Torture is sometimes morally permissible.

Resolved: Torture is sometimes morally permissible. I wish to thank my opponent for his quick response, having said that lets dive in. ====== Case Pro ====== The Daughter Scenario For those people out there who aren't familiar with logical fallacies I put a definition for an emotional appeal below. Does my argument appeal solely on the basis of people's emotions? I don't think so. Certain forms of emotional appeals are indeed fallacious however I don't see how my argument appeal's to emotion so as to cause someone to arrive at an invalid conclusion. Appeal to Emotion: In this type of fallacy, the arguer attempts to persuade someone by playing on his or her sympathies, fears, vanity, anger or other emotions, rather than providing legitimate premises that support the conclusion. The fallacy can appeal to various emotions including pity, pride, fear, hate, vanity, or sympathy. Generally, the issue is oversimplified to the advantage of the arguer. http://www.aphilosopher.net... My opponent seems to find it hard to believe that anyone would capture a person for the sole purpose of torturing and killing them. He simply doesn't know enough about history. You may wish to google the following names, Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. At any rate I created the scenario to be elaborate in order to prevent clever and witty people from weaseling their way out of it. I raised this scenario in another debate and the guy responded by saying he would order the swat team to utilize a tech whiz to hack the keypad on the door. This type of drivel and elusion has no end unless you set clear parameters. I am confident, almost certain, that if my opponent found himself in my "daughter scenario" he would do whatever is necessary to save his own child. I have more respect for any person than to think they would be so calloused as to idly witness the death of their own child at the hands of a psychopath. Your inability to answer candidly only serves to demonstrate the weakness of your position. The fact that the situation is improbable is orthogonal to the issue at hand; this wouldn't change what the moral thing to do would be if the situation did arise. Collateral Damage "When discussing moral imperatives, it is not the outcome but the intention which is most vital." So, if I torture a convicted terrorist in order to avert a catastrophe would not my intentions help determine whether or not I'm acting ethically? "The odds that our interests will be furthered in an act of torture need only equal the chance that any innocent child will be killed in one of our bombing raids." Here is what I mean whent I wrote that. Our use of torture can legitimately carry with it the same probability of success occasioned by dropping a single bomb in order to bring down 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. Further it should be obvious that a failed torture attempt isn't going to leave children orphaned and women disemboweled. ======== Case Con ======== Contention 1: Torture is unreliable. 1b. "Even when the victim has the necessary information, torture frequently fails to extract it. Vietnamese torture of American soldiers had a success rate of only 5%, for example [1]. Many subjects have been known to be tortured to death before relinquishing information [2]." Even if your statistics were valid then they would have to be at least 30 years old. Come on, I think you can do better than that. And at any rate how the Vietcong conducted their torture is completely irrelevant to my argument. Indicting the usefulness of torture generally by using antiquated statistics from the Vietnam era is like indicting all of medicine because there a few doctors who are incapable of practicing medicine properly. 1c. You seem to be opposed to torture because it would inevitably result in innocent people being subjected to the practice. The torture of an innocent person in the pursuit of saving lives is unfortunate but it is far less horrible than the death of an innocent child in a war. I contend that this view is so self evidently true that anyone with the intention of repudiating it will have a burden to demonstrate why its false. Saving lives in the context of a war is no different than saving lives in the context of preventing a nuclear bomb from going off. The situations are different but the result in both cases remains the same. This is why the two are analogous. Terrorism need not be relabeled as an ongoing endless war for my position to be valid either. Justified wars are designed to save lives. Justified counter terrorism is also designed to save lives. To merely assert that the two aren't analogous when they clearly are is fallacious. And if we are willing to pursue a course of action which is guaranteed to kill innocent men, women and children then we should also be willing to occasionally risk torturing an innocent person. Collateral damage should be far more troubling to us than the occasional misapplication of torture: there are, after all, no infants stationed at Guantanamo bay. 1d. I have never advocated any method of torture that would "break" someone to the point of them becoming irrational and disconnected from the world. ========== Contention 2: There are better alternatives. "Torture is not the only method of information extraction. "Brain fingerprinting" (http://www.brainwavescience.com......) is not only infinitely more humane than torture, but is in many cases more reliable." Fictitious alternatives and prospective future potentials for advanced neuroimaging are irrelevant to this debate. We aren't living in the 22nd century were living in the 21st in case you haven't noticed. I happily await the day when we have methods of painlessly extracting useful intelligence directly from people's brains; unfortunately this isn't the world we find ourselves in. Because of this your contention lacks any substance. If we had fully functional foolproof lie detector machines or ways of viewing all of someone's specific thoughts then I would concede the debate. The fact that such technology is either nonexistent/ not being used currently is more than just a small problem for you. Contention 3: Torture is harmful. "But what are benefits compared to intentionally inflicting great suffering on a person?" I don't wish to caricature my opponent's position but here is how I understand it. The suffering of millions of people killed in a nuclear explosion has to be given less weight than the suffering endured by torturing a single terrorist. In other words the temporary physical and emotional pain endured by a terrorist has to be given more deference than the potential deaths of millions of people and their families. He more or less confirms this position when he writes, "Even if torture regardless of all evidence turns out to save lives, it does not matter when a single life is placed in jeopardy." I would also add that there are methods of torture, which would never place someone's life in jeopardy. My opponent seems to gloss over this fact. ====== Case Pro ====== Allow me to sum up my argument in a rough syllogism. Premise #1 It is morally acceptable to defend life if something of equal or lesser value isn't lost. Premise #2 Torture is a means of defending life. Premise #3 Torture in order to save lives does not involve losing something of equal or lesser value. Conclusion: It is morally acceptable to use torture to save lives. If you think that premise #3 is flawed then you should also categorically oppose warfare. All the best, Freeman