Torture is sometimes morally permissible.

Hello there, Although officially it's my second, this will technically be my first debate on this site since my opponent in my initial debate forfeited both rounds following a rather vague opening. Having read through this opening statement and looking at a few of Freeman's previous debates I can see right from the outset that I indeed have a worthy opponent and a lively exchange will no doubt be taking place. I want to start off by endorsing my opponent's encouragement of voters to read both sides carefully before coming to any conclusions. I've noticed a few debates on this site so far where the voting result doesn't seem to fairly represent the actual debate that took place and it is my hope that this exchange will be fairly judged. Contention 1: Hypothetical situations I don't think the proposed scenario is a realistic one and will explain why. Firstly, in reality you don't know for certain if someone you've captured is a terrorist, or even if he is a terrorist you don't know whether or not he has the information you're after. It seems to me to be a moral abomination to either assume his guilt, declare his human rights forfeit and proceed to torture him given the chance that he may in fact be innocent or not have the information he's being tortured for. Your hypothetical situation supposes the following: - We know there is a bomb in a city which will explode relatively soon, that is to say soon enough that other means of locating the bomb, assuming it exists, would take too long. - We happened to have somehow captured the terrorist responsible conveniently just in time. - The prisoner has offered an unsolicited confession which we can somehow know to be genuine. - We know for a fact that the prisoner knows details that will lead to the diffusion of this bomb. I don't think such a situation has occurred, nor do I think such a situation is likely to occur. It seems that to posit such an unrealistic scenario to justify an action does one's argument more harm than good. Are you saying that torture would never be acceptable in reality? Contention 2: The false choice of pacifism Who said anything about being absolutely pacifist? I do not see the relation between choosing not to suspend a person's human rights and allowing a sociopath to freely murder the population of an entire city with a knife. I believe you have committed here what is generally referred to as the slippery slope fallacy [1] - ie. suggesting that pacifism in the face of potentially using torture somehow invariably leads to pacifism in the face of apprehending a serial killer. If this is not what you mean, I hardly see how it is even relevant to this discussion. Contention 3: Warfare and collateral damage Firstly it seems by your wording that you're assuming that I (or whoever takes the debate) approves of the launching of the war on Iraq. I don't approve of it, and neither does the majority of your own country if I'm not mistaken. However, I concede that although war is a terrible thing, sometimes it is in fact unavoidable, which is true of the first and second World Wars in my opinion. The point of collateral damage is an interesting one though. I absolutely accept that during even a justified war there will be innocent casualties which are unavoidable. The difference here is intent. Before you say that intent is irrelevant, 'intent' or 'mens rea' is the sole difference between murder and manslaughter. Both situations result in the death of a person or persons, but they are rightly recognized as clearly different from each other. This idea of intent effecting moral judgments is well documented. As the topic of the debate is whether torture is sometimes morally permissible and not whether it is sometimes practical, I believe this is very valid point. Marc Hauser or Peter Singer, published a study a few years ago on this very point [2]. Given that you've listed Peter Singer as one of your intellectual influences, you may indeed already know about it. I'm unfortunately rather short on time for this opening statement, so in short they found that the intent of an action had massive consequences on whether an action is considered moral or not. For example, is diverting a cart on a collision course to kill five people to a siding where it only kills one person the same as murdering a man in a waiting room in order to harvest his organs in order to save five patients in the hospital that would've otherwise surely died? 97% of people don't think so. Since morality is defined "a code of conduct put forward by a society" according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [3], I believe this invalidates your relation of the deliberate torture of a helpless prisoner to the expected collateral damage to result from a war. Contention 4: Failures of intuition I regret that I'm rather strapped for time so I'm unable to address this point in detail, but will pick it up more fully in later rounds. Briefly on your point about "life having infinite value" though. Clearly there is a difference between one rapist dying as opposed to 6 million Jews dying in the holocaust. There's a reason why we don't use mathematicians to define morality :P I believe I pointed out the distinction between the numbers of people effected in the previous point. Contention 5: I'll point out now that I don't completely agree with the statement you posted from your previous debate, but (and I apologize again) due to the cut off time of being able to post this bearing down upon me I'm unable to elaborate at this point. However, I believe my distinction between intentional harm and unintentional yet unavoidable harm has been made. I've had a busy last few days unfortunately but will be able to afford more time in the next few rounds :) ======== Conclusion ======== It seems that the bulk of your argument towards the latter part of your opening statement rests on there being no distinction, morally speaking, between collateral damage and the deliberate torture of an individual. I believe this is an invalid argument because intention is a fundamental part of moral judgments. Had the topic of the debate been "Is it practical to torture someone in certain situations" I may indeed have agreed. Is it morally permissible to torture a human being? I propose that it's not only not morally permissible, but is a moral abomination. You said "Torture need not entail that its recipient is killed or even physically harmed in any way...". However, you yourself define torture as "the action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone defenseless". That seems to be a contradiction. Even so, I'm curious what means of torture you're proposing for the purposes of this debate. Could you specify please, because I'm unaware of ANY forms of torture (as per your definition) that do not have dramatic long lasting effects on its recipients. I look forward to your response :) Rob. ======== References: ======== [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org... [2] M. Hauser and P. Singer, 'Morality without religion', Free Inquiry 26: 1, 2006, 18-19. [3] http://plato.stanford.edu...