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This is the kind of stuff that probably makes some people’s job down the pipe easier and at the same time undermines the Western civilization. Make no mistake,

by mrtksn 5y ago

This is the kind of stuff that probably makes some people’s job down the pipe easier and at the same time undermines the Western civilization. Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. The exact same goes for the surveillance programs. Losing the moral high ground degrades the whole society. The whole anti establishment movement rallies around stuff like this. The lefties and the right-wingers will be after different things but they will be able to come together on the hypocritical stance and corruption of the current system. It unites enemies against you who think that the most important thing is to bring down the current horrible governance and figure out things later.

adamsmith143 5y ago
Is it possible for you to construct a scenario where torture is morally acceptable? E.g. you have a virtual certainty that a dirty bomb is going to be detonated in NYC and will kill 1M+ and potentially irradiate the city for decades. Is torturing one person who you know with certainty knows the location of the bomb defensible? Basically, how many lives would you be willing to sacrifice to prevent the suffering of a single person?
- defen 5y ago
  Do we have any evidence that torture actually works? That the person being tortured will tell accurate information? Basically do we have any examples of this sort of situation, where there was an imminent threat to life and people were saved due to torture?
  - throwawaymanbot 5y ago
  - adamsmith143 5y ago
    >Basically do we have any examples of this sort of situation, where there was an imminent threat to life and people were saved due to torture? In the made up scenario you could make a case that even if there is a low probability of torture working, the scale of lives saved would make it worth it. A 20% chance of saving 1M people is still net +200k lives.
  - dls2016 5y ago
    > Do we have any evidence that torture actually works? Most evidence points the other direction. > Finally, an exhaustive 2014 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence analyzed millions of internal CIA documents related to the torture of terrorism suspects, concluding that “the CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” It adds that “multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-rsquo-ve-known-for-400-years-that-torture-doesn-rsquo-t-work/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-rsquo-ve-known... https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CRPT-113srpt288.pdf https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publ...
- Sharlin 5y ago
  Absolute certainty that the victim has the information you want is a pretty high bar to clear. Philosophical thought experiments notwithstanding, some things are best regarded as deontologically forbidden in practice, no matter how consequentialist one leans otherwise.
- Loughla 5y ago
  This is a good moral question, and really is going to come down to personal belief. I absolutely do not believe governments should be able to torture someone, for any reason, regardless of the consequences. It has less to do with the suffering of a single person, and more with the constant and consistent scope creep that enters every government program coupled with the ability for any and all governments to be full of faceless, and therefore blameless, bureaucrats. Torture to save 1 million people today becomes torture to save 10 people tomorrow. If no one can be held accountable, then it becomes torture to stop a robbery instead of genocide. If you let your morals slip once, you are an immoral society. Like it or lump it. Edit to clarify: I am 100% anti-torture in any situation. I didn't think that needed clarification?
  - shapefrog 5y ago
    Is it not already a moral slip to allow those 1 million people to die in a fireball to save the 1 person from torture?
    - bluesign 5y ago
      What is the threshold, what about saving 1 person from dying ?
      - Ekaros 5y ago
        Or potentially saving someone from torture?
    - pmoriarty 5y ago
      "Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth." -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
    - 5y ago
- sdoering 5y ago
  In the end, what you are asking comes down to some form of the "Trolley Problem" [0]. The critique towards the Trolley Problem can be directed towards your (very) hypothetical scenario as well: > In a 2014 paper published in the Social and Personality Psychology Compass, researchers criticized the use of the trolley problem, arguing, among other things, that the scenario it presents is too extreme and unconnected to real-life moral situations to be useful or educational. I can't say, how I would react in a given situation. I don't know, if I could torture/kill one (or a few) for the survival (or a better chance of survival) of a larger group. Because in the end one would have to ask were to draw the line. From a strictly utilitarian point of view killing one person to secure the survival of two others is a net positive outcome. But it feels morally more than wrong. Where to draw the line. 1 against 50? Against 1000? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
  - adamsmith143 5y ago
    > From a strictly utilitarian point of view killing one person to secure the survival of two others is a net positive outcome. But it feels morally more than wrong. Well of course all sorts of definitive truths feel unintuitive or wrong to humans, perhaps that's just a limitation of our brains. From this utilitarian pov the net positive outcome is the morally correct one.
    - sdoering 5y ago
      Is there something like a "definitive truth"? Being an atheist, I would say, that this is an overly simplistic view. But that would be my personal take on that. Utilitarianism isn't a rational choice. What if - in my extreme example, one of the two surviving people would have been Hitler? Or even less dramatic, still contrived: What if the person being killed would go on and invent a cure against cancer? You can't predict the future and these contrived examples only show, that (probably) every theory/philosophy can be brought to its knees by going to its extreme conclusions. So how to quantify "value"? How do we calculate the consequences of our decisions? We can't imho.
      - 5y ago
- mrtksn 5y ago
  No not really. Dirty bombs and people motivated to detonate one don't spontaneously appear in New York or anywhere. It always has a prelude, some kind of injustice(perceived or real) by you towards a community(drone strike school children bus kind of stuff) that you fail to exterminate and they come back to you. Fixing terrorism by more surveillance, torture, less rights might delay the detonation of a dirty bomb but since the core issue remains nothing is solved. Besides, there are very effective techniques against information extraction through torture, like dividing organisations into cells. IMHO, if it comes to torture 1 person to save 1M+ people there's likely to be another person who you will fail to catch and that person will take down the 1M+. I don't believe that the scenario of torturing 1 person and saving 1M+ exists beyond games and movies. After years of torture, dronning and gunning people, the US left Afghanistan and people were falling from the skies when trying to run away. Did you miss that? Why do you think that torture can be an effective tool?
- catchclose8919 5y ago
  ...maybe "information extraction" and "torture" are not exactly the same thing? Extracting valid information from hardened bad guys would probably work better by using other means than physical pain (eg. threaten wiping out their family or close ones, drugs + yes-no questions under and MRI brain activity scanner etc. etc.), pain and brutality applied to people already crazy and quasi-suicidal to begin with would only give you a mix of nonsense, lies and irrelevant infos that you'll not be able to separate well and fast enough to figure out how to prevent that bomb from going. I mean, you're probably not torturing average-Joe working-in-an-office with 2.5 kids and a white fence house :)
- pessimizer 5y ago
  A typical scenario for this question, but not a good one. There's no reason for torture to work on this person, you have no timely way of verifying what they're saying, and you're going to hurt/kill them whether or not they give you the answer. They're just going to lie to you. What you have to do is credibly threaten to torture or kill their family members and loved ones, to rape their children. This works. Are you a bad enough dude to rationalize that?
  - catchclose8919 5y ago
    > Are you a bad enough dude to rationalize that? Probably many are, but for a person crazy enough to do such a horrible act such threats would also likely not work (either "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore"). As a society I think we can only try to avoid creating enough people who have "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore"... They're basically "cancer cells", once at least one survives long enough to "do it's thing" (recruit team, deploy destructive thing etc.), there's nothing you can do besides damage control, you don't "interrogate a cancer cell", they're either irrational, or have no rational reason to help you regardless of any threat or pain you apply. But you're right, torture would only work for "regular criminals/terrorists" for which... one shouldn't need torture, threats and rewards for collaboration would be enough. But these "regular bad guys" would not do stupid s like mass attacks on "civilians". Generally if you end up thinking you absolutely need actual torture you've already f up badly, you're seeing things wrong, and sooner or later s will hit the fan for you or your organization... it's more of a sign of incompetence!
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      > Probably many are, but for a person crazy enough to do such a horrible act such threats would also likely not work (either "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore"). War isn't crazy, and participating in attacks on [your country] doesn't mean that one is irrational or doesn't care about anyone in the world. Just because you are willing to give your own life for a cause doesn't mean you have nothing to lose. The reason I say it works is because it actually works, and has been used by states many times, esp. in South America by US trained torturers, but also by plenty of others, like the Khmer Rouge. The point is credibility - and if somebody has planted a dirty bomb in some city, you can't credibly give them any reward for telling on themselves. You can promise things, but they will not believe you. If you're Pinochet, though, you can credibly threaten to have someone's children raped and murdered, because he did it all the time. He can credibly promise to do it even after the bomb goes off, and after you've been executed, because he's done it to others. He can have them brought to you and have it done in front of you. The US also uses this tactic, although since it will never carry it out (although it will carry out deportations, indictments, etc. for family members) it relies on a lot of playacting. There are stories of the US pretending to torture family members within earshot of people being interrogated.
- gregshap 5y ago
  Even if morally acceptable, the torture should still be highly illegal. Like any citizen, the interrogator can make their own moral analysis of whether the crime and their own punishment are worth it. Anyone allowing or covering up the torture is equally guilty. If a firefighter can give their life to save one other, the interrogator can choose to give theirs.
- car_analogy 5y ago
  > Is it possible for you to construct a scenario where torture is morally acceptable? Sure it is. But if torture was limited to only cases as clear-cut as the one you propose, it would be virtually non-existent. For such rare, extreme cases, it's better to keep it illegal, and hope an interrogator will risk jail to save the million people (and possibly be freed by jury nullification), than (effectively) legalizing it, and have its use creep to anyone merely suspected of terrorism (as defined by, from the point of view of the torture victims, an invading force), by an organization unaccountable even to citizens of its own country.
  - adamsmith143 5y ago
    > it's better to keep it illegal, and hope an interrogator will risk jail to save the million people (and possibly be freed by jury nullification), than (effectively) legalizing it, and have its use creep to anyone merely suspected of terrorism (as defined by, from the point of view of the torture victims, an invading force), by an organization unaccountable even to citizens of its own country. Well I believe this is technically still the case in the US.
- Teever 5y ago
  How come when someone posts a link about a heinous gang rape no one ever replies with 'Is it possible for you to construct scenario where rape is morally acceptable?' Riddle me that and you'll have answered your own question and hopefully had an epiphany along the way.
  - DoItToMe81 5y ago
    Gang rapes haven't been drilled into people's heads as justifiable against a dehumanized and faceless enemy. Not yet, at least.
- inasio 5y ago
  I remember that soon after 9/11 the tv show 24 started exploring "justified torture" scenarios, in retrospect I'm pretty sure it was not a coincidence.
- pmarreck 5y ago
  Let’s make it personal. Someone’s kidnapped your 2 year old kid and you know that this person knows where they are.
  - philovivero 5y ago
    Yeah. Let's do make it personal. (I'll rephrase another commenter's comment) If I disassemble you and redistribute your body parts, I could save several people who are in dire need of a heart, some kidneys, some blood. Should I just go ahead and do this? If not, why not?
    - pmarreck 5y ago
      I never said someone had to die. In your case, someone does.
      - yencabulator 5y ago
        Okay, so just one kidney and some blood then.
        adolph 5y ago
        Or a vaccine administration? (sorry if this is too soon to bring that up)
      - vkou 5y ago
        Why should it matter? We could save three or four lives by ending just one. Surely, the lives of four people are at least a few times more valuable than that of one.
- rendall 5y ago
  > Is it possible for you to construct a scenario where torture is morally acceptable? Yes, it's possible to concoct a fictional scenario whereby torturing one person saves millions of lives. Heck, why not a more plausible scenario where torturing someone saves 2 lives. But it's a non-sequitur: a true statement that is irrelevant. I won't argue this well, especially not well enough to convince someone for whom "torture" is acceptable, but principles matter. It's the only thing that separates the good guys from the bad guys. Not guns, not good looks, not firm jaws, not money, not power, not magical spells. Bad and good people have, or don't have, those things in equal measure. Torture = bad guy. Beating people in the street = bad guy. Planting evidence on a suspect = bad guy. Stealing elections = bad guy. This is important because, while some of those things might be expedient to get your desired outcome, it makes society worse. If you do that, you are the bad guy. Maybe the other guy is bad too, but you definitely are. Now when other people do it, you can't say shit. You did it. You could not come up with a better way. Society is now worse and more dangerous because of you. All the bad guys have reasons for doing bad things, but only good guys do the good things, even when it's not easy. Good people say "times are extraordinarily dangerous, so now more than ever we must fight to maintain our integrity and our values, and treat our opponents with due process and dignity, no matter how much we despise them" We now have a society where torture is considered awful, but that is hard won. Not long ago, we would burn people alive publicly as punishment for Very Serious reasons. When we start saying "torture is ok now because these times are extraordinarily dangerous", then torture is a bit more acceptable when times are not so dangerous. That's it. That's the argument.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses a real case where a car thief stole a car with a child in the backseat. The car thief had abandoned the car somewhere, and, as it was summer and daytime, the child was going to cook to death in the car. The police detain the thief and ask him where the car and child is, they offer to reduce his charges, and he denies it was him though they have him on video stealing the car. The police decide to beat the guy until he reveals where the car is. They do and he does. Would you say the police did anything wrong?
- Super_Jambo 5y ago
  Even if you can construct a morally acceptable edge case it should still be illegal. In these extreme edge cases the people on the ground can be expected to break the law and break out the thumb screws. After all if you're willing to torture someone your own freedom is presumably a relatively mild price to pay... right? We could then hope that the citizens enforcing the legal system will recognize the correctness of their actions and let them off. Legal torture exists because the powerful don't see themselves as answering to anyone.
- gmadsen 5y ago
  for one, the marine general Mattis said he was against torture. Not because of moral issues, but simply because it was ineffective. People will say whatever they think you want to hear to stop being tortured, which then leads to a lot of really bad and false intel
  - bell-cot 5y ago
    THIS. "Does Not Actually Work In The Real World" (no matter what Hollywood, or your own imagination or seething emotions might say on the subject) is a 100%-All-Cases-Covered "NO" for "...ends justify the means..." bullshit. Exact same reasoning as "thou shalt not brutally beat epileptic children, to try to cure them by driving the demons out".
- tryitnow 5y ago
  Yes, of course, anyone with a decent imagination can do so. Unfortunately, that has little practical impact. I can construct a lot of scenarios where I build an amazing startup and become a billionaire seemingly overnight. Tragically, my bank account balance always seems to ignore the brilliant scenarios my mind comes up with. Honestly, outside of philosophy departments questions like this aren't terribly useful. The problem with your question is that ignores the specific circumstances of this case - where there obviously was no dirty bomb, there was no "certainty", there were not one million lives at stake in some definite deterministic sense.
  - adamsmith143 5y ago
    >Honestly, outside of philosophy departments questions like this aren't terribly useful. I disagree completely. The fact that you can construct such a scenario says something very important about it. That it is not totally morally indefensible and the discussion is not one about a binary choice but one about degree.
- ed_balls 5y ago
  > torture is morally acceptable? Someone stole the car with the baby inside. Police caught the thief, but there is no car or the baby. There is a heatwave and the baby can last max 2h in the car. The thief panicked and dumped the car somewhere. He is not willing to tell where it is. Beating him up to get the info is acceptable ethically.
  - spacechild1 5y ago
    They can threaten the thief with murder charges, promise a reduced sentence if he tells the location of the car, etc. Do you really think beating up the thief would be more effective? Life is not a hollywood action movie.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      On TV they give up everything they worked for and believe in if you break a few fingers. In real life, they just lie to you, you run back and forth trying to verify the lies, then 2 hours have passed. edit: Americans (and others) have been taught to believe in torture like a religion, to continue to associate torture with truth. Torture is an argument; you're arguing with people that it's in their best interest to do what you want them to do. It is rarely an appropriate argument, and rarely an effective argument. It's far easier and more effective to convince them that cooperating with you is the right thing to do, and that's still not easy. But there are tactics, such as complete isolation and control over their environment, rewards for any sort of cooperation, friendliness and human connection, actual rhetoric and discussion, periods of complete disorientation alternated with periods of calm, pandering to their egos. They don't work in two hours.
    - ed_balls 5y ago
      > promise a reduced sentence They did, but it didn't work > Life is not a hollywood action movie. This is an example from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- spacechild1 5y ago
  People keep bringing up these hypothetical thought experiments, but they are just wildly unrealistic. Also, they approach the topic from the wrong end: I shouldn't have to justify not to use torture. The abolishment of torture is a milestone of Western civilization.
  - philovivero 5y ago
    Bringing sanity to the discussion. Thank you.
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Historically, torture was far more likely to be used on accusers and witnesses than presumed perpetrators. The idea is that if you're tasked with some sort of policing role and can't possibly figure out who is in the wrong, you just beat up both the accuser and the alleged perp. Chinese justice in the imperial era worked pretty much the same way: criminal punishment was neither explicitly retaliative nor restorative in intent. The basic dynamics is that this hopefully makes it less likely for people to lie, since no one sane would want to risk being beat up unless they had an actual grievance and no other way of addressing it.
  - drugstorecowboy 5y ago
    If that's true it's fascinating, could you suggest a resource I could use to learn more about this? If you know you are both just going to be punished and justice wasn't retaliative nor restorative, what would be the point of bringing a grievance to the authorities?
- bluesign 5y ago
  I think most interesting construct would be, allowing someone to torture someone, only with condition that in the end torturer is killed, while torturer decides with totally free will.
- gregatragenet 5y ago
  What if by detaining and torturing an individual or a few key individuals you could prevent the death of many of your citizens and widespread destruction - through a bloody civil war. It would be for the good of the people. <--- most Autocrats
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vkou 5y ago
  > Basically, how many lives would you be willing to sacrifice to prevent the suffering of a single person? Taking you apart for your organs can be used to save the lives of multiple people. So, I'd say, in your case, three or four, tops. I don't imagine that was the answer you were looking for.
- belorn 5y ago
  If you know with certainty that the person knows the location of the bomb then you also know where the bomb is located. It the same issue when the police and prosecutor know all facts with certainty. At this point you don't need a court, a judge or a jury. In an artificial system where everything is know with perfect certainty you don't even need police and prosecutors, just a method to punish the guilty. A legal system is only needed in order to determine who is guilty and who isn't, and this is unnecessary if we know already who is guilty.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    Would you torture a person if you were 90% sure they knew about the dirty bomb?
    - belorn 5y ago
      How would you know its 90% certainty? Even attempting to measuring certainty has an uncertainty factor in it. We know with some uncertainty the murder rate each year, and from this we have some measurable number that a person might be murdered. But we also know that murders tend to occur in non-random ways. At what murder rate should we start to arrest people at random? They are fun thoughts experiments, but as guides for real life they work about as good as extreme simulations which removes mass, gravity and air friction.
  - nicholasnorris 5y ago
    You know, a lot of times, people think they know things with absolute certainty, but then it turns out that they don't.
- philovivero 5y ago
  I am appalled at your insinuation, but even more appalled at all the replies that take your premise at face value. No. No, there is no such scenario. You can coerce the information out of someone who has the knowledge in other ways, if that is the problem, even though that problem never actually surfaces outside of bad TV show plots. Torture is wrong. It does not work. It often, in fact, does the opposite of work. It debases our humanity, our civility, and society. It makes the world a worse place in so many ways, I find it sad that otherwise intelligent people are even pondering this. No. Torture is not morally, legally, or ethically acceptable.
- worik 5y ago
  This is a vacuous argument. No matter what principals you hold I can come up with a scenario where you will violate them. It does not make you unprincipled. States using torture is a long way down the hole. It is such a shame that a dynamic exciting creative society like the USA's has fallen so far. It would be possible for the country to be a beacon of hope and civilisation. Instead it has become just another in a long line of grubby corrupt super states. Such a crying shame.
14 5y ago
Not only that but it is considered a war crime to torture from my understanding. So how can we look at Russia and say they are committing war crimes if the US blatantly does things like this. We need to lead on a moral high ground.
- yardie 5y ago
  Russia is basically stating the justification for the invasion of Ukraine by saying the US did it first in Iraq. The US has already proven how toothless the UN Security Council is and Russia is reinforcing that idea.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    Wasn't that the point? That no country inside it could be acted against (veto), as otherwise neither China, Russia, nor the US would have agreed to join?
- krageon 5y ago
  The US is friends with the regime that has the war crime tribunal, and Russia is not. In the end such things are disappointingly simple.
  - detaro 5y ago
    Neither the US nor Russia (nor China) recognize Den Haag as having authority over them. The US even has a law authorizing the president to use military force to prevent it from prosecuting US service members. It's pretty much irrelevant when it comes to any of those countries. And even outside of that, has ever anyone been prosecuted that didn't comprehensively loose the respective war?
  - belter 5y ago
    The US is not a friend of the country as it made a law saying they would invade the Netherlands if required. "The new law authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the court, which is located in The Hague. This provision, dubbed the "Hague invasion clause," has caused a strong reaction from U.S. allies around the world, particularly in the Netherlands. " "U.S.: 'Hague Invasion Act' Becomes Law" https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
chiefalchemist 5y ago
Worse? Intel obtaibed at the torture extreme is simply not reliable. The cultural need - at the elites' level - to "break" the opposition is disturbing. And yes,ultimately this manifests in the broader culture. If for no other reason, the elites have become normalized to The Culture of Violence and see no reason to change course. Their power remains safe and intact.
- tiahura 5y ago
  Intel obtaibed at the torture extreme is simply not reliable. Besides a few anecdotes, how many torture debriefings have you read and then cross checked? Unless you’re in the industry, how could you possibly think you have an informed opinion on methods of intelligence gathering?
  - l33t2328 5y ago
    Well, there was a long report about it that came to that conclusion, so
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panetta_Review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panetta_Review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_report_on_CIA_torture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_...
  - chiefalchemist 5y ago
    You call Torture an industry? Like what, tech manufacturing? That's disturbing. While the myth about Tprture's (lack of) effectiveness persists? The idea that being an "industry" insider is necessary to understand Human Psychology 101 is also misinformation. These ideas come from the NSA, CIA, etc. It doesn't mean they're true. It doesn't mean we have to buy them.
    - worik 5y ago
      > You call Torture an industry? Like what, tech manufacturing? That's disturbing. In rouge states it is. Just saying....
deutschew 5y ago
> Losing the moral high ground degrades the whole society. There never was any moral high ground, the establishment were successful at making people FEEL as such. We are quick to point fingers at Nazis, Terrorists, Enemies yet the Western perspective is always 'we can do know wrong, if we did, its justified' which is exactly what the opposing side does. Once a subtle reminder that many supported Nazi ideals early in America, even as Jews were being sent to gas chambers, companies like IBM were happy to do business with the regime, very much like they do with CCP companies as well as Putin. There really is no way to change this without outside intervention, I will leave that to your imagination.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  > There never was any moral high ground, the establishment were successful at making people FEEL as such. I understand what you're trying to say with respect to dirty hands, and not wilfully misunderstanding you. But, wrong. There _was_ a moral high ground. It subsisted within the group of people you claim were duped. Those were and always will be the people who count, who hold the _normative_ values of a society. What they "feel" is American Values (more broadly "western ones"). The "establishment" you mention were the bad guys, and remain so. To the extent they spit on normative values then claims refuge in the necessity of dirty hands, they are unsoldierly and they play into the hands of the enemy who seeks to divide us and undermine our values. They may was well be KGB/FSB agents in our midst.
  - deutschew 5y ago
    What I'm saying is pick up a history book or even read through various things America was involved in all over the world. It is anything BUT moral and yes the average American has no say in the matter in the decision making. So perhaps that absolves them of the sins of the state but nevertheless the blind masses continue to push away these ugly things under the closet with various political labels and in doing so they are implicitly approving these actions because it ultimately benefits THEM at the expense of other humans. My point was try to see it from the people on the receiving end of pax Americana and tell me why the opposing sides reacted the way they have. History is written by the victor and you simply don't get to hear from the losers. Therefore, there can be no absolute comparisons. You push somebody to poverty or vilify them, there is no exit but the desired outcome you seek. Once again, narratives is what shapes our reality, and the one that continuously virtue signals is the one that ultimately wins.
mywacaday 5y ago
Hard to see how the US can claim a moral high ground on anything when it continues to not be a member of the ICC and is even occasionally actively hostile towards individual judges and member countries by threatening sanctions.
- teakettle42 5y ago
  I’m glad that my US constitutional rights cannot be abrogated by a supranational judicial system.
  - pydry 5y ago
    I'm not especially thrilled with the idea that this can grant you a license to murder me in my sleep with impunity simply because Im not a US citizen. The alternative of supernational courts dispensing justice at an international level is essentially loose federations of gangs doing the same thing. And, when a kid in a crips neighborhood tries to join the bloods...
    - ericmay 5y ago
      > I'm not especially thrilled with the idea that this can grant you a license to murder me in my sleep with impunity simply because Im not a US citizen. Doesn't seem to stop other countries from doing this internationally and to their own citizens anyway. Something like the ICC in how you're envisioning things can only work when it's backed by military force. So long story short, it is mainly just the U.S. enforcing things, which doesn't really change anything.
      - pydry 5y ago
        The idea that America enforces international law is almost as comical as the idea Russia or China enforces it. America is an international gang not an international cop.
        ericmay 5y ago
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
What I found particularly depressing that all this was done with an explicit purpose of obtaining a cert. In terms of human level absurdity, I could only think of Brazil movie. It is both ridiculous and absolutely believable. I agree that the cost of moral high ground is a great loss to the society as a whole. We may never be able to recover from this. Guantanamo Bay is part of normal conversation and barely raises an eyebrow. Without going into details, my boss's kid recently said his dad drone strikes people ( he does nothing of the sort ). This is the new normal.
paganel 5y ago
It has seriously been undermined for the last 20 years (I'd say even 30), that's why guys like Putin who fight in order to bring back a multi-polar world know what they're doing, they're not crazy or anything. The West has lost its brightness, its shine, its power of attraction (if one ignores the material thing), the reasons for that are numerous and I don't see any way to bring back the "end of history"-times (i.e. the complete dominance of the West when it comes to its cultural and societal influence) many were dreaming about in the 1990s.
ganzuul 5y ago
Oh, this is far, far worse. It shows the CIA is just as rogue as the Kremlin, and given their history it is fairly clear now that within these two groups there is extreme collusion. The Western intelligence apparatus has been hijacked by a force that is getting instructions from the reptilian brain instead of the cerebral cortex, meaning they are now the enemy.
- api 5y ago
  Putin and the modern day Russian regime is basically the KGB. The KGB took over Russia after the USSR collapsed. It's basically the same agency.
- nanna 5y ago
  > The Western intelligence apparatus has been hijacked by a force that is getting instructions from the reptilian brain The sheer wackiness of David Icke's Antisemitism (where 'reptile brains' are coda for Jews) never ceases to amaze me.
  - adolph 5y ago
    I'm not 100% sure what the OP intended but there are more generous interpretations: Many people call [the limbic system] the "Lizard Brain,” because the limbic system is about all a lizard has for brain function. It is in charge of fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and fornication. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/where-addiction-meets-your-brain/201404/your-lizard-brain https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/where-addiction-meet...
  - ganzuul 5y ago
    Why bring the Jews into this? What are you playing?
    - nanna 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke#Accusations_of_antisemitism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke#Accusations_of_anti...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tiahura 5y ago
Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. Given that we don’t have all, or even most, of the data, that’s really just emotionally driven speculation. And maybe I’m being overly nuanced, but I’m beginning to accept that there’s a qualitative difference between distasteful treatment of dozens of people suspected of having information about terrorists, and the systematic persecution of entire populations. I’m not terribly concerned that China, Russia, or anyone else is going to snatch and torture random nobody like me, and then justify it by pointing to CIA torture of Al Queda.
naoqj 5y ago
>Losing the moral high ground degrades the whole society. How does having "the moral high ground" help the lower class of a society?
- afshin 5y ago
  The answer to this is related to the answer of: "would you prefer to be in the lower class of Norwegian society or the lower class of nearby Belarussian society?"
  - naoqj 5y ago
    Do you think the difference in the standard of life is because of "having the moral ground"?
    - drewcoo 5y ago
      If morals are how we maintain and encourage the well-being of other humans, then yes.
      - thereisnospork 5y ago
        At this risk of being pedantic: the question isn't how we maintain the well-being of other humans, it is how we maintain the well-being of our humans[0] and frankly there's a lot to be said for boot-to-neck diplomacy. [0]Specifically here our non-upper crust humans.
        worik 5y ago
        > At this risk of being pedantic: the question isn't how we maintain the well-being of other humans, it is how we maintain the well-being of our humans[0] and frankly there's a lot to be said for boot-to-neck diplomacy. That attitude with the associated American power was a complete catastrophe for: * Iraq. * Nicaragua * Panama * Cuba * Afghanistan
keybored 5y ago
I cannot express how bewildering this comment is. The article in question is about using torture as a training tool -- inflicting brain damage on a person so that folks will learn the valuable skill of beating up defenseless people. Then this comment comes along and complains about the optics of it. Why? Because it undermines "Western civilization". And what's the problem with that? Because then Western civilization loses its "moral high ground". And what will that lead to? That the right- and left-wing -- those good-for-nothings that want to "bring down the current horrible governance and figure out things later" -- will opportunistically use that against the shining city on the hill called Western Civilization. Whether this torture business is right or wrong is not even part of the discussion, and might not even be relevant -- the whole point is that the angelic Western Civilization might be beset by the devilish "anti-establishment movement".
- hammock 5y ago
  What about parent comment did you think had to do with optics? By my reading it has everything to do with the actual behavior itself, which they call "atrocities."
  - keybored 5y ago
    All of it. I wrote two paragraphs as an interpretation of a two-paragraph comment so I don't know how else to explain it at this point.
    - hammock 5y ago
      Do you believe "moral high ground" functions as a result of optics, not as a result of actual correct moral action?
      - keybored 5y ago
        You can achieve a moral high ground based on your actions. And that's the only way to do it, in fact. But that clearly has nothing to do with this post since it is about example No. 19281 of the CIA doing some heinous shit. And what's the apparent takeaway from that? That Western Civ might lose its moral high ground. But what about example No. 19280 of the CIA doing some henious shit? What about No. 19279? ... Whence this alleged moral high ground?
cryptonector 5y ago
It's a very small step from this to disappearing and torturing dissidents at home. With The View calling for Tucker Carlson to be tried for treason by a military tribunal, I think we're approaching that point. Then when we get there and someone disappears (say, a colleague, a friend of a friend), some will think and even say "they must have done something". How do I know? Because that is what happened in Argentina during its Dirty War. Oh, I know, most of you will say "that could never happen in my country because we're a first-world Western nation", but Argentina very much was and still is a Western country, complete with rule of law ("Estado del Derecho"), and it was much wealthier then relative to the rest of the world, and had been truly first world in 1950. So, yes, these things very much can happen here in the U.S., and in Canada, and in the UK, and in France and Germany and Spain and Italy and Netherlands and Belgium and Norway and Sweden and so on. It takes a very small number of men to do most of the torturing and killing domestically. Sure, lots more are needed to do the arresting (disappearing) of victims. But not very many need to get down and dirty. Just ten men killing 150 victims/year would have covered the majority of the killings in the Dirty War over six years.
- halfnormalform 5y ago
  Excusing your whataboutism, it isn’t hard to argue he’s a foreign agent.
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    Carlson, a foreign agent? It's just as easy to accuse you of shilling. Please be serious. And if you are, then we're in deeper trouble than I'd thought.
  - libraryatnight 5y ago
    He seems more like an unscrupulous jackass than a foreign agent. Rachel Maddow seems just as ridiculous and stupid, but she seems far less dangerous and I'm not sure why that is. All the 24 hour news stations are FUD engines, but Fox and Carlson in particular have this urgency to everything they say - it's always the end of the world, an agenda, everyone is out to get you all the time. It's exhausting. That said he doesn't seem like a foreign agent, just a typical Fox News personality.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
Power corrupts, when you're capable of doing this and go unpunished, you'll have people doing it. Every government ever had and will have this problem. What we should try to achieve in our society is to limit the power given to individuals on other people and allow each member of society to be free of centralised coercion. Nobody should have a monopoly on violence and nobody should be able to forcefully collect taxes from people and then go and wage a war on foreign people. You can call it being anti-establishment, I call it being morally consistent with the idea of freedom which is so often touted in the USA.
rayiner 5y ago
> Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. The exact same goes for the surveillance programs. I don’t know if I agree with that. I think folks underestimate how much conflict in interests “regular people” in different countries really have.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Conflict of interests between communities has nothing to do with a community limiting its own people's rights or resorting to atrocities in order to make the job of someone in the community easier. See, this specific situation has happened because a worker decided that their job will be accomplished easier this way. For the mass surveillance or denial of privacy for people is based exactly on the same idea: If they have access to people's communications they will spend less time and money to do their job in comparison to more involved traditional methods. I find it ridiculous that people are expected to be harmed or denied privacy in order to improve the efficiency in an institution.
Diesel555 5y ago
> Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. The exact same goes for the surveillance programs. And yet it is worth noting that the US government released this information under their own policies to the detriment of the "political class" and their own credibility worldwide. This is an important aspect of Democracies. I doubt you'd see the PRC releasing documents about the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region which will for sure be received as bad any time soon. (This is not said to justify the acts in the article to be clear, but to point out a property of Democracies which is important)

by mrtksn 5y ago

adamsmith143 5y ago

Is it possible for you to construct a scenario where torture is morally acceptable? E.g. you have a virtual certainty that a dirty bomb is going to be detonated in NYC and will kill 1M+ and potentially irradiate the city for decades. Is torturing one person who you know with certainty knows the location of the bomb defensible? Basically, how many lives would you be willing to sacrifice to prevent the suffering of a single person?

defen 5y ago
Do we have any evidence that torture actually works? That the person being tortured will tell accurate information? Basically do we have any examples of this sort of situation, where there was an imminent threat to life and people were saved due to torture?
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
- adamsmith143 5y ago
  >Basically do we have any examples of this sort of situation, where there was an imminent threat to life and people were saved due to torture? In the made up scenario you could make a case that even if there is a low probability of torture working, the scale of lives saved would make it worth it. A 20% chance of saving 1M people is still net +200k lives.
- dls2016 5y ago
  > Do we have any evidence that torture actually works? Most evidence points the other direction. > Finally, an exhaustive 2014 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence analyzed millions of internal CIA documents related to the torture of terrorism suspects, concluding that “the CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” It adds that “multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-rsquo-ve-known-for-400-years-that-torture-doesn-rsquo-t-work/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-rsquo-ve-known... https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CRPT-113srpt288.pdf https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publ...
Sharlin 5y ago
Absolute certainty that the victim has the information you want is a pretty high bar to clear. Philosophical thought experiments notwithstanding, some things are best regarded as deontologically forbidden in practice, no matter how consequentialist one leans otherwise.
Loughla 5y ago
This is a good moral question, and really is going to come down to personal belief. I absolutely do not believe governments should be able to torture someone, for any reason, regardless of the consequences. It has less to do with the suffering of a single person, and more with the constant and consistent scope creep that enters every government program coupled with the ability for any and all governments to be full of faceless, and therefore blameless, bureaucrats. Torture to save 1 million people today becomes torture to save 10 people tomorrow. If no one can be held accountable, then it becomes torture to stop a robbery instead of genocide. If you let your morals slip once, you are an immoral society. Like it or lump it. Edit to clarify: I am 100% anti-torture in any situation. I didn't think that needed clarification?
- shapefrog 5y ago
  Is it not already a moral slip to allow those 1 million people to die in a fireball to save the 1 person from torture?
  - bluesign 5y ago
    What is the threshold, what about saving 1 person from dying ?
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Or potentially saving someone from torture?
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth." -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
  - 5y ago
sdoering 5y ago
In the end, what you are asking comes down to some form of the "Trolley Problem" [0]. The critique towards the Trolley Problem can be directed towards your (very) hypothetical scenario as well: > In a 2014 paper published in the Social and Personality Psychology Compass, researchers criticized the use of the trolley problem, arguing, among other things, that the scenario it presents is too extreme and unconnected to real-life moral situations to be useful or educational. I can't say, how I would react in a given situation. I don't know, if I could torture/kill one (or a few) for the survival (or a better chance of survival) of a larger group. Because in the end one would have to ask were to draw the line. From a strictly utilitarian point of view killing one person to secure the survival of two others is a net positive outcome. But it feels morally more than wrong. Where to draw the line. 1 against 50? Against 1000? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
- adamsmith143 5y ago
  > From a strictly utilitarian point of view killing one person to secure the survival of two others is a net positive outcome. But it feels morally more than wrong. Well of course all sorts of definitive truths feel unintuitive or wrong to humans, perhaps that's just a limitation of our brains. From this utilitarian pov the net positive outcome is the morally correct one.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    Is there something like a "definitive truth"? Being an atheist, I would say, that this is an overly simplistic view. But that would be my personal take on that. Utilitarianism isn't a rational choice. What if - in my extreme example, one of the two surviving people would have been Hitler? Or even less dramatic, still contrived: What if the person being killed would go on and invent a cure against cancer? You can't predict the future and these contrived examples only show, that (probably) every theory/philosophy can be brought to its knees by going to its extreme conclusions. So how to quantify "value"? How do we calculate the consequences of our decisions? We can't imho.
    - 5y ago
mrtksn 5y ago
No not really. Dirty bombs and people motivated to detonate one don't spontaneously appear in New York or anywhere. It always has a prelude, some kind of injustice(perceived or real) by you towards a community(drone strike school children bus kind of stuff) that you fail to exterminate and they come back to you. Fixing terrorism by more surveillance, torture, less rights might delay the detonation of a dirty bomb but since the core issue remains nothing is solved. Besides, there are very effective techniques against information extraction through torture, like dividing organisations into cells. IMHO, if it comes to torture 1 person to save 1M+ people there's likely to be another person who you will fail to catch and that person will take down the 1M+. I don't believe that the scenario of torturing 1 person and saving 1M+ exists beyond games and movies. After years of torture, dronning and gunning people, the US left Afghanistan and people were falling from the skies when trying to run away. Did you miss that? Why do you think that torture can be an effective tool?
catchclose8919 5y ago
...maybe "information extraction" and "torture" are not exactly the same thing? Extracting valid information from hardened bad guys would probably work better by using other means than physical pain (eg. threaten wiping out their family or close ones, drugs + yes-no questions under and MRI brain activity scanner etc. etc.), pain and brutality applied to people already crazy and quasi-suicidal to begin with would only give you a mix of nonsense, lies and irrelevant infos that you'll not be able to separate well and fast enough to figure out how to prevent that bomb from going. I mean, you're probably not torturing average-Joe working-in-an-office with 2.5 kids and a white fence house :)
pessimizer 5y ago
A typical scenario for this question, but not a good one. There's no reason for torture to work on this person, you have no timely way of verifying what they're saying, and you're going to hurt/kill them whether or not they give you the answer. They're just going to lie to you. What you have to do is credibly threaten to torture or kill their family members and loved ones, to rape their children. This works. Are you a bad enough dude to rationalize that?
- catchclose8919 5y ago
  > Are you a bad enough dude to rationalize that? Probably many are, but for a person crazy enough to do such a horrible act such threats would also likely not work (either "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore"). As a society I think we can only try to avoid creating enough people who have "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore"... They're basically "cancer cells", once at least one survives long enough to "do it's thing" (recruit team, deploy destructive thing etc.), there's nothing you can do besides damage control, you don't "interrogate a cancer cell", they're either irrational, or have no rational reason to help you regardless of any threat or pain you apply. But you're right, torture would only work for "regular criminals/terrorists" for which... one shouldn't need torture, threats and rewards for collaboration would be enough. But these "regular bad guys" would not do stupid s like mass attacks on "civilians". Generally if you end up thinking you absolutely need actual torture you've already f up badly, you're seeing things wrong, and sooner or later s will hit the fan for you or your organization... it's more of a sign of incompetence!
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    > Probably many are, but for a person crazy enough to do such a horrible act such threats would also likely not work (either "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore"). War isn't crazy, and participating in attacks on [your country] doesn't mean that one is irrational or doesn't care about anyone in the world. Just because you are willing to give your own life for a cause doesn't mean you have nothing to lose. The reason I say it works is because it actually works, and has been used by states many times, esp. in South America by US trained torturers, but also by plenty of others, like the Khmer Rouge. The point is credibility - and if somebody has planted a dirty bomb in some city, you can't credibly give them any reward for telling on themselves. You can promise things, but they will not believe you. If you're Pinochet, though, you can credibly threaten to have someone's children raped and murdered, because he did it all the time. He can credibly promise to do it even after the bomb goes off, and after you've been executed, because he's done it to others. He can have them brought to you and have it done in front of you. The US also uses this tactic, although since it will never carry it out (although it will carry out deportations, indictments, etc. for family members) it relies on a lot of playacting. There are stories of the US pretending to torture family members within earshot of people being interrogated.
gregshap 5y ago
Even if morally acceptable, the torture should still be highly illegal. Like any citizen, the interrogator can make their own moral analysis of whether the crime and their own punishment are worth it. Anyone allowing or covering up the torture is equally guilty. If a firefighter can give their life to save one other, the interrogator can choose to give theirs.
car_analogy 5y ago
> Is it possible for you to construct a scenario where torture is morally acceptable? Sure it is. But if torture was limited to only cases as clear-cut as the one you propose, it would be virtually non-existent. For such rare, extreme cases, it's better to keep it illegal, and hope an interrogator will risk jail to save the million people (and possibly be freed by jury nullification), than (effectively) legalizing it, and have its use creep to anyone merely suspected of terrorism (as defined by, from the point of view of the torture victims, an invading force), by an organization unaccountable even to citizens of its own country.
- adamsmith143 5y ago
  > it's better to keep it illegal, and hope an interrogator will risk jail to save the million people (and possibly be freed by jury nullification), than (effectively) legalizing it, and have its use creep to anyone merely suspected of terrorism (as defined by, from the point of view of the torture victims, an invading force), by an organization unaccountable even to citizens of its own country. Well I believe this is technically still the case in the US.
Teever 5y ago
How come when someone posts a link about a heinous gang rape no one ever replies with 'Is it possible for you to construct scenario where rape is morally acceptable?' Riddle me that and you'll have answered your own question and hopefully had an epiphany along the way.
- DoItToMe81 5y ago
  Gang rapes haven't been drilled into people's heads as justifiable against a dehumanized and faceless enemy. Not yet, at least.
inasio 5y ago
I remember that soon after 9/11 the tv show 24 started exploring "justified torture" scenarios, in retrospect I'm pretty sure it was not a coincidence.
pmarreck 5y ago
Let’s make it personal. Someone’s kidnapped your 2 year old kid and you know that this person knows where they are.
- philovivero 5y ago
  Yeah. Let's do make it personal. (I'll rephrase another commenter's comment) If I disassemble you and redistribute your body parts, I could save several people who are in dire need of a heart, some kidneys, some blood. Should I just go ahead and do this? If not, why not?
  - pmarreck 5y ago
    I never said someone had to die. In your case, someone does.
    - yencabulator 5y ago
      Okay, so just one kidney and some blood then.
      - adolph 5y ago
        Or a vaccine administration? (sorry if this is too soon to bring that up)
    - vkou 5y ago
      Why should it matter? We could save three or four lives by ending just one. Surely, the lives of four people are at least a few times more valuable than that of one.
rendall 5y ago
> Is it possible for you to construct a scenario where torture is morally acceptable? Yes, it's possible to concoct a fictional scenario whereby torturing one person saves millions of lives. Heck, why not a more plausible scenario where torturing someone saves 2 lives. But it's a non-sequitur: a true statement that is irrelevant. I won't argue this well, especially not well enough to convince someone for whom "torture" is acceptable, but principles matter. It's the only thing that separates the good guys from the bad guys. Not guns, not good looks, not firm jaws, not money, not power, not magical spells. Bad and good people have, or don't have, those things in equal measure. Torture = bad guy. Beating people in the street = bad guy. Planting evidence on a suspect = bad guy. Stealing elections = bad guy. This is important because, while some of those things might be expedient to get your desired outcome, it makes society worse. If you do that, you are the bad guy. Maybe the other guy is bad too, but you definitely are. Now when other people do it, you can't say shit. You did it. You could not come up with a better way. Society is now worse and more dangerous because of you. All the bad guys have reasons for doing bad things, but only good guys do the good things, even when it's not easy. Good people say "times are extraordinarily dangerous, so now more than ever we must fight to maintain our integrity and our values, and treat our opponents with due process and dignity, no matter how much we despise them" We now have a society where torture is considered awful, but that is hard won. Not long ago, we would burn people alive publicly as punishment for Very Serious reasons. When we start saying "torture is ok now because these times are extraordinarily dangerous", then torture is a bit more acceptable when times are not so dangerous. That's it. That's the argument.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses a real case where a car thief stole a car with a child in the backseat. The car thief had abandoned the car somewhere, and, as it was summer and daytime, the child was going to cook to death in the car. The police detain the thief and ask him where the car and child is, they offer to reduce his charges, and he denies it was him though they have him on video stealing the car. The police decide to beat the guy until he reveals where the car is. They do and he does. Would you say the police did anything wrong?
Super_Jambo 5y ago
Even if you can construct a morally acceptable edge case it should still be illegal. In these extreme edge cases the people on the ground can be expected to break the law and break out the thumb screws. After all if you're willing to torture someone your own freedom is presumably a relatively mild price to pay... right? We could then hope that the citizens enforcing the legal system will recognize the correctness of their actions and let them off. Legal torture exists because the powerful don't see themselves as answering to anyone.
gmadsen 5y ago
for one, the marine general Mattis said he was against torture. Not because of moral issues, but simply because it was ineffective. People will say whatever they think you want to hear to stop being tortured, which then leads to a lot of really bad and false intel
- bell-cot 5y ago
  THIS. "Does Not Actually Work In The Real World" (no matter what Hollywood, or your own imagination or seething emotions might say on the subject) is a 100%-All-Cases-Covered "NO" for "...ends justify the means..." bullshit. Exact same reasoning as "thou shalt not brutally beat epileptic children, to try to cure them by driving the demons out".
tryitnow 5y ago
Yes, of course, anyone with a decent imagination can do so. Unfortunately, that has little practical impact. I can construct a lot of scenarios where I build an amazing startup and become a billionaire seemingly overnight. Tragically, my bank account balance always seems to ignore the brilliant scenarios my mind comes up with. Honestly, outside of philosophy departments questions like this aren't terribly useful. The problem with your question is that ignores the specific circumstances of this case - where there obviously was no dirty bomb, there was no "certainty", there were not one million lives at stake in some definite deterministic sense.
- adamsmith143 5y ago
  >Honestly, outside of philosophy departments questions like this aren't terribly useful. I disagree completely. The fact that you can construct such a scenario says something very important about it. That it is not totally morally indefensible and the discussion is not one about a binary choice but one about degree.
ed_balls 5y ago
> torture is morally acceptable? Someone stole the car with the baby inside. Police caught the thief, but there is no car or the baby. There is a heatwave and the baby can last max 2h in the car. The thief panicked and dumped the car somewhere. He is not willing to tell where it is. Beating him up to get the info is acceptable ethically.
- spacechild1 5y ago
  They can threaten the thief with murder charges, promise a reduced sentence if he tells the location of the car, etc. Do you really think beating up the thief would be more effective? Life is not a hollywood action movie.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    On TV they give up everything they worked for and believe in if you break a few fingers. In real life, they just lie to you, you run back and forth trying to verify the lies, then 2 hours have passed. edit: Americans (and others) have been taught to believe in torture like a religion, to continue to associate torture with truth. Torture is an argument; you're arguing with people that it's in their best interest to do what you want them to do. It is rarely an appropriate argument, and rarely an effective argument. It's far easier and more effective to convince them that cooperating with you is the right thing to do, and that's still not easy. But there are tactics, such as complete isolation and control over their environment, rewards for any sort of cooperation, friendliness and human connection, actual rhetoric and discussion, periods of complete disorientation alternated with periods of calm, pandering to their egos. They don't work in two hours.
  - ed_balls 5y ago
    > promise a reduced sentence They did, but it didn't work > Life is not a hollywood action movie. This is an example from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
spacechild1 5y ago
People keep bringing up these hypothetical thought experiments, but they are just wildly unrealistic. Also, they approach the topic from the wrong end: I shouldn't have to justify not to use torture. The abolishment of torture is a milestone of Western civilization.
- philovivero 5y ago
  Bringing sanity to the discussion. Thank you.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
zozbot234 5y ago
Historically, torture was far more likely to be used on accusers and witnesses than presumed perpetrators. The idea is that if you're tasked with some sort of policing role and can't possibly figure out who is in the wrong, you just beat up both the accuser and the alleged perp. Chinese justice in the imperial era worked pretty much the same way: criminal punishment was neither explicitly retaliative nor restorative in intent. The basic dynamics is that this hopefully makes it less likely for people to lie, since no one sane would want to risk being beat up unless they had an actual grievance and no other way of addressing it.
- drugstorecowboy 5y ago
  If that's true it's fascinating, could you suggest a resource I could use to learn more about this? If you know you are both just going to be punished and justice wasn't retaliative nor restorative, what would be the point of bringing a grievance to the authorities?
bluesign 5y ago
I think most interesting construct would be, allowing someone to torture someone, only with condition that in the end torturer is killed, while torturer decides with totally free will.
gregatragenet 5y ago
What if by detaining and torturing an individual or a few key individuals you could prevent the death of many of your citizens and widespread destruction - through a bloody civil war. It would be for the good of the people. <--- most Autocrats
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
vkou 5y ago
> Basically, how many lives would you be willing to sacrifice to prevent the suffering of a single person? Taking you apart for your organs can be used to save the lives of multiple people. So, I'd say, in your case, three or four, tops. I don't imagine that was the answer you were looking for.
belorn 5y ago
If you know with certainty that the person knows the location of the bomb then you also know where the bomb is located. It the same issue when the police and prosecutor know all facts with certainty. At this point you don't need a court, a judge or a jury. In an artificial system where everything is know with perfect certainty you don't even need police and prosecutors, just a method to punish the guilty. A legal system is only needed in order to determine who is guilty and who isn't, and this is unnecessary if we know already who is guilty.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Would you torture a person if you were 90% sure they knew about the dirty bomb?
  - belorn 5y ago
    How would you know its 90% certainty? Even attempting to measuring certainty has an uncertainty factor in it. We know with some uncertainty the murder rate each year, and from this we have some measurable number that a person might be murdered. But we also know that murders tend to occur in non-random ways. At what murder rate should we start to arrest people at random? They are fun thoughts experiments, but as guides for real life they work about as good as extreme simulations which removes mass, gravity and air friction.
- nicholasnorris 5y ago
  You know, a lot of times, people think they know things with absolute certainty, but then it turns out that they don't.
philovivero 5y ago
I am appalled at your insinuation, but even more appalled at all the replies that take your premise at face value. No. No, there is no such scenario. You can coerce the information out of someone who has the knowledge in other ways, if that is the problem, even though that problem never actually surfaces outside of bad TV show plots. Torture is wrong. It does not work. It often, in fact, does the opposite of work. It debases our humanity, our civility, and society. It makes the world a worse place in so many ways, I find it sad that otherwise intelligent people are even pondering this. No. Torture is not morally, legally, or ethically acceptable.
worik 5y ago
This is a vacuous argument. No matter what principals you hold I can come up with a scenario where you will violate them. It does not make you unprincipled. States using torture is a long way down the hole. It is such a shame that a dynamic exciting creative society like the USA's has fallen so far. It would be possible for the country to be a beacon of hope and civilisation. Instead it has become just another in a long line of grubby corrupt super states. Such a crying shame.

14 5y ago

Not only that but it is considered a war crime to torture from my understanding. So how can we look at Russia and say they are committing war crimes if the US blatantly does things like this. We need to lead on a moral high ground.

yardie 5y ago
Russia is basically stating the justification for the invasion of Ukraine by saying the US did it first in Iraq. The US has already proven how toothless the UN Security Council is and Russia is reinforcing that idea.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Semaphor 5y ago
  Wasn't that the point? That no country inside it could be acted against (veto), as otherwise neither China, Russia, nor the US would have agreed to join?
krageon 5y ago
The US is friends with the regime that has the war crime tribunal, and Russia is not. In the end such things are disappointingly simple.
- detaro 5y ago
  Neither the US nor Russia (nor China) recognize Den Haag as having authority over them. The US even has a law authorizing the president to use military force to prevent it from prosecuting US service members. It's pretty much irrelevant when it comes to any of those countries. And even outside of that, has ever anyone been prosecuted that didn't comprehensively loose the respective war?
- belter 5y ago
  The US is not a friend of the country as it made a law saying they would invade the Netherlands if required. "The new law authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the court, which is located in The Hague. This provision, dubbed the "Hague invasion clause," has caused a strong reaction from U.S. allies around the world, particularly in the Netherlands. " "U.S.: 'Hague Invasion Act' Becomes Law" https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...

chiefalchemist 5y ago

Worse? Intel obtaibed at the torture extreme is simply not reliable. The cultural need - at the elites' level - to "break" the opposition is disturbing. And yes,ultimately this manifests in the broader culture. If for no other reason, the elites have become normalized to The Culture of Violence and see no reason to change course. Their power remains safe and intact.

tiahura 5y ago
Intel obtaibed at the torture extreme is simply not reliable. Besides a few anecdotes, how many torture debriefings have you read and then cross checked? Unless you’re in the industry, how could you possibly think you have an informed opinion on methods of intelligence gathering?
- l33t2328 5y ago
  Well, there was a long report about it that came to that conclusion, so
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panetta_Review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panetta_Review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_report_on_CIA_torture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_...
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  You call Torture an industry? Like what, tech manufacturing? That's disturbing. While the myth about Tprture's (lack of) effectiveness persists? The idea that being an "industry" insider is necessary to understand Human Psychology 101 is also misinformation. These ideas come from the NSA, CIA, etc. It doesn't mean they're true. It doesn't mean we have to buy them.
  - worik 5y ago
    > You call Torture an industry? Like what, tech manufacturing? That's disturbing. In rouge states it is. Just saying....

deutschew 5y ago

> Losing the moral high ground degrades the whole society. There never was any moral high ground, the establishment were successful at making people FEEL as such. We are quick to point fingers at Nazis, Terrorists, Enemies yet the Western perspective is always 'we can do know wrong, if we did, its justified' which is exactly what the opposing side does. Once a subtle reminder that many supported Nazi ideals early in America, even as Jews were being sent to gas chambers, companies like IBM were happy to do business with the regime, very much like they do with CCP companies as well as Putin. There really is no way to change this without outside intervention, I will leave that to your imagination.

nonrandomstring 5y ago
> There never was any moral high ground, the establishment were successful at making people FEEL as such. I understand what you're trying to say with respect to dirty hands, and not wilfully misunderstanding you. But, wrong. There _was_ a moral high ground. It subsisted within the group of people you claim were duped. Those were and always will be the people who count, who hold the _normative_ values of a society. What they "feel" is American Values (more broadly "western ones"). The "establishment" you mention were the bad guys, and remain so. To the extent they spit on normative values then claims refuge in the necessity of dirty hands, they are unsoldierly and they play into the hands of the enemy who seeks to divide us and undermine our values. They may was well be KGB/FSB agents in our midst.
- deutschew 5y ago
  What I'm saying is pick up a history book or even read through various things America was involved in all over the world. It is anything BUT moral and yes the average American has no say in the matter in the decision making. So perhaps that absolves them of the sins of the state but nevertheless the blind masses continue to push away these ugly things under the closet with various political labels and in doing so they are implicitly approving these actions because it ultimately benefits THEM at the expense of other humans. My point was try to see it from the people on the receiving end of pax Americana and tell me why the opposing sides reacted the way they have. History is written by the victor and you simply don't get to hear from the losers. Therefore, there can be no absolute comparisons. You push somebody to poverty or vilify them, there is no exit but the desired outcome you seek. Once again, narratives is what shapes our reality, and the one that continuously virtue signals is the one that ultimately wins.

mywacaday 5y ago

Hard to see how the US can claim a moral high ground on anything when it continues to not be a member of the ICC and is even occasionally actively hostile towards individual judges and member countries by threatening sanctions.

teakettle42 5y ago
I’m glad that my US constitutional rights cannot be abrogated by a supranational judicial system.
- pydry 5y ago
  I'm not especially thrilled with the idea that this can grant you a license to murder me in my sleep with impunity simply because Im not a US citizen. The alternative of supernational courts dispensing justice at an international level is essentially loose federations of gangs doing the same thing. And, when a kid in a crips neighborhood tries to join the bloods...
  - ericmay 5y ago
    > I'm not especially thrilled with the idea that this can grant you a license to murder me in my sleep with impunity simply because Im not a US citizen. Doesn't seem to stop other countries from doing this internationally and to their own citizens anyway. Something like the ICC in how you're envisioning things can only work when it's backed by military force. So long story short, it is mainly just the U.S. enforcing things, which doesn't really change anything.
    - pydry 5y ago
      The idea that America enforces international law is almost as comical as the idea Russia or China enforces it. America is an international gang not an international cop.
      - ericmay 5y ago

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

What I found particularly depressing that all this was done with an explicit purpose of obtaining a cert. In terms of human level absurdity, I could only think of Brazil movie. It is both ridiculous and absolutely believable. I agree that the cost of moral high ground is a great loss to the society as a whole. We may never be able to recover from this. Guantanamo Bay is part of normal conversation and barely raises an eyebrow. Without going into details, my boss's kid recently said his dad drone strikes people ( he does nothing of the sort ). This is the new normal.

paganel 5y ago

It has seriously been undermined for the last 20 years (I'd say even 30), that's why guys like Putin who fight in order to bring back a multi-polar world know what they're doing, they're not crazy or anything. The West has lost its brightness, its shine, its power of attraction (if one ignores the material thing), the reasons for that are numerous and I don't see any way to bring back the "end of history"-times (i.e. the complete dominance of the West when it comes to its cultural and societal influence) many were dreaming about in the 1990s.

ganzuul 5y ago

Oh, this is far, far worse. It shows the CIA is just as rogue as the Kremlin, and given their history it is fairly clear now that within these two groups there is extreme collusion. The Western intelligence apparatus has been hijacked by a force that is getting instructions from the reptilian brain instead of the cerebral cortex, meaning they are now the enemy.

api 5y ago
Putin and the modern day Russian regime is basically the KGB. The KGB took over Russia after the USSR collapsed. It's basically the same agency.
nanna 5y ago
> The Western intelligence apparatus has been hijacked by a force that is getting instructions from the reptilian brain The sheer wackiness of David Icke's Antisemitism (where 'reptile brains' are coda for Jews) never ceases to amaze me.
- adolph 5y ago
  I'm not 100% sure what the OP intended but there are more generous interpretations: Many people call [the limbic system] the "Lizard Brain,” because the limbic system is about all a lizard has for brain function. It is in charge of fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and fornication. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/where-addiction-meets-your-brain/201404/your-lizard-brain https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/where-addiction-meet...
- ganzuul 5y ago
  Why bring the Jews into this? What are you playing?
  - nanna 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke#Accusations_of_antisemitism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke#Accusations_of_anti...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tiahura 5y ago

Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. Given that we don’t have all, or even most, of the data, that’s really just emotionally driven speculation. And maybe I’m being overly nuanced, but I’m beginning to accept that there’s a qualitative difference between distasteful treatment of dozens of people suspected of having information about terrorists, and the systematic persecution of entire populations. I’m not terribly concerned that China, Russia, or anyone else is going to snatch and torture random nobody like me, and then justify it by pointing to CIA torture of Al Queda.

naoqj 5y ago

>Losing the moral high ground degrades the whole society. How does having "the moral high ground" help the lower class of a society?

afshin 5y ago
The answer to this is related to the answer of: "would you prefer to be in the lower class of Norwegian society or the lower class of nearby Belarussian society?"
- naoqj 5y ago
  Do you think the difference in the standard of life is because of "having the moral ground"?
  - drewcoo 5y ago
    If morals are how we maintain and encourage the well-being of other humans, then yes.
    - thereisnospork 5y ago
      At this risk of being pedantic: the question isn't how we maintain the well-being of other humans, it is how we maintain the well-being of our humans[0] and frankly there's a lot to be said for boot-to-neck diplomacy. [0]Specifically here our non-upper crust humans.
      - worik 5y ago
        > At this risk of being pedantic: the question isn't how we maintain the well-being of other humans, it is how we maintain the well-being of our humans[0] and frankly there's a lot to be said for boot-to-neck diplomacy. That attitude with the associated American power was a complete catastrophe for: * Iraq. * Nicaragua * Panama * Cuba * Afghanistan

keybored 5y ago

I cannot express how bewildering this comment is. The article in question is about using torture as a training tool -- inflicting brain damage on a person so that folks will learn the valuable skill of beating up defenseless people. Then this comment comes along and complains about the optics of it. Why? Because it undermines "Western civilization". And what's the problem with that? Because then Western civilization loses its "moral high ground". And what will that lead to? That the right- and left-wing -- those good-for-nothings that want to "bring down the current horrible governance and figure out things later" -- will opportunistically use that against the shining city on the hill called Western Civilization. Whether this torture business is right or wrong is not even part of the discussion, and might not even be relevant -- the whole point is that the angelic Western Civilization might be beset by the devilish "anti-establishment movement".

hammock 5y ago
What about parent comment did you think had to do with optics? By my reading it has everything to do with the actual behavior itself, which they call "atrocities."
- keybored 5y ago
  All of it. I wrote two paragraphs as an interpretation of a two-paragraph comment so I don't know how else to explain it at this point.
  - hammock 5y ago
    Do you believe "moral high ground" functions as a result of optics, not as a result of actual correct moral action?
    - keybored 5y ago
      You can achieve a moral high ground based on your actions. And that's the only way to do it, in fact. But that clearly has nothing to do with this post since it is about example No. 19281 of the CIA doing some heinous shit. And what's the apparent takeaway from that? That Western Civ might lose its moral high ground. But what about example No. 19280 of the CIA doing some henious shit? What about No. 19279? ... Whence this alleged moral high ground?

cryptonector 5y ago

It's a very small step from this to disappearing and torturing dissidents at home. With The View calling for Tucker Carlson to be tried for treason by a military tribunal, I think we're approaching that point. Then when we get there and someone disappears (say, a colleague, a friend of a friend), some will think and even say "they must have done something". How do I know? Because that is what happened in Argentina during its Dirty War. Oh, I know, most of you will say "that could never happen in my country because we're a first-world Western nation", but Argentina very much was and still is a Western country, complete with rule of law ("Estado del Derecho"), and it was much wealthier then relative to the rest of the world, and had been truly first world in 1950. So, yes, these things very much can happen here in the U.S., and in Canada, and in the UK, and in France and Germany and Spain and Italy and Netherlands and Belgium and Norway and Sweden and so on. It takes a very small number of men to do most of the torturing and killing domestically. Sure, lots more are needed to do the arresting (disappearing) of victims. But not very many need to get down and dirty. Just ten men killing 150 victims/year would have covered the majority of the killings in the Dirty War over six years.

halfnormalform 5y ago
Excusing your whataboutism, it isn’t hard to argue he’s a foreign agent.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  Carlson, a foreign agent? It's just as easy to accuse you of shilling. Please be serious. And if you are, then we're in deeper trouble than I'd thought.
- libraryatnight 5y ago
  He seems more like an unscrupulous jackass than a foreign agent. Rachel Maddow seems just as ridiculous and stupid, but she seems far less dangerous and I'm not sure why that is. All the 24 hour news stations are FUD engines, but Fox and Carlson in particular have this urgency to everything they say - it's always the end of the world, an agenda, everyone is out to get you all the time. It's exhausting. That said he doesn't seem like a foreign agent, just a typical Fox News personality.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

Power corrupts, when you're capable of doing this and go unpunished, you'll have people doing it. Every government ever had and will have this problem. What we should try to achieve in our society is to limit the power given to individuals on other people and allow each member of society to be free of centralised coercion. Nobody should have a monopoly on violence and nobody should be able to forcefully collect taxes from people and then go and wage a war on foreign people. You can call it being anti-establishment, I call it being morally consistent with the idea of freedom which is so often touted in the USA.

rayiner 5y ago

> Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. The exact same goes for the surveillance programs. I don’t know if I agree with that. I think folks underestimate how much conflict in interests “regular people” in different countries really have.

mrtksn 5y ago
Conflict of interests between communities has nothing to do with a community limiting its own people's rights or resorting to atrocities in order to make the job of someone in the community easier. See, this specific situation has happened because a worker decided that their job will be accomplished easier this way. For the mass surveillance or denial of privacy for people is based exactly on the same idea: If they have access to people's communications they will spend less time and money to do their job in comparison to more involved traditional methods. I find it ridiculous that people are expected to be harmed or denied privacy in order to improve the efficiency in an institution.

Diesel555 5y ago

> Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. The exact same goes for the surveillance programs. And yet it is worth noting that the US government released this information under their own policies to the detriment of the "political class" and their own credibility worldwide. This is an important aspect of Democracies. I doubt you'd see the PRC releasing documents about the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region which will for sure be received as bad any time soon. (This is not said to justify the acts in the article to be clear, but to point out a property of Democracies which is important)