Torture is sometimes morally permissible.

==================== Response to Pro's Statements ==================== Firstly, hypothetical situations are fine and are often a good way to illustrate one's point. However, I feel that when they are so removed from reality, they are not a good argument to convince someone that something should be justified in reality. In addition to that you introduce new scenarios that also seem to miss the point, but this time degenerate into petty emotional appeals. You link us a graphic image of what appears to be a father holding his dead child in the hopes that it will pull on the emotional strings of readers and divert them from the main argument. In other words, resorting to red herrings. I could just as easily link some graphic pictures of innocent torture victims but at this point I don't believe I'm that desperate just yet. Even your means of torture is a hypothetical and unrealistic method - "Imagine that we were to create an ideal "torture pill"- a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instruments of their utter concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce a temporary state of transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no person would willingly submit to for a second time." You're trying to convince readers that torture is sometimes morally permissible. We both know full well that if your argument were adopted and applied then we wouldn't be using non-existent magic pills to torture people, we'd be using horrible and frightening techniques, such as sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, starvation, forced standing, and Waterboarding, to name a few. It is absurd to expect that we can simply submit someone to torture, get the information we're after, and then release them and they go off and live happily ever after. Torture is barbaric and painful in the extreme (as it is designed to be), and will almost certainly leave the victim with significant negative long term effects. Can we at least agree that torture is not harmless, and focus the discussion on whether or not such a practice can be justifiably used on a human being, morally speaking? If not, I'd be happy to cite studies that show the negative long term effects of torture, but I don't suspect you disagree with that point, and I'd rather save character limit. I don't concede that quoting a study showing 97% people approving of a moral proposition is merely an argumentum ad populum fallacy. I'm sorry but the overwhelming majority concensus is what determines what is morally acceptable in a given society at a given time. A more accurate example of an argumentum ad populum fallacy would be saying that the famous quote "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" came from Voltaire himself rather than a later biographer of Voltaire [2] and your reason being that most people buy into this misapprehension. The argumentum ad populum fallacy applies to matters of fact where something is either true or it's not; Morality isn't so black and white. I'll give you an example: Is it morally acceptable to deny blacks the right to vote or be elected to a jury? Today, absolutely not. 150 years ago though, it was considered absolutely natural. Abraham Lincoln, a man generally held up as a person of great moral character of his time and whose face is depicted on American currency, himself said - "I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people [1]. A more recent example is the hitting of students by teachers with rulers and paddles but is now generally regarded as abusive. It is indeed very likely that future generations will regard things immoral that we currently regard as acceptable. You said: "The goal of torture, at least how I'm advocating for it, is not to needlessly cause harm to other humans, but to save life en masse." - I understand that the context in which you're advocating torture is quite specific, but it is still inhumane and morally deplorable. =============== Refining the argument =============== As I said previously I feel the main area of confusion here is around what it really means for something to be 'morally permissible'. If I'm wrong please correct me, but I assume we both agree at this point that torture is very unpleasant, inhumane, leads to severe long term physical and psychological problems, and is also quite ineffective at extracting valid information that you're specifically after. Where we seem to part ways is that you contend that, while the majority of the time it is grossly immoral, sometimes certain extreme circumstances turn it into a morally permissible act. At these specific times, you believe, it doesn't matter that you may very well not be getting accurate information, or that you may in fact be violating the human rights of an innocent person; The potential benefit, however small, outweighs all other consequences. Again, correct me if this is not your position. I also agree, as I previously stated, that torture can certainly be the most practical course of action sometimes in terms of yielding the most lives saved, but that's not to say that it's morally permissible. I'll give you some examples to demonstrate the difference between morally permissible and practical. Imagine the two following scenarios: Scenario 1: A train carriage is speeding uncontrollably down a hill and will kill 5 people who are trapped on the tracks near the bottom. You stand at a switch that, if pulled, will divert the carriage onto a siding, sparing the 5 people, but killing one innocent bystander who happens to be standing there. Scenario 2: There are 5 patients in hospital in desperate need of an organ transplant (each being the same blood type but needing a different organ). They have been waiting unsuccessfully for a long time and doctors estimate they will all be dead within the next few days if a donor is not found. You discover, as it were, that there is a healthy man sitting in the waiting room who matches all the patients as a compatible donor. He refuses to be a donor because doing so would kill him as some of the organs required are vital organs. Do you have this man killed and harvest his organs to save the 5 patients? Note that in both scenarios there are two outcomes, either 1 person dies or 5 people die. You are essentially asked to decide which it will be. The 97% that I previously quoted was the percentage of people, across different cultures and religious backgrounds, who saw a moral distinction between the two and chose to divert the cart to the siding in scenario 1 but let the 5 patients die in scenario 2. I'm curious, what would your answer be to these two scenarios? I'll tell you what else would be practical in terms of saving the most lives. If I were to steal your phone, sell it for a few hundred dollars, and donate that money to an organization like UNICEF who would almost certainly be able to use that money to save the life of a child overseas. Compare it to you yourself freely volunteering the same amount of money to such an organization. Both situations are the same - you're at a loss of a few hundred dollars, a child's life is saved - but clearly there's a moral distinction whereas there is no practical distinction. Your inability to distinguish between what is practical and what is moral is the fundamental flaw in your argument thus far, in my opinion. ======== References: ======== [1] The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, "Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois" (September 18, 1858), pp. 145-146. [2] Evelyn Beatrice Hall in The Friends of Voltaire (1906), Ch. 8: Turgot: The Statesman