![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"If you had captured a terrorist, and you knew a bomb was going to go off in a few hours and he knew how to stop it, wouldn't you be right to torture him in order to save innocent lives?"
"What an unlikely scenario that is! That you would catch that person with so little time left in a plot that was probably years in setting up but could still be stopped at the last minute, AND you KNEW that you had the right guy and he could tell you how to stop it AND you were sure you could break him in time to stop the plot and he didn't think that he could hold out just long enough that you wouldn't have time to follow up after he gave you a bogus answer ... Outside of Hollywood does that come up often enough to be meaningful in a discussion of state sanctioned torture?"
And then it hit me. We've got a bunch of people who dodged military service trying to run a war without having to listen to the experts: what they know about war is mostly from movies, so of course they're thinking in terms of a Hollywood plot device and mistake it for reality!
(That's been percolating through my brain, waiting to form a big enough puddle to form into words, since reading ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
theferrett's thoughts about the second season of 24 this morning.)
(no subject)
(no subject)
But at least that would frame torture correctly as a punitive thing, not a fundamental intelligence tool ...
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
I'd respond with the one we have.
"If you had a jail full of 1000 people, and you thought some of them MIGHT be terrorists that MIGHT know SOME useful things which MAY result in a savings of SOME lives at SOME point (sooner or later), would you torture them all to find out EVERYTHING they knew?"
"If Yes, then how would you know when you tortured each of them enough? And if could tell, once you were done, what would you say to the ones who were innocent? Would you send them home? If you send them home, they will tell all of their friends and families about what you did."
"Shouldn't it be illegal to do this since it seems overwhelmingly likely to make some people think that we are the real enemy, and want to blow us up with bombs and cost lives?"
I'm fine with it being legal for you to torture someone provided your victim's family gets to torture you if he turns out to be innocent.
(no subject)
(no subject)
Exactly what I'd been trying to put words together to say.
Thanks.
(no subject)
(no subject)
Just because something is considered to be a crime doesn't it can't be justified under extreme circumstances.
You just take your chances when you commit such an act. The criminal justice system gets a crack at you and you have to explain yourself. You have to sit and allow yourself to be judged as to whether what you did was justified or not.
Want a real Hollywood scenario?
I'm sure the passengers of the 9/11 flight that crashed in Western PA were violating many laws when they attacked the hijackers. They would have been acquitted of course because they were acting "in the defense of themselves or others".
If the hypothetical Hollywood scenario ever occurs, and I'm sitting on the grand jury, I'll refuse to indict. So would anyone else with a soul. Arguing that it shouldn't be made a crime for that reason insults garden variety straw-man arguments.
(no subject)
(no subject)
Consider then, what happens when they realize it didn't go according to the script. Now they're stuck with a war on their hands where the people aren't joyous, the day isn't saved, and what's even more interesting, the bad guys didn't give up or go away.
Now tell me what good can come of this if the people running the war are waiting for reality to match the script, rather than changing the script to match reality.
(no subject)
I'm not sure that's ever going to happen. Between that being enough cognitive dissonance that they'll erect psychological defense mechanisms to avoid experiencing it, and their having started out already boasting of not being "reality based" (paraphrase since I'm too tired to do a Google hunt right now: "you reality-based folks are obsolete, reality is whatever we decide it is"), they ain't seein'.
"Now tell me what good can come of this [...]"
You get one guess how much "good" I expect, and leafing back through my old journal entries for my politics is cheating. I'll be surprised if you guess wrong.
(Actually some good can come of it as much by luck as aught else, and some other good can come directly but at so high a price that it makes few people happy. Mostly, I think they'll just be relieved when it's finally over, whenever that is.)
(no subject)
The problem I see is that unless a) a miracle happens (reality does actually conform to their scripted world) or b) a miracle happens (they start looking outside their box consistently), it's not going to be over for a very long and expensive while.
While some good might come of it by luck, they're not actively helping their own cases. Three more years...
(no subject)
I'm too tired to do a Google hunt right now
Here's the Wikipedia entry on the reality-based community, with links to the Even The Liberal New York Times article.
(no subject)
This kind of situation is referred to as the problem of dirty hands: what do you do when there are two choices and both of them are morally wrong? Politicians are especially prone to these kinds of decisions; what should they do? There are a number of responses to it - perhaps the most common one in real life is to deny that there are only two choices. *grin* We're always looking for another solution.
That doesn't answer the theoretical question, of course, although I suspect that most people would agree on the broad answer ("do what causes the least harm") while disagreeing on which action that is.
(no subject)
This was recently made very clear to me this semester in my first philosophy class. For the most part, we agreed on the least harm principle, however out of just 13 students in the class, we had wildly different ideas on what that entailed.
(no subject)
This article in the Weekly Standard mentions the above.
Another interesting link:
NYtimes
Saying all that, as Jmax points out below, the times when the scenario is true are few and far between. In those cases, it is best that the people involved be acting outside the guidelines and illegally - they might be pardoned in light of the circumstance. But we've seen what happens when what should be extraordinary is treated as ordinary.
(no subject)