Torture is sometimes morally permissible.

I will be outlining several arguments that defend the position that torture can be morally justified in certain situations. I would encourage everyone voting on this debate to read both sides carefully before coming to any conclusion as to who won. Contention 1: Hypothetical situations Imagine that a terrorist has planted a bomb in the heart of a nearby city. He now sits in your custody. As to the bombs location, he will say nothing apart from his glee of its subsequent detonation and the mass casualties it will cause. Given this state of affairs- in particular, it seems that there would be no harm in exposing this unpleasant fellow to a suasion of bygone times. Contention 2: The false choice of pacifism Pacifism in the face of evil is generally thought to be a viable moral option to war. However, I think that it is usually flagrantly immoral. What is pacifism after all but a willingness to die and to let others die at the pleasure of the world's thugs. It should be enough to note that a single sociopath armed with a knife could annihilate a city filled with pacifists. There is little doubt that such sociopaths exist and that they generally come better armed. [1] It should be obvious that the consequences of one mans uncooperativeness can be made so grave, and his malevolence and culpability so transparent, so as to awaken the grand inquisitor in all of us. Many readers will be tempted to dismiss torture as categorically evil but this position is impossible to square with our willingness to wage modern warfare. Contention 3: Warfare and Collateral damage When we as a nation choose to engage in war, for either offensive or defensive purposes "collateral damage"—the maiming and killing of innocent noncombatants—will be unavoidable. It is truly one of the great ironies of liberal discourse that the thought of waterboarding someone like Osama Bin Laden raises more ire than the unintended (though perfectly foreseeable, and therefore accepted) slaughter of children. At the eve of the war with Iraq it was superficially easy to predict that many men, women and children would be maimed and killed as result of our endeavor. After all, what is collateral damage but the inadvertent torture of innocent men, women and children. Whenever we drop bombs we do so with the foreknowledge that a number of innocent people will be disemboweled, blinded, paralyzed, orphaned and kill by them. So we must now ask ourselves the obvious, if we are willing to act in a way that guarantees the misery and death of a considerable number of innocent children, why spare the rod with known terrorists? The deaths of the children that have been killed in Iraq were even easier to predict than the trajectories of the missiles and bullets that killed them. And yet we deem these accidents morally permissible, insofar as we regard the justification for any given war to be truthful. Contention 4: Failures of intuition Can our intuitions about ethics fail us? Sure they can. In fact, there is already some evidence that our ethical intuitions are driven by proximity and emotional salience. [2] The reasons for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those that create the illusion in Shepard's tables. [3] In this context, Liberals may be apt to say vacuous clichï¿½s like "harming another person is always wrong" or "Life has infinite value", but are these true? Clearly they aren't because if the axiom that life has infinite value were true it would mean that we would be just as much obliged to save a single rapist from dying as we would be to save the Jews from Hitler's Germany. After all, no summation of infinities is larger than a single infinity. And if it were always wrong to harm someone else we would all be reduced to allowing ourselves to be passively slaughtered at the pleasure of criminals. Fine phrases are all that people have left when they've run out of arguments. Contention 5: The logical incoherence of absolutist positions against torture Here is an excerpt from a previous debate I had on torture. "No matter the purpose, it is morally bankrupt to so greatly harm another human being. Proponents of torture attempt to justify torture by pointing to the benefits. But what are benefits compared to intentionally inflicting great suffering on a person? Even if torture regardless of all evidence turns out to save lives, it does not matter when a single life is placed in jeopardy." –MTGandP [4] If the avoidance of harming other human beings were the sine qua non of our morality then this line of argument would be equally valid when applied to warfare- even defensive warfare. Allow me to rework the previous quote with a few minor alterations and see if you can't detect something wrong with it. No matter the purpose, it is morally bankrupt to so greatly harm another group of people. Proponents of Warfare attempt to justify war by pointing to the benefits. But what are benefits compared to intentionally inflicting great suffering on people? Even if war regardless of all evidence turns out to save lives, it does not matter when so many lives are placed in jeopardy. The untenability of this drivel should strike at the heart of even the most self-hating moral nihilist. Passages like those above do not demonstrate that torture is always wrong; they merely demonstrate that a juxtaposition of bad ideas can coexist within a single mind. ==================== Potential rebuttals addressed ==================== (Torture is unreliable) Opponents of torture will be quick to assert that the confessions elicited under torture have been notoriously unreliable. Considering what can be at stake in a world where nuclear proliferation is still ongoing this argument seems to lack its usual force. The odds that our interests will be furthered in an act of torture need only equal that occasioned by a single bomb dismantling an organization like Al Qaeda. What are the odds that one of our bombing raids will kill Osama Bin Laden? They have to be pretty slim and undoubtedly many innocents will be killed and maimed in our failed attempts. Insofar as our use of torture carries with it the same amount of success as our more lethal tactics for saving lives we can deem it morally permissible. If there were even one chance in a million that someone like Osama bin Laden could tell us something under torture that could lead to the dismantling of an organization like Al Qaeda or Hamas, then it seems we should use every thing in our disposal to get him talking. ========= Conclusion ========= Torture need not entail that its recipient is killed or even physically harmed in any way, whereas modern warfare guarantees innocent children will be killed, blinded, orphaned and severely disfigured in the act of war. If we are willing to accept the fact that bombs and rifle rounds will eventually yield civilian casualties we should be willing to torture a certain class of suspects and military prisoners; If we are unwilling to torture then we should also be unwilling to wage modern warfare. Definitions Definitions (oxford dictionary): Torture-the action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone defenseless as a punishment or to force them to do or say something, or for the pleasure of the person inflicting the pain. Sources [1] http://www.law.umkc.edu... [2] See J.D. Greene et al., "An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment," Science 293 (Sept. 14 2001): 2105-8; and J.D. Greene, "From Neural ‘Is' to moral ‘Ought': What Are the Moral Implications of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?" Nature reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003): 846-49 [3] http://www.michaelbach.de... [4] http://www.debate.org... (See Cons round 1 argument –Contention 3: Torture is harmful)