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Originally Posted by filtherton
What's not to get? It sounds like you don't really understand what you're talking about. Did you know that many Christians on the left are absolutely opposed to torture? Or that absolutism isn't always bad?
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Examples of a reasonable form of absolutism are pretty lacking, in my opinion.
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So you just, like, sit around and fantasize about situations where torture was morally justified? That can't be good for your mental health.
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Not really... but questions regarding the ethics of torture should raise those kinds of thoughts, at least a little bit, if one is to claim they have actually given the issue due consideration.
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This is ridiculous. This has nothing to do with the kind of torture that was the standard operating procedure of the previous administration. You're talking about some sort of fictional fantasy world. In Real Life people were tortured when there wasn't really anything at stake, when they didn't have any useful information- that's how torture happens In Real Life, when people decide that some sort of abstract notion of personal safety is more important than a commitment to human rights.
That's what this whole torture thing is really about- making people who are fundamentally insecure feel secure.
This Jack Bauer bullshit needs to die.
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Well, I wanst really commenting on torture as implemented by the previous administration.. but in general, there are possible situations where torture would be moral. I'm sure that any scenario I could posit to you, would be immediately dismissed as a "Jack Bauer" fantasy, but whatever.
If you can imagine a sliding scale, where the morality of an act of coercion is proportional with the severity of the risks involved with failing to acquire information necessary to prevent some disaster, you should be able to understand how I feel about it. On the low end of the scale, you might have a typical police interrogation... on the high end of the scale you might have more advanced torture techniques. On one hand though, I do think there is probably an upper limit on the type of torture that could be realistically ethically used, but I don't think waterboarding gets there... nor naked human pyramids.
If say, a million lives are at stake, and the best possibility to save them was through an act of torture, I think it would be morally questionable not to go through with it. Heck even if 9/11 could have been prevented with an act of torture...
This has nothing to do with me trying to feel "secure"... its about coming to a reasonable conclusion about the ethics of torture. I don't think the anti-torture absolutists have proven their case, that I have seen. I don't think I would really advocate that we actually permit torture as a matter of public policy... but I would be all for letting someone off the hook if they used torture reasonably.
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And I'm pretty sure that you won't find any studies concerning the effectiveness of torture because any scientist who attached his/her name to the study would be stripped of their credentials and compared to the nazis.
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Then why is there such confidence behind the claims that torture is unreliable? Do we have good scientific information to corroborate these claims, or can we dismiss them as unsubstantiated?