Quote:
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Originally Posted by baggygreen
Letum, tchocky, DI,
you guys are clearly in the never torture camp - so i'll ask again, hypothetically, if there was a nuke in NYC [...]
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hehe, the olde ticking bomb eh?
Well, its not very original and neither is my reply, but I'm happy to go over it again:
The "ticking bomb" argument attempts to justify torture by utilitarian and
consequentialist means.
i.e. it is based on the premise that
an act can be justified if the good it brings about
is greater than the evil needed to cause it.
Now that is severely, if not terminally, flawed to begin with. There are the problems
of predictability, intention, the various arguments ad absurdum, etc most of which
are as old as Mill and Bentham.
For example, you could use the same rational to kill one innocent person to use his
7+ Organs to save the lives of 7 other people because the good (7 innocents saved)
outweighs the evil (one innocent killed).
Now I would be satisfied that I had answered you if I launched in to a critique of
Bentham, Mill, etc. but to be frank, I would get bored, so I am going to take all that
as given and continue.
The ticking bomb argument relies on several premises that at first appear to be part
of the ceteris paribus
, but are not.
Perhaps the most obvious is the assumption that the person to be tortured knows
where the bomb is. This is not part of the ceteris paribus because it is practically
impossible to know such a thing with anything approaching a good degree of
certainty. This was illustrated dramatically with the shooting of the innocent
Brazilian in London. Error it unavoidable. In fact, studies show that the innocent are
more likely to confess under torture than the guilty. This makes torture as
indiscriminate and as likely to succeed as shooting into crowds. It also means that it
will falsely appear to justify torturing more and more people as you will keep getting
more and more confessions.
However, I shall put the problem of torturing the innocent aside and continue.
The second premise is that torture is an effective method of extracting information.
This is not part of the ceteris because it is false. If we where to claim that it was
accurate, we would have to believe that there where thousands of witches in
medieval Europe because that is the information that torture has given us.
A more contemporary example is the 4 IRA bombers that admitted to planting bombs
when under police torture, despite being totally innocent.
However, I shall put the problem of torture being ineffective aside and continue.
Even if torture was effective, the problems it causes would mean that there could be
no overall gain. When the French systematically tortured members of the Algerian
insurgency of 1950-'60 it helped turn a small uprising of 500 or so into a unwinnable
terrorist and guerrilla war against French. The same strategic disaster happened
when allegations of the South Vietnamese and Americans torturing the Viet. Cong
surfaced.
The "ticking bomb" argument makes use of flawed reasoning, piled upon flawed
reasoning. This is disguised in it's appealing rhetoric and appeal to those who have a
shallow knowledge of the subject and are prone to knee-jerk reactions without
proper understanding of the concepts being used.
Torture can not be justified this way, even in such an apparently clear cut case
as the ticking bomb argument; let alone in the reality of the world.