A great moral quandary

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by mrmitchell
I don't doubt that they are very bad people. But the reports of guys confessing at Guantanamo or Iraqi prisons reminds me of the old joke, where the KGB officers are leading a bear out of the forest that's screaming, "Okay, okay, I'm a rabbit!"

The version I heard was NYPD and the bear was OBL.

[Kuciwalker]

Re: A great moral quandary

Originally posted by Oerdin
torture

Like this?

[DAVOUT]

The problem of the argument that torture can save lives, which is thrue, is that the best person must share it with very bad persons (Gestapo, KGB, South Africa antiterrorists, etc): if you are justified to torture, why are not they?. Such "good persons" would be placed in the same category than the "bad persons", which is generally not acceptable for them.
The problem has no solution : generally speaking it is easy to condemn the use of torture, but in a situation where a goodman has his loved ones under threat of death, another goodman cannot pretend that he would do nothing.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by notyoueither
Take it towards an extreme.

A guy is known to have planted a large bomb somewhere in the United States. His whereabouts are unknown, as is the placement of the bomb.

His 9 year old son helped him gather the materials for the bomb. His son is in custody. The boy knows where the bomb is and where his father is, but won't talk. Is it OK to beat him in an attempt to get the information? Is it OK to use other forms of duress?

let a volunteer scapegoat (who understands what the consequences will be) beat the information out of the kid and then severely punish the to limit of the law the guy who beat the kid up while using the information thus acquired to save all those lives.

poor kid,

poor guy

but at least the larger catastrophie was avoided.

[Kuciwalker]

To steal an example from Drake: what would when you capture a member of AQ who might/does have information that could lead us to OBL, but they'll find out fairly soon that we have the guy and OBL will flee to another cave. We have to get the information quickly, the reward for getting it is high, but it might not work anyway and the situation could come up many times. It's not an exceptional case, so you can't use the justification that exceptional measures are permitted. We have to have a policy that allows torture to be used in some circumstances to use it in those.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
To steal an example from Drake: what would when you capture a member of AQ who might/does have information that could lead us to OBL, but they'll find out fairly soon that we have the guy and OBL will flee to another cave. We have to get the information quickly, the reward for getting it is high, but it might not work anyway and the situation could come up many times. It's not an exceptional case, so you can't use the justification that exceptional measures are permitted. We have to have a policy that allows torture to be used in some circumstances to use it in those.

that could lead to very routine torture. I don't think the stakes would be high enough to justify that.

[Drake Tungsten]

Just for the record, I personally wouldn't support the use of torture in a situation like the one Kuci proposed. I'd damn sure support the use of the interrogation methods that Oerdin and other wingnuts have mislabelled as "torture", though.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Geronimo
that could lead to very routine torture. I don't think the stakes would be high enough to justify that.

Sorry, as Drake mentioned I forgot the quote marks around "torture."

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Just for the record, I personally wouldn't support the use of torture in a situation like the one Kuci proposed. I'd damn sure support the use of the interrogation methods that Oerdin and other wingnuts have mislabelled as "torture", though.

torture

"torture"