re: #24 Obdicut

There is never a time you can know that torture is the right solution. Ever.

And you know this, because you’ve done all possible experiments and considered all possible scenarios?

All you can really say is that most, or very nearly all, instances where it might seem at first that torture would serve and nothing else would, are cases of being mistaken as to the facts. Some other means of interrogation would work better. Your torture would elicit only desperate lies, and not the truth. Etc. etc.

It is very difficult to logically rule out, in advance, all possibilities. What if you have an encrypted message, in hand, with the answer you need, if only you could decrypt it. You ask for the key. You will be able to distinguish desperate lies from the truth: the real key will decrypt the file.

I am NOT advocating for torture as policy. It attracts sickos. It hurts our reputation. (My observation that there can be instances where it is morally necessary seems to be hurting mine.) It looks like an answer in many situations where it’s not.

My guess is that if the guy making the call knows he will die for making it, there won’t be many frivolous uses of torture. Lesser penalties, for that matter, ought to suffice to make the point that this is no tool for anything but the most dire of emergencies.

But you are overly confident of your thinking, to imagine that you have taken into account everything that might ever come up, and reasoned through it all, and you know that there can never, ever, be a case where torture would demonstrably offer far better chances of averting a colossal disaster than would any other approach.

Drawing bright red lines around secondary moral issues elevates to primary importance moral rules that in the final analysis are corollaries to the first-principles rules. This is why, in both Judaism and Christianity, the Sabbath may be broken if lives are at stake, for instance. Both faiths have come to grips with this necessity to distinguish top priorities from secondary.

I’m arguing in the same spirit. Rule 1: a human shall not murder another human, nor (various qualifications about risk and feasibility now enter; there is a lot of fine print) idly stand by and just watch it happen when intervening would have been easy enough.

Rule 2: Rule 1 takes priority.

Rules 3—-(whatever).