Peterkin

No. I said your toe is not relevant to any of those things. And no to the second statement, as well. I am arguing that by your logic the worst thing is the right thing, if a certain set of assumptions is accepted. That's one of the assumptions. That's another of the assumptions. The third is that torturing the prisoner will save the innocents.

It's not relevant! Neither is how little or much pain is acceptable. It wouldn't be in the scenario in which it is assumed that the suspect you're torturing is not an innocent, that your hurting him is sensible and that you stop before killing him. But it would be the worst crime in your book, if you had the wrong man [an innocent] and the torture got out of control [took his life] before yielding results [senseless]. So putting the same method on the other side of a legal line makes the worst thing the right thing, based on those assumptions.

"Right" is defined by the value system in which it is applied. Logic works within a defined set of acceptable limits; based on a mutually agreed set of assumptions. If you assume that there are different categories of human: for example, guilty and innocent ones, and also assume that human lives are valuable, and also assume that the innocent ones are more valuable than the guilty ones, and also assume that each innocent is worth the same, so that the value of innocents depends on their number, rather than their degree of innocence and the value of guilty perpetrators is nullified by their placement in the 'presumed guilty' category, rather than their number or degree of guilt, then the logic of [slowly and horribly] smashing a guilty one in order to [hopefully] save one or more innocents is perfectly sound. On another set of assumption, it isn't. If your justification is accepted in a system, then the the answer is Yes. If your justification is rejected in the system, the answer is No.

So what? How does your pain justify hitting dimreepr's toe with a mallet? So, that would be.... torture. Not bombing? Not genocide?

It's not about my happiness - I don't even eat meat and I'm so unhappy about warfare that I've entirely given up on my species. It's about the reality of human experience and the basis of human values. The two acts are not comparable in any code of natural or civilized behaviour. The comparison I attempted to make is: In all the vast range of kinds and immense numbers of victims of killing, only a very small segment - the unauthorized killing of a member in good standing of one's own society - is generally considered wrong. And even in that small segment, exceptions are permitted. In the very small range of torture, all of it is counter to nature, and it's generally considered wrong, but some exceptions are permitted. The moral equation is hugely disproportionate in all respects.

You can pose that in the form of an ethics question, but it isn't. "Is torture an acceptable tool for law enforcement?" is an ethics question. "Where does torture rate on the scale of human evils?" is a question of personal or social values; it's a question of cultural world-views and personal convictions. In one belief system, the loss of a thousand lives is as nothing to the destruction of a single human soul, because the innocents will be saved and rewarded, and the one who traded his soul for their [temporary, earthbound] lives is damned for eternity. In another, prolonging the lives of many absolutely justifies causing a few to suffer. In yet another, using evil methods, even once, for any reason, corrupts the system and fatally poisons the body politic. Conversely, one might be convinced that whatever works to preserve the system is right bu definition. It's not an ethics question; it's a bookkeeping question.

Oh, my precious bodily fluids!

When we have a stomach ache at age 4 months, it's most often colic and we don't 'attribute' it; we respond to by making noises of distress. When we get a stomach ache at age 4 years, we begin to suspect food intake or a disease process as its cause. At age 14, we often attribute it to fear of exams or falling in love, but it's more likely to be ice cream on top of hot dogs, or influenza. At age 40, we consider overindulgence, a toxin, a virus, overproduction of stomach acid, and we may wonder whether it's caused by stress or anxiety. It's certainly normal to know about pain receptors, nerves and the brain by that age. It's possible but not 'normal' to consider that the first avenue of investigation. We are aware of psychosomatic pain and its most likely causes: fear, guilt and empathy. It' usually traceable to a specific event, experience or emotion. That's a fairly big IF. Maybe. but it doesn't answer my question about you thesis regarding shared vs subjective perception of reality:

Evil is an emergent property of the valuation process of self-reflective moral entities.

I would certainly resort to that option before I even considered the jumper cables. For one thing, I imagine - don't know, just find it easier to imagine - they'd be less likely to lie under a chemically induced state of compliance than a mechanically induced one. Faster, too, probably, which is a major consideration in the script. (And, if it leaves psychic scars on the subject, I'm more readily persuaded that their origin lies in his own actions and quite easily persuaded that my own psychic scars won't be as deep as if I had laid violent hands on him. These are selfish considerations... Is that wrong?)

I tried, early on, to distinguish ethics from emotion; principle from visceral response. I'm no longer convinced that can ever be done by human beings who function is a society. Maybe yogis on their mountaintop, or philosopher kings on their thrones.

Thing is, I don't think we can. Killing is natural to us: we're predators and warmongers. The instinct comes from a long line of fiercely territorial carnivores and omnivores. Killing is innate and endemic to us. All societies make laws against murder, wherein murder has a particular legal definition as regards members of the same polity, and doesn't cover the vast majority of armed conflict, law enforcement, punishment and revenge, gladiatorial contest - let alone the vast, unending, unquestioned carnage of farming and hunting. Rather than a few permissible killings being excepted from a categorical ban on killing, murder (in its several degrees) is the only that's excepted from all the accepted and required killing we do all the time. So, you have to separate causing the death of one species from killing all other species, and put a different moral valuation on it, then scoop the minority cause of human death "murder" out of all the normal kinds of killing, and judge the situational merits of each case. Torture is exactly the other way around. It is an exceptional kind of interaction of one human with another - one that is not necessary for the maintenance of life, territory and social cohesion. Torture is a sophisticated, intelligent human invention, not an animal instinct. Yes, I know cats play with their prey; they do that even when it's dead, to prolong the excitement of the hunt. They are unaware of its suffering, don't intend the suffering and get no pleasure: the suffering of the prey is of no benefit to the predator; it's a mere side effect. The suffering of an inquisitor's or sadist's victim is the objective of the exercise.

OK. The answer to the OP question was NO: it's never right to torture people or other living things. Do you mean by saying ? Unfunnily enough, people do live in those places, and get tortured there, and authorized law-enforcement agents are never put on trial for torturing prisoners there.

OK. The answer, then, is NO

Of course. Who is capable of leaving their biases out of their opinions?

No medals are likely. I'm not aware of any having been awarded to police officers, anywhere in the world, for having solved or prevented a crime through illegal methods. They do very often get away with zero adverse consequences to themselves. I think they shouldn't and neither should I.

No. I said that, in a desperate situation, I ould consider all options, including those I consider wrong. I also stated on several occasions that I don't know whether I would, or could go through with it. And this is the crux of the matter. This is the point of divergence I've been trying to explain. If an act is categorically wrong, it is always wrong. It is not necessarily the biggest wrong this species is capable of (that would be global destruction, and we're beavering at that, too) but on the scale of wrongs up there in the top 20% IMO. It's wrong if you do it; wrong if a prison guard does it, wrong if a madman does it, wrong if an enemy spymaster does it, wrong if a grand inquisitor does it, wrong if some snot-nosed private in a POW camp does it, wrong if a CIA agent does it and wrong if a police officer does it. It would still be wrong if i did it. It would still be wrong if a district court judge in his padded leather chair wrote me a permission slip and put a big red seal on. So, the next question is : What should happen to me if I went ahead and did it anyway, knowing that it's wrong, because I believed that an even bigger wrong would be prevented thereby? I'm not asking what would happen, but what should happen. That may be the distinction between what you represent as the majority view and what I suspect is the minority view (Noted: neither number is in evidence) I believe what should happen is my arrest, arraignment an trial, and my plea would be 'guilty with extenuating circumstances'. If that means I couldn't get a jury trial, the verdict is a coin-toss: which side the judge is on, so that's no good. I'd prefer a trial by 12 peers. (And I can't afford Alan Shore, so no guarantee.) What I think would happen at that trial, assuming it's a fair one, depends entirely - entirely - on whether I had succeeded in saving the victims. If I won my bet, I would almost certainly be acquitted. If I lost - didn't get the correct information in the allotted time - I would almost certainly be convicted. That's how I think most people in modern westernized industrial societies think: winners win; losers lose. Either way, I would have quit active duty by then, even if my chief didn't have the moral fibre to sack me, and be in some in some bacground kind of work, where i never had to encounter another suspect or make another arrest.

I didn't present scenarios. I explained about actual police and forensic procedure, about which I used to know something. My practical experience is out of date now, but the jury-trial system hasn't changed and the statistics I cited are recent, both from the US and Australia. Everybody who reads the news. Lots of people predicted something like it. When you set up a world order guaranteed to breed hate and political strife, and especially one where a small, powerless faction has no other recourse against a powerful state machinery, you can expect many examples of terrorist activity. What makes it effective is that revolutionary cells are notoriously difficult to spy on, so the authorities can't prepare for all the forms in which terrorist activity will manifest. There are too many accessible targets. The White House and Pentagon were obvious targets, and there had been a previous attempt on the World Trade Center. The use of domestic flights and residences made it harder to forecast. The rise of Islamic militancy was not exactly news. That's not a game, that's a sigh of resignation. I am well cognizant of my place in the minority. Provided the agent on the scene correctly identifies his situation as that situation.... Which, of course, he always assumes is the case, if he has carte blanche. I don't think it's the same at all. I can think of no examples of mercy-torture, or torture in self-defence. This defence-of-others (howbeit the others in danger are not present) scenario is the only one the analagy covers.

In each case, well before the window of opportunity is expected to close. In the two given scenarios presented here, that would be a few hours. The child will be murdered; the bomb will go off in a few hours. Given that it may, and probably will, take a couple of hours to extract the information under torture - in this instance, inexpert torture (because the alternative is too abhorrent to contemplate in an ethics thought-experiment), you have 1-4 hours to exhaust all other sources of information and avenues of investigation. Al else, in these situations, fails very quickly.

Sure. Lots of things might be. Some of those improbable things might even happen together. If enough of those improbable things improbably converged within your immediate purview, you might can be as certain of a suspect's guilt as if they had been witnessed committing the crime. If all of those improbable things converged in a single moment, in a single case, you might have the makings of a scripted thought-experiment. When that happens, you will make the right decision. Probably. Where's the fun? What's to win? No, I simply disagree with your approach to law-enforcement.

So why does the agent on the scene have access to them, if you can't think of them in a cool, detached assessment? All those may have happened, and may come to light during an investigation. But the rapist of little girl you keep bringing as an example of 100% certainty is still not applicable to all these "may have"'s: you already had the information. In cases where you don't need to decide whether to use torture; i.e. cases that are inapplicable to the scenario presented here. In which a great many injustices happen. (Yes, yes, the criminals do more harm than the police, so it's okay.) Under abnormal circumstances, "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" is a verdict based on the common sense, experience, gut feeling, hunch, or prejudice of a police officer. That does apply to the case in point; the legal definition does not. That's vigilante justice. It has not proven particularly beneficial to societies.

Violating someone's trust is wrong; deceit for the purpose of harming another who poses no threat to yourself, or depriving them of something to which they are entitled is wrong; deception to gain unearned benefit or advantage is wrong. Story-telling is not wrong. Kindness is not wrong. Protecting someone's privacy is not wrong. Helping an ally is not wrong. Telling untruths or withholding true information doesn't all belong in one big bag labelled LIES. It can't be judged with one big moral gavel. Human communication is entirely context-determined.

You claim that, but it continues inapplicable to cases where vital information regarding the crime is urgently needed at the time and in the hours immediately following the apprehension of a suspect. There is no time, in either of the thought-experiment scenarios to do any routine investigation, let alone exhaust ll avenues short of torture, as every one of those avenues is time-consuming. In the red-handed capture example, no information is required from the suspect: everything necessary to know about the crime, the perpetrator, the weapon and the victim is already known. In the verdict of "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" example, there can be no such verdict until after the trail, which comes after the time-consuming forensic collection and testing, witness testimony - routine investigation; all the regular methods. And if evidence extracted by torture is introduced at the trial, it either nullifies or fatally taints that sentence.

That's the only common factor between a scripted scenario and real life. In real life situations, this is the only thing you know for sure at the time the decision must be made. You cannot be 100% sure you have the right captive; you can't be sure of his guilt, of whether he knows what you need to find out, what interrogation method will elicit the information he does have, whether and for how long the information you get will be useful, whether all less bad options have been exhausted, which kind of torture - if any - will produce results most quickly, what repercussions, consequences and long-term effects will result - for the the victim(s), the suspect, yourself, your agency, the justice system and society. You cannot know. You have to rely on your own judgment and instinct. If the rules are strict and your training is sound, more mature judgment than primal instinct. If not, more hunch and gut reaction. In our safe and comfortable chairs, secure in the belief that we will never participate, either as agent or as suspect, it's an easy decision. And that's wrong. It should never be easy.

Nothing to do with me. That can happen to anyone. What debate? Everyone who had something to say has said it several times over.