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This would be fine and dandy and all part of an exciting narrative if not for the fact that torture in the real world is incredibly unreliable. Top Google resul

by Uhhrrr 7y ago

This would be fine and dandy and all part of an exciting narrative if not for the fact that torture in the real world is incredibly unreliable. Top Google results are mostly politicized so here's Wikipedia on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_torture_for_interrogation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_torture_for_i...

Ididntdothis 7y ago
Even if torture worked it still is immoral. It really doesn’t matter how effective it is.
- tyre 7y ago
  immoral now, but not so definitively unethical. If one person were tortured to save the lives of 100, is that unethical. Possibly, but also possibly not. The classic thought experiment around this is the trolley problem, where murdering innocents can save more lives than non-action.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    I don’t really like this example. Has there ever been a situation where things were things were so urgent that torturing somebody was the only option? I doubt it. And if torture is so useful why only apply it to foreigners and not criminals at home?
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    The problem with trolley problems (and utilitarianism in general) is that they assume a degree of foresight that rarely exists in the real world. You know there are more lives at risk on path A than path B, and you know that pressing a button will reliably allow you to choose between them. None of this obtains in the torture case. Suppose you learn with certainty there is a bomb somewhere on Main Street, and you capture X, the evil bomber, with only 10 minutes to go. You want X to give you the exact location, because you don't have time to evacuate the whole street. So you torture X...but what if he just gives you the wrong location? It will take you several minutes to check it out, and while you're doing so, the bomb goes off. You've failed. Even when you know for sure that the torture subject has the information you want there is delay between getting an answer and verifying it. In any ticking clock scenario the original malefactor can build in a plan for a diversion or the equivalent o a warrant canary to warn co-conspirators. So what do you do? Send someone to check but act like you don't believe them and keep torturing X anyway? X knows it will take non-zero time to validate any answer and can structure the evil plot to take account of that. If you keep torturing X, you might just get a second decoy, plus there's now a strong argument that you're just doing it because you like it, and have picked a job which provides you with the excuse of necessity. And ticking-clock-with-captured-terrorist scenarios are so rare in reality as to be nonexistent. Almost invariably torture is deployed either to terrorize people or to fish for information which the subject might or might not have. Generally, if prisoners won't supply the information an interrogator desires, they don't have it; and if they do have it, they're sufficiently strong-willed to withstand the torture. In a good many cases, the fact of torture motivates them to hold out, because it validates their moral opposition to a power that tortures people in the first place.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  That sort of segues into my counter to Machiavelli's 'end justifies the means'. Which is what if the means are the ends? You want to live in a world where you get tortured if the cops think you aren't being helpful enough? Or maybe they do it as a matter of policy? Yeah no.
- Uhhrrr 7y ago
  It is not immoral to depict torture, though. It is, however, immoral to tell people that it works, because that could lead people to try it out.
- goatlover 7y ago
  Depends on whether one is a consequentialist, and the good outweighs the bad.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    I have never heard of anything good coming from torture. The only thing I know of is that you are quickly losing your moral standing.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- dntbnmpls 7y ago
  > Even if torture worked it still is immoral. You write that as if it is an indisputable law of nature. It's been debated in philosophy/ethics forever. Like most controversial ethical issues, it's unsettled at best. > It really doesn’t matter how effective it is. Many would disagree. If proven effective, you could easily argue it is moral to torture an evil-doer to save the lives of many. Life isn't black and white. It's a lot of gray. You are free to believe what you want, but I just don't like the absolute moralizing - especially when it comes to controversial topics.
  - sgt101 7y ago
    >Many would disagree. If proven effective, you could easily argue it is moral to torture an evil-doer to save the lives of many. Neither of these things are an actual argument. Just because some people disagree it does not make a fact untrue. Just because you can argue something does not make that arguement correct. The argument that many good lives would be saved is defeated by the fact that a society that tortures people is making a mockery of human dignity and the values that can underpin human happiness. When one person can be tortured for extreme need, soon anyone can be tortured for any reason. There are countless examples of this kind of slippage, from the terrors in France and Russia to the use of extreme surveillance by local authorities in the UK (to determine if school places should be allocated). How can anyone be happy when they might be taken and tortured at any moment? How can the preservation of people in terror be a goal to be accomplished by an intrinsically evil act. We are defined by how we dispense mercy and compassion, that is what makes society worth preserving.
squeaky-clean 7y ago
This is literally the articles point. > “Evidence suggests that torture does not work, but media often show that it does,” Kearns said.
- jessriedel 7y ago
  The only thing mention in the article is that torture can lead to false confessions, which are undesirable but very far from showing that torture is not effective on net. What's the best citation for ineffectiveness?
  - XorNot 7y ago
    The CIA engaged in a sustained campaign of black site torture under Bush and the subsequent report found that they obtained no actionable intelligence from "enhanced interrogation". They did get some intelligence - from conventional interrogation and debriefing of prisoners.
devit 7y ago
The problems seem to be that the person may not know the information and the information may not be easy to verify. Wouldn't that make torture potentially effective in cases without those issues, such as torturing someone to get them to reveal a password to an encrypted device that you know they use daily?
- XorNot 7y ago
  Not if they have a deniable secondary volume set up. Or only encrypted a partition (which you can't mathematically prove its actually data and not just empty space). People have been arrested and held because they had Truecrypt installed but never actually used it. Basically if you decrypt the device what are you looking for? What if you don't find it?
- tropo 7y ago
  Yes, and it is often effective even with those issues. Suppose you know facts A, B, C, and D. You want to know E. You ask about all 5 facts. You can verify 4 out of 5, but you don't reveal that. After getting the 5 answers, you trust fact E if the other facts are verified. If not, torture, but don't reveal how exactly you are sure about lying, and then try again.
  - XorNot 7y ago
    If you don't already know E, then how are you going to verify it? How do you even know they know it? Given that they don't want to tell you E in the first place, how many of the hundreds of answers they'll scream at you are you going to be able to follow up on?
    - winstonewert 7y ago
      The point is that you verify A, B, C, and D. If they are telling you the truth about those, they are probably also truthful about E. They could only effectively lie about E if they knew that was the one thing you couldn't verify.
      - 7y ago

by Uhhrrr 7y ago

Ididntdothis 7y ago

Even if torture worked it still is immoral. It really doesn’t matter how effective it is.

tyre 7y ago
immoral now, but not so definitively unethical. If one person were tortured to save the lives of 100, is that unethical. Possibly, but also possibly not. The classic thought experiment around this is the trolley problem, where murdering innocents can save more lives than non-action.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I don’t really like this example. Has there ever been a situation where things were things were so urgent that torturing somebody was the only option? I doubt it. And if torture is so useful why only apply it to foreigners and not criminals at home?
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  The problem with trolley problems (and utilitarianism in general) is that they assume a degree of foresight that rarely exists in the real world. You know there are more lives at risk on path A than path B, and you know that pressing a button will reliably allow you to choose between them. None of this obtains in the torture case. Suppose you learn with certainty there is a bomb somewhere on Main Street, and you capture X, the evil bomber, with only 10 minutes to go. You want X to give you the exact location, because you don't have time to evacuate the whole street. So you torture X...but what if he just gives you the wrong location? It will take you several minutes to check it out, and while you're doing so, the bomb goes off. You've failed. Even when you know for sure that the torture subject has the information you want there is delay between getting an answer and verifying it. In any ticking clock scenario the original malefactor can build in a plan for a diversion or the equivalent o a warrant canary to warn co-conspirators. So what do you do? Send someone to check but act like you don't believe them and keep torturing X anyway? X knows it will take non-zero time to validate any answer and can structure the evil plot to take account of that. If you keep torturing X, you might just get a second decoy, plus there's now a strong argument that you're just doing it because you like it, and have picked a job which provides you with the excuse of necessity. And ticking-clock-with-captured-terrorist scenarios are so rare in reality as to be nonexistent. Almost invariably torture is deployed either to terrorize people or to fish for information which the subject might or might not have. Generally, if prisoners won't supply the information an interrogator desires, they don't have it; and if they do have it, they're sufficiently strong-willed to withstand the torture. In a good many cases, the fact of torture motivates them to hold out, because it validates their moral opposition to a power that tortures people in the first place.
Gibbon1 7y ago
That sort of segues into my counter to Machiavelli's 'end justifies the means'. Which is what if the means are the ends? You want to live in a world where you get tortured if the cops think you aren't being helpful enough? Or maybe they do it as a matter of policy? Yeah no.
Uhhrrr 7y ago
It is not immoral to depict torture, though. It is, however, immoral to tell people that it works, because that could lead people to try it out.
goatlover 7y ago
Depends on whether one is a consequentialist, and the good outweighs the bad.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I have never heard of anything good coming from torture. The only thing I know of is that you are quickly losing your moral standing.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
dntbnmpls 7y ago
> Even if torture worked it still is immoral. You write that as if it is an indisputable law of nature. It's been debated in philosophy/ethics forever. Like most controversial ethical issues, it's unsettled at best. > It really doesn’t matter how effective it is. Many would disagree. If proven effective, you could easily argue it is moral to torture an evil-doer to save the lives of many. Life isn't black and white. It's a lot of gray. You are free to believe what you want, but I just don't like the absolute moralizing - especially when it comes to controversial topics.
- sgt101 7y ago
  >Many would disagree. If proven effective, you could easily argue it is moral to torture an evil-doer to save the lives of many. Neither of these things are an actual argument. Just because some people disagree it does not make a fact untrue. Just because you can argue something does not make that arguement correct. The argument that many good lives would be saved is defeated by the fact that a society that tortures people is making a mockery of human dignity and the values that can underpin human happiness. When one person can be tortured for extreme need, soon anyone can be tortured for any reason. There are countless examples of this kind of slippage, from the terrors in France and Russia to the use of extreme surveillance by local authorities in the UK (to determine if school places should be allocated). How can anyone be happy when they might be taken and tortured at any moment? How can the preservation of people in terror be a goal to be accomplished by an intrinsically evil act. We are defined by how we dispense mercy and compassion, that is what makes society worth preserving.

squeaky-clean 7y ago

This is literally the articles point. > “Evidence suggests that torture does not work, but media often show that it does,” Kearns said.

jessriedel 7y ago
The only thing mention in the article is that torture can lead to false confessions, which are undesirable but very far from showing that torture is not effective on net. What's the best citation for ineffectiveness?
- XorNot 7y ago
  The CIA engaged in a sustained campaign of black site torture under Bush and the subsequent report found that they obtained no actionable intelligence from "enhanced interrogation". They did get some intelligence - from conventional interrogation and debriefing of prisoners.

devit 7y ago

The problems seem to be that the person may not know the information and the information may not be easy to verify. Wouldn't that make torture potentially effective in cases without those issues, such as torturing someone to get them to reveal a password to an encrypted device that you know they use daily?

XorNot 7y ago
Not if they have a deniable secondary volume set up. Or only encrypted a partition (which you can't mathematically prove its actually data and not just empty space). People have been arrested and held because they had Truecrypt installed but never actually used it. Basically if you decrypt the device what are you looking for? What if you don't find it?
tropo 7y ago
Yes, and it is often effective even with those issues. Suppose you know facts A, B, C, and D. You want to know E. You ask about all 5 facts. You can verify 4 out of 5, but you don't reveal that. After getting the 5 answers, you trust fact E if the other facts are verified. If not, torture, but don't reveal how exactly you are sure about lying, and then try again.
- XorNot 7y ago
  If you don't already know E, then how are you going to verify it? How do you even know they know it? Given that they don't want to tell you E in the first place, how many of the hundreds of answers they'll scream at you are you going to be able to follow up on?
  - winstonewert 7y ago
    The point is that you verify A, B, C, and D. If they are telling you the truth about those, they are probably also truthful about E. They could only effectively lie about E if they knew that was the one thing you couldn't verify.
    - 7y ago