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Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I'd ask how effective torture would be. If torturing, say, five people a year for one day each, prevented all deaths from

Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I'd ask how effective torture would be. If torturing, say, five people a year for one day each, prevented all deaths from war and terrorism for the whole year? Make that deal any day. To me the problem with torture isn't that it's "bad". It's that it doesn't serve a useful purpose and serves many counter-purposes. If it wasn't so clearly useless, I'd have to think a lot more about whether I'd support it.

krichman 13y ago
Before we begin this scheme, you should have yourself and/or your family waterboarded for a few hours and see if your opinion changes. Edit: I mean, even if it were useful, is is acceptable? Probably not.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  I'm not sure what my emotional reluctance to be harmed has to do with whether this (in the hypothetical world I've constructed) is a net boon for society.
- vidarh 13y ago
  > Edit: I mean, even if it were useful, is is acceptable? Probably not. Which would be a quite interesting level of emotional hypocrisy, given that we tolerate far greater damage to far larger number of individuals on a regular basis in the name of security. Consider the number of civilian dead from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, for example.
jacquesm 13y ago
> If torturing, say, five people a year for one day each, prevented all deaths from war and terrorism for the whole year? Make that deal any day. Ok, we'll start with you. This had better work!
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  I'm not really sure what you're getting at. I acknowledged efficacy in my comment. Individual reluctance to be harmed has almost nothing to do with the calculation of whether it's overall a better world with the policy or without.
  - jacquesm 13y ago
    It's only a better world from the perspective of those that are not being tortured. The fact that by massive voting imbalance those few being tortured would have 0 chance of stopping it does not begin to describe the injustices inherent in your proposed scheme. Ethics and principles are hard to reconcile with statistics and calculations, by suggesting that there is a greater good for which you will discard your principles in a heartbeat you are devaluing everything. The question then becomes where do you draw the line? A few individuals? A few tens of individuals? A few hundred? A few thousand? As long as it is one person less than would be killed otherwise? Best not to make that first step and stick to 'torture is bad, no matter what the upside'.
    - jamesaguilar 13y ago
      I don't really believe in ethics or principles. Those are just words people use to dress up their preferences about how the world should work. Where do you draw the line therefore zero is a standard approach from the nays in almost any policy debate, but it is easily defeated. I draw the line somewhere. Not sure where. I'd have to figure it out if I ever heard evidence that Convinced me torture is useful.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        If torture were useful and ethics don't exist, then why would you draw the line anywhere other than "one less victim"?
        sokoloff 13y ago
        Because of a thing called the discount rate. For future or uncertain outcomes, one rationally discounts the amount they are willing to pay right now, with 100% certainty, against the future and/or uncertain outcome. There's a possibility (IMO, a certainty) that torture isn't 100% effective, and there's some number greater than 100 of deaths that I'd need to avoid a year from now to torture 100 people today. (some of those 100 might die anyway before the terror event; we might thwart the terror event via some other means; the terror threat may itself disappear [death of those terrorists or other means]) It's just another case of "pay me $1MM today and I promise to pay you back exactly $1MM in 20 years"...
- CJefferson 13y ago
  How is your argument different from "some innocent people might get lifetime jail sentences, so we must give out no long sentences"?
  - flyinRyan 13y ago
    Well, personally I consider jail sentences a form or torture and would like to see the prison system abolished. So no inconsistency for me. :)
csomar 13y ago
1. You are making a wrong assumption. Torture won't prevent terrorism. Instead, it'll just make the prisoner friends more aggressive and looking for revenge. 2. To me the problem with torture isn't that it's "bad" Hmmm, have you tried losing an eye? That's should be quite bad.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  Ugh. What does your comment add to the conversation. Half of it is a reiteration of my comment re efficacy. The other half is a willful misreading of what I meant when I said "bad". Its like you are so eager to get in there and disagree with me that you neither read my comment to the end nor stopped to think even for a second about whether your response was rational.
  - molloy 13y ago
    I agree with your main point in this rebuttal, but I think you should have worded it in a way that would educate him as to why his interpretation was egregious without coming out so bitterly. It would raise the odds of your message actually being heeded. I understand that when people respond ignorantly, it's incredibly frustrating at times. However, they're more likely to change if you educate patiently instead of reprimanding.
gjulianm 13y ago
Though I understand your point, I don't share it. There are thing that are plain bad. For example, applying death penalty to every criminal would be 'good' for the society: less criminals and you'd waste less money in jails. But we all know that killing people like that is not morally good.
b1daly 13y ago
But what is the point of your thought experiment? What I infer is that you don't support torture because it is not effective. You agree that it is bad, but that is not relevant to whether it should be used. What I infer is that you are an advocate of a crude form of utilitarianism. Some other morally bad activity that is actually effective in saving more lives than it destroys is something you can get behind. This type of reasoning is used in all sorts of military actions, like drone strikes. Armong the many problems with it: in practice it never works out that even a simple calculation of whatever action saves net lives should be pursued. Instead, policy makers operate with wildly different valuations of individual lives. Roughly, the ration of the value of one american life to one foreign national of a Muslim persuasion seems to be about 100:1. This leads to very steep slippery slopes and resulting atrocities. That's just one problem with your views, which are thoughtless and crude.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  The point of my thought experiment is the op was saying that there are some thing we don't even have to think about like torture and the surveillance we are discussing. For the surveillance, it seems much more reasonable to believe it might actually help.
  - flyinRyan 13y ago
    I disagree. Using evil tactics is a "code smell" if you will. Even thinking about using such tactics for one second is a red flag that something has gone wrong. Why would you need to spy on your own citizens? Because they're upset. Would it really be better to oppress them than figure out why they're upset and address it?
mercurial 13y ago
> Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I'd ask how effective torture would be. Effective at getting information? Probably. As torture is primarily used for interrogation, torturers would stop torturing if it didn't work. But I guess it's a bit like bombing a village where you have seen Talibans two hours ago. Sometimes you will kill the Talibans. Sometimes you will kill Talibans and civilians. Many times, you'll just kill civilians. For instance, during the Algerian Independence War, French intelligence intoxicated the FLN by making them believe they had been infiltrated (operation KJ-27, January 1958). The FLN commander in the sector tortured the suspects, which promptly gave names of people they knew, which in turn got tortured, and so on. This resulted in the elimination of (at least) hundreds of combatants, most of whom were actually loyal to the FLN.
- pitt1980 13y ago
  "torturers would stop torturing if it didn't work" I don't know if that follows that argument can be used to defend the logic of any illogical act specifically with torture, there are cultural pressures to "do everything possible" that override considerabtions on whether it actually works
  - mercurial 13y ago
    > that argument can be used to defend the logic of any illogical act You can find historical examples of torture working for the goal of acquiring information. For instance, the battle of Algiers is well-documented. Any asymmetrical conflict has involved torture. Obviously, any perceived benefit on the ground is counterbalanced by the loss of moral high ground, worsened perception by the local population and occasionally, international condemnation.
- flyinRyan 13y ago
  The original purpose of torture was to get people to admit to things the government needed them to admit to. For example, the Templars were taken down by the king of France by torturing them until they "admitted" committing heresy. That allowed him to execute them, and avoid paying the huge sum of money they were owed. Getting information, I'd say not very effective. The issue is, what if the person really doesn't know? How do you tell the difference? You listed some examples, but how did you confirm that this information was true and not just bullshit these people were saying to make the torture stop? In the end, weren't the "loyalists" just killed anyway? Maybe they weren't actually loyal so they were simply killed and logged as loyalists. Since the main "evidence" is testimony under extreme duress there's no way to know for sure.
oblivionawaits 13y ago
Torture results in more terrorism. You would not be stopping it using these methods. Instead, you would be engaged in it.
flyinRyan 13y ago
How far will you go with this? What if we discovered that raping the parent/child of the suspect in front of them could save even more lives? I mean, you make a good point that it torture doesn't work (well, it actually does work but only for it's original purpose: to get people to claim they did something that we need them to claim they did, even if they didn't), but personally I don't want to know if it works or not because it's not valid no matter how effective.
pizza234 13y ago
The problem with this type of thinking is that it's focused on the small picture. If you want to "solve" terrorism, first of all, you stop all the bullying, controlling, exploitative, and to summarize trouble-making, foreign policies. In spite of what the USA agenda and propaganda dictates, terrorists attack for a logical reason (of course, this doesn't mean a reasonable one), not because they wake up one morning with the intention of bombing the population of a given country. To answer your question more directly though: torture and grey-legal area practices are ineffective because they are already put in practice. There's plenty of documentaries about this, and by the way, a short time ago has been posted a link to the Guantanamo prison practices here in HN.

krichman 13y ago

Before we begin this scheme, you should have yourself and/or your family waterboarded for a few hours and see if your opinion changes. Edit: I mean, even if it were useful, is is acceptable? Probably not.

jamesaguilar 13y ago
I'm not sure what my emotional reluctance to be harmed has to do with whether this (in the hypothetical world I've constructed) is a net boon for society.
vidarh 13y ago
> Edit: I mean, even if it were useful, is is acceptable? Probably not. Which would be a quite interesting level of emotional hypocrisy, given that we tolerate far greater damage to far larger number of individuals on a regular basis in the name of security. Consider the number of civilian dead from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, for example.

jacquesm 13y ago

> If torturing, say, five people a year for one day each, prevented all deaths from war and terrorism for the whole year? Make that deal any day. Ok, we'll start with you. This had better work!

jamesaguilar 13y ago
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. I acknowledged efficacy in my comment. Individual reluctance to be harmed has almost nothing to do with the calculation of whether it's overall a better world with the policy or without.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  It's only a better world from the perspective of those that are not being tortured. The fact that by massive voting imbalance those few being tortured would have 0 chance of stopping it does not begin to describe the injustices inherent in your proposed scheme. Ethics and principles are hard to reconcile with statistics and calculations, by suggesting that there is a greater good for which you will discard your principles in a heartbeat you are devaluing everything. The question then becomes where do you draw the line? A few individuals? A few tens of individuals? A few hundred? A few thousand? As long as it is one person less than would be killed otherwise? Best not to make that first step and stick to 'torture is bad, no matter what the upside'.
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    I don't really believe in ethics or principles. Those are just words people use to dress up their preferences about how the world should work. Where do you draw the line therefore zero is a standard approach from the nays in almost any policy debate, but it is easily defeated. I draw the line somewhere. Not sure where. I'd have to figure it out if I ever heard evidence that Convinced me torture is useful.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      If torture were useful and ethics don't exist, then why would you draw the line anywhere other than "one less victim"?
      - sokoloff 13y ago
        Because of a thing called the discount rate. For future or uncertain outcomes, one rationally discounts the amount they are willing to pay right now, with 100% certainty, against the future and/or uncertain outcome. There's a possibility (IMO, a certainty) that torture isn't 100% effective, and there's some number greater than 100 of deaths that I'd need to avoid a year from now to torture 100 people today. (some of those 100 might die anyway before the terror event; we might thwart the terror event via some other means; the terror threat may itself disappear [death of those terrorists or other means]) It's just another case of "pay me $1MM today and I promise to pay you back exactly $1MM in 20 years"...
CJefferson 13y ago
How is your argument different from "some innocent people might get lifetime jail sentences, so we must give out no long sentences"?
- flyinRyan 13y ago
  Well, personally I consider jail sentences a form or torture and would like to see the prison system abolished. So no inconsistency for me. :)

csomar 13y ago

1. You are making a wrong assumption. Torture won't prevent terrorism. Instead, it'll just make the prisoner friends more aggressive and looking for revenge. 2. To me the problem with torture isn't that it's "bad" Hmmm, have you tried losing an eye? That's should be quite bad.

jamesaguilar 13y ago
Ugh. What does your comment add to the conversation. Half of it is a reiteration of my comment re efficacy. The other half is a willful misreading of what I meant when I said "bad". Its like you are so eager to get in there and disagree with me that you neither read my comment to the end nor stopped to think even for a second about whether your response was rational.
- molloy 13y ago
  I agree with your main point in this rebuttal, but I think you should have worded it in a way that would educate him as to why his interpretation was egregious without coming out so bitterly. It would raise the odds of your message actually being heeded. I understand that when people respond ignorantly, it's incredibly frustrating at times. However, they're more likely to change if you educate patiently instead of reprimanding.

gjulianm 13y ago

Though I understand your point, I don't share it. There are thing that are plain bad. For example, applying death penalty to every criminal would be 'good' for the society: less criminals and you'd waste less money in jails. But we all know that killing people like that is not morally good.

b1daly 13y ago

But what is the point of your thought experiment? What I infer is that you don't support torture because it is not effective. You agree that it is bad, but that is not relevant to whether it should be used. What I infer is that you are an advocate of a crude form of utilitarianism. Some other morally bad activity that is actually effective in saving more lives than it destroys is something you can get behind. This type of reasoning is used in all sorts of military actions, like drone strikes. Armong the many problems with it: in practice it never works out that even a simple calculation of whatever action saves net lives should be pursued. Instead, policy makers operate with wildly different valuations of individual lives. Roughly, the ration of the value of one american life to one foreign national of a Muslim persuasion seems to be about 100:1. This leads to very steep slippery slopes and resulting atrocities. That's just one problem with your views, which are thoughtless and crude.

jamesaguilar 13y ago
The point of my thought experiment is the op was saying that there are some thing we don't even have to think about like torture and the surveillance we are discussing. For the surveillance, it seems much more reasonable to believe it might actually help.
- flyinRyan 13y ago
  I disagree. Using evil tactics is a "code smell" if you will. Even thinking about using such tactics for one second is a red flag that something has gone wrong. Why would you need to spy on your own citizens? Because they're upset. Would it really be better to oppress them than figure out why they're upset and address it?

mercurial 13y ago

> Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I'd ask how effective torture would be. Effective at getting information? Probably. As torture is primarily used for interrogation, torturers would stop torturing if it didn't work. But I guess it's a bit like bombing a village where you have seen Talibans two hours ago. Sometimes you will kill the Talibans. Sometimes you will kill Talibans and civilians. Many times, you'll just kill civilians. For instance, during the Algerian Independence War, French intelligence intoxicated the FLN by making them believe they had been infiltrated (operation KJ-27, January 1958). The FLN commander in the sector tortured the suspects, which promptly gave names of people they knew, which in turn got tortured, and so on. This resulted in the elimination of (at least) hundreds of combatants, most of whom were actually loyal to the FLN.

pitt1980 13y ago
"torturers would stop torturing if it didn't work" I don't know if that follows that argument can be used to defend the logic of any illogical act specifically with torture, there are cultural pressures to "do everything possible" that override considerabtions on whether it actually works
- mercurial 13y ago
  > that argument can be used to defend the logic of any illogical act You can find historical examples of torture working for the goal of acquiring information. For instance, the battle of Algiers is well-documented. Any asymmetrical conflict has involved torture. Obviously, any perceived benefit on the ground is counterbalanced by the loss of moral high ground, worsened perception by the local population and occasionally, international condemnation.
flyinRyan 13y ago
The original purpose of torture was to get people to admit to things the government needed them to admit to. For example, the Templars were taken down by the king of France by torturing them until they "admitted" committing heresy. That allowed him to execute them, and avoid paying the huge sum of money they were owed. Getting information, I'd say not very effective. The issue is, what if the person really doesn't know? How do you tell the difference? You listed some examples, but how did you confirm that this information was true and not just bullshit these people were saying to make the torture stop? In the end, weren't the "loyalists" just killed anyway? Maybe they weren't actually loyal so they were simply killed and logged as loyalists. Since the main "evidence" is testimony under extreme duress there's no way to know for sure.

oblivionawaits 13y ago

Torture results in more terrorism. You would not be stopping it using these methods. Instead, you would be engaged in it.

flyinRyan 13y ago

How far will you go with this? What if we discovered that raping the parent/child of the suspect in front of them could save even more lives? I mean, you make a good point that it torture doesn't work (well, it actually does work but only for it's original purpose: to get people to claim they did something that we need them to claim they did, even if they didn't), but personally I don't want to know if it works or not because it's not valid no matter how effective.

pizza234 13y ago

The problem with this type of thinking is that it's focused on the small picture. If you want to "solve" terrorism, first of all, you stop all the bullying, controlling, exploitative, and to summarize trouble-making, foreign policies. In spite of what the USA agenda and propaganda dictates, terrorists attack for a logical reason (of course, this doesn't mean a reasonable one), not because they wake up one morning with the intention of bombing the population of a given country. To answer your question more directly though: torture and grey-legal area practices are ineffective because they are already put in practice. There's plenty of documentaries about this, and by the way, a short time ago has been posted a link to the Guantanamo prison practices here in HN.