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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 detonate

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.

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

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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.