In a comment over at Obsidian Wings, 'Katherine' comes up with just about the best counter-hypothetical to the "ticking bomb" justification for torture (ie. would you torture someone to stop a ticking bomb and you knew your victim knew where it was and how to stop it) that I've ever seen.
I'll post the first sentence, and assume you can figure out the rest:
Stipulate that in 2002, Dick Cheney's cardiologist was deeply opposed to the coming invasion of Iraq.
...though you should go read it all.
My biggest problem with the hypothetical ticking bomb scenario is that it's worthless as a guide to tell you what you should do in an arbitrary situation: it is a post-mortem analysis of a situation which was chosen so that it’s easy to reach the conclusion the torture supporter wants you to reach. It's an artificial moral dilemma: you know the past, present and future and you're asked what was the morally-best decision to make in the past. In reality, of course, you can’t see the future so you can’t say “yes, a couple of minutes of torture is justified here because it will save X lives.” In reality, you don’t know what information the suspect has (if any); and you certainly don’t know if he will give it up with X minutes of torture. You might think you know, but unless you can both read minds and tell the future, you actually don’t know.
And here's something I've never seen these ticking-bomb torture-supporters ask: when you’ve secretly and extra-legally (as the US currently does it) tortured the wrong guy to death, even though you were so sure (!) he had the information you thought you knew he had, what happens ? You bet his pain, suffering and life against your gut feeling - and he lost. What does your moral reasoning tell you to do when you’ve brutally killed an innocent man but will not suffer any legal penalties ?
Dear American Republicans,
Please stop.
Yours sincerely,
The Rest of the World.
cleek, cleek, cleek. You just don’t get it. The U.S. doesn’t torture, thus it never has to face your moral dilemma. And certainly the intelligence and other agencies who get to use these techniques have never gotten anything wrong, or been mistaken, about anything. Ever. And these people are terrorists! TERRORISTS! You want to give rights to TERRORISTS! Don’t you know they’re TERRORISTS! Why don’t you trust our gov’t.
Oh, and nevermind all that Saint Reagan nonsense about the scariest words in the english language are “I’m here from the government and I’m here to help.” He had alzheimers and you can’t trust anything he says. Although he did vanquish communism all by himself and with the awesome power of Star Wars and by being folksy.
Oh, I forgot: You are objectively pro-Saddamislamomexifascist!
mexifascist! Ole!