I know how to read. The concept I am criticizing in your argument is "data". And I am saying that taking a statistical approach to these questions is misguided.

I know how to read. The concept I am criticizing in your argument is "data". And I am saying that taking a statistical approach to these questions is misguided. "Maybe if it would save 1000 lives per month? Or one million lives per month? I suspect you don't have any hard data on the impact of torture." I didn't say you were advocating torture either. I am trying to show by example that this decision calculus can be used to justify all kinds of evil nonsense, torture being one example. You can always generate counterfactuals of this form to justify anything... so this method of justification is meaningless. I don't know why you believe that we are not talking about torture. Maybe you don't know that you are presenting a family-based reformulation of the exact same ticking time bomb scenario used by Alan Dershowitz to justify torture. You are reusing these arguments, so maybe you should think about exactly what these arguments have justified in the last ten years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticking_time_bomb_scenario http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticking_time_bomb_scenario It's true, though, that you are not talking about torture per se. What you are talking about is weighing some count of human lives against a moral imperative not to do some evil thing. Torture usually stands in for that evil thing because up until very recently, everyone agreed that it was so evil that the kind of weighing you are talking about would not be countenanced. Let me tell a story that may explain what I am getting at. In 1984 (the year), a feminist named Carol Cohn went to a military school to learn about strategic nuclear concepts like mutually assured destruction, first strike, credible second strike, counterforce weapons, etc. What she found was that as she became immersed in that world, she learned to make similar kinds of artificial weighings of the destruction of cities against the loss of second strike capability. The decision calculus she learned to use allowed her to think about nuclear weapons in terms of numbers and geography rather than in terms of human life ("collateral damage"). "If I was unable to speak my concerns in the language, more disturbing still was that I also began to find it harder even to keep them in my own head. No matter how firm my commitment to staying aware of the bloody reality behind the words, over and over, I found that I could not keep human lives as my reference point. I found that I could go for days speaking about nuclear weapons, without once thinking about the people who would be incinerated by them." http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl07aa.shtml http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl07aa.shtml (the whole article) I suggest you should not be acquiring "data" at all on this question. The only things the data could tell you would be artificial and dehumanized.