the target to a school the torturee doesn’t know about? Did they have a backup plan if one of them was captured?

    Hey, maybe you can torture the answer out of him! Lather, rinse, repeat.

  42. craig says

    “The major difference between this and other ‘cruel and unusual situations’ (I don’t know what else to call them) is that there are real, defined victims, the person being tortured is admittedly guilty, and there is no other way to get the needed information in time.”

    No, there are no real and defined victims, you suspect there are real and defined victims, but you don’t know for sure, or else you wouldn’t be trying to get that info in the first place, you’d already have it.

    Which also points out why information gleaned that way is unreliable. Without corroboration, it’s just a coin-toss.

    I hate making that argument though because I don’t fucking CARE how useful the information would be. Torture is wrong and immoral.

    “Guilty until proven innocent” might conceivably save lives on balance. Executing drunk drivers might save lives. Sterilizing Republicans might save lives. “Kill all of them before they kill all of us” might.
    It doesn’t fucking MATTER. That’s not what morality and ethics are about.

    There was a time in this country when discussing the merits of torturing suspects would be seen in the same light as discussing the merits of raping small children.

    I knew when 911 happened that the whole country was going to go fucking insane and things were going to get ugly, but PLEASE get a fucking spine, grow a set of balls and stop seeing boogeymen everywhere. It’s been over 6 years, you can calm the fuck down down and STOP making living in this country a worse nightmare than 911 ever was.

  43. Matt says

    Well, I am not so certain of my position that I can’t be argued away from it. Although I don’t think I stated it explicitly, I entered this debate thinking that in certain circumstances, torture should be legally permitted. autumn and Robert‘s posts have led me to believe otherwise. I accept that legalizing torture may not be wise. I am still uneasy with accepting laws we know to be flawed because our legal system seems to have trouble making exceptions (witness California’s three strikes law) but with the torture issue, it seems to me this is unlikely to be a problem.

    Venger, I understand that distinction you’re trying to make but I don’t find your argument convincing. Perhaps you would feel guilt, but your feelings don’t mean that you were guilty. I know that a lot of police officers that are forced to kill people suffer emotional distress afterwards, but this does not mean that they are guilty of an immoral action.

    For those of you rejecting my argument on the grounds that it is based on a utilitarian framework, I have to ask you, by what other measure would you develop laws?

  44. Geral says

    The United States does not torture. Therefore, waterboarding isn’t torture.

    Love the logic?

    I’m tired of hearing about waterboarding though. Its a horrible method, but you would be naive as hell if you thought it was the only method being used. Its just one thats been confirmed.

    I would like to know what the Beacon of Freedom(TM) uses to defend our freedom when it comes to interrogation techniques. But what the hell do I know, I’m just a baby eating liberal appeasist who wants the terrorists to win.

  45. Matt says

    Sophist, though I think thought experiments do have value in debates on ethics, this was not a thought experiment. I cited my sources, that situation was described by a CIA agent who was involved in the operation. Although it might get a laugh, I really didn’t get the sense that the man interview was unintelligent or immoral. To my understanding, the CIA is pretty careful about who it recruits. I will accept the truth of what he’s saying because, since he comes out against torture, he doesn’t seem to have any reason to make up the details that, from my point of view, justified it.

  46. Crudely Wrott says

    If one does things that are terrifying to the average, rational person, then the perpatrator has no reason to express surprise or incredulity should same impose upon his world view or his precious ass.

    I am more offended by protestations of offense than I am of being personally offended. How this is possible I cannot say. Maybe it has something to do with the observation that no matter how loud it is said it is merely said. Or my utter apostacy. Who’ll gimme a dollar on apostacy? Step right up, young man!

    If there is no evidence there is no point in wasting time. Unless you like magic more than breathing.

  47. MCullen says

    The current pro-torture political rhetoric that is intended to increase acceptance of torture is FULL of references to “Jack Bauer.”
    Several of your presidental candidates have used that specific example. The platform of the GOP, or at least of most of its candidates, is openly based on a fantasy, a TV show. That’s the unreality of the current reality whether you like it or not.
    How scarey is the statement about rhetoric? I never caught the very probability that the pro-torture rhetoric is to increase acceptance of torture. This administration is more like a mafia if you ask me and they have to go.

  48. Ichthyic says

    the platform of the GOP, or at least of most of its candidates, is openly based on a fantasy, a TV show.

    well, not JUST a TV show.

    the platform is based on a lot of other imaginary things as well.

    I often enjoy picking out the imaginary things the folks who signed on to the PNAC site base their ideologies on.

    fantasies make great defenses for flawed rationalizations, though. don’t expect them to stop utilizing them any time soon.

    just go back to Dan Quayle’s bit of horrid rationalization based on commentary and actions by the fictional character “Murphy Brown”.

    oh, wait, that’s still a TV show.

    damn.

  49. MCullen says

    Oh, and the first step in the creation of the Gulag was the establishment of “special military tribunals” for the trial of those deemed exceptionally dangerous.
    To quote “Easy Rider”, “This used to be a hell of a country”.

    Posted by: autumn | December 29, 2007 12:50 AM

    Tajmahal comes to mind, “If you ain’t scared you ain’t right”. I believe was the statement.

  50. JakeS says

    Where do people get the idea that any information gained through torture is reliable in any way? Take the recent FBI report on the information Zarkowi (sp?) gave to the CIA. After waterboarding, any information he gave was unrelable…because he was confessing to everything to make the torture stop. Torture is not good for reliable info. It’s good for ringing out confessions. Take the inquisition. The torturers have already made up their minds about guilt, they just needed to force a confession. Torture historically has been used AFTER convictions. It was used more as a punishment and a deterent than an interrogation toon. Twentieth century dictatorships of all stripes are notorious for torture of not just dissadent elements, but of average people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who often confessed to being involved in numerous plots to undermine the dictatorship, when they were only out shopping or something and never wanted to get involved. That is what torture is. It is a method of controlling the populace through fear. Torture is nothing more or less than terrorism.
    I’m sick of the way the media (both newsreports and fictional books and movies) presents torture as interrogation, even if used only by The Bad Guys.

  51. Janine says

    It’s torture. No question. Terrible terrible torture. To experience it and understand it and then do it to another human being is to leave the realm of sanity and humanity forever. No question in my mind.

    Scylla

    How long have many of us argued the Bush, Cheney, Rove, Gonzo and the many other people in this administration lacks basic humanity and live in a fantasy world? It is very sad that the facts about water boarding are so muddied that people debate about if it is torture. But it is to be expected when there are the caliber of people we have in charge.

  52. Sideways says

    Waterboarding (along with several other torture techniques currently in vogue) was lifted from a CIA manual intended for training American troops to resist torture if captured. North Koreans waterboarded captured GIs until they confessed to nonexistent war crimes.

    Waterboarding has a pedigree extending all the way back to the Spanish Inquisition. It has been used, every time, to extract false confessions from the tortured. The idea that waterboarding can produce ‘actionable intelligence’ is absurd.

    The Spanish Inquisition didn’t care because all those sinners were guilty of something anyway. The Communists didn’t care because all those capitalists were corrupt criminals anyway. The Republicans don’t care because all those Muslims are terrorists anyway.

    Waterboarding is about crushing a few unlucky people and terrifying the rest. It is terrorism at its most literal. Anyone who says otherwise is, at best, fooling himself.

  53. Ichthyic says

    Waterboarding is about crushing a few unlucky people and terrifying the rest

    IOW, waterboarding is terrorism.

    yup.

    wait, I keep losing track… who are the terrorists again?

  54. says

    I just totally respect and admire that guy for having the guts to perform such an intimate investigation.

    Listening to the AG confirmation hearings on C-SPAN with the AG saying “I can’t comment on whether waterboarding is torture…” over and over again, I guess what he meant was “…unless it’s being done correctly…”

    I wish I’d been able to introduce this guy’s testimony.

  55. Hank says

    wait, I keep losing track… who are the terrorists again?

    Duh, it’s the guy getting not-tortured by buff alpha males while a clock ticks ominously and the camera pans to a school yard where kids play with puppies and unicorns.

  56. Ichthyic says

    Duh, it’s the guy getting not-tortured by buff alpha males while a clock ticks ominously and the camera pans to a school yard where kids play with puppies and unicorns.

    ah, thanks.

    ?

    !!?

  57. DLC says

    Given the “terrorist bomb out there” scenario, you have ask yourself this: If he’s a committed terrorist and knows all he needs to do is remain silent for 12 hours and the bomb will go off, you aren’t going to get anything out of him, even with waterboarding. Or you will get lies. Plausible, detail filled lies.
    John McCain may be the least favorite politician in these parts, but when he says “waterboarding is torture”, I agree with him.

  58. Gregory Kusnick says

    Seems to me the important question is not whether whether waterboarding is torture, or whether it’s effective at extracting reliable information, or whether the information thus extracted is crucial for saving the lives of schoolchildren. The important question is what effect a policy of institutionalized torture will have on the causes of terrorism. Will acting like thugs persuade people not to hate us? Or will it simply confirm their worst fears about us, thereby fanning the flames of terrorism and putting even more schoolchildren at risk?

  59. John C. Randolph says

    I have to wonder, given the entire pharmacopeia available to the psychiatric profession, isn’t it simpler and more efficient to just drug the hypothetical terrorist-with-immediately-relevant-information and get him to spill his guts that way?

    -jcr

  60. Christopher says

    Well, to the people whose imagination can stretch far enough to conceive of a situation where torture is necessary, how much further does the imagination stretch? If one believes that the person you’ve captured won’t talk under torture, do you go after his family? Pick up his mother, daughter, and 8-year old son, build a rape room according to some official government specification, call it something less scary, like “water-bedding”, and see if that works?

    This is actually what I wonder when I see people defending the use of physical torture. They don’t appreciate the horror, it’s too removed. They don’t have relatives who’ve been tortured, the closest they come to it is in mass-market entertainment, written by people who have no more experience of the issue than the viewers.

    People aren’t horrified, because they don’t grasp it. Torture isn’t something that they live in fear of, they don’t understand what it’s about.

  61. JustAnOutsider says

    “The Republicans don’t care because all those Muslims are terrorists anyway.”

    Exactly. And it’s not just torture; the U.S. government has kidnapped and held men captive for years based solely on their religion and skin color. Sure, some of the Gitmo captives are actually terrorists, but the Bush administration has actively blocked any attempt to accurately determine who is and isn’t guilty.

    If it’s okay to use waterboarding in the war on terrorism, why isn’t it okay to use it in the war on crime? If you take for granted that waterboarding is effective, it’s far easier to imagine scenarios where the police could save lives by waterboarding criminals than it is to imagine scenarios where waterboarding a terrorist would be effective. And yet, I don’t see any torture advocates making this argument. Could it be because they know if the police make a mistake it could be them or someone they care about who gets tortured? Implicit in the pro-torture advocate’s position is the knowledge that it’s only going to be used on an inhuman “them”. Even Matt, who has actually been pretty reasonable on the subject, started off by arguing that torture victims were “almost certainly not innocent”.

  62. craig says

    “the platform is based on a lot of other imaginary things as well.”

    What, you mean like “illegal aliens are taking the jobs and ruining the economy?”

  63. says

    isn’t it simpler and more efficient to just drug the hypothetical terrorist-with-immediately-relevant-information and get him to spill his guts that way?

    They haven’t got a really reliable truth drug, that’s the problem. You can disorient the hell out of someone, but the same problem exists as in the torture scenario.

    Imagine you took someone and jacked them up on some kick-ass disassociative and then had an actor show up pretending to be a sympathetic partner. Maybe they’d talk – they might spill operational plans, but then again they might be talking to their own ear-wax. The problem becomes, again, how do you tell?

    So the trick would be to have a drug that made someone tell the complete truth the first time. That does not exist – if it did, we’d see dramatic social consequences (think “Fast penta” from Lois McMaster Bujold’s sci-fi books) So in the absence of a perfect interrogator’s drug, there’s stuff in the pharmacopia that would be handy. I’m thinking specifically of something like Fentanyl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl What it can do is mess with your neuroplasticity – you lose the ability to move things from short-term memory to long-term. For an interrogation, you can see how this would be useful – you get the victim disassociated but able to speak, short-circuit their short-term memory, then get them talking and you could cross-index all the different stories they told you during the session. My ex-wife had surgery under Fentanyl and it was mind-boggling to talk to her afterward: she told me the same thing about 40 times, because she couldn’t remember having told me. A large part of lying under interrogation is keeping your story straight… A really scary scenario would be to give a victim something like fentanyl and MDMA or fentanyl and demerol, then when they wake up the next day with no memory, achy and feverish, tell them you gave them “forget me” drugs and water-boarded them and that they spilled everything. Give a while for the notion that they broke under interrogation to soak in, and repeat the process.

    I’ve had a few experiences with psychoactives that have shown me how easy it is for the meat robot’s perception of reality to get completely derailed. The downside is that memories that are laid down are just as “real” as any other “reality” so if you tripped someone out and convinced them they were burning in the eternal fires – and it was real to them – is it torture? (hint: yes) But what if you chemically disorient someone and they think they’re talking to the almighty and getting a pat on the head? Is that torture? “It depends what you mean by ‘is'”

    When I first saw that thing about the guy self-waterboarding, I fact-checked with a friend of mine who is a serious diver and he said this:
    Once you have a scare like the one he describes – and I’ve had one or two in my lifetime – you are always terrified of drowning.
    When you’re tripped out on certain chemicals, if you have a mildly aversive experience, it can become a life-long haunting memory. It’s amazing how well we learn under certain conditions.

    Opening up the medicine chest to aid in interrogation is a real pandora’s box. I could quite easily see people walking out of an interrogation looking perfectly normal on the outside but being completely f*cked in the head, permanently.

    At this point, “THE US TORTURES PEOPLE IN SECRET” is going to be the global perception for the forseeable future, no matter what we say. Remember when those pilots of ours were captured by the Iraqis? And we complained, because they were being exposed to possible humiliation?

    “America is angry about this,” said an irritated President Bush. “If ((Saddam)) thought this brutal treatment of pilots is the way to muster world support, he is dead wrong.” Saddam’s tactics also aroused disgust in Europe. “He’s a man without pity,” said British Prime Minister John Major. Both Bush and Major hinted that they might seek to prosecute Saddam for war crimes if the prisoners are mistreated in any way.

    I wonder if waterboarding is ‘mistreatment’?

  64. truth machine says

    The goal of waterboarding is to simulate drowning without the actual drowning or inhalation into the lungs.

    I don’t know where he got that idea. Waterboarding isn’t just simulated drowning, it always involves inhalation of water, as he found out. The Wikipedia article is a good source of information.

  65. truth machine says

    I don’t understand how torturing an admitted terrorist to get information to stop the deaths of many innocent children is unethical.

    Uh, because torture is inherently unethical, and that is compounded by the fact that the idea that torture will produce information that stops the deaths of many innocent children is an illusion that can only be maintained by a deeply immoral person.

    In addition, this is a dishonest strawman — virtually no real instance of waterboarding is this sort of situation. Those who present these sorts of scenarios to justify torture know full well that they are actually justifying much more “casual” uses.

  66. truth machine says

    For those of you rejecting my argument on the grounds that it is based on a utilitarian framework, I have to ask you, by what other measure would you develop laws?

    I reject a framework that would justify forced sacrifice of maidens to marauding dragons. If no maiden comes forward voluntarily, it would be better for us all bravely perish fighting the dragon; there are far worse things than not maximizing one’s lifespan. And that’s the underlying reason that utilitarianism fails — in the end, we’re all dead anyway; acquired utility is invariably lost.

    take the risk of the drag

  67. truth machine says

    I don’t understand how torturing an admitted terrorist to get information to stop the deaths of many innocent children is unethical.

    What has an admitted terrorist admitted to? In this country, people are being convicted as terrorists for just for sending money to some organization on some government list. And how does someone admitting to some past action justify doing something horrible to them? What if the person has never done anything wrong but you think they have information that can only be gained through torture — what’s the difference to a utilitarian? Oops, you just slipped down the slope. What if many-1 children are at risk … oops further down the slope for each child eliminated.

    Torture is evil. If you don’t understand how it is always wrong, you’re broken.

  68. David Marjanović says

    I can’t imagine how it’s possible to believe that torture is alway unethical. I, for one, can imagine scenarios in which ethics would positively require the use of torture.

    You have overlooked that people commonly lie under torture. People will say anything under torture, just to make it stop. Thousands of people confessed to have had truly bizarre sexual relations with the devil…

    Also, what happens if you catch the terrorist of the famous short-sighted example and he tells you where he put the bomb? For all you know, he could be sending you to the other end of the building, so that you’ll be there evacuating and looking for the bomb while it goes up somewhere else.

    Comments 13 and 14 are spot-on.

  69. David Marjanović says

    I can’t imagine how it’s possible to believe that torture is alway unethical. I, for one, can imagine scenarios in which ethics would positively require the use of torture.

    You have overlooked that people commonly lie under torture. People will say anything under torture, just to make it stop. Thousands of people confessed to have had truly bizarre sexual relations with the devil…

    Also, what happens if you catch the terrorist of the famous short-sighted example and he tells you where he put the bomb? For all you know, he could be sending you to the other end of the building, so that you’ll be there evacuating and looking for the bomb while it goes up somewhere else.

    Comments 13 and 14 are spot-on.

  70. truth machine says

    Add to that the fact that we as a nation seem able to accept civilian collateral damage during conflicts and it’s hard to understand how it would be unethical to torture someone who is almost certainly not innocent and possesses information which will save innocent lives.

    See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

    One clear distinction is that in the first case, one does not intend harm towards anyone – harming the one is just a side-effect of switching the trolley away from the five. However, in the second case, harming the one is an integral part of the plan to save the five. [1]
    So, some claim that the difference between the two cases is that in the second, you intend someone’s death to save the five, and this is wrong, whereas in the first, you have no such intention. This solution is essentially an application of the doctrine of double effect, which says that you may take action which has bad side-effects, but deliberately intending harm (even for good causes) is wrong.

  71. truth machine says

    “I can imagine a purple pony. Isn’t imagination fun? ”

    Well, here come the straw men.

    No, that’s no strawman. You wrote “I, for one, can imagine scenarios in which ethics would positively require the use of torture.”

    Regardless of what you can imagine, there is no such beast, since torture cannot be guaranteed to produce what you want of it (unless that is making someone suffer).

  72. Laen says

    I fully admit that I’m not a completely ethical person. I’m the kind of person that wants to hunt down the person that rapes my mother/sister. I’m the kind of person that would torture someone to get information to save that school. I’m far from hippie, liberal, pacifist, whatever other supposed insult a chickenhawk feels like throwing around at me.

    Torture doesn’t work. It’s been shown in study after study that you can’t trust information gathered by torture. The CIA used to agree before this administration. So while the ethics of torture is an important mental exercise, it really should have no purpose in the discussion. Torture does not supply reliable information, that should end the discussion.

  73. truth machine says

    I think that torture is awful and should never become routine. But to deny that there are some cases in which it would be required seems absurd to me.

    It’s disturbing that, not only do such utilitarians exist, but there are utilitarians who find it absurd that anyone might not be one, someone so detached from reality that he isn’t aware that many people think that intentionally causing extreme suffering is wrong regardless of what benefit it might bring, or that it’s “absurd” to have such a view.

  74. fromm says

    If waterboarding is not torture, what makes them think it will help to extract information?
    If it is legal, why must it be hidden?

  75. truth machine says

    I recently read this blog post by someone at The Economist.

    There’s a fallacy here: that torture produced actionable intelligence in one instance doesn’t mean that torture will produce actionable intelligence in any other instance. As Craig said of throwing your remote control at the wall to change the channel, it might work sometimes.

  76. truth machine says

    If one does things that are terrifying to the average, rational person, then the perpatrator has no reason to express surprise or incredulity should same impose upon his world view or his precious ass.

    Once again Crudely Wrott wins “Stupidest Comment in Thread” for this strawman.

  77. Some Guy says

    Another problem I have with the use of torture in the interrogation of terrorism suspects may be fallacious. If so, someone point it out for me.

    Remember Jill Carroll? (http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/carroll/)

    From her story, we are reminded that terrorists are real people who often have families (note that this is NOT a call for sympathy or empathy). In some cases, terrorism is truly a “family affair”.

    So let’s say we catch a for-real, non-innocent terrorist. We torture the piss out of him and he gives us a little useful info and a lot of stuff we know isn’t true. Well, maybe his wife will tell us more. He probably talks to her. Bring her in and strap her ass down, too. Well, she didn’t give us anything new. Bring her sister and their 5 kids in. .. etc. Once you’ve started torturing, where do you stop?

    If you think torture is a legitimate and effective interrogation tool, and you believe there’s valuable information in your suspect’s parents, wives, kids, etc., aren’t you by that logic morally bound to also torture them too?

  78. Steverino says

    Matt,

    What you seem to forget is, when we, the United States, used methods of torture, we give permission to all of our enemies to do the same to our men.

    We lose the moral high ground because it makes us no better than they are.

    This was not an isolated case, which might be easier to swallow (no pun intended, but this was a practice backed and pushed by the highest levels of administration.

  79. Brian Macker says

    Of course waterboarding is torture, and it is illegal under US law for any US citizen to torture even terrorists or unlawful combatants anywhere in the world. Our military is not covered as throughly by the Geneva Conventions. In a fairly recent news interview a Bush administration official admitted that the CIA tortured at least two or three people. Therefore, it seems that someone should be up on charges.

    Certain people have spent so much time crying wolf on so many other issues this true case of government criminality isn’t getting any coverage. The administration should be asked about this on every press conference, but it isn’t.

    Why? Because so many inaccuracies and lies are being spread around by the left that everyone assumes this is just another BS story. Like the 1 million supposedly killed by Bush. Lie. Or the belief Bush blew up the World Trade Center. Or the belief Bush lied about what the CIA had told him about WMD. Or Dan Rather’s lies. So on and so forth.

    Please be circumspect in your claims otherwise none of them will be believed.

  80. truth machine says

    If you think torture is a legitimate and effective interrogation tool, and you believe there’s valuable information in your suspect’s parents, wives, kids, etc., aren’t you by that logic morally bound to also torture them too?

    As I noted in #71. People who justify torture on utilitarian grounds have no basis for not torturing the innocent as long as the expected overall outcome is positive. To restrict torture to only those guilty of some bad deed requires something else — some notion that the guilty are deserving of extreme suffering. And if the guilty are deserving of extreme suffering, why only do it to extract information, why not do it as a matter of course? In reality, this is what happens.

  81. truth machine says

    Certain people have spent so much time crying wolf on so many other issues this true case of government criminality isn’t getting any coverage.

    No, that isn’t why, asshole.

  82. Moses says

    I can’t imagine how it’s possible to believe that torture is alway unethical. I, for one, can imagine scenarios in which ethics would positively require the use of torture.

    You know what, people can make up all kinds of fantasies where terrible conduct is “acceptable.” Many (not all) rapists typically have fantasies that include their victims “enjoying it” to make their terrible behavior “okay.”

    And that’s where you are with this “torture is okay” mentality.

    Add to that the fact that we as a nation seem able to accept civilian collateral damage during conflicts and it’s hard to understand how it would be unethical to torture someone who is almost certainly not innocent and possesses information which will save innocent lives.

    Our Nation has repeatedly conducted genocide (native Americans anyone), condoned some of the most brutal slavery in the history of the world and, since the end of WWII, acted like complete, power-mad asses in pumping a rather imperial foreign policy. So don’t give me “the nation condones it” bullshit. Mob mentality that ends with genocide or lynchings or torture or pogroms isn’t “okay” even if “everyone’s” doing it…

    I don’t think torture should become a matter of policy, but I can’t imagine how a moral person can categorically deny that torture can ever be used ethically.

    Posted by: Matt | December 28, 2007 11:23 PM

    Ah, a logical fallacy. Just because you can imagine why, in certain cases, imagine raping your next-door neighbor is a good thing doesn’t mean that it can ever be considered ethical and that you should. But, beyond your fallacy and inhumanity and crap-tastic ethical development you’ve shown I don’t know if I feel more sorry for you or revolted by you.

  83. Jamie says

    Does everyone here agree with Sam Harris’ position on torture, namely that there are some special circumstances under which it is ethical? If not, why not? Would you not consider torturing a terrorist if it were the only way of obtaining information about a ticking time-bomb that would kill millions of people?

  84. Moses says

    It is conceivable that if we performed vivisection and other medical experimentation on humans, we could learn how to cure many diseases, and save many more lives that such research would cost. Interestingly, most civilized societies don’t think that such pure utilitarianism is justified.

    Posted by: Tulse | December 29, 2007 12:07 AM

    Order of Molly. Absolutely.

  85. says

    Does everyone here agree with Sam Harris’ position on torture, namely that there are some special circumstances under which it is ethical? If not, why not? Would you not consider torturing a terrorist if it were the only way of obtaining information about a ticking time-bomb that would kill millions of people?

    Um, read the thread. You’ll get your answer. Sam bought the same Jack Bauer/ticking time bomb bullshit.

  86. Moses says

    Does everyone here agree with Sam Harris’ position on torture, namely that there are some special circumstances under which it is ethical? If not, why not? Would you not consider torturing a terrorist if it were the only way of obtaining information about a ticking time-bomb that would kill millions of people?

    Posted by: Jamie | December 29, 2007 8:39 AM

    Why do people have to come up with these stupid scenarios? They’d just have a suicide bomber on the switch and set it off. Or they’d use a remote detonation device.

    I mean, really, finding a suicide bomber (or rigging a remote detonator) is not difficult for the kind of terrorist operation that could build/obtain a bomb that could blow up a major city.

    For example, there were 20 participants (though one missed his flight) for the WTC, Pentagon & WH targets. And at least some of them had to be rather sophisticated to learn to fly those big jet airplanes.

    If that’s not good enough for you, in 1983, Hezbollah conducted over 20 suicide attacks. This included killing 241 Marines (which caused Reagan to tuck his tail and run) when they drove a dump-truck full of explosives into the Marine barracks.

    Or how about this? From 1980 to 2003, there have been a total of 315 documented suicide bomber attacks in all parts of the world. Of which 79 were in Sri Lanka and have killed, through 2003, about 65,000 people.

    I mean, really, how lame do you have to rationalize to justify your lack of moral and ethical development?

  87. Jamie says

    Um, read the thread. You’ll get your answer. Sam bought the same Jack Bauer/ticking time bomb bullshit.

    I haven’t found the answer, and I’m not prepared to read every single post of the thread. Answer the question straight: are there some conceivable circumstances under which torture, just like murder, is ethically justifiable? I really can’t understand how anyone could say no.

    Of course the ticking time-bomb scenario is remote from reality and of course torture should be illegal, just like murder (even though klling e.g. the next Hitler might be ethical). But that’s not the point of a moral thought experiment. Anyway, this is all so self-evident that I don’t find it interesting — I was just trying to find out if any politically correct fundamentalists here have deluded themselves into believing that Harris said something which is totally unreasonable.

  88. says

    I haven’t found the answer, and I’m not prepared to read every single post of the thread. Answer the question straight: are there some conceivable circumstances under which torture, just like murder, is ethically justifiable?

    So not just intellectually lazy, but just plain lazy. And a Bill O’Reilly culture warrior, too, with your ongoing attacks on “political correctness.”

    But to answer your question, no.

  89. True Bob says

    For you torture apologists, realize that these “bad guys” have motives. They believe in their causes. So when you torture information out of them, because you have your (bogus) ticking time bomb scenario, they will LIE to you. The bomb is in Union Station, but they will plausibly tell youit is in Metro Square. By the time you find out they lied (since it is a ticking time bomb scenario), it’s because the bomb went off while you were searching the decoy.

    Torture is never about getting information. As noted above, it’s about power.

  90. Jamie says

    And a Bill O’Reilly culture warrior, too, with your ongoing attacks on “political correctness.”

    I despise Bill O’Reilly, and I also despise the fundamentalist mentality of many people here, according to which whatever is politically correct is also unquestionably true.

    So there are no conceivable circumstances under which it is ethically justifiable to do torture? If a ticking time-bomb is about to explode and kill and maim millions of people, it wouldn’t be ethical to torture a crazed terrorist even if that were the only possible way to save those people? This is a direct question and I’ll not allow you to dodge it. Your current answer is no; the sensible think for you to do would be to retract that.

    (I anticipate a fervid and maniacal defense of the creed — the hallmark of religious ideology.)

  91. CalGeorge says

    Does everyone here agree with Sam Harris’ position on torture, namely that there are some special circumstances under which it is ethical?

    No.

    Is torture okay if the good people do it to the bad people?

    No. If the good people do it, they join the ranks of the bad.

    Period.

  92. Gartso says

    I don’t know if that will make any sense to the people arguing about the “ethical” point of torture, but there is also the legal point.

    According to International Law no state is allowed to torture prisoners of war for information (or for any other reason). If you do torture the POW and learn information you will definitely save a lot of lives (from your army). But it is illegal because war has some rules and civilised states have played by these rules (more or less) for ages. If you torture people then you expect the enemy to horribly torture your own prisoners of war and then the war becomes more brutal.

    When it extends to civilians, then are you not giving the enemy the legal right to kill and torture (kidnap etc etc) your civilians too?

    The mental change comes when a country is at war, but no casualties are tolerated (only in the US this notion exists). If the first rule is that no americans get killed then the rights and freedoms of everyone are of secondary importance.

    I believe this is the kind of thinking that brought things in the place they are

    PS: forgive english mistakes etc. not my native language

  93. craig says

    “This is a direct question and I’ll not allow you to dodge it. “

    Uhoh. You won’t allow it? Crap! How you gonna do that, torture us?

    As stated above, your answer is in the thread, repeatedly. You’re going to refuse to read it and then demand that people do as you say, repeat themselves, etc?

    And if they don’t want to you won’t “allow” them to dodge it?
    Well if its actually possible for you to not allow it, then it must be equally possible for your demand to be shoved up your obnoxious ass.

    Here it comes, bend over… I won’t allow you to dodge it.

    (sorry everyone else for getting stupid, but dammit I’m tired, and when I get tired I get cranky.)

  94. Valmorian says

    Jamie: “So there are no conceivable circumstances under which it is ethically justifiable to do torture?”

    As others have pointed out, this is a pointless investigation. As long as you are appealing to imaginary scenarios, then there is NO action that is unethical in ALL circumstances.

    So what? Does that mean that there are no unethical actions?

  95. says

    If a ticking time-bomb is about to explode and kill and maim millions of people, it wouldn’t be ethical to torture a crazed terrorist even if that were the only possible way to save those people?

    Would it be ethical to sever a child from her dæmon if that were the only way to stop the flow of Dust out of the universe?

    See, inventing scenarios which have no connection with the real world is not a helpful way to pose or resolve ethical quandaries. If you postulate a new kind of terrorist with an Invisible Pink Ticking Bomb, and a new kind of torture which gets accurate information and nothing else, and a new kind of law enforcement and military organization which has no other means of gathering intelligence, et cetera, et cetera, then para-torture in this alternate reality might be ethical.

  96. says

    So there are no conceivable circumstances under which it is ethically justifiable to do torture? If a ticking time-bomb is about to explode and kill and maim millions of people, it wouldn’t be ethical to torture a crazed terrorist even if that were the only possible way to save those people?

    No, it is not ethical.

    It’s really that simple. You can go ahead and torture, but you are declaring that there are no ethical constraints that will hinder you from doing what you want. This shouldn’t be hard to understand — by advocating torture, you are renouncing certain widely held moral standards. You don’t get to both torture and hold yourself up as a paragon of justice and goodness; you’ve abdicated any claim to that last title.

  97. says

    I’m reminded of the classic question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” It’s a direct question, and I won’t let you dodge it! Say yes, and you were a wife-beater in the recent past, but say no, and you mark yourself as an abusive husband today.

  98. demallien says

    Jamie,

    Well, I for one remain convinced that there are certain circumstances where torture is “ethical”. If you have caught someone engaged in terrorist activities, and you know that an attack that could kill thousands is underway, and you have limited time to foil it, and you suspect that the terrorist that you have caught has the pertinent information to foil the attack, then I for one say that it would be ethical to use torture to get that information once all other avenues have ben exhausted.

    That said, I’m still against terrorism, but for entirely practical grounds. Gregory Kusnick nails it back at #65. Whilst you may succeed in blocking this terrorist act, your torturing will probably create even more terrorists, and some of them will get through.

  99. demallien says

    The fact that torture is far from reliable is not enough of a reason to not use it. If I have the choice of thousands dying in a terrorist attack, and torture has a 10% chance of getting me the information I need to stop it, then, all things being equal, then a completely ethical response is to inflict harm on the one to try and protect the thousands.

    That said, ethics is all well and good, but, as I stated in my last post, in practical terms, the long run result would probably be even more terrorists, and even more deaths, meaning that tortre must be used very carefully, if at all.

  100. T_U_T says

    If a ticking time-bomb is about to explode and kill and maim millions of people, it wouldn’t be ethical to torture a crazed terrorist even if that were the only possible way to save those people?

    Right ! And what about

    If a ticking time-bomb is about to explode and kill and maim millions of people, it wouldn’t be ethical to get the terrorist’s loved ones, the entire family, heck, the entire tribe of the terrorist, start to rape them, disembowel, skin, and tear them to pieces a la hellraiser, one after other and make him do watch all that, even if that were the only possible way to save those people?

    And what about this.

    If the only way to prevent future terrorist attacks would be nuking the rest of the mankind into oblivion, wouldn’t we be obliged to unleash the nuclear apocalypse ?

    I hope you see now what is wrong with that sort of questions. And if not, I believe the only way to teach you otherwise is to put you in a meat grinder and process you to cat fod. Slowly. One turn a hour.

  101. True Bob says

    If you have caught someone engaged in terrorist activities, and you know that an attack that could kill thousands is underway, and you have limited time to foil it, and you suspect that the terrorist that you have caught has the pertinent information to foil the attack,…

    Those are a lot of “ifs”, demallien, that you must know 100% correctly, to even start your scenario. Then you have to add that your victim will NOT respond to proven efective interrogation techniques, but WILL answer TRUTHFULLY to your “enhanced” techniques.

    But now who do you get to do this torture?

    This is where the ticking time bomb scenario collapses. If it isn’t a standard practice, you have no experts. If you have no experts, your torture will not be effective. The only means of having institutional knowledge on how to torture and collect good data, is to have an ongoing machinery of torture, with training for torturers. Where are you going to find your subjects? It’s not like CPR – a dummy won’t work.
    Your desire to be able to do it once means you must practice it constantly.

  102. craig says

    How long you live is not as important as how you live.

    A life prolonged by the use of torture is a lesser life than one shortened by an act of terrorism.

    Deciding that torture is ethical based on how positive the end result is for you is similar to deciding that stealing is ethical based on how big your haul of loot was.

  103. says

    I forgot to say something important here:

    If you postulate a new kind of terrorist with an Invisible Pink Ticking Bomb, and a new kind of torture which gets accurate information and nothing else, and a new kind of law enforcement and military organization which has no other means of gathering intelligence, et cetera, et cetera,

    This list should also include the condition, “if the act of torture did not intimidate others and cut out the heart of democracy”.

  104. demallien says

    Of course, toture really is a tool of last resort, for all of the reasons mentioned by various posters above. But of course, what are the tools that we should use to catch terrorists/discover enemy plans? I’m assuming here that everyone considers it desirable to stop terrorists.

    Physical defences are no good, see Bruce Schneier’s recent criticisms of for example airport scanning to understand why.

    Surveillence techniques have their limits, but we could do better if we weren’t so determined to protect privacy. Indeed, if you give me the choice of the state using torture, or the state using massive surveillence, I would prefer torture.

    So then, how else are we supposed to get the needed information? Or are we supposed to let innocents die to protect our principles (knowing that a good number of those innocents don’t even share those principles). I don’t see how that is just either..

  105. truth machine says

    Does everyone here agree with Sam Harris’ position on torture, namely that there are some special circumstances under which it is ethical?

    Try reading the thread, moron.

    If not, why not?

    Because a) torture is wrong, you creep, and b) because it’s ineffective.

    Would you not consider torturing a terrorist if it were the only way of obtaining information about a ticking time-bomb that would kill millions of people?

    Just because there is no other way to obtain that information doesn’t mean that torture provides a way. And these aren’t real scenarios — they are scenarios invented by moral degenerates in order to justify torture in the immoral circumstances in which it is actually applied.

  106. Samantha Vimes says

    Matt, if you found a terrorist with schematics for several hospitals and schools and knew his accomplice would strike soon, YOU EVACUATE THE BUILDINGS.
    And tighten security around them.

    Guess what? If you’ve got a real, dyed-in-the-wool zealot on your hand, he just might be one of the people who doesn’t talk until you’ve held him under the water for too long! If there is a ticking bomb somewhere, the LAST thing you want to rely on is torture. You use your brain. Unfortunately, Matt, this may be outside the realm of possibility in your case so I’m glad you will probably never be in a position to combine your lack of morals AND lack of logic.

  107. truth machine says

    . Sam bought the same Jack Bauer/ticking time bomb bullshit.

    Funny how the people who buy this — Harris, Dershowitz, Jamie … — all hate Muslims.

  108. truth machine says

    even though klling e.g. the next Hitler might be ethical

    I think you may well be the next Hitler. Ok if I kill you?

  109. craig says

    We get the information through traditional methods. The ones that WORK, and have worked throughout all of the LESSER crises this country has gone through. Use of moles. Spies. Etc.
    Virtually all of the intelligence we have had in the last several decades was obtained that way, not through torture. Not through massive surveillance either. Target surveillance, yes.
    Massive surveillance is like looking for a needle in a haystack by first making sure you build the world’s biggest haystack.
    The push for massive surveillance is motivated by entirely other things.

    And yes, we ARE supposed to let some innocents die to protect our principles. We’ve made that choice many times in our past (other times we’ve failed, such as the internment of Japanese-Americans).

    Our whole system of justice is based on the idea of it being better to let some bad things happen that might not if we compromised our ethics.

  110. demallien says

    True Bob,

    That first ‘if’ is indeed one of the many reasons that I am against torture on practical grounds. We ca’t be sure that we aren’t torturing an innocent. That said, if the torturee is an enemy combattant in a war, I don’t have any more qualms with torturing that person without a court order than I do with killing them without a court order. In war, these things happen.

    In a civil setting, I would consider a warrant from a judge as an absolute prerequisite before torture could be condoned. Also, as you note, there are other interrogation techniques that can get good results, although, at the end of the day none of them are particularly brilliant from the ethics point of view, as they all have as a goal the obtention of information from someone that doesn’t want to give that information.

    Violation of that person’s personal rights is going to be necessary no matter what trick you use – lying to them, menacing them, drugging them, sleep deprivation, bribing them, even brain scanning them to try and see if they are lying or telling the truth, all of these have their own problems. Worse still, what do you do if the person just decides to shut up?

    Anyway, as I said, I don’t like torture on practical grounds, especially when we consider the likely consequences. But I think some posters here are taking a false moral high ground that just simply does not exist.

  111. truth machine says

    I was just trying to find out if any politically correct fundamentalists here have deluded themselves into believing that Harris said something which is totally unreasonable.

    Most of those who have posted here, including PZ, have said that Harris’s view is unreasonable. Are we all, then politically correct fundamentalists? Or is it possible that you’re a stupid asshole?

  112. craig says

    “We get the information through traditional methods. The ones that WORK, and have worked throughout all of the LESSER crises this country has gone through. Use of moles. Spies. Etc.”

    Whoops, that was supposed to read GREATER crises.

  113. truth machine says

    I also despise the fundamentalist mentality of many people here, according to which whatever is politically correct is also unquestionably true.

    I despise lying arrogant scum trolls like you, and you’ll find that most other posters here do too. No one here holds that “whatever is politically correct is unquestionably true”. Apparently “politically correct” means whatever you disagree with.

  114. craig says

    “But I think some posters here are taking a false moral high ground that just simply does not exist.”

    Its clear that you can’t see it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Shame, too, because it’s not that high of a climb, more of a pitcher’s mound than a mountain. Used to be most americans could make it all the way up.

  115. Laen says

    People over react to terrorism. It’s a crime. How many people died last year to terrorists in the US? Hell in the world? How many people were killed during other crimes? I for one am not willing to throw away my rights and the Constitution just to fight a crime. Fear is their goal, and being willing to give away your rights to fight them means it’s working.

    P.S. Yes I know this conflicts with my earlier comments about what I personally might do, but I’m aware that when I have an emotional attachment to a situation I might react different that when I have time to think something through clearly. Hence my stance against legalized torture even when I think I might fall into the trap of doing it myself.

  116. truth machine says

    Your current answer is no; the sensible think for you to do would be to retract that.

    (I anticipate a fervid and maniacal defense of the creed — the hallmark of religious ideology.)

    So those who disagree with you on this moral issue not only aren’t sensible but must have a religious ideology? You seem to have no idea what sort of hole you’ve dug for yourself here.

  117. demallien says

    Ahhh, yes, traditional methods. What, you mean like bribery, blackmail, using prostitutes, getting people addicted to drugs, and all the other dirty tricks used ny intelligence agencies around the world? I can’t deny that they too can be effective, but they are hardly shining examples of ethics any more than torture.

  118. truth machine says

    Would it be ethical to sever a child from her dæmon if that were the only way to stop the flow of Dust out of the universe?

    That reference almost makes reading the output of the putrid Jamie slime worthwhile.

  119. craig says

    “People over react to terrorism. It’s a crime. How many people died last year to terrorists in the US? Hell in the world? How many people were killed during other crimes? I for one am not willing to throw away my rights and the Constitution just to fight a crime. Fear is their goal, and being willing to give away your rights to fight them means it’s working.

    P.S. Yes I know this conflicts with my earlier comments about what I personally might do, but I’m aware that when I have an emotional attachment to a situation I might react different that when I have time to think something through clearly. Hence my stance against legalized torture even when I think I might fall into the trap of doing it myself.”

    Well, that’s at least a truthful answer, and understandable. People in dire circumstances do things they wouldn’t otherwise. They may lose their sense of ethics and morality, or even just abandon their morals. The stress gets to them, anger, everything. Of course that’s a common reaction, and copping to it as you have is honest.

    The problem is that we have a nation full of people who are NOT in dire circumstances, but they have lost their heads anyway. They are pushing for government policy that abandons ethics and morals.

    In essense, they are pushing for our government to officially act like a father who has just found out that someone killed his wife and has kidnapped his daughter. Panicked, desperate, not thinking clearly and willing to do anything – ethics and morals be damned.

    And they are winning, our government IS acting like that.

  120. truth machine says

    If I have the choice of thousands dying in a terrorist attack, and torture has a 10% chance of getting me the information I need to stop it, then, all things being equal, then a completely ethical response is to inflict harm on the one to try and protect the thousands.

    What if the one with the information is completely innocent? Perhaps they are withholding the information because their family will be killed if they provide it. If that’s not allowed, then your ethics involves a component that says its ok to torture bad people. And that component can lead to it being ok to torture bad people even if it doesn’t save thousands. Many people here have ethical intuitions that tell them it’s not ok to torture people in any case.

  121. craig says

    “Ahhh, yes, traditional methods. What, you mean like bribery, blackmail, using prostitutes, getting people addicted to drugs, and all the other dirty tricks used ny intelligence agencies around the world? I can’t deny that they too can be effective, but they are hardly shining examples of ethics any more than torture.”

    Really? Sure, they aren’t exactly ethical, but you’re saying that getting info from someone by getting them drunk or getting them laid or threatening to tell their wife about their gay lover is equal to ripping their fingernails out with pliers? Slipping someone a mickey and rifling through his briefcase is as immoral as wiring up his testicles to a generator?

  122. truth machine says

    I’m assuming here that everyone considers it desirable to stop terrorists.

    Terrorism is a tactic, mostly used by the weaker party in assymetrical warfare; it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

  123. truth machine says

    Indeed, if you give me the choice of the state using torture, or the state using massive surveillence, I would prefer torture.

    So then, how else are we supposed to get the needed information?

    Uh, standard interrogation and intelligence techniques?

  124. craig says

    “I can’t deny that they too can be effective,”

    Whoops, almost let that one slip by. They TOO can be effective?

    So now you’re arguing not only is torture a last resort, but that it’s effective? And by the way you phrase it, seemingly MORE effective than the other means? (Oh, well those can work sometimes too…)

    Based on WHAT? Based on FANTASY. You’re basing your ethics and morals not on any knowledge you have but on FANTASY.
    You are imagining the usefulness of torture based on nothing but your own DESIRE that it be useful… because then it can be used.

    You want the torture, and you are trying to find a way to justify it.

    Knock that shit off. Stop with the fucking fantasy.

  125. truth machine says

    We get the information through traditional methods.

    Indeed. It’s remarkable that folks like demallien are so feebleminded and ignorant that they can’t imagine that there’s any alternative to torture, despite the reams and reams that have been written on this subject in readily available sources … like NYT editorials by intelligence professionals.

  126. truth machine says

    That said, if the torturee is an enemy combattant in a war, I don’t have any more qualms with torturing that person without a court order than I do with killing them without a court order. In war, these things happen.

    Yes, you’re a moral degenerate, we got that.

  127. truth machine says

    Used to be most americans could make it all the way up.

    Fear and cowardice produces moral degenerates like demallien.

  128. truth machine says

    Really? Sure, they aren’t exactly ethical, but you’re saying that getting info from someone by getting them drunk or getting them laid or threatening to tell their wife about their gay lover is equal to ripping their fingernails out with pliers? Slipping someone a mickey and rifling through his briefcase is as immoral as wiring up his testicles to a generator?

    Remember, you’re dealing with a moral degenerate. Such intellectual dishonesty is a natural consequence.

  129. CalGeorge says

    My question is:

    Why do some people say that breathing in water is an “exquisite” experience?

    Start at around 1:41:

  130. demallien says

    You see craig, that’s exactly what I’m talking about when I say that some people here are taking the moral high ground when none exists. You for example seem quite OK with blackmailing a guy by threatening to reveal to his wife that he has a gay lover. That guy may lose his wife, access to his children and conceivably even his job (even probably if his job is the kind that you need a security clearance for – I speak from experience) if you go through with that threat. There have been many cases of people committing suicide when faced with such a situation (I had a friend in the Air Force that committed suicide for exactly this reason).

    Slipping a mickey to someone is OK? Oh, so letting rip with some rohypnol to get a girl in bed is OK then right? Funny, last I checked, that is considered rape.

    Your position isn’t looking so morally high and mighty now, is it? Those things which you seem to consider minor compared to torture, can be actually very important for the person involved.

  131. Dahan says

    As has been noted before, we put Japanese officials on trial for torture in WW2 because they used waterboarding. The practice hasn’t changed, neither should our definition. It’s torture. To anyone who feels different, I ask them to think of their youngest daughter, grandfather, etc in that situation. End of argument.

  132. Laen says

    “That said, if the torturee is an enemy combattant in a war, I don’t have any more qualms with torturing that person without a court order than I do with killing them without a court order. In war, these things happen.”

    demallien

    Yes they happen, and every time they do the person who commits the act should be punished. You kill someone in war because they are a threat, if they aren’t a threat you don’t kill them. What possible justification could you have for torturing a captured enemy combatant?

  133. demallien says

    Laen,

    The justification is, and always has been, that the enemy may have information that you can use to save lives, at least for your side. You also seem to not understand the nature of war. In war, innocents are killed. the soldiers responsible are not punished, provided that the deaths were a side-effect of an action carried out against opposition soldiers. It’s a little more complex than that, you start having to talk about things like proportionality etc, but that’s the basic gist.

    War is not nice. It would be a really good idea to not have wars at all. This is why I participated in anti-war marches when my country(for craig’s sake, it’s Australia, not the US…) decided to participate in Gulf War 2.0. No country should attack another country, ever. I just can’t think of any justification for an invasion, even if the country has an evil dictator engaged in killing half his population – the problem is that the invasion will be inevitably worse.

    But if your country is attacked, I consider it perfectly reasonable to defend it. I was, besides, a member of my country’s defence force.

    This whole torture/no torture thing reminds me a bit of my ethics classes which were part of my obligatory military training as an officer in the RAAF. We would talk about things such as Churchill’s decision to not defend against an attack on Coventry that he knew about through Enigma decodes. To defend would reveal that the codes had been broken, and the Germans would change the codes in response, leaving the allies blind. But to not defend would mean the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of civillians.

    If I’m understanding people here correctly, most of them would have favoured Churchill defending Coventry, even if it meant that in the long run many more people would die, and maybe the war would be lost. Churchill took the opposing view, accepting that some people would have to be sacrificed, to win the war.

    The most interesting thing though, in that class was that our instructor did not say which course of action was right or wrong. He simply wanted us to talk through the issues involved, see the different points of view, and accept that there can be no absolute ethical answer when there is less than perfect information. The decision would be easy if we could say “130 561 people will die if we defend Coventry, but 176 civillians will die if we don’t”. You choose to save the 130 561, because that’s worse than 176 people dying.

    But if you say “if we defend Coventry, there is a chance that the enemy will learn that we have broken his codes, and that he may subsequently change them to a new code that we can’t break, and then we may suffer massive losses rather than small losses”, then suddenly the choice becomes difficult, because we are dealing with unknowns.

    The same applies to torture. We are dealing with unknowns. Is the person a terrorist? Do they have the information that we need? Will they crack under interrogation? Is there something else that we could do to get that information in this particular case? The calculations are as a result difficult to do.

    All I’m saying (and those that have lobbed a couple of ad-hominems my way keep missing this point) is that there is no ethical/moral high ground here. In different situations, different solutions shall impose. Torture is just one way that we have at our disposal to obtain information that the enemy is trying to keep hidden. We use these techniques because the thought of allowing innocents to die at the hands of fanatics is unacceptable to us. But these techniques must always be weighed – costs versus benefits, because there are costs to using unethical tactics – not least that you can lose your “soul” whilst staring into the abyss.

  134. Laen says

    “The justification is, and always has been, that the enemy may have information that you can use to save lives, at least for your side.”

    That justification is wrong. It’s been shown that torture in general is not effective. I can’t imagine that in dealing with religious fanatics that are willing to blow themselves up to kill us it would be more effective. There has been no reason put forth to show why would should change our long standing policy against torture.

    “You also seem to not understand the nature of war.”

    I understand war quite clearly.

    “In war, innocents are killed. the soldiers responsible are not punished, provided that the deaths were a side-effect of an action carried out against opposition soldiers. It’s a little more complex than that, you start having to talk about things like proportionality etc, but that’s the basic gist.”

    I suppose I could have been more clear, but since we were talking of torture I assumed it was understood I meant killing people on purpose. Of course accidents happen and innocent people are sometimes killed. I am quite aware of proportionality and ROE’s and the ambiguity that goes along with them.

    “All I’m saying (and those that have lobbed a couple of ad-hominems my way keep missing this point) is that there is no ethical/moral high ground here.”

    By that logic the terrorists are on the same moral ground as the US and Aussie armies. After all they both kill civilians. I disagree with that, I think intentions matter. There is a moral high ground.

  135. craig says

    “You see craig, that’s exactly what I’m talking about when I say that some people here are taking the moral high ground when none exists. You for example seem quite OK with blackmailing a guy by threatening to reveal to his wife that he has a gay lover.”

    Where did I say I see that as OK?
    When I mentioned traditional methods, YOU posited those as what would be done, and suggested that they were equivalent to torture.

    I stated that they were UNETHICAL, but also pointed out what should be obvious to any rational person – that they are NOT equivalent to torture. That given a choice between the two, it’s better to blackmail a guy than to torture him.

    Nowhere did I say was quite OK with it, YOU posited blackmail as a tactic, and I said it would be unethical and merely pointed out that it is NOT equal to pulling his fingernails out.

    You really do seem to be letting your fantasy world color not only your perceptions of what is ethical, but also your perceptions of what others are saying.

  136. Elin says

    How do you torture a sadomasochist? Well, considering that the main ingredient in an S/M relationship is CONSENT, the answer is: same way you torture a “normal” person.

  137. Hank says

    demallien: Read less Tom Clancy. Seriously, what kind of screwy fantasy world do you live in? You act as if torture was in any way shape or form an effective means of information gathering. It still isn’t.

  138. craig says

    “Slipping a mickey to someone is OK? Oh, so letting rip with some rohypnol to get a girl in bed is OK then right? Funny, last I checked, that is considered rape.”

    And reconsidering this one, I think I may have even been too polite with you.

    You mischaracterise my statements repeatedly. You state as fact what are really your own presumptions or distortions or fantasies.

    You equate blackmail with torture. You equate stealing documents from a briefcase with rape. After mischaracterizing me as being OK with drugging people and stealing documents, you strongly imply that somehow that also means I’m OK with rape.

    It seems to me that the only thing you learn from this ethics class is how to twist and weasel your way out of ever having to take an ethical stand that’s not to your personal benefit.

    Creepy as hell. Thick as a brick, etc.

  139. Jamie says

    To PZ Myers:

    No, it is not ethical.

    It’s really that simple. You can go ahead and torture, but you are declaring that there are no ethical constraints that will hinder you from doing what you want. This shouldn’t be hard to understand — by advocating torture, you are renouncing certain widely held moral standards. You don’t get to both torture and hold yourself up as a paragon of justice and goodness; you’ve abdicated any claim to that last title.

    OK, you’re a fundamentalist. It’s really that simple.

    What the hell are you talking about? I’m not “advocating torture” — obviously I would be appalled by its use in almost all thinkable circumstances. And as I made clear before, I think it should be universally illegal. But in the ticking time-bomb scenario I described, it would be absolutely crazy to stand back and allow the destruction and maiming of millions of people, rather than torture one terrorist. There’s such a thing as a lesser evil.

    How could you possibly deny this?

  140. brent says

    Slipping a mickey to someone is OK? Oh, so letting rip with some rohypnol to get a girl in bed is OK then right? Funny, last I checked, that is considered rape.

    I must say that this actually made me laugh out loud. It might be one of the dumbest bits of “reasoning” that I have ever read on the internet(s) and thats really saying something. Let me see if I understand what you are trying to argue here: 1) Rohypnol is a sedative that is often used in date rape because it causes a very specific kind of disorientation. 2) therefore all instances in which I use the drug rohypnol are the moral equivalent of rape. Seriously, you actually believe this makes sense?

  141. Jamie says

    I despise lying arrogant scum trolls like you, and you’ll find that most other posters here do too. No one here holds that “whatever is politically correct is unquestionably true”. Apparently “politically correct” means whatever you disagree with.

    You accuse people of lying way too readily, pukebag. I wasn’t lying; I was saying what I believe. The position being maintained here is patently absurd, and I think intelligent people like PZ should easily be able to see this. The explanation, I believe, is that they are blinded by their political correctness.

  142. TTT says

    I defy any of the “24”-cultists in this thread to name so much as one instance when torture produced useful, actionable intelligence.

    A REAL instance, not a “ticking timebomb” scenario you made up. When I’m in a “ticking timebomb” scenario, I’d call Superman to save the day, a fictional hero for a fictional threat.

  143. notthedroids says

    I’ll restate the point I made earlier:

    It’s easy enough for torture apologists to cite hypothetical situations in which torture could possibly be used to extract information that would (debatably) save lives.

    But is there any actual example of lives being saved in such a “ticking time bomb” scenario? Ever? In all of history?

  144. brent says

    But in the ticking time-bomb scenario I described, it would be absolutely crazy to stand back and allow the destruction and maiming of millions of people, rather than torture one terrorist. There’s such a thing as a lesser evil.

    The problem with your scenario jamie, as many others have pointed out is that it is a scenario that has no connection to reality. It contains a whole list of conditionals that make the whole scenario highly unlikely to say the least. As Blake Stacey so cleverly put it in #103 above, its like asking:

    Would it be ethical to sever a child from her dæmon if that were the only way to stop the flow of Dust out of the universe?

    The real answer to the question is that this is not a particularly useful way of thinking about morality or ethics. Fiction may sometimes resemble reality but the scenarios imagined in 24 are no more realistic than those in The Golden Compass. In the real world, torture is not valuable except as a tool of fear and control.

  145. brent says

    The position being maintained here is patently absurd, and I think intelligent people like PZ should easily be able to see this. The explanation, I believe, is that they are blinded by their political correctness.

    I will add this to my long list of references where “political correctness” seems to be an epithet meaning “a position with which I disagree and which I am too intellectually lazy to argue against in any substantive way.”

  146. Jamie says

    It’s easy enough for torture apologists to cite hypothetical situations in which torture could possibly be used to extract information that would (debatably) save lives.

    But is there any actual example of lives being saved in such a “ticking time bomb” scenario? Ever? In all of history?

    I’m no “torture apologist”. I’ve already said that I almost invariably strongly disagree with its use. I think it should be illegal. The torture in Guantanamo was deplorable, and a strategic blunder as well. Sam Harris, whose ideas I’ve been defending in this thread, is of the same opinion.

    What more do you want me to say? That I don’t think torture should be used in any conceivable circumstance? I won’t say that, because I don’t believe it.

  147. Jamie says

    The problem with your scenario jamie, as many others have pointed out is that it is a scenario that has no connection to reality. It contains a whole list of conditionals that make the whole scenario highly unlikely to say the least.

    I’m fully aware of all that. So why don’t I just let the matter drop? Because many people here, even PZ Myers, seem to really believe that torture should not be used in any circumstance. Are they really that deluded? Well everything they’ve said indicates that they are.

  148. brent says

    Because many people here, even PZ Myers, seem to really believe that torture should not be used in any circumstance.

    Perhaps the problem here surrounds the issue of how one uses the term “conceivable.” Most people are using the term here to describe a scenario which is realistic, which is to say that there is some reasonable likelihood that it could occur in the real world in which we all live.

    There is also a sense in which “conceivable” can be used to mean “can possibly imagine.” In which case, of course, many people would agree that there are conceivable circumstances in which torture would make sense. But this is not particularly interesting or useful as a moral argument because there are essentially no actions that anyone could ever possibly take which could not be justified as some sort of lesser evil if we stretch our imaginations widely enough. There are scenarios that one could compose where raping a child or committing genocide are the lesser evil in some fanciful scenario but how is that helpful in any discussion of real world ethics and morality? What possible difference could it make to the discussion of real world policy if we concede that torture is reasonable in such an incredibly fanciful scenario? Its like arguing about whether or not the Hulk could beat Superman in a fight. It doesn’t help our understanding about how to ethically study the effects of gamma rays so why bring it up in that context?

  149. justpaul says

    Sorry for the copy-and-paste, but I don’t have a link…

    New York Daily News
    Defense bigs ask ’24’ to cool it on torture
    BY OWEN MORITZ
    DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
    Friday, February 9th, 2007

    The grossly graphic torture scenes in Fox’s highly rated series “24” are encouraging abuses in Iraq, a brigadier general and three top military and FBI interrogators claim.
    The four flew to Los Angeles in November to meet with the staff of the show. They said it is hurting efforts to train recruits in effective interrogation techniques and is damaging the image of the U.S. around the world, according The New Yorker.
    “I’d like them to stop,” Army Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan, dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, told the magazine.
    Finnegan and others told the show’s creative team that the torture depicted in “24” never works in real life, and by airing such scenes, they’re encouraging military personnel to act illegally.
    “People watch the shows, and then walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they’ve just seen,” said Tony Lagouranis, who was a U.S. Army interrogator in Iraq and attended the meeting.
    “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about ’24’?” Finnegan said.
    The show’s co-creator and executive director, Joel Surnow, 52, a self-described “right-wing nut,” seemed stunned by the complaints, but gave no hint that the torture scenes would be toned down – or shown not to work. “We’ve had all of these torture experts come by recently, and they say, ‘You don’t realize how many people are affected by this. Be careful,'” Surnow conceded. “But I don’t believe that.”
    Kiefer Sutherland, who is reportedly paid $10 million a year to play agent Jack Bauer, admits to being “anti-torture” and “leaning toward the left.” He says he tries to tell people the show “is just entertainment.”
    Joe Navarro, an FBI interrogation expert who was at the meeting, said he wouldn’t want anyone like Bauer on his team. “Only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected,” he said. “You don’t want people like that in your organization. They are untrustworthy, and tend to have grotesque other problems.”

  150. Jamie says

    But this is not particularly interesting or useful as a moral argument because there are essentially no actions that anyone could ever possibly take which could not be justified as some sort of lesser evil if we stretch our imaginations widely enough.

    You must appreciate that improbable, fanciful scenarios aren’t altogether barred from the real world. There are more realistic scenarios than the ticking time-bomb. Have you seen Dirty Harry? A sick criminal has bound and hidden a young girl, who is terrified and starving to death. Callahan (the main character) tortures this sicko to find where the girl is being held. What Callahan does is illegal, though we can all agree that it’s morally justifiable. And the scary thing is, this kind of situation really isn’t especially unrealistic. It’s not inconceivable in any sense of the word.

  151. truth machine says

    What Callahan does is illegal, though we can all agree that it’s morally justifiable.

    No, we don’t all agree to that, dumb fuck. Regardless of what you think of them, some people have moral judgments that are different from yours.

  152. Jamie says

    Oh yes, pardon me. I forgot that it’s morally acceptable to allow a little girl starve to death in the dark rather than torture a sick killer for several minutes. I apologize for my dumb-fuckery.

  153. truth machine says

    Because many people here, even PZ Myers, seem to really believe that torture should not be used in any circumstance. Are they really that deluded?

    No matter what you think of such judgments, they cannot be delusions — moral judgments are not matters of fact.

  154. truth machine says

    I forgot that it’s morally acceptable to allow a little girl starve to death in the dark rather than torture a sick killer for several minutes. I apologize for my dumb-fuckery.

    What part of “regardless of what you think of them” don’t you understand? You don’t have to think it morally acceptable in order to recognize that some people do. Unless you think that morality is absolute and it is inconceivable for your own moral judgments not to be right.

  155. says

    So there are no conceivable circumstances under which it is ethically justifiable to do torture? If a ticking time-bomb is about to explode and kill and maim millions of people, it wouldn’t be ethical to torture a crazed terrorist even if that were the only possible way to save those people?

    Where am I supposed to begin pointing out the flaws? I see more flaws than argument.

    For a start, any elementary bomb-building textbook will explain how to tamper-proof your bomb, such that the only way it is going to stop ticking is if it explodes — either by the timer running out, or by the tamper-detect mechanism triggering it early.

    Secondly, it’s very unlikely that one bomb would kill and maim millions of people (that’s a few cities’ worth). Inverse-square law, and all that. A few hundred casualties is generally considered pretty good going for a terrorist bomb.

    Thirdly, you don’t know for certain that torture will even be effective. The terrorist might lie (after all, you are going to stop torturing as soon as he says something; it needn’t be true). He might hold out. He might not even have the required information; the person who ordered the bomb does not need to know how it was built, the builder of the bomb does not need to know where it is to be deployed, and the person who placed the bomb does not need to know how (if at all) it can be deactivated.

    Fourthly, performing acts of torture is a great way to stir up international hostility to yourself.

  156. truth machine says

    I forgot that it’s morally acceptable to allow a little girl starve to death in the dark rather than torture a sick killer for several minutes.

    What I find sick is your treatment of fiction as reality in order to satisfy your desire to imagine torturing someone. I’m not certain of what I would do in that situation, but I suspect that I would not torture the man because a) I would be very uncertain of its success and b) I would find it deeply repugnant to personally engage in such an act. Saving the girl doesn’t trump everything — after all, it wouldn’t make torturing some other little girl, even just for a few minutes, morally justifiable. I’m not so quick as you to justify torturing people by characterizing them as “sick killers”.

  157. brent says

    There are more realistic scenarios than the ticking time-bomb. Have you seen Dirty Harry? A sick criminal has bound and hidden a young girl, who is terrified and starving to death. Callahan (the main character) tortures this sicko to find where the girl is being held. What Callahan does is illegal, though we can all agree that it’s morally justifiable. And the scary thing is, this kind of situation really isn’t especially unrealistic.

    LOL. Dirty Harry? Really Jamie? Is this what this argument has come to?

    OK I see the issue here. You seem not to understand exactly why people are telling you that these scenarios are not realistic and applicable to the real world. You are completely incorrect. The scenario in Dirty Harry is not realistic for a number of reasons and those reasons are precisely why his behavior is both illegal and immoral in the real world. 1) It assumes that there is a particular class of criminal that is not persuadable by all of the sorts of methods of persuasion that we have used for centuries to extract information from criminals. 2) It assumes that there are no other investigative methods of determining the whereabouts of the little girl like tracking down the kidnappers known locations or associates. 3) It assumes perfect knowledge of the girl’s condition which of course we have because we are third party omniscient viewers. In the real world the girl might be either in perfect health and eating a sandwich or might have been dead for hours before we even captured our kidnapper. 4) It assumes that, despite not being a complete psychopath, Dirty Harry is an effective and skillful torturer. 5) It assumes that the torturous methods that we use will yield truthful information both quickly and effectively. Moreover it assumes that such methods will do so more quickly and more effectively than any other conceivable (there’s that word again) method.

    In fact, none of these conditions is likely to be true in the real world. The chances of all of them being true is effectively nil. This is what people are trying to tell you. Talking about a scenario presented in a nonsensically macho movie like Dirty Harry as being somehow applicable to a real world discussion of the effectiveness of torture is like discussing the possibilities that unicorns live in Narnia. It is a discussion removed from reality in every important way. And I think Clint Eastwood would probably be the first person to tell you that.

  158. Jamie says

    For a start, any elementary bomb-building textbook will explain how to tamper-proof your bomb, such that the only way it is going to stop ticking is if it explodes — either by the timer running out, or by the tamper-detect mechanism triggering it early.

    What?

    Secondly, it’s very unlikely that one bomb would kill and maim millions of people (that’s a few cities’ worth). Inverse-square law, and all that. A few hundred casualties is generally considered pretty good going for a terrorist bomb.

    What if it’s a nuclear bomb? This is becoming increasingly realistic. Anyway, my argument still stands even if the potential casualties amount to “only” several hundred.

    Thirdly, you don’t know for certain that torture will even be effective. The terrorist might lie (after all, you are going to stop torturing as soon as he says something; it needn’t be true).

    Yes, but if the terrorist tells the wrong information, he might get tortured again and again. Maybe his only chance of getting off easy is by spilling the beans.

  159. Ichthyic says

    You must appreciate that improbable, fanciful scenarios aren’t altogether barred from the real world. There are more realistic scenarios than the ticking time-bomb. Have you seen Dirty Harry?

    so the proponent of torture, Jamie, in over 16 hours of posting, has managed to make it from using examples from fictional TV to support his position, to fictional movies instead.

    what progress!

    What next? will he move to fictional books? Broadway Plays?

    seriously, when someone can’t even be bothered to look at real world cases when formulating their ideologies, they simply aren’t worth debating.

    It’s not worth debating someone’s imagination, whether we are speaking of creationist imaginings, or Jamie’s.

    ridicule seems more appropriate to me.

  160. truth machine says

    Where am I supposed to begin pointing out the flaws? I see more flaws than argument.

    The scenario in Dirty Harry is not realistic for a number of reasons and those reasons are precisely why his behavior is both illegal and immoral in the real world.

    What’s sick is how ready people like Jamie are to ignore all the problems in order to justify — and imagine themselves performing — torture.

  161. truth machine says

    You accuse people of lying way too readily, pukebag. I wasn’t lying

    You said something that is false (“the fundamentalist mentality of many people here, according to which whatever is politically correct is also unquestionably true”) and that anyone with a functioning brain would know is false, so that’s another lie.

  162. Jamie says

    Brent,

    Have you seen the film? The situation I described is portrayed very believably. The criminal is apprehended and the hero, right there and then, wants to know location of the girl. It is quite possibly in the criminal’s interests to refuse. If he immediately gives up the girl, he won’t have any power of negotiation.

    I can’t give you any real-life examples of torture being used for good purposes, but I don’t suppose this is the kind of information that would be spread about.

  163. truth machine says

    What the hell are you talking about? I’m not “advocating torture” — obviously I would be appalled by its use in almost all thinkable circumstances.

    Phenomenally stupid or phenomenally dishonest, it’s moot … you’re advocating it in your scenarios, fuckwad.

  164. Ichthyic says

    I can’t give you any real-life examples of torture being used for good purposes, but I don’t suppose this is the kind of information that would be spread about.

    and therein lies your problem, yet again.

    instead of spending time actually looking (there is available information out there, you know), you instead choose to rely on imagination and fictional scenarios from Hollywood.

    a typical american these days, i suppose, but still, you can’t really expect to be taken seriously?

    oh wait, you do, don’t you?

    BWAAHAHAHAHA.

    you really are no better than Dan Quayle.

  165. brent says

    Have you seen the film? The situation I described is portrayed very believably. The criminal is apprehended and the hero, right there and then, wants to know location of the girl. It is quite possibly in the criminal’s interests to refuse. If he immediately gives up the girl, he won’t have any power of negotiation.

    For goodness sake Jamie! I have seen the film. I have seen it many times. What I am trying to tell you is that it is not even close to being a realistic portrayal of a law enforcement situation and really everyone but very small children should be aware of this. I can assure you that even the writers and Clint Eastwood himself are aware of this. Do you really not get that? Can you possibly be delusional enough to believe that Dirty Harry represents some kind of realistic methodology of policing? If you truly are then there really isn’t much more that we can discuss but let me just try to reiterate this one more time in a clearer way.

    Any good, effective police officer or soldier or detective or CIA interrogator or District Attorney will often find themselves in the position of calmly explaining to people who watch too many movies that doing real investigative work, finding really important and effective information is not about violently harming the suspect. Torture is a waste of time and counterproductive even in the most exigent circumstances in the real world.

    Again, in order to tell a story like Dirty Harry, we have to present information about the world in a way that it cannot ever be present in real life. We have to be omniscient and understand the effects of our actions with perfect foresight and clarity. We have to be presented with a scenario in which, belying centuries of evidence of effective and non-violent interrogation methods, our most effective method is violence to the body of our suspect. These conditions, Jamie, do not exist. Dirty Harry is a fucking movie that takes place in a universe where these conditions do exist. If you are relying on that to make a moral or ethical case then you are proceeding from the worldview of a child.

  166. brent says

    Sorry. I missed a paragraph in my earlier post. My penultimate paragraph was supposed to be this:

    Think about it this way Jamie. A real detective in the real world is presented with a criminal who he has strong reason to believe is holding someone in an exigent circumstance. He has to make a decision about how to get information about where this person is being held. Now, he could make the decision to violently harm that suspected criminal knowing 1) that torture is not particularly effective in extracting truthful information and 2) that he does not have perfect knowledge of the situation (how many people are being held, whether the girl is alive or dead etc,) 3) that his actions are illegal and likely to ultimately result in the freedom of the person he is torturing to go on and commit other crimes. Or he could decide to use other methods eg. promises of leniency, threats of more serious penalties of the girl is not found alive, good cop/bad cop, appeals to the kidnappers humanity, investigation of other elements of the kidnapper’s life for further clues etc. Now in this scenario our real world detective, unlike the fictional Dirty Harry, has no way of knowing that apparently the only effective method of getting the information is to go with the torture scenario. Would you really try to argue that the moral or ethical thing to do in that circumstance, lacking this knowledge, would be to go with the scenario that is least likely to be effective, which is torture?

  167. Jamie says

    These conditions, Jamie, do not exist. Dirty Harry is a fucking movie that takes place in a universe where these conditions do exist. If you are relying on that to make a moral or ethical case then you are proceeding from the worldview of a child.

    I was using it to illustrate the type of scenario that might occur in real life. Yes, an improbable scenario like all the others I’ve mentioned, but it’s beyond absurd to insist that they cannot occur in real life.

  168. Ichthyic says

    but it’s beyond absurd to insist that they cannot occur in real life.

    all you have to do is find one actual, reality based example that matches the one in “Dirty Harry” to support your point.

    you can do that, right?

  169. Jamie says

    Currently, I don’t think torture should be done on terrorists except, perhaps, in some very special cases. But what if, in the future, they get more and more dangerous, having at their disposal nuclear and biological weapons? If we ever reach that stage, it will perhaps be ethical to torture a terrorist just to find out the location of his gang’s HQ.

  170. Ichthyic says

    But what if, in the future, they get more and more dangerous, having at their disposal nuclear and biological weapons?

    it’s nice that you can use your imagination and all, but, uh, you might want to check it against reality once in a while.

    …and bother to pay attention to why, even in your imagined scenarios, torture wouldn’t be effective.

    again, the information researching the effectiveness of torture, FROM THE PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY HAVE USED IT, is out there.

    there simply is no reason for you to continue to make up shit, or rely on Jack Bauer or Dirty Harry to make informed decisions.

    that you can’t see how silly that is suggests you must be very young, or very sheltered.

    spend less time watching TV, is my only other suggestion to you.

    read a good book once in a while, eh?

  171. Jamie says

    all you have to do is find one actual, reality based example that matches the one in “Dirty Harry” to support your point.

    As I said before, this isn’t the kind of information the responsible parties want us to know. We don’t know all of what goes on behind closed doors in police stations.

    Call me self-conscious, but I’m not prepared to plow through hundreds of Google matches that correspond to the keywords “torture”, “beating” and so forth. You do it yourself if you’re given to that sort of thing.

  172. Unstable Isotope says

    I think torture is immoral in any and all circumstances. It is especially immoral they way we’re practicing it because these are men (and boys) that have not been convicted of any crime. I have absolutely no doubts that some of them are very bad guys but I believe there are probably innocent people there too.

    My opposition to torture, though, has nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of the torturee. The world decided after bitter experience that certain acts should not be performed by anyone, no matter what moral justification one thinks one has. That’s where the Geneva Convention came from. It didn’t come from a bunch of naive optimists, it came from the experiences of world war.

    By “unsigning” the Geneva Convention and by practicing torture we are opening a can of worms for ourselves. If we are no longer bound by the law, why would other people be bound by this law as well? Aren’t we saying that it’s o.k. to torture Americans and hold them without charge on secret evidence? What moral standing would we have to object when our own people are treated this way?

    So, if I can’t convince you that torture is immoral or ineffective, can we at least agree that practicing torture gives others leave to do it as well? I know there are a lot of people with a view of “American exceptionalism.” Just because we think we have good intentions doesn’t make it right. Others can believe they have good intentions too. The Japanese soldiers we executed for torture probably thought that they were saving Japanese lives.

  173. Ichthyic says

    As I said before, this isn’t the kind of information the responsible parties want us to know

    more imagination on your part, as I said before. ever heard of the Freedom of Information Act? funny enough, it has resulted in several such studies, funded with taxpayer dollars, being available for public viewing.

    that you are too lazy to try and find the information is hardly an excuse.

    have you considered that without doing ANY research on your end at all, that your arguments are patently worthless?

    if not, why not?

  174. Jamie says

    I think torture is immoral in any and all circumstances.

    See, I wasn’t strawmandering. This kind of absolutism does exist.

    again, the information researching the effectiveness of torture, FROM THE PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY HAVE USED IT, is out there.

    All right then, let’s see this information. Out with it.

    spend less time watching TV, is my only other suggestion to you.

    I alluded to one movie, so I must watch too much TV? Cut it out with these erroneous deductions, you pathetic, slimey guttersnipe.

  175. Jamie says

    have you considered that without doing ANY research on your end at all, that your arguments are patently worthless?

    Research about what, you stupid fucking shit? Why would I need to research the claim that there are possible circumstances in which torture is ethical?

  176. brent says

    I alluded to one movie, so I must watch too much TV? Cut it out with these erroneous deductions, you pathetic, slimey guttersnipe.

    The conclusion that you watch too much TV is based upon the fact that you can actually, with what I assume is a straight face, publicly post the idea that Dirty Harry offers us some insight into a realistic ethical law enforement scenarios. For certain, no one with a strong understanding of the difference between fiction and reality could make such a claim. You have not only claimed that, you have argued that to think otherwise, which I can assure you that most intelligent adults do, is absurd. Whether or not you watch too much TV, your understanding of the world is clearly overly influenced by the type of fiction presented there.

  177. craig says

    “See, I wasn’t strawmandering. This kind of absolutism does exist.”

    Wow, Jamie, you did it! You figured out our secret – we’re absolutely against torture. Its true. And you figured it out with the only clue being an entire thread where we’re screaming it at you to get it through your thick skull.

    No you’ve exposed us, we’re absolutists when it comes to torture. From now on we’ll have to hang our heads in shame as you point out how we have an absolutely anti-torture ideology. We may have to change our names or something.

  178. brent says

    Why would I need to research the claim that there are possible circumstances in which torture is ethical?

    Although this ought to be evident to anyone who isn’t mentally challenged, the claim that there are realistic circumstances in which torture is ethical ought to involve at least some understanding of what torture entails and its effectiveness. This would require some understanding of what the hell you are talking about that doesn’t come from viewing the fictional actions of fictional characters.

    Unless you are now making the argument that torture in your wildly imagined scenarios can somehow be justified regardless of its effectiveness. In this case, you wouldn’t need to do any research, you would just need to be an asshole.

  179. craig says

    Also, would it be ethical for Luke to kill Darth Vader even though he was his father?

    Sure it’s far-fetched, but you can’t tell me that it’s impossible such a scenario wouldn’t arise.

    And why didn’t anyone tell Jan Brady she looked ridiculous in that wig?

  180. Jamie says

    The conclusion that you watch too much TV is based upon the fact that you can actually, with what I assume is a straight face, publicly post the idea that Dirty Harry offers us some insight into a realistic ethical law enforement scenarios.

    I thought the scenario in Dirty Harry was realistic inasmuch as something like that could happen in the real world. That’s all. I don’t see the absurdity in this. Now enough of your bullshit psychoanalysis of me.

    The Al Qaeda of 50 years in the future (whatever it is) may be armed with nuclear and biological weapons. Weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union may fall into the wrong hands. The threat of terrorism may, for these reasons and more, grow severely. Maybe in 50 years’ time it will be ethical to torture a terrorist just to obtain the whereabouts of the gang’s HQ. I’m not making an assertion here; I’m submitting a speculation for your consideration. I don’t need to research a damn thing to do this. If you’re going to deny it then are the one who needs to do the research. You would need to show, among other things, that the threat of nuclear terrorism is negligible and could never arise.

  181. Laser Potato says

    “I thought the scenario in Dirty Harry was realistic inasmuch as something like that could happen in the real world.”
    *blood shoots out of ears*
    “You would need to show, among other things, that the threat of nuclear terrorism is negligible and could never arise.”
    Don’t try to shift the burden of proof. We’re not stupid.
    Seriously, where ARE these trogodytes coming from?!

  182. Jamie says

    I meant to say: “If you’re going to deny it then you are the one who needs to do the research.”

  183. Ichthyic says

    I don’t see the absurdity in this.

    that’s the sad thing.

    many congressionals didn’t see the absurdity of their references to Jack Bauer while debating the issue on the floor, either. think they could have easily had their staffers look up the relevant CIA research on the subject?

    nawwww.

    congratulations on being an average american?

    I wash my hands of you.

  184. Jamie says

    How the fuck could the “burden of proof” possibly be upon me? All I’m saying is that somewhere, sometime, there might be a situation in which we have to choose between two evils, the lesser of which is applying some form of torture to a criminal.

  185. Jamie says

    congratulations on being an average american?

    Congratulations, you bungled yet another attempted deduction. I’m not an American.

  186. brent says

    I thought the scenario in Dirty Harry was realistic inasmuch as something like that could happen in the real world. That’s all. I don’t see the absurdity in this.

    The fact that you don’t see the absurdity in this is the whole point. Something like that could not happen in the real world because cops, in the real world, do not have the perfect foresight to know that the torture of a person will result in the positive outcome they want. That is the real world. What you saw was a movie.

    Maybe in 50 years’ time it will be ethical to torture a terrorist just to obtain the whereabouts of the gang’s HQ. I’m not making an assertion here; I’m submitting a speculation for your consideration. I don’t need to research a damn thing to do this. If you’re going to deny it then are the one who needs to do the research.

    Maybe in 50 years time we will all live in chocolate houses and ride flying purple ponies. I am not making an assertion here; I’m submitting a speculation for your consideration. I don’t need to research a damn thing to do this. If you’re going to deny it then are the one who needs to do the research.

    You would need to show, among other things, that the threat of nuclear terrorism is negligible and could never arise.

    No jamie. We wouldn’t have to show anything because we are not making the positive assertion. You are. Moreover, even if we wanted to waste our time disproving your bizarrely imagined possibilities, we wouldn’t need to show that there would be no terrorism, only that torture is not an effective law enforcement tool. Others have provided some links and finding more is a trivial matter. You have made it clear, however, that you have no interest in doing that research yourself.

    The fact that you seem unable to grasp this simple concept, that torture is wrong in part because it is not useful, is somewhat ridiculous. Really, less TV man.

  187. truth machine says

    See, I wasn’t strawmandering. This kind of absolutism does exist.

    No one ever denied it exists, moron — several of us have proclaimed it. But it seems to be your view that there’s something wrong with such a view, but you have nothing to offer in support of that, other to reiterate that people are “fundamentalists” and other hollow charges. That’s right, people are “fundamentalist” about torture; torture is fundamentally wrong. Many people think that those who disagree — like you — are sick fucks.

  188. truth machine says

    I thought the scenario in Dirty Harry was realistic inasmuch as something like that could happen in the real world.

    Brent’s point is that it could only happen in the real world if criminals and police were very different from how they are in the real world.

  189. Laser Potato says

    “Brent’s point is that it could only happen in the real world if criminals and police were very different from how they are in the real world.”
    At this point, I don’t think ANYTHING could make Jamie realize the real world isn’t like his/her airy fairy Hollywood fantasy land where everything is black and white with no shades of grey, us vs. them, good vs. evil. Jamie refuses to step outside of his/her self-constructed bubble of “nuke ’em all and let God sort it out”. Sad really.

  190. Jamie says

    Maybe in 50 years time we will all live in chocolate houses and ride flying purple ponies.

    So you’re going to equate the threat of nuclear terrorism to living in chocolate houses and riding flying purple ponies? How mature of you. Anyway, are you reading the other posts? Here’s a choice quotation:

    That’s right, people are “fundamentalist” about torture; torture is fundamentally wrong. Many people think that those who disagree — like you — are sick fucks.

    He is very explicit. He is denying the ethical legitimacy of torture in any situation, even the ones you describe as unrealistic.

  191. truth machine says

    The Al Qaeda of 50 years in the future (whatever it is) may be armed with nuclear and biological weapons. Weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union may fall into the wrong hands. The threat of terrorism may, for these reasons and more, grow severely. Maybe in 50 years’ time it will be ethical to torture a terrorist just to obtain the whereabouts of the gang’s HQ. I’m not making an assertion here; I’m submitting a speculation for your consideration.

    I’ve considered it and concluded that, among other things, “terrorist” is a magic word by which folks like you justify every depraved behavior imaginable. If someone is torturing someone, the first one sounds like the terrorist to me. As for WMD in the wrong hands, They are already in the wrong hands — the U.S. Israel, Pakistan, India … any hands with access to these weapons are dangerous.

    If we have to resort to torture to locate the HQ of a terrorist organization with WMD, then we are grossly incompetent. Such incompetence would not make the torture ethical.

  192. Jamie says

    Sick fucks? I can’t let that pass. This is from the guy who literally says it’s ethical to stand back and allow a million people get maimed instead of torturing a terrorist.

  193. truth machine says

    He is very explicit. He is denying the ethical legitimacy of torture in any situation, even the ones you describe as unrealistic.

    Uh, I said that there are those who deny it. Like Ichthyic:

    Wow, Jamie, you did it! You figured out our secret – we’re absolutely against torture. Its true. And you figured it out with the only clue being an entire thread where we’re screaming it at you to get it through your thick skull.

    But you still think this is news?

  194. craig says

    “Uh, I said that there are those who deny it. Like Ichthyic:”

    um, that was me you quoted. and I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me or holding me up to scorn. (It’s way past my bedtime.)

  195. truth machine says

    Sick fucks? I can’t let that pass.

    Deja vu all over again … whatcha gonna do, torture me?

    This is from the guy who literally says it’s ethical to stand back and allow a million people get maimed instead of torturing a terrorist.

    What about torturing an innocent person who isn’t revealing information because his family will be killed if he does? Is that ethical? I’ve already mentioned this numerous times, but you’re too dishonest to address it. We can slide even further down the slope … I’ve given those scenarios too. More scenarios: what if there’s a 1% chance that the terrorist will give up the info? .000001%? When is it ethical and when isn’t it?

    Yes, Jamie, some people have non-utilitarian principles, and some people think that people like you who make up reasons to torture people — as long as you can call them “terrorist” — are sick fucks. You have convinced me on numerous grounds that you are a sick fuck. What are you going to do about that? What can you possibly do about it?

  196. truth machine says

    um, that was me you quoted.

    Sorry.

    and I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me

    That’s because I took care not to state whether I do.

    or holding me up to scorn. (It’s way past my bedtime.)

    No, I was holding you up as objective evidence that there are people who take a certain stand.

  197. craig says

    “Sick fucks? I can’t let that pass. This is from the guy who literally says it’s ethical to stand back and allow a million people get maimed instead of torturing a terrorist.”

    The sick fuck is the person who invents a completely idiotic, preposterous scenario in order to badger other people into agreeing and sharing his twisted fantasies.

    You might as well say “would you rape a 2 year old if it stopped the world from blowing up?” and try to badger people into agreeing that pedophilia is ok, just so you won’t feel alone in your sick obsessions. You can substitute any other twisted deed being justified by an imaginary and improbable scenario.

    You’re not interested in anything but dragging people down to your level. You know your argument is sick, you just want affirmation that you’re ok rather than facing your demons.

  198. craig says

    “No, I was holding you up as objective evidence that there are people who take a certain stand.”

    ok, gotcha.

  199. brent says

    He is very explicit. He is denying the ethical legitimacy of torture in any situation, even the ones you describe as unrealistic.

    Jamie,

    I’ve concluded that this is a waste of time not because you disagree with me, but because you seem to be too dense to even understand and respond to the arguments that are being made here. I will try one time to summarize the fundamental issues that you seem to be missing and then you will have to have the final word on this. Life is too short.

    First this:
    So you’re going to equate the threat of nuclear terrorism to living in chocolate houses and riding flying purple ponies?

    As I say, I see that you are a bit dense but I think even you realize that I am doing nothing of the sort. I am comparing your future imagined scenario of an act of terrorism and its incredible, last minute, perfectly ethical, torture-based solution to living in chocolate houses. They both have exactly the same grounding in reality, which is zero. Your scenarios do not comport with reality. I know you are somehow incapable of understanding that but perhaps repetition may be helpful. It has certainly been repeated often enough on this thread.

    Now, what truth machine and what everyone else is saying here is that torture is wrong in the real world. That is the place where torture is talking place and that is the context in which we have to understand its legitimacy or lack thereof. If you want some concession from them that in your completely imaginary world where torture was proven to be effective, reliable and absolutely necessary to prevent the destruction of millions of innocent puppies and kittens in the next 5 minutes, then I am sure some will be glad to grant it. But that is a stupid conversation for stupid people who are transfixed by fantasy scenarios that do not concern us in the real world.

    The world you imagine does not exist, Jamie. The effectiveness of torture in that imaginary world is also imagined. In this world, torture is counterproductive and unethical in, yes, every realistic scenario. Your scenarios are very much unrealistic, you just don’t seem to be able to understand why.

  200. says

    Once more, with pictures:

    Brazil…

    There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

    — (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)

  201. says

    Square-eyed torture supporter Jamie said:

    What?

    You evidently need to learn a little about practical bomb construction. If you believe in a cause with enough passion to set off bombs, it’s worth building them properly. That means there should be no way to stop the timer or move the bomb without detonating the explosive. It’s not that difficult to arrange, especially if you are using an electronic timer (clue: you don’t need a big red LED display with the time remaining. Driving the LEDs is a PITA, requiring many I/O lines and a bigger battery. Although if you did decide to fit such a display, and you were being totally sadistic, you’d make the bomb detonate at some innocuous-looking time like 1’03”, thus giving bomb disposal experts a glimmer of false hope). Only half-hearted, “cry for attention” wannabes use half-hearted attempts at timers (e.g. joss stick and match heads).

    What if it’s a nuclear bomb? This is becoming increasingly realistic.

    Put down the remote control and step slowly away from the TV. Honestly, if it was that feasible for an ordinary person to build a nuclear bomb, some secondary school student would have done it by now. The fact that they haven’t suggests that it’s not as easy as Hollywood scriptwriters would have you believe.

    Anyway, my argument still stands even if the potential casualties amount to “only” several hundred.

    Your argument is considerably weakened by the reduction in numbers.

    Yes, but if the terrorist tells the wrong information, he might get tortured again and again. Maybe his only chance of getting off easy is by spilling the beans.

    But every delivery of false information represents a break in the torture, and a break is a break. You also overlook the fact that some people are perfectly prepared to die for a cause.

    Anyway, sooner or later the authorities are going to find out — The Hard Way — exactly where the bomb is …..

  202. truth machine says

    You might as well say “would you rape a 2 year old if it stopped the world from blowing up?” and try to badger people into agreeing that pedophilia is ok, just so you won’t feel alone in your sick obsessions. You can substitute any other twisted deed being justified by an imaginary and improbable scenario.

    He did the same thing in the scientific racism thread, claiming that, in order to engage in “reasonable discussion”, one must not dismiss the genetic-basis-for-IQ-differences-among-races hypothesis out of hand, even though no one did so and there is no scientific justification for entertaining the hypothesis in the first place. He’s a very sick sort of concern troll.

  203. says

    demallien, you seem be arguing from a massively false premise (or two).

    You write:

    The justification is, and always has been, that the enemy may have information that you can use to save lives, at least for your side. You also seem to not understand the nature of war.

    May is a pretty important word there. You have no idea before you begin to torture what value the information will have. As soon as you accept that you can mistreat the enemy and discard their carcass if it turns out they weren’t any use, you have surrendered any claim to being a moral person.

    And before you rant on about the nature of war, I have served in several conflicts (NI, Gulf1, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone) and been part of an interrogation cell. Torture was never used at any time and everyone knew it was the wrong thing to do.

    Your attempt to claim validity for the method hinges on your 100% certain knowledge that the person you are about to mistreat has information which is more valuable than either their life or your own moral status. If you already know so much, why torture them?

    In war, innocents are killed. the soldiers responsible are not punished, provided that the deaths were a side-effect of an action carried out against opposition soldiers. It’s a little more complex than that, you start having to talk about things like proportionality etc, but that’s the basic gist.

    It is a lot more complex than that. The Geneva convention was something created by people who had lived through the horrors of two world wars and seen the effects that violations of the laws of war have on every side in the conflict. They weren’t even that new, in the middle ages efforts were made to codify combatants behaviour to stop people torturing and killing innocents no mater how they may justify its “tactical advantage.”

    Churchill’s choice to sacrifice Coventry was not an “ethical” decision (why was it kept secret from the public for years after enigma was revealed?) and it is a massively different example to the use of torture to gather information. While Coventry didn’t have a black – white ethical answer, it was black and white in other regards. The Germans were going to attack.

    The person you are advocating torturing may not be a terrorist – in that case, you have tortured an innocent person for no good reason. If your basic information about them is wrong, is it ethical to torture them to find out? You are demanding a post hoc rationalisation for the use of torture and I cant for the life of me see how this shows torture could ever be ethical…

  204. truth machine says

    Now, what truth machine and what everyone else is saying here is that torture is wrong in the real world.

    I personally take a somewhat different view. I have argued by example that, if you accept some instance — in any world — of torture as morally justified, then you are on a slippery slope that unavoidably leads to torture scenarios that are clearly not morally justified. Any line that you draw is entirely arbitrary, which offends the moral intuition. The only way to avoid this is to never accept any instance of torture as morally justified. That doesn’t mean that I would never actually torture anyone — I’m human, and all sorts of emotional or utilitarian factors could enter into my decision making — but I would consider myself to have committed a moral wrong by torturing someone, even if I saved the entire planet by doing so. Utilitarian good outcomes don’t necessarily make the actions that brought them about morally good — a point that Jamie seems incapable of comprehending, but that should be made clear with the scenario of torturing an innocent person who won’t voluntarily yield the information because his family will be killed if he does. The utilitarian value of torturing the innocent man — saving the world’s population except for his family — is very high, but I think even Jamie would say that torturing an innocent person isn’t morally justifiable. And if he doesn’t say that, then there’s no limit to what depravity he would find morally justifiable under some circumstance.

  205. says

    Jamie, you seem heavily caught up in TV as your source of moral judgements.

    Have you seen Dirty Harry? A sick criminal has bound and hidden a young girl, who is terrified and starving to death. Callahan (the main character) tortures this sicko to find where the girl is being held. What Callahan does is illegal, though we can all agree that it’s morally justifiable. And the scary thing is, this kind of situation really isn’t especially unrealistic. It’s not inconceivable in any sense of the word.

    Yes, it works well in the movie and, as with all good movies you are encouraged to agree with the protagonist. Dirty Harry is a great film. It is not reality.

    In the movie the ends do indeed justify the means because there is a “good” outcome at the finish.

    In reality, the person being tortured by Callahan is just as likely to be an innocent bystander picked up by accident or even if he is the sick fuck himself, all he needs to do is give false information (remember most people will lie to stop the torturer rather than tell the truth because they have been “persuaded”) then Callahan runs in the wrong direction and the girl dies anyway.

    Now, without knowing that the outcome of the information gained from torture will be positive (save lives etc) remind me how you can justify it?

  206. Doug Indeap says

    Methinks those refusing to answer torture hypotheticals, characterizing them as “unrealistic,” doth protest too much. As a former law student accustomed to the Socratic method of teaching, I understand that such hypotheticals are designed to reveal and clarify the considerations and reasoning leading us to conclude one way or the other. Ducking the question simply because one deems it unrealistic merely thwarts the learning process, leaves one’s thinking unexamined and perhaps obscure, and raises doubts whether one will survive the first year of school.

    Less emotional flamethrowing and more genuine mulling of these hypotheticals could be revealing. What’s to lose–other than an opportunity to learn.

  207. brent says

    I personally take a somewhat different view. I have argued by example that, if you accept some instance — in any world — of torture as morally justified, then you are on a slippery slope that unavoidably leads to torture scenarios that are clearly not morally justified.

    Sorry. Didn’t mean to speak for you.

    Methinks those refusing to answer torture hypotheticals, characterizing them as “unrealistic,” doth protest too much. As a former law student accustomed to the Socratic method of teaching, I understand that such hypotheticals are designed to reveal and clarify the considerations and reasoning leading us to conclude one way or the other.

    Yes and No. it depends what sort of question you are attempting to answer. If you are trying to discern the reasonableness of torture in a real world scenario than it does no good to propose a scenario which is not analogous to the real world. As others have pointed out, it is relatively easy to construct some scenario where any action can be construed as the “lesser evil” up to and perhaps including the destruction of the entire universe. Its also intellectual wankery that tells us nothing about how to think about said act in the real world.

    Ducking the question simply because one deems it unrealistic merely thwarts the learning process, leaves one’s thinking unexamined and perhaps obscure

    I haven’t gone to law school so maybe this sort of examination is helpful in that circumstance. But in thinking about ethics, I don’t see how it could be helpful to consider ethical crises that are fundamentally different from any that we would ever realistically face. Perhaps you have some example of how this sort of thought experiment might be helpful but this sure does not seem like one of them.

    More importantly, no one is actually ducking the question. Some are saying that the question is stupid because the answer is basically always going to be yes, we should torture, if you construct the scenario in a far fetched enough way. Others are saying no, because whatever the scenario, the result is always going to lead us down the path to unjustifiable moral acts. Either way, the point is that the Jack Bauer scenario doesn’t help us to understand how we should think about torture in this particular universe where it turns out that torture is not the quick and efficient and always justifiable solution that it is in that one.

  208. Doug Indeap says

    I’m reminded of the “trolley problem” thought experiment, which is summarized at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem. The hypothetical: A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?

    Then there is this variation: As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

    Surveys have shown that most would throw the switch in the first hypothetical and not throw the fat man in the second hypothetical. Some have speculated that these results reveal something of the evolution of our intuition. Humankind evolved having to occasionally confront the question whether to lay hands on someone, so our intuition responds to the prospect of throwing the fat man to his death. Throwing switches to have remote effects, though, was not part of humankind’s evolutionary experience, so that hypothetical engages our reason more than our intuition.

  209. truth machine says

    Methinks those refusing to answer torture hypotheticals, characterizing them as “unrealistic,” doth protest too much.

    I don’t think you understand what is going on here. Jamie has labeled as “fundamentalist” those who insist that torture is always morally wrong. In an attempt to convince them that they are mistaken, he proposes (without ever properly characterizing them) scenarios in which there is some large utilitarian gain from torture — lots of people are saved — but the act is presumably justifiable because the tortured person is “a terrorist” or “a sick murderer”. He never spells how it is that being that sort of person makes the torture more justifiable. And he never explains how it is that large utilitarian gains necessarily make the actions that produce them morally good — surely that isn’t always the case, else we could justify all sorts of monstrous means to desirable ends. And he glosses over all the real-world complications and risks of failure that would make the cases he names not so clear cut a matter of utilitarian gain after all. It isn’t just a matter of characterizing the scenarios as unrealistic, it’s about not accepting Jamie’s dubious assumptions and not playing his game. It is Jamie who has failed to reveal and clarify his considerations and reasoning; those of us who have argued against him have attempted to do so.

  210. truth machine says

    Either way, the point is that the Jack Bauer scenario doesn’t help us to understand how we should think about torture in this particular universe where it turns out that torture is not the quick and efficient and always justifiable solution that it is in that one.

    In fact it causes many people to misunderstand, sanctioning torture in situations that are very different from those they imagine. It’s a bit like a jury deliberating and then returning to render a verdict, but in the wrong courtroom.

  211. brent says

    I’m reminded of the “trolley problem” thought experiment, which is summarized at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem.

    Yes. Discussing this sort of thing can be interesting in terms of fleshing out larger philosophical issues. But that isn’t exactly what is happening here. The trolley scenario is deliberately constructed so that it is not realistic scenario so that the kinds of moral strictures and limitations and solutions that we would often apply in any kind of a real world circumstance like it are deliberately removed from our consideration. Its meant to be unrealistic.

    Jamie’s scenarios, on the other hand are chosen precisely because he/she believes that they are realistic and because he/she thinks that they offer a clear cut example of the sort of real world decision any reasonable person ought to make. In that sort of a scenario and in the real world of course, the actual consequences and effectiveness of torture are important to how one answers the question.

  212. truth machine says

    The trolley problem scenarios explore people’s moral intuitions — under what conditions would you throw the switch, throw something or someone off a bridge, etc. Jamie’s scenarios are aimed at badgering people into admitting that there is some situation — regardless of which one it is — under which they would torture. The trolley problem has some intelligent aim and there is something we can all gain from working at it. Jamie’s scenarios are all about his scoring some stupid rhetorical point of no real value … other than the undercurrent of making torture — especially of “terrorists” — more palatable (this is the same goal of Sam Harris and Alan Dershowitz).

  213. says

    Clearly some people can’t (won’t) learn.

    “What if torture the only way in my imaginary extreme situation?”

    “Information acquired through torture is unreliable. And torture is morally/ethically wrong”

    “But what if it’s the only way?”

    “The victim is as (more?) likely to lie as tell the truth. And torture is morally/ethically wrong”

    “But what if it’s the only way?”

    “Torture doesn’t work and is morally/ethically wrong”

    “But what if it’s the only way?”

    Repeat ad nauseum.

  214. Ichthyic says

    In fact it causes many people to misunderstand, sanctioning torture in situations that are very different from those they imagine.

    even sadder when we see this happening with our own supposed “representatives” in congress.

    OTOH, I guess i can’t argue that our representatives aren’t actually, uh, “representative” of their majority constituency.

    which is not only sad, but scary.

    time to check out of this hotel, I’m thinking.

  215. Helioprogenus says

    Regardless of what unethical fucking morons say, waterboarding is and always will be torture. Only in the minds of self-righteous assholes, who read the bible for pleasure, and believe they’re doing the bidding of some etheral entity that lives in some imaginary place does waterboarding constitute normalcy. For torture apologists, there is no excuse for it. Besides, there are far better methods of gaining information that involve psychological tools. For example, extreme sleep deprivation has been shown to reduce resistance without physical harm. If these assholes really wanted to gain some information, they should have just kept these “persons of interest” awake until they were forthcoming. Either way though, the information released would be the same, probably bullshit just to get the torturer to stop.

  216. Dangerous Dan says

    craig wrote: Really? Sure, they aren’t exactly ethical, but you’re saying that getting info from someone by getting them drunk or getting them laid or threatening to tell their wife about their gay lover is equal to ripping their fingernails out with pliers?

    demallien replied: You see craig, that’s exactly what I’m talking about when I say that some people here are taking the moral high ground when none exists. You for example seem quite OK with blackmailing a guy

    demallien, you F-ing moron, craig was asking if you thought that torture was worse than those other things. It doesn’t appear to me that he thinks that the things that you proposed doing are not bad, immoral, evil or unethical, but only that torture can be worse.
    I believe that whipping someone until they are unconscious and bleeding and then trying to wake them up by dipping them in a vat of acid is probably worse than raping them. Both acts are immoral, evil and unethical, but one is worse than the other.

    anything goes demallien also wrote: “… All I’m saying (and those that have lobbed a couple of ad-hominems my way keep missing this point) is that there is no ethical/moral high ground here….”
    So, if I understand you correctly, if you or someone you care about has sent lots of money to some organization known to the government to have ties with terrorists, it is ethical and moral of the government to drag you or your loved one out of their home, ship them of to Guantanamo for an unlimited stay without trial and torture them for information they may or may not have? Is that your moral and ethical position?

    My moral and ethical position is that if I am ever in a position to possibly save lives by torturing someone, and despite the fact that experts in that field have stated that it is an unreliable method of extracting information, and that I feel that it is and evil, immoral and unethical thing to do, should I go ahead and torture that someone, I do expect to be prosecuted and possibly imprisoned or executed if caught, even if the information I extract does save lives. And, if I, the center of my universe deserve that treatment, so does anyone else who uses torture.

    Torture is useful for extracting confessions. You can decide what confession you want, then grab your victim, and with enough torture and interrogation, you can get that confession out of that person.
    Even if torture was as reliable in extracting information as it is in extracting manufactured confessions and stories made up to appease the torturers, it would still be immoral and unethical.

  217. Doug Indeap says

    In discussing the ticking-bomb hypothetical, Sam Harris wondered whether restraint in use of torture in such a case can be reconciled with our willingness to engage in war in the first place and thus accept the “collateral damage” that inevitably results. His query is if we’re willing to act in a way that guarantees the death and misery of many innocents (i.e., engage in war), why spare the rod with suspected terrorists in that war? With the bomb ticking, if there is even a small chance that torture would elicit information enabling us to prevent the death and misery of hundreds or thousands or more innocents, would it be immoral to employ torture? Would it be immoral not to? Note that the bit about a “small chance” accounts for the possibility, paramount in the minds of some here, that torture is not all that effective for getting good information. That consideration plainly complicates the ethical questions, but hardly resolves them.

  218. Anonymous says

    Jamie says, “Answer the question straight: are there some conceivable circumstances under which torture, just like murder, is ethically justifiable? I really can’t understand how anyone could say no.”

    This guy is a real class-act: racism-apologist and torture apologist! Jesus Christ, son. Sorry for the OT post, but is this guy just a troll or a sociopath?

  219. Jamie says

    Lying slimebag, I’m neither a racism-apologist nor a torture apologist — I’m what’s called a clear-thinker.

    I think torture can be used ethically in very special circumstances. For example, if Al Qaeda had nuclear weapons or were launching suicide bombing attacks every day, then it might be ethical to use torture to get information about them. The claim that the information yielded would very probably be unreliable is totally unsupported, and the arguments advanced to support it are really quite laughable. Of course telling a lie would get you temporary relief, but they would find out you were lying and the torture would resume.

    I didn’t apologize for racism either. All I said is that we shouldn’t react hysterically to the proposal that some races have higher average intelligence than others. If you think such discourse would be immoral or politically dangerous, explain why — don’t just hurl insults. If you think “scientific racism” has been proven false, then provide the citations instead of just calling people ignorant and stupid.

  220. Jamie says

    You people are truly crazy. You’re raving fundamentalists, completely dictated by your leftist ideology. You react wildly, like feral beasts, to mildly un-PC statements.

  221. Jamie says

    I hate to say this, but America seems to be completely and utterly fucked up when it comes to political ideology. On one hand you have bigots like Bill O’Reilly, and on the other you have the PC-fundamentalists who say they would prefer to allow a time-bomb to kill millions of people rather than torture one crazed terrorist. I would never get this kind of truly insane misrepresentation over here in Western Europe.

  222. says

    Jamie, are you proposing we create a statue that says “if we KNOW there is a bomb that WILL kill millions, and we KNOW that the person KNOWS it’s location, but we have no way of KNOWING it’s location unless we torture this person, THEN we may torture?”

    Because that’s not a torture policy is implemented today. It’s more like “You need some random info, so torture to get it.”

  223. brent says

    In discussing the ticking-bomb hypothetical, Sam Harris wondered whether restraint in use of torture in such a case can be reconciled with our willingness to engage in war in the first place and thus accept the “collateral damage” that inevitably results. His query is if we’re willing to act in a way that guarantees the death and misery of many innocents (i.e., engage in war), why spare the rod with suspected terrorists in that war?

    I just don’t think the question is as complicated as it would seem when we consider what actually happens in the real world. In the hypothetical, the situation is presented as one of binary opposition. One has the choice to torture or not and one choice leads to mass destruction whereas the other has at least some chance of stopping said destruction with minimal negative effect. When one considers the question in that context, there is certainly some room to argue about the proper course of action.

    The problem is that the scenario can only be constructed just so in order to create that ethical tension. In the real world, when we are talking about war on the one hand, there are some fairly large indicators of the possible right and wrong. If one’s name is not Bush or Cheney, then you probably believe that war ought to be a tool of last resort. Even knowing that innocents will probably suffer as the result of one’s action, in most wars which I think most of us would agree to fight, there is really no other reasonable alternative other than an acceptance of some other horrible result, like genocide, unchecked aggression etc. We try to react with war only when we know for certain there are no other alternatives and even then we try to act proportionally etc. I know a few are absolute pacifists and some are preemptive hawks, but most accept that war is just sometimes a necessary evil.

    The problem with the comparison to torture in the real world is that is never really the case. One can very carefully try to construct a scenario in which one has no other choice, but that scenario is always going to be pretty far fetched. In those “just so” constructions, I am always constrained in ways that I would never be in reality and I always have more knowledge of both the results of action and inaction than I would in reality. So I believe I have already answered this but in that far fetched scenario, depending upon how it is constructed, I would probably answer yes, go ahead and torture. I suppose there are some that would answer no. But the bottom line is that my answer tells me nothing about either what I think about the exigencies of war – I believe it is an entirely different sort of moral dilemma – or about torture in the real world – which is, for sure, nothing like Dirty Harry or NYPD Blue.

  224. Jamie says

    The problem with the comparison to torture in the real world is that is never really the case. One can very carefully try to construct a scenario in which one has no other choice, but that scenario is always going to be pretty far fetched.

    You keep going back to this theme, and you’re never making any sense. My response is two-fold.

    In the first place, even if the ticking time-bomb scenario were an impossibility, Sam Harris’ argument is still correct. By all means, dismiss his thought experiment as an irrelevancy — but don’t accuse him of being a torture apologist, and don’t call him a sick fuck. That was exactly the reaction here to my defense of what Harris said, and while you weren’t guilty of it yourself, I didn’t see you doing anything to distance yourself from this fanatical misrepresentation.

    Second, Harris may have done a good job raising our consciousness to the ethical legitimacy of torture under special circumstances. One reason is that we need to challenge taboos; we shouldn’t take even our closest moral convictions as seemingly God-given axioms. Another reason is that the threat of terrorism may be far graver in the future, as Harris effectively argues in his book. You flippantly remarked that we may also ride pink flying ponies in the future. You cannot for a second seriously believe that the Islamist threat is as improbable as pink flying ponies, so let’s not be silly.

  225. says

    …says it’s ethical to stand back and allow a million people get maimed instead of torturing a terrorist…

    I don’t understand why people are arguing about the efficacy and morality of torture when it is clear that impeachment, while it would not bring back the countless lives lost, is an ethical and civilized procedure, which would certainly save thousands, if not millions of lives from the carnage of protracted war and chaos, let alone the ticking time bomb of the threat of nuclear–oh; I see. Nobody here was advocating for the torture of the crooks and liars in charge.

    Liberals.

  226. Doug Indeap says

    If one accepts that torture can be justified in some circumstances, the question then becomes one of drawing the line. Different people would, naturally, draw the line in different places. Most would, I think, consider it justified, if ever, only in extreme, rare circumstances. How to meaningfully define those circumstances is tricky to say the least.

    There appear to be two ways to go about drawing the line–above or below the table. 1. Mindful of the difficulties, we could try to explicitly define circumstances appropriate for torture and devise ways to limit its use to those circumstances. It would be necessary to address concerns about the slippery slope and the possibility of mistakes–which inhere in various human institutions and practices. The law undertakes to draw lines in other difficult matters with varying degrees of success. 2. Alternatively, we could outlaw torture in all circumstances and implicitly expect/hope that individuals (Jack Bauer sorts) would recognize appropriately extreme circumstances when they see it, engage in torture in disregard or violation of the law (and either succeed or fail in obtaining helpful information), and then seek mercy (e.g., jury nullification) in our judicial system, yet stand ready to accept the consequences (e.g., conviction and sentencing).

    Some here have signaled a preference or at least acceptance of some version of the second approach. Some, though relatively few, seem attracted to the first approach. And others advocate a total ban on torture and profess not to want anyone, Jack Bauer types included, to cross that line ever no matter what the circumstances, risks, rewards, etc.

    Feelings obviously run high in this arena as well. Without giving the matter much thought, I have long placed myself in the camp opposed to torture across the board, while at the same time recognizing that I could imagine scenarios (realistic or not) that might push me over the line and noting that I saw something sinister or heroic in Jack Bauer types depending on my assessment of whether the circumstances justified their actions. As I’ve given this subject more thought recently, I’m finding it resists easy answers.

  227. says

    Lying slimebag, I’m neither a racism-apologist nor a torture apologist — I’m what’s called a clear-thinker.

    Only in the self-certified sense.

    In the first place, even if the ticking time-bomb scenario were an impossibility, Sam Harris’ argument is still correct.

    No it isnt.

    It only approaches correct when you have countless “ifs” as prior assumptions and is as realistic an approximation of circumstances where torture would be appropriate as saying when little green men from outer space land.

    Torture is not effective at gaining time-critical information and is morally wrong. Torturing a terrorist suspect on the grounds he may have information that he may release to you in time that it may allow you to stop an attack which may go ahead and kill others is insane.

    The whole argument only exists because America is so scared by the 2001 attack, and the Christian majority have demonised Muslims to such an extent inhuman treatment of them is acceptable.

    It is sad that people are so clearly aware of torture being morally wrong they wrap up the treatments with sanitised names and objectify the victims as alien monsters who deserve nothing less. The west is in the process of throwing away all the laws and values which differentiated it from cultures viewed as evil, dictatorial and inhumane.

  228. truth machine says

    In discussing the ticking-bomb hypothetical, Sam Harris wondered whether restraint in use of torture in such a case can be reconciled with our willingness to engage in war in the first place and thus accept the “collateral damage” that inevitably results. His query is if we’re willing to act in a way that guarantees the death and misery of many innocents (i.e., engage in war), why spare the rod with suspected terrorists in that war?

    This exhibits exactly what I said in #223, except that I’m not so sure that Harris misunderstands that his ticking-bomb hypothetical is not the sort of case in which terrorists are tortured in the real world. In fact I’m pretty sure that he does realize this, and intentionally uses extreme unrealistic scenarios to make real-world torture more palatable. Basically what we have here is an argument that, because it is conceivably acceptable to torture an evil person if it were the only possible way to save millions and it was guaranteed to work, there’s no reason to oppose the torture we actually do. The fact is that we have ample reasons to oppose the torture we actually do, and raising these hypotheticals is intellectually dishonest. Harris is not just indulging in theoretical philosophy: his arch antagonism to Muslims and his strong pro-Israeli stance drive these “speculations” of his.

    Also, the trolley problem provides an answer to Harris: collateral damage can be likened to pulling the switch resulting in fewer deaths, while torture is like throwing the man off the bridge. Folks like Harris try to weaken the moral intuition in the latter case by calling talking about terrorists instead of people.

  229. truth machine says

    You people are truly crazy. You’re raving fundamentalists, completely dictated by your leftist ideology. You react wildly, like feral beasts, to mildly un-PC statements.

    So whatcha gonna do about it, you sick fuck?

  230. John Phillips says

    Anyone who thinks torture is effective in anything other than extracting a previously conceived confession is living in cloud cuckoo or movie plot land. For those who argue for fanciful ‘ticking time bomb’ scenarios and the effectiveness of torture, I suggest you do the research, the information is out there and plentiful, both historical and modern. Then see if you are so ready to use it purely from a pragmatic point of view.

    Now personally, I am ex forces and abhor the very idea of torture under any circumstance, i.e. one of Jamie’s fundamentalists and proud of it. But even if I wasn’t, the very lack of utility, i.e. the fact that it just doesn’t work while making us the monsters, would make me reject it. I.e. once we go down the road of allowing torture, irrespective of the scenario envisaged, we have given up all pretence at holding the moral high ground. Seems strange saying that as I keep being told that us atheists don’t have a proper basis, such as the holy babble or similar, for our morality. But apparently we do, at least far more so than those in charge of your once great nation with their supposed god given moral compass.

  231. truth machine says

    I know a few are absolute pacifists and some are preemptive hawks, but most accept that war is just sometimes a necessary evil.

    It’s important to make a distinction between waging war and initiating war. International law says that initiating war is an immense crime, forbidden unless necessary to defend against an imminent threat.

  232. truth machine says

    Second, Harris may have done a good job raising our consciousness to the ethical legitimacy of torture under special circumstances. One reason is that we need to challenge taboos

    Ah yes, Harris and Jamie are challenging the taboo against torture, but they’re not sick fucks — right.

    We are perfectly capable of determining the ethical legitimacy of real cases of torture. The only one reason to raise the ethical legitimacy of torture “under special circumstances” is to try to transfer the acceptance of torture in the extreme case to less extreme cases. It’s not consciousness raising, it’s consciousness lowering.

    You cannot for a second seriously believe that the Islamist threat is as improbable as pink flying ponies, so let’s not be silly.

    This reveals Jamie’s true agenda. The reason to get us “fundamentalists”, us “feral beasts”, to acknowledge that torture is acceptable in some circumstance is to pave the way for torturing “Islamists”. Lucky Jamie, we’re already there.

  233. truth machine says

    Alternatively, we could outlaw torture in all circumstances

    Um, “we”, the civilized world, has done just that.

  234. truth machine says

    implicitly expect/hope that individuals (Jack Bauer sorts) would recognize appropriately extreme circumstances when they see it, engage in torture in disregard or violation of the law (and either succeed or fail in obtaining helpful information), and then seek mercy (e.g., jury nullification) in our judicial system, yet stand ready to accept the consequences (e.g., conviction and sentencing).

    Jack Bauer is a fictional vigilante thug with superhuman powers. I have no expectation that such a person can “recognize appropriately” anything, nor would “stand ready to accept the consequences”, and I don’t want anyone like that in the position where he can torture anyone. Really, you people watch too much TV and know too little about the real world.

  235. Dangerous Dan says

    Jaimie exclamed:

    The claim that the information yielded would very probably be unreliable is totally unsupported

    And then whined:

    You people are truly crazy. You’re raving fundamentalists, completely dictated by your leftist ideology. You react wildly, like feral beasts, to mildly un-PC statements.

    In a different topic, Glazius wrote:

    “Quaestiones sunt fallaces et inefficaces”. “Torture is deceptive and ineffectual”, from the “Directorum Inquisitorum”, composed by Nicholas Eyermich, chief inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, in the 14th century. Among Eyermich’s notable accomplishments is finding an end run about the Church’s prohibition on torturing a heretic more than once. Published in the 16th century with the advent of the printing press, it became in effect the field manual for inquisitors all over Europe.

    Several second of searching brought me to Legendary CIA Director William Colby: Torture is ineffective

    Are a Spanish Inquisitor and the former director of the CIA too left wing for you? More ignorant of torture than you?

    Jamie, your scenario seems only a little less far-fetched, arbitrary and unrealistic than one in which someone can save millions of lives by ripping out a terrorist’s eyeballs and raping the sockets. Does the remote possiblity that this act can save lives justify a policy of permitting it? Are you so far past the edge of the right wing that you think that there should be a policy for raping terrorists’ eyesockets, just because it is possible to construct a scenario in which that might save lives?

    If the agent on the scene is that convinced that torturing a terrorist suspect will save lives, he should be willing to take whatever punishment follows committing that crime.

    I can imagine that if I were the potential torturer in the scenario you proposed, I would consider using torture. I do, however have difficulty imagining being sufficiently confident that the information so aquired would be useful enough to justify the torture even on the minimal utilitarian scale.
    I still believe that no matter the utility, it is evil, immoral, illegal and unethical, but then again, I am aware that there are circumstances in which I may choose to do evil, immoral, illegal and unethical acts. Fortunatly, such circumstances have not yet occured.

    When police agencies in any country are allowed to use torture to extract information, torture is also used to extract confessions. This is a much simpler job than actually investigating, and so it gets used often.

  236. truth machine says

    Now personally, I am ex forces and abhor the very idea of torture under any circumstance, i.e. one of Jamie’s fundamentalists and proud of it.

    Ex forces? Why, you’re just a feral beast, completely dictated by your leftist ideology!

    If there weren’t already enough grounds for thinking that Jamie is an insane sick fuck, I think his outburst in #234 and #235 would seal the deal. Just who does he think he’s winning over?

  237. craig says

    Arguing that torture is sometimes justified can be summed up as arguing that “the ends justify the means” can be an ethical position to take.

    That has pretty much been universally rejected by civilized societies, and that attitude is behind things like the incarceration of Americans of Japanese ancestry in WWII, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, etc.

  238. craig says

    “You cannot for a second seriously believe that the Islamist threat is as improbable as pink flying ponies, so let’s not be silly.”

    To me, personally? Yes, it pretty much is. I stand a better chance of getting struck by lightning three times in a row while holding my winning 40 million dollar lottery ticket than I do of being personally harmed by an “Islamist.”

  239. John Phillips, FCD says

    TM: ironically, by US standards I would perhaps be labelled a commie by many as I am slightly left of centre in UK terms. I.e. compared to my position, even the Dems are probably right wing, while GWB and his cronies appear more and more like some out of control South American junta every day, in more ways than one. The only thing missing so far is the death squads operating on home soil. Then again, by all accounts, Haliburton seems more than well placed to supply the necessary manpower if required, as they have been getting plenty of practise in Iraq. Bit bleak? Perhaps, but when a supposedly democratic government uses semantics to enable and justify torture, what isn’t possible next. And thoughts like that alone should give pause to all those who try to justify the use of torture with their movie plot scenarios, even if the ethical quagmire of torture doesn’t give them pause. After all, once you have stepped over the line once, it becomes a lot easier each time after and it might be them apearing in the chair one day. But hey, the authorities will have made extra sure that they are truly dangerous before they torture them, won’t they?

  240. Kerry Maxwell says

    One thing I’ve gleaned from this discussion is that the show 24 must make you stupid. I knew there was a reason I never watched it.

  241. Doug Indeap says

    Also, the trolley problem provides an answer to Harris: collateral damage can be likened to pulling the switch resulting in fewer deaths, while torture is like throwing the man off the bridge. Folks like Harris try to weaken the moral intuition in the latter case by . . . talking about terrorists instead of people.

    While collateral damage can be likened to pulling the switch and torture likened to throwing the man off the bridge, that hardly answers the question Harris posed. Indeed, ethicists study the two hypotheticals for the very purpose of exploring why most people reach opposite conclusions about them even though they are identical insofar as the number of lives at stake. Some researchers have speculated that humans have two separate, overlapping ethical systems–one intuitive, developed from the long evolutionary experience of humans, and one rational, developed more recently in human history. Throwing the man triggers the former, but not the latter. Throwing the switch triggers the latter, but not the former.

    Observing and analyzing this interesting difference offers insights to our thinking, but does not settle what ultimately is “right” and why. It may be that those who would ban torture always are more in touch with their intuitive ethical system, while those who would accept torture in some circumstances are guided more by their rational ethical system.

    As for speculation about possible ulterior motives of Harris (or Jamie or others) in these discussions, I have little interest. I’d rather follow the actual discussion to some rational conclusion, than chase, to what end I don’t know, some speculation about what others really mean when they say something else.

  242. truth machine says

    While collateral damage can be likened to pulling the switch and torture likened to throwing the man off the bridge, that hardly answers the question Harris posed.

    If we have different moral intuitions about the two, that answers the question of whether our different attitudes toward the two can be reconciled. Sorry if you don’t grasp that.

    Indeed, ethicists study …

    Yes yes, as I noted, I cited the Trolley problem article way back in #77; I am well familiar with the issues and the work on it by people such as Mark Hauser. There’s no need to lecture me about something I understand very well.

    Observing and analyzing this interesting difference offers insights to our thinking, but does not settle what ultimately is “right” and why.

    “Ultimately”? Good grief. Go read Hauser’s “Moral Minds” and J.L. Mackie’s “Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong”.

  243. truth machine says

    It may be that those who would ban torture always are more in touch with their intuitive ethical system, while those who would accept torture in some circumstances are guided more by their rational ethical system.

    I would say instead that those who would accept torture are less well socialized and are seeking ways to justify their urge to do harm to their perceived enemies. The actual arguments they give in favor of torture, such as Jamie’s, are anything but rational.

  244. truth machine says

    Yes yes, as I noted, I cited the Trolley problem article way back in #77

    Oops, it was #76. And it was in regard to this very question. Sheesh.

  245. Jamie says

    Jamie, your scenario seems only a little less far-fetched, arbitrary and unrealistic than one in which someone can save millions of lives by ripping out a terrorist’s eyeballs and raping the sockets. Does the remote possiblity that this act can save lives justify a policy of permitting it?

    First of all, this “remote possibility” stuff is unsupported bullshit. It’s quite simple: torture is highly undesirable. Telling a lie to your torturers may get you temporary relief, but when they find out you were lying the torture would resume.

    Second, you’re not very intelligent. I specified that the bomb would not just kill, but maim also. This could easily cause greater suffering in the world than “ripping out a terrorist’s eyeballs”.

  246. Jamie says

    You idiots need to pull your heads out of your asses and realize that the world is a nasty place. Sometimes a lesser amount of suffering is the only alternative to a greater amount of suffering. You also need to cut it out with this “axiomatic” approach to moral questions. If you don’t allow any of your beliefs to be questioned you are, plainly and simply, a fundamentalist.

    It’s no good being a rational, reasonable person until it comes to sensitive moral questions or political ideology. Adopting such “partial rationality” results in a slippery slope, and it becomes hard to determine just how many of your ethical and political convictions are off-limits and immune to discussion.

  247. Jamie says

    Several second of searching brought me to Legendary CIA Director William Colby: Torture is ineffective

    Are a Spanish Inquisitor and the former director of the CIA too left wing for you? More ignorant of torture than you? Of course torture in the Spanish Inquisition (and more broadly, the whole Inquisition) was ineffective in obtaining true information. Generally the torturers wouldn’t relent until their victims admitted they were witches or minions of the Devil.

    The opinion of William Colby doesn’t prove anything. Is that the best you can do — cite the opinion of one man?

  248. truth machine says

    Second, you’re not very intelligent. I specified that the bomb would not just kill, but maim also. This could easily cause greater suffering in the world than “ripping out a terrorist’s eyeballs”.

    Talk about not very intelligent .. the bit about ripping out the terrorist’s eyeballs wasn’t about suffering, but about the dementia of anyone who would provide a moral justification for raping eyesockets.

  249. Jamie` says

    Talk about not very intelligent .. the bit about ripping out the terrorist’s eyeballs wasn’t about suffering, but about the dementia of anyone who would provide a moral justification for raping eyesockets.

    The guy who would let millions of people be maimed and killed rather than torture one terrorist has the temerity to accuse me of being demented? My irony meter just had an orgasm.

    I wasn’t the one who brought up the possibility of ripping out eyeballs. But I think it’s clear that when given different options, you take the one that will result in less suffering. I really don’t see what’s wrong about this. Clearly nothing is wrong with it; you’re just doing what you always do, which is rabidly setting upon anyone who breaches your politically correct creed.

  250. truth machine says

    The guy who would let millions of people be maimed and killed rather than torture one terrorist has the temerity to accuse me of being demented?

    Yes, that’s right, your a demented sick fuck for demanding that anyone torture anyone under any circumstance. You’re a mentally ill sociopath.

  251. truth machine says

    But I think it’s clear that when given different options, you take the one that will result in less suffering.

    As I’ve said quite a few times already, this implies that it is morally wrong not to torture an innocent man who isn’t giving up the information because his family will be killed if he does. You don’t respond to this because, in addition to being a sick fuck, you are deeply dishonest. And so, so, stupid that you can’t understand that utilitarian choices are not identical to moral choices. Your combined stupidity, mental illness, and arrogance makes you unable to comprehend why others might have different moral judgments than you, and all you can come up with to explain it is your idiotic charge about political correctness.

    ism is problematic as a source of morality.

  252. Jamie says

    So you’ve admitted that you would let millions of people — and in theory everyone in the whole world — undergo brutal maiming, just for the sake of upholding your inane axiomatic dogma. You are truly a despicable bag of nastiness and self-righteous shit. And despite your bluster, you are a stupid and unsubtle cretin who isn’t fooling anyone save a rabble of equally dense fundamentalists.

  253. Doug Indeap says

    Gentlemen, gentlemen, please,

    I’m having difficulty finding the real arguments among all the personal insults. Passion in discussion is great, but you’ve plainly pissed each other off to the point that passion is getting in the way of discourse. I’m neither the moderator here nor anyone’s nanny, but nonetheless I’ll query: Can you take deep breaths and get back to a civil discussion?

  254. says

    Kerry @254 and Truth Machine @255

    Hey! I like 24! I think it is a great series. I am, however, fully aware it is a complete work of fiction and no matter how “realistic” they try to make it look it is complete bollocks. In a similar vein, I don’t watch Start Trek and expect the Klingons to invade us any day soon.

    Jamie @ 260/261 (and loads of others)

    I see you have given up on any pretense of a reasonable argument. Your attitude towards torture is immature at best, and largely driven by an apparent conflation of fiction and reality.

    Your belief that the “lesser amount” of suffering is justified by the prevention of a greater amount is flawed because, outside of television, you have know prior knowledge that the greater amount will be prevented. You argument supports randomly detaining and torturing people on the grounds that their “lesser” suffering may prevent a greater suffering later down the line. If you cant see how your ideas for the acceptable use of torture are flawed (both morally and practically) then you really must hate living in the free world.

  255. mothra says

    Since Jamie lives in la la land, perhaps a la la land example will get through.

    In Star Wars, Episode IV, Darth walks into the cell and confronts Princess Leia. “And now we will discuss the location of the hidden rebel base.” He brings along a robotic sphere/ hypodermic/ truth serum. It does not work.

    She is brought up to the command center and Moff Tarkin. With Alderan in view, Tarkin says, “you would prefer a military target? Name the system.”

    “Datoone, they’re on Datoone.” She says with shattered look.

    “There, you see Lord Vader, she can be persuaded [turns to weapons officer] fire when ready.”

    You know the movie Jamie. Got the lesson yet? Torture does not produce reliable information. Torture requires depraved people, or produces depraved people. Torture recruits allies for whatever cause was used to justify it. Torture must ALWAYS be morally wrong.

  256. Doug Indeap says

    Okay, I’m suffocating in smug pronouncements unburdened by actual argument or analysis. Later dudes.

  257. Tulse says

    Sometimes a lesser amount of suffering is the only alternative to a greater amount of suffering.

    So if a terrorist said that he would set off a nuke unless you murdered your family, and you were certain that this were the case, you would agree to his demands? What if the victim demanded were the US President or the Pope? What if the requested victims were the local maternity ward? Surely the sacrifice of a few lives such as these versus millions is the lesser amount of suffering? Or are you not willing to go fully utilitarian?

  258. truth machine says

    Okay, I’m suffocating in smug pronouncements unburdened by actual argument or analysis.

    That and your post before it look like smug pronouncements, you arrogant and intellectually dishonest ass.

  259. truth machine says

    So you’ve admitted that you would let millions of people — and in theory everyone in the whole world — undergo brutal maiming, just for the sake of upholding your inane axiomatic dogma.

    And you have admitted that you would murder your own family and all your best friends if that would save a larger number of people.

  260. truth machine says

    I see you have given up on any pretense of a reasonable argument.

    He gave that up in his second post, when he referred to “any politically correct fundamentalists here”.

  261. Jamie says

    And you have admitted that you would murder your own family and all your best friends if that would save a larger number of people.

    No, I haven’t said anything even vaguely like that. You are a wretched liar.

  262. Jamie says

    You know the movie Jamie. Got the lesson yet? Torture does not produce reliable information. Torture requires depraved people, or produces depraved people. Torture recruits allies for whatever cause was used to justify it. Torture must ALWAYS be morally wrong.

    Star Wars? Is that what you morons have resorted to? Very scientific. You cannot prove your claim that torture is always unreliable. You can’t even specify how unreliable — is it wrong 50% of the time or less or more?. You don’t know. Admit you don’t know and fucking stand down.

  263. says

    Jamie:

    No, I haven’t said anything even vaguely like that.

    You really dont see this is the logical extension of your argument?

    Maybe you dont…

  264. says

    Jamie:

    You cannot prove your claim that torture is always unreliable. You can’t even specify how unreliable — is it wrong 50% of the time or less or more?

    You’re funny.

    Torture is unreliable because you dont know how often it is wrong. If it was wrong (for example) 50% of the time, that would be a reliable number to work with.

    Stop trolling.

  265. Jamie says

    Torture is unreliable because you dont know how often it is wrong. If it was wrong (for example) 50% of the time, that would be a reliable number to work with.

    You don’t have a clue. The truth is that you have absolutely no idea just how unreliable torture is. You don’t know if it works 90% of the time or 50% or what. There is no scientific evidence supporting your assertions.

    I think it’s quite obvious that torture is pretty reliable. When someone threatens to torture you if they find out you’re lying, you will be considerably less inclined to lie. If you’re going to make the counter-intuitive claim that torture is so unreliable that it can’t be useful, you’ll need evidence to back up your assertion. You don’t have any — not a single shred.

  266. Jamie says

    Some people here have said, in very explicit terms, that it is immoral to torture one individual even if that is the only way to save the world from (for example) Nazi conquest. You people are completely deranged by your ideology.

    You are a disgrace to liberalism. You are not liberals, you are airy-fairy idealists.

  267. says

    Jamie:

    You don’t have a clue. The truth is that you have absolutely no idea just how unreliable torture is. You don’t know if it works 90% of the time or 50% or what. There is no scientific evidence supporting your assertions.

    You’re still funny. In a crazy, mad-cat woman sort of way.

    Can you read? Do you know what “reliable” means?

    As for your weird idea about moral torture, well every one knows it is nonsense (as I suspect you do). It easy to test though:

    Would you rape and torture both your mother and father if it would save 100 children from being blown up?

  268. Jamie says

    Would you rape and torture both your mother and father if it would save 100 children from being blown up?

    How the fuck is this equivalent to torturing a crazed, murdering terrorist to save a million people? You are a thoroughly dishonest slimebag.

  269. says

    How the fuck is this equivalent to torturing a crazed, murdering terrorist to save a million people? You are a thoroughly dishonest slimebag.

    Ok, you really are 100% resistant to learning or admitting anything. I am sorry I was foolish and naive enough to think there was any value debating with you. I should have taken the hint from every one else and, hopefully, I will learn from this experience.

    Your supposed “utilitarian” ideals obviously breakdown and you view the sanctity of your parents are more important than the lives of 100 children – would you rape and torture your mother and father if it would prevent the Nazi’s taking over the world? You have no concept of “innocent until proven guilty” and appear to believe that your opinion is the final, global, benchmark of what is or isnt “right.” You seem to be unaware that before your hypothetical sadist begins the torture he has no idea how effective the information will be, and you seem to miss the point that if the only moral justification is that the information will save the zillions of people, if it doesn’t there is no justification. You really seem to miss what this says about the overall ethical value of torture.

    In all, you miss nearly every single issue about this debate. You constantly throw out childish scenarios which dont even have internal consistency.

    Well done. I was trolled. You win.

  270. says

    How the fuck is this equivalent to torturing a crazed, murdering terrorist to save a million people? You are a thoroughly dishonest slimebag.

    Because from what we can tell, your parents probably are crazed “terrorists”. After all, they produced a torture afficianado like you, and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

    Let’s be frank here, and cut the bullshit. There is one reason and one reason only why one human being tortures another, and that is the depraved sexual thrill they get out of inflicting pain and death upon others. All this trembly special pleading we see from torture fans trying to justify something that is every bit as patently inhuman as pedophilia is just so much handwaving. They are no different from their predecessors centuries ago who shoved needles and pokers into women’s genitals in search of the “witch’s mark”.

  271. says

    Hey! I like 24! I think it is a great series. I am, however, fully aware it is a complete work of fiction and no matter how “realistic” they try to make it look it is complete bollocks. In a similar vein, I don’t watch Start Trek and expect the Klingons to invade us any day soon.

    Actually the Vulcan Mind Meld would be more effective in real life than torture. Imitating Mr. Spock would only waste time. Imitating Torquemada would make things much worse.

  272. Ichthyic says

    Actually the Vulcan Mind Meld would be more effective in real life than torture.

    funny thing, but in the star trek universe the mind meld actually HAS been used as torture.

  273. mothra says

    @ Jamie. You are far worse than a mere concern troll. All we can hope for is that your immorality will eventually die with you (hopefully- for their [potential] sakes- you have no children). I specifically used the Star Wars Example because: 1) You used a Dirty Harry example to justify your point. 2) Others called you on this, 3) You objected to their criticisms, i.e defending the use of a movie example. So I gave you a counter example of the type that you have argued would be acceptable in this discussion and YOU revert to name calling and STILL did not address the argument.

  274. windy says

    Would you rape and torture both your mother and father if it would save 100 children from being blown up?

    How the fuck is this equivalent to torturing a crazed, murdering terrorist to save a million people?

    How do you know that the guy you are torturing really is a crazed, murdering terrorist?

    If he really is a terrorist, what if (he is convinced that) by blowing up a million people, he will save a billion people? Isn’t terrorism moral then?

  275. windy says

    “There, you see Lord Vader, she can be persuaded [turns to weapons officer] fire when ready.” You know the movie Jamie. Got the lesson yet? Torture does not produce reliable information.

    On the other hand, Sauron obtained reliable if soon outdated information by torturing Gollum. That must have been justified since the ultimate WMD was hidden in the Shire. Unfortunately the ragtag band of terrorists won out in the end, very disappointing.

  276. truth machine says

    “And you have admitted that you would murder your own family and all your best friends if that would save a larger number of people.”

    No, I haven’t said anything even vaguely like that. You are a wretched liar.

    But that’s a problem for you, you fool, because if you wouldn’t do that then your utilitarian “greater good” justification for torture falls apart. You can’t have it both ways — justify torturing terrorists to save a million people — but not justify torturing innocent people to save a million people. You would have to go beyond that and justify torturing terrorists per se.

  277. truth machine says

    Some people here have said, in very explicit terms, that it is immoral to torture one individual even if that is the only way to save the world from (for example) Nazi conquest. You people are completely deranged by your ideology.

    So it isn’t immoral to torture your mother, or a five year old, if that is the only way to save the world from (for example) Nazi conquest? That’s what you just said. And if that’s not what you meant, then you need an additional basis to justify the distinction among who can be tortured and who can’t.

    We aren’t deranged by any ideology, we just aren’t STUPID like you.

  278. brent says

    LOL. This thread is still going on? Look folks, it was a noble but always doomed venture.

    Jamie is what we technically refer to as a moron. I realized that days ago. He is either completely incapable or completely unwilling to understand and confront the ethical implications of his own arguments let alone anyone else’s. In retrospect, he stopped being even minimally coherent by about midway through his second post. I can’t see that there is any real value to continuing to “debate” him. He lacks either the honesty or the intelligence to participate in such a project. Hopefully, we will have a more fruitful public debate among our political representatives.

  279. Jamie says

    I can’t see that there is any real value to continuing to “debate” him. He lacks either the honesty or the intelligence to participate in such a project. Hopefully, we will have a more fruitful public debate among our political representatives.

    And of course you can’t point out what’s wrong with anything I’ve said. I am obviously right that it would be ethical to torture someone if that were the only way of saving a million people. All you can do is trot out the unsupported assertions.

  280. Jamie says

    If he really is a terrorist, what if (he is convinced that) by blowing up a million people, he will save a billion people? Isn’t terrorism moral then?

    I’ve already refuted this piece of idiocy. Taking your argument to its logical conclusion, the police shouldn’t be able to arrest criminals. (For if we can arrest people we think are criminals, it follows that neo-Nazis would be able to arrest whoever they think are criminals!)

  281. Jamie says

    @ Jamie. You are far worse than a mere concern troll. All we can hope for is that your immorality will eventually die with you (hopefully- for their [potential] sakes- you have no children). I specifically used the Star Wars Example because: 1) You used a Dirty Harry example to justify your point. 2) Others called you on this, 3) You objected to their criticisms, i.e defending the use of a movie example. So I gave you a counter example of the type that you have argued would be acceptable in this discussion and YOU revert to name calling and STILL did not address the argument.

    I mentioned Dirty Harry just to show that it’s possible to conceive of sitations in which torture is, by almost everyone’s agreement, a moral act. The guy who commits torture in that film is intended to be the hero, and viewers largely agree.

    Are you seriously trying to use Star Wars to prove that torture is unreliable? And seemingly with a straight face, you’re complaining about my ignoring you?

  282. windy says

    I’ve already refuted this piece of idiocy.

    It was your own argument in a different setting, so yes, I guess you did.

  283. Tulse says

    I am obviously right that it would be ethical to torture someone if that were the only way of saving a million people.

    And it would be ethical to wipe out a daycare centre if that were the only way of saving a million people. And it would be ethical to kill your own family if that were the only way of saving a million people. And it would be ethical to perform forced vivisection on children if such medical research were the only way of saving a million people.

    If not, explain the limits of your pure utilitarianism. Seriously, explain. Don’t pontificate or make references to imaginary characters from revenge-fantasy films — explain.

  284. windy says

    Tulse: that’s the same ‘piece of idiocy’ that Jamie already claims to have refuted. Strangely, I can’t seem to find that refutation either!

    Although people have commented on the futility of this discussion, I agree that it would be interesting to hear Jamie’s explanation. I suspect that pure utilitarianism is a mischaracterization…

  285. says

    Jamie, you really are the present that never stops giving. You should be part of a stage show comedy double act. Granted it may be a bit 1970 slapstick, but your inability to maintain a coherent argument is really funny.

    @300

    And of course you can’t point out what’s wrong with anything I’ve said. I am obviously right that it would be ethical to torture someone if that were the only way of saving a million people.

    Erm. No. Please go back and re-read all the posts which explain why this juvenile assumption is flawed.

    @301

    I’ve already refuted this piece of idiocy. Taking your argument to its logical conclusion, the police shouldn’t be able to arrest criminals.

    Erm. No. Again.

    First off you havent refuted the argument that following your assertions terrorism is moral (in fact most terrorists think it is moral). More importantly you have tried a false appeal to ridicule based on a false reductio ad absurdum.

    @302 – the real funny one.

    I mentioned Dirty Harry just to show that it’s possible to conceive of sitations in which torture is, by almost everyone’s agreement, a moral act. The guy who commits torture in that film is intended to be the hero, and viewers largely agree.

    Are you seriously trying to use Star Wars to prove that torture is unreliable?

    Wow. You really do have a loose grip on reality. Post 302 is your whole “argument” in a nutshell and the fact you have repeated it with an apparently straight face shows you haven’t read (or understood) anything any one has told you.

    Some things you may want to consider.

    1 – in Dirty Harry, you the viewer are aware of a godlike amount of information. Without this information the torture wouldn’t be judged ethical.
    2 – The torture in this turns out to be true, and you the viewer have enough extra information to know the answers are true and actionable.
    3 – It is a movie. Using it as an example of a “Moral” argument opens the doors for others to do the same.
    4 – You seem to think that because the results of an act turn out to be positive by your judgement, this means the act was ethical. You are unaware that when the act starts you have no way of knowing if the results will turn out to be the ones you want. This is one of the major flaws with using movies and tv as your moral compass.
    5 – If torturing a suspected criminal because he may have informatin which you may get him to tell you and may allow you to save lives then so are all the other examples people suggested and you ignored. If a terrorist told you that you had to peel the skin of your mother while she was still alive to prevent a nuclear bomb going off in every city in the US, would you do it? In fact, would you kill one child to save two others? The rationale is the same.

    Basically, and I dont mean to be too rude here, you seem to have the ethical standards of a teenager who has watched too many action/adventure films.

  286. Jamie says

    And it would be ethical to wipe out a daycare centre if that were the only way of saving a million people. And it would be ethical to kill your own family if that were the only way of saving a million people. And it would be ethical to perform forced vivisection on children if such medical research were the only way of saving a million people.

    Yes, I agree with all of that. You can hardly blame someone who acts so as to minimize human suffering. But given the reality of human selifishness, it’s perfectly understandable for someone to value the lives of their family more than a million strangers.

    First off you havent refuted the argument that following your assertions terrorism is moral (in fact most terrorists think it is moral).

    Sorry, nothing of the sort follows from my assertions. Amid the personal attacks and general vitriol, I could only discern the following argument against my position: We are not justified in torturing terrorists in order to achive what we think is the greater good, or else the terrorists should be able to practice torture in order to achieve what they think is the greater good. This assumes moral relativism, plain and simple. To see how practical it is, let’s substitute torturing terrorists for arresting criminals: “We are not justified in arresting criminals in order to achieve what we think is the greater good, or else criminals should be able to arrest us in order to achieve what they think is the greater good.”

    If a terrorist told you that you had to peel the skin of your mother while she was still alive to prevent a nuclear bomb going off in every city in the US, would you do it? In fact, would you kill one child to save two others? The rationale is the same.

    Assuming we could be certain the terrorist were not lying, then yes, it clearly would be ethical to comply with his demand. But selfishness is ineluctable in humans, and we could fully understand why someone would refuse to do it. (Torturing a sick terrorist isn’t remotely the same. As many people as you like would be willing to do the dirty work if a million lives were at stake.)

    Basically, and I dont mean to be too rude here, you seem to have the ethical standards of a teenager who has watched too many action/adventure films.

    I mentioned something in a movie in one post, and these crazed fundamentalists continue to harp on about it.

  287. Tulse says

    Wow. Jamie, I suppose I have to respect you for your consistency of principle, but you honestly believe it is just a numbers game? You really think that, for the greater good, innocent people should be subjected to pain and death against their will? Individuals have no rights, just uses? That goes against centuries of political thought, and is certainly anathema to the principles upon which the US was founded, but hey, at least you’re consistent.

    (And somehow I don’t think that the Dirty Harry audience would have been as sympathetic if Callahan had shot 12 toddlers in order to save 13, which your logic would demand.)

  288. Jamie says

    (And somehow I don’t think that the Dirty Harry audience would have been as sympathetic if Callahan had shot 12 toddlers in order to save 13, which your logic would demand.)

    Caricature. Sorry, but a million people versus one terrorist is hardly the same as 13 versus 12. Bare in mind that explosions also cause people to be maimed and suffer grievously (sometimes for the rest of their lives).

    I’ve deliberately avoided playing the “numbers game” all along. My interpretation of human suffering is flexible and open to debate. However, I don’t think it’s flexible enough to favour one murdering terrorist over a million people and their families.

  289. Jamie says

    I meant “bear, not “bare”. (The mob here have carefully furnished me with every charge of inadequacy under the Sun except illiteracy. I’ll not allow them the full complement.)

  290. windy says

    Wow. Jamie, I suppose I have to respect you for your consistency of principle, but you honestly believe it is just a numbers game? You really think that, for the greater good, innocent people should be subjected to pain and death against their will?

    Of course he doesn’t think that. You are only allowed to play the numbers game if you are doing it for the right cause. But if you do have the right ideology, you must do whatever it takes to stop Evil, including killing toddlers, spraying Agent Orange on civilians and peeling the skin off your own mom. Terrorists, Nazis and Communists are not allowed to play the numbers game, because they are Evil. You don’t have to worry about turning Evil as long as you torture and murder less people than the commies did. Easy!

    I’d actually respect a pure utilitarian a lot more.

  291. truth machine says

    Wow. Jamie, I suppose I have to respect you for your consistency of principle,

    He isn’t consistent at all; he rejected raping and torturing his mother and father to save 100 children, and claimed he didn’t say anything like “would murder your own family and all your best friends if that would save a larger number of people”.

    And the hypocritical twit talks about “amid the personal attacks and general vitriol”, when his second post here asserted that anyone who disagrees with him is a deluded politically correct fundamentalist.

    Jamie is ethically challenged on every level.

  292. truth machine says

    My interpretation of human suffering is flexible and open to debate. However, I don’t think it’s flexible enough to favour one murdering terrorist over a million people and their families.

    In other words, Jamie’s ethical rule is “whatever I think is right is right, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a politically correct fundamentalist”. He’s got the intellectual depth of a turnip.

  293. truth machine says

    “If a terrorist told you that you had to peel the skin of your mother while she was still alive to prevent a nuclear bomb going off in every city in the US, would you do it? In fact, would you kill one child to save two others? The rationale is the same.”

    Assuming we could be certain the terrorist were not lying, then yes, it clearly would be ethical to comply with his demand.

    Aside from how diseased this utilitarian thinking is, Jamie seems incapable of recognizing that making the assumption would itself be immoral.

    Torturing a sick terrorist isn’t remotely the same.

    How about torturing a sick Jamie? He uses that word but seems to have no idea what it means; for him, it’s just a label he can slap on someone to justify torturing them. “sick terrorists” aren’t remotely the same; they deserve torture, in Jamies’s eyes.

  294. Jamie says

    Of course he doesn’t think that. You are only allowed to play the numbers game if you are doing it for the right cause. But if you do have the right ideology, you must do whatever it takes to stop Evil, including killing toddlers, spraying Agent Orange on civilians and peeling the skin off your own mom. Terrorists, Nazis and Communists are not allowed to play the numbers game, because they are Evil. You don’t have to worry about turning Evil as long as you torture and murder less people than the commies did. Easy!

    I didn’t mention communists, so cease lying. As for terrorism and Nazism: yes, I truly believe those things are wrong (although I don’t like the word “evil”). The terrorists and Nazis believe that liberal democracy is wrong — are they just as right as I am? If you think so, consider that some serial murderers, in their twisted vision, think they are doing right. Does this mean we shouldn’t do anything to stop them (for what moral authority tells us that we are right and they are wrong)? No, of course it means nothing like that.

    He isn’t consistent at all; he rejected raping and torturing his mother and father to save 100 children, and claimed he didn’t say anything like “would murder your own family and all your best friends if that would save a larger number of people”.

    No, scumbag, don’t put words in my mouth. I said I wouldn’t commit that act out of personal selfishness, which I can’t help. I am a limited being, and I cannot be expected to always do what I feel is right.

    “sick terrorists” aren’t remotely the same; they deserve torture, in Jamies’s eyes.

    Despicable little lying slimey shit, aren’t you? I didn’t say anything of the sort. I wouldn’t torture anyone, even a serial murderer, unless there were pressing need to do so.

  295. says

    Jamie:

    Assuming we could be certain the terrorist were not lying

    This is a major flaw. You need to make assumptions before you can judge the ethical validity of the act. You have no idea, and Callahan really would have had no idea, of the outcome until after the act.

    I find it interesting that now you have had time to realise your position was inconsistent (at best) you have decided you would be happy to torture your mother to save the world.

    As an aside, why would it be wrong to kill 12 children if it saved 13 but not to kill 12 if it saved a million. Where is the turning point?

  296. says

    Jamie,

    The terrorists and Nazis believe that liberal democracy is wrong — are they just as right as I am? If you think so, consider that some serial murderers, in their twisted vision, think they are doing right. Does this mean we shouldn’t do anything to stop them (for what moral authority tells us that we are right and they are wrong)?

    This is more of a problem for your brand of ethics than other peoples.

    You determine that doing what you think is right and good allows the use of any means to reach your goal. This requires the assumption that everything you believe to be “good” is good.

    Others are saying that doing something wrong is wrong no matter what the goal is. This doesn’t require a value judgement of the goal it requires a value judgement of the act.

    Do you think, independent of the outcome, torture is wrong?

  297. truth machine says

    “He isn’t consistent at all; he rejected raping and torturing his mother and father to save 100 children, and claimed he didn’t say anything like “would murder your own family and all your best friends if that would save a larger number of people”.

    No, scumbag, don’t put words in my mouth. I said I wouldn’t commit that act out of personal selfishness, which I can’t help.

    In other words, even though you wouldn’t do it due to personal selfishness, you consider it morally wrong to not murder your own family and all your best friends if that would save a larger number of people (make it a billion).

    Let’s again make this clear: as a selfish person, you could not bring yourself to do what you believe is morally right, namely to murder your own family and all your best friends if it would save a billion people. That to not murder all these innocent people would be morally wrong. And you cannot even imagine why others might not agree with such radical utilitarianism.

    Me, I consider torture to be a moral wrong. But I concede that, being a weak human being, I might torture a terrorist if I had an excellent reason to think it would save a billion people. But then, I’m not some moron who confuses utility with morality.

  298. truth machine says

    “sick terrorists” aren’t remotely the same; they deserve torture, in Jamies’s eyes.

    Despicable little lying slimey shit, aren’t you? I didn’t say anything of the sort. I wouldn’t torture anyone, even a serial murderer, unless there were pressing need to do so.

    But clearly you would be quicker to torture a “sick terrorist” than an innocent person, even if the number of people saved would be the same, because … the “sick terrorist” is more deserving of torture.

  299. Jamie says

    But clearly you would be quicker to torture a “sick terrorist” than an innocent person, even if the number of people saved would be the same, because … the “sick terrorist” is more deserving of torture.

    Yes, I would be much more willing to torture a terrorist than an innocent person, just as I’d be much more willing to kill a terrorist than an innocent person. I think most people would agree with me.

  300. says

    Is that a convicted terrorist – someone who has been found guilty in a court after consideration of evidence – or just someone you think is a terrorist?

  301. Jamie says

    Is that a convicted terrorist – someone who has been found guilty in a court after consideration of evidence – or just someone you think is a terrorist?

    I’m not the faith-head here. Where have I suggested not going by the evidence?

  302. says

    In not one of your examples have you implied due process has taken place.

    Am I right in thinking your ticking time bomb scenario allows enough time to gather evidence which will convince a properly convened court of law as to the terrorists guilt and involvement before the waterboarding and testicle-electrodes begin?

  303. truth machine says

    Yes

    Contradicting your previous “I didn’t say anything of the sort”.

    Some people think that no one is more deserving of torture than anyone else, regardless of what they have done.