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If torture were useful and ethics don't exist, then why would you draw the line anywhere other than "one less victim"?
by 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 agoBecause 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"...
- jamesaguilar 13y agoOne less victim of what? Torture, or the thing torture is preventing? Anyway, the answer is trivial: you'd decide the same way you decide anything else with a marginal cost and a marginal benefit. If the country has to torture one person for a day to save a thousand people fifty quality-adjusted life-years each, it seems like an obvious win. OTOH, if it's five million people for one QALR, we've wasted far more years in torture than we've saved, and we'd have drawn the line somewhere lower.