In the case of abortion, I'll grudgingly admit that reasonable people can differ, at least in cases of rape or incest; in life-of-the-mother cases (pregnancy in

In the case of abortion, I'll grudgingly admit that reasonable people can differ, at least in cases of rape or incest; in life-of-the-mother cases (pregnancy in the Fallopian tube), the other side might even be right. But on torture? I'm not willing to make any concession to people who think that hanging a Japanese general for waterboarding US soldiers is fine, while leaving a US president entirely unpunished for waterboarding actual and suspected terrorists is not fine. Either we owe the Axis (and especially that general's heirs) some enormous apologies, or we need a few trials of a certain past political administration. I tend be a fan of bright lines in general. If you don't know that some things are wrong (and, therefore, that any line of reasoning that leads to them has a problem with it somewhere), how do you know when you've gone astray?