I have an distaste for most opinion polls (simple are you voting for X or Y aside), they are usually inherently bias, poorly timed and worded, lack rigor in implementation and interpretation and conclustions, etc. They may give broad trends but to extract details of certain groups etc., seems mostly no more than hand waving.

And the interplay of religious values and beliefs, traditions, national politics, political leanings etc is very complex. I would not put too much stock in most polls and find a better use of my time in listening to John Prine and reading David Hume.

Further thoughts: At 82% against Spain, France and UK have almost identical opinion about torture. If we look at the importance the population give to religion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importa...ion_by_country
France and UK are close at 26% and 29% of the population considering religion important to their daily lives, while Spain at 50% had a much higher percentage who consider religion important.

Conclusion: The uniformity in opinion on torture between Spain France and UK is not due to similarity in the populations religious opinions. There is likely some other effect at work.

I wish they had included Italy in the torture pole!

Here is another international poll on torture. Those surveyed were asked if they agreed with the proposition "Torture is sometimes necessary and acceptable to gain information that may protect the public".



The problem in the US has to do with the remarkable ability of the American public to ignore facts and tell fairy stories to themselves about what is going on. A YouGov poll back in 2005 got figures like this:

So what has anyone paying attention since then learned? Well, Boston attack aside, the terrorism threat has proved to be largely illusory. We know that not only did the US use the techniques above, but that the people tortured were not "known terrorists [who] know details about future terrorist attacks in the U.S.", but random people the CIA suspected of knowing stuff. Some large number (26 I believe) were later judged innocent in the CIA's own documents. Chaining someone to the ceiling in a cold room, judged "wrong" by 79% of people in the survey above even when used on terrorists with information, was inflicted on a man who froze to death and later was discovered to be innocent. We've also discovered (again) that there's no evidence that torture actually works, because people respond by saying whatever they think the interrogator wants to hear.

So how do the American people respond to this? By becoming ever more supporting of terrorism.

What's going on here is pretty simple. Americans are confronted with two facts:

- Torture is wrong
- The US tortured people

The cognitive dissonance is resolved not with the obvious "the US did evil things", but by relinquishing the belief that torture is wrong, in order to avoid believing that the US - and by proxy themselves - supported evil acts.

Everyone does this to some extent, but Americans seem to be particularly adept at it. It also doesn't surprise me at all as an atheist liberal that the cohort most accomplished at self-delusion is Christian conservatives, it's what they spend their lives doing.

Whats with India? I know we are nuters here in the US but they are supposed to be all enlightened. Guess all the conflict over Kashmir.

The problem is that what you think is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is whether it does work, and the considerable evidence acquired over centuries, is that it does not achieve the ostensible goal of obtaining useful "intelligence" and that it does achieve the often unstated goal of terrifying and subjugating the population.

Of course this sort of empirical argument is difficult to grasp for those whose fundamental premises reject empiricism.

Basically anything that Americans can point to in the external world so not to look inward. It is a projection of self hate from most Americans. As long as some other person is being tortured in the hope it is providing long term benefit for the US it will continue to be justified, until USA looks inward to their own inner "demons" they will never quench their thirst for a sense of justice for their own misery caused.

They will cause more wars and either make up more external threats or even create real ones (since they can't leave any other country alone for whatever reason I assume still 9/11? and the war on terror - which never can be defined). Until a movement is made within the US itself and the people themselves to look inward to their own faults no real progress will be made. I fear that it will take the destruction of all material wealth to realise this truth and that their ego will no longer be hide behind the vast wealth (that brings no pleasure to them) which will expose the great folly and stupid mechanism they have created which is the democratic war mongers (you must be democratic are they will shoot you) and massive banking cartel.

Most Americans are strong, the USA is one if not the strongest nation on earth but that's not all I see from them. I see a people living in great fear (from their own inner demons) thus causing one of two reactions,

1. To cry for mercy but as we have established US are a strong power. So they won't take this route and have no reason to do so.
2. Aggression - to strike and lash out. To put blame externally on the world their own inner faults. This time around it's the Muslims and the middle east in general.

This act of torture then can be justified by any and all means as long as it gets the job done in protecting the US from whatever external threat there is which is heightened by the fear they create. The more fearful they become the greater need to "get them before they get us" attitude.

Well...In just a few posts after the one you quoted, I did volunteer:

the "information extraction in a pinch" part is where any quarrel between me and you would be...

Just read an interesting article in a journal from a well respected law school.

http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/torturecardozo.pdf

It raises some interesting points:

-there is a correlation between the belief that torture is ineffective and the belief that torture should be forbidden (not exactly shocking, but interesting),

-there is evidence that torture can be ineffective (the confessions of those accused of witchcraft is a pretty convincing argument)

-there is evidence that torture can be effective (examples are in the article).

It did cause me to think about things to some extent. I still reaffirm that I am opposed to torture but it is interesting that for me that position is driven by theism. I try to the best of my ability to reject evil in my life and I cannot see supporting torture as anything but evil. Putting that aside, it is hard to argue rationally that torture should be categorically rejected, at least if the admittedly anecdotal information in the article is valid. Given the sources, it could be ex post facto justification of a political doctrine that allows torture. Ignoring that point though, it would seem most rational to define very clearly those circumstances where torture has a high (needs definition) probability of being effective and use it in those cases. Again, admittedly hard to manage.

If I was an atheist I think I would have a hard time rejecting that reasoning.

In any event, I suspect that those people who make a blanket statement "Torture does not work" are speaking wishfully to justify a position. I also think that if you are going to reject torture, using the "doesn't work" argument is not valid. I think you must acknowledge that it might work at times, but you reject it anyway and are willing to pay the price in lost innocent lives to be clear of the taint of having used torture.

Torture clearly works in certain circumstances. As the article notes, it's essential that specific information is being sought and that the information can be quickly and easily verified. I also think it is immoral to use torture if it is not almost certain that the subject has the information being sought.

There are two questions here though. One, does torture occasionally work? And two, if it does, does it follow that we should legalise it?

The concrete, specific anecdotes the article gives on where torture has worked and was justified all involved extra-legal torture. There's another one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, involving Australian police severely beating a man who had left a small child locked in a hot car in a location he would not disclose, which is kind of my go-to "ticking time bomb" example.

The bar is set at "am I willing to throw myself on the mercy of a jury and/or go to jail in order to commit torture here?". This is the question I want people to have to ask themselves if they're going to torture someone. There is no utility in making it legal. Torture is insidious and if legalised, inevitably starts being used on people when there's no guarantee they know anything, or in circumstances where the interrogator wants to hear a certain answer. The article notes this was the case in medieval times, it was also the case in the recent CIA torture. It's human nature that this will happen.

I assume you've read the OP and discovered that it isn't atheists that are having a hard time rejecting torture.

Torture doesn't work as an interrogation strategy for unknown unknowns. It's also not necessary in the case of most known unknowns (which can be figured out with techniques like surveillance). But for some reason everyone is obsessed with discussing the near-nonexistent ticking time bomb scenarios.

No other crime is subjected to this level of nittery. If I say trespassing is wrong and theft is wrong, people aren't like "BUT WHAT IF YOU'RE LOST IN THE WOODS IN A SNOWSTORM AND STUMBLE ON A CABIN WHICH HAS FOOD SUPPLIES? THEN IT MIGHT BE OK TO BREAK IN AND STEAL THEIR FOOD AND FIREWOOD!". Like, no ****? The fact that you have come up with some edge-case example doesn't invalidate the statement "theft is wrong" or mean that we should codify exceptions to theft being a crime into law. It means that under some circumstances the best course of action is to break the law.

You picked a very odd example. The question of whether it's okay to steal bread to feed your family is a well-known moral dilemma. If you raise the absolute moral claim that theft is wrong, you will find that people will raise the stealing to feed the family scenario. And you clearly don't watch Survivorman because he talks about the fact that it's legal to break into people's homes in a survival situation (and he does so in at least a couple of his shows).

The ticking bomb example exists precisely because it drives at the heart of the questions that are important from both a legal and a moral perspective.

You're applying two distinct standards. One is "it is wrong" (which is basically an absolute moral claim in your presentation) and the other is "it is illegal" (which is basically a relativistic claim). The mixing of the two makes your analysis basically useless.

There are questions as to whether morality should drive legality (if you claim that it's immoral to torture, should that be sufficient impetus to codify it as illegal?) or whether the legality of the situation should remain ambiguous (so that the threat of it as a possibility can be a coercive force in the decision-making process of the individual that might have information).

Yes, but to my knowledge nobody uses the stealing bread moral dilemma to argue that we should legalise theft. Yet the ticking time bomb scenario is routinely used to argue for a (limited) legalisation of torture.

From a moral perspective perhaps, but not a legal one.

I'd compare it to the Fourth Amendment. The interesting question when justifying the fourth amendment protection against surveillance, say, isn't about whether spying on people is justified if it means you can foil criminal plots, which is basically analogous to the ticking time bomb scenario. It's the practical question of whether that power is liable to be misused by the State. So it is with torture. The practical question of how power will actually be used is more important than constructing scenarios of where using it would be justified.

I don't really follow and I'm certainly not making absolute ("always wrong") moral claims about anything. My point is that when we say things like "theft is wrong", "murder is wrong" etc, outside of academic philosophical discourse people don't generally follow up with "BUT WHAT ABOUT HIGHLY SPECIFIC SCENARIOS X Y AND Z", but "torture is wrong" in current public discourse is invariably met with "BUT TICKING TIME BOMB". These things are interesting from a philosophical point of view, but from a practical point of view they are distractions. Virtually all evils are sometimes the lesser of two evils if one constructs an elaborate enough scenario. It is not usually interesting or helpful to point this out.

My point appears to be the opposite of what you said - that all morality is by nature of the complexity of the world non-absolute (i.e. one can always construct exceptions), whereas all legal systems need to be absolute for reasons of clarity, conciseness and avoidance of abuse of power. Attempting to enumerate all possible exceptions to laws makes them worse, not better.

You need to be very clear about this. I don't think that anyone is talking about legislating the legalization of torture. Rather, this is about not creating legislation that prohibits it. You may want to interpret as legalization, but that would be an equivalent error to claiming that non-belief is the same as negative belief.

It's both. I don't really see how it could be interpreted otherwise.

I don't really agree with your framework at all here. The practical question is precisely connected to the legal question. The legal question sets up the boundaries under which the practical question can be answered. The framework of "If it's important enough then we'll break the law to do it" basically flaunts the entire legal framework.

You may not personally be making those claims, but it seems that your framework is.

Again, I completely disagree with your framework. People who are hungry DO steal. It's not merely academic.

http://www.northescambia.com/2011/08...m-alabama-home

So I don't really see how you can call it a distraction if it really does happen in real life.

It is when you're establishing laws. Laws are intended to create boundaries on behaviors. In fact, it seems undeniably essential to address those issues when creating laws. There are many, many cases where laws have had unintended consequences because they were not fully and carefully considered when they were established, and the types of scenarios that you're writing off are precisely the ones that need to be dealt with.

So if you accept that there might be a reason to torture someone, why would you legislate against it? Why not leave it as an ambiguous proposition? Why is it better to force the issue into illegality?

Your position seems incoherent.

Torture is already illegal under United States law as a result of ratification of international treaties. It's just that nobody is enforcing the law.

So if anyone ever breaks a law justly, you regard it as a sign that the law is unjust or incomplete? What about blood alcohol limit? Should the law read: "Under .05 BAC, unless you are delivering an injured person to hospital, your wife is in labor, you're escaping from a bushfire, you are being chased by people who want to kill you....". The law can't possibly cover every eventuality in which it might be necessary to break it. If you write into the law "it's OK to drive drunk if taking an injured person to the doctor", then what do you do when someone drives at .23 to take someone to the doctor because they have the sniffles? Do we have to codify each illness and the allowable BAC? .15 is OK for appendicitis, but not for lesser illnesses?

The law can only ever be an approximation to what is just. There are always complications and exceptions.

The point is that when I say "theft is wrong" what I mean is "theft is wrong, unless carried out to avoid a greater wrong" because that's literally always what I mean when I say something is wrong. I just usually omit that part for shorthand.

Obviously, the problem is how to define "greater wrong", this is pretty much the entirety of the field of morality.

These unintended consequences cannot be very severe if the law is one forbidding certain behaviour. For instance, nobody in history has ever been like "I have someone here in severe medical distress, but the speed limit between here and hospital is 30mph. Damn it! Guess I'll just stick to the speed limit". When the consequences for breaking a law are worth it, you break the law.

Edit: Laws forbidding behaviour can have unintended consequences if misapplied (I vaguely remember a story in the US of some DA trying to prosecute meth lab owners under chemical weapons charges). Laws against torture don't seem to fit into this category, because if calling something "torture" passes the laugh test, then I probably want that thing banned.

The unintended consequences for approving torture, on the other hand, are unknown in scope.

Why don't we have theft laws that say "theft is illegal, unless you really need the thing"? Because if we do that, behaviour will change. The definition of "really need" will be relentlessly expanded. People will start relying on being able to steal to meet their needs.

I want torture illegal because I only want it used if there is absolutely no alternative and there is no way to codify that effectively. The only way to do it is to threaten people that if their definition of "absolutely no alternative" in a given case varies from the rest of society, they will face harsh punishment.

Going back to the example of the police beating here in Australia (go here and scroll down to "Case Study 3.1 - The Beating"), police brutality is taken very seriously in Australia, but I would be very surprised if a jury did anything but laugh it out of court if those officers had been charged. I am a believer in jury nullification as a means for smoothing out the rough edges of the law. From what you have said so far ITT, your position is that either it was wrong to beat this guy, or that we should legalise police brutality in certain circumstances and then try to keep a leash on it. I regard the first position as morally mistaken and the second as ludicrously naive.

Well, the question of the actual force of authority of the UN is a different type of question all together, but I'll grant this and move on.

Yes, it's clearly an indicator of such.

If your BAC is above .05, you probably shouldn't be the person driving an injured person or your wife to a hospital. That's what ambulances and medical helicopters are for. Call the professionals and let them do their job.

At least in the US, if you're out in the country and drunk and you need to run from a fire, it's probably because you started it, and you're compounding one illegal and unsafe behavior on top of another one. Probably the drunk driving gets overlooked in that case and everyone focuses on the negligence.

And if people are trying to kill you... I don't really know why you're drunk in that scenario or why they want to kill you.

It is often the case that it's unnecessary to break it.

Again, ambulances and helicopters. They exist. They resolve the problem. It's not okay to drive drunk to take an injured person to a hospital. In a life-threatening situation, it's often better to wait for the ambulance because the ambulance will be able to more safely speed to your location and start treatment upon arrival.

But the law about BAC isn't about justice. Not at all. It's about safety. I don't really think this example is meaningful as a comparison to the point you're trying to make. Not all laws are created for the same reason and they don't all have the same implications.

Just like driving 60 MPH in a 55 MPH zone isn't akin to laws against murder. There's no clear moral impetus to draw the speed limit at 55, but there is a clear moral impetus to prevent murder.

How you define "wrong" is also entirely in the field of morality. Your position makes no sense because you don't seem to be able to put together a coherent framework. You're using "wrong" to mean both "illegal" and "immoral" and that's creating problems for your presentation.

You make this claim, but I'm not entirely sure it's true. People have taken very sick people to the hospital without driving dangerously. They still stop at stop lights and drive "within" the speed limit (in the sense that they're still within the normal flow of traffic that's often faster than the speed limit).

And again, there's a better solution to the problem which is to call an ambulance.

Again, this is just an argument for ignoring the law. I don't think it really accomplishes what you think it does. Maybe I think the cost of a ticket every now and then is worth getting to work 10 minutes faster. Can I then take that type of justification and push it forward to something like torture? "I know torture is illegal, but I just get such a kick out of it that I'm going to do it anyway. It's totally worth it." In this situation, the law doesn't really mean or do anything.

This is just an odd slippery slope argument. I don't think that allowing torture to happen implies that everyone is going to get tortured for no reason. But it certainly does reveal a bit of an anti-authoritarian leaning in your perspective.

That has more to do with the interpretation of the law and is a red herring. I think it should be illegal to steal even if it's something you need. But I don't think it should be illegal to glean (dumpster diving behind restaurants, picking a fruit off someone's fruit tree in their front yard, etc).

There is no situation in which there will be "absolutely no alternative." This isn't about a law being problematic, it's about your concept being problematic.

Besides, the "court of public opinion" thing is just a bad way to do things.

You seem to be arguing exactly the opposite of the thing you've been arguing the entire time. Suddenly, ticking timebomb scenarios are meaningful and practical?

What you're doing here is using results-oriented thinking. Because it works, you want to change your perspective of the act. Suppose that the man didn't say, or that they had the wrong guy. Would your view of the situation change? It should. That's because you're basically arguing that the end justifies the means.

I don't know the Australian legal framework, but under the US framework, this would be an illegal behavior. And it would probably be prosecuted as such. I don't think I would object. The fact that the desired result was obtained is mostly irrelevant to the legal question.

But again, there's a moral matter which is really the question. I don't think it's necessarily immoral to inflict some sort of duress on a person to attempt to gain information from them. The quality and quantity of that duress is an open question and I'm not sure drawing hard lines about it is an appropriate way to go.

Was it wrong to beat the confession out of the guy? Legally, it's clearly wrong. Morally, I think it probably was wrong based on the American norms of justice, fairness, and morality. I don't think you'll find a lot of support for that form of treatment in the US.

We're getting into more law and politics than morality, but I agree with Chris that this doesn't seem like a very practical view of law, from a moral standpoint. By which I mean that it's infeasible to codify every possible nuance in the way we'd like to ideally enforce a law. It seems like there are difficulties either way, but Chris' way of approaching the problems is similar to mine.

Even if it's not a perfectly sharp boundary, I think there is a necessary distinction between "duress" and "torture".

I agree that it makes no sense to try to codify the exceptions. Here's my view:

1) If you think torture is a moral NEVER, then it makes sense to codify that it is a legal NEVER.
2) If you think torture is a moral MAYBE, then it makes sense NOT to codify that it is a legal NEVER.

I think this is the clearest way to approach the situation. ChrisV's position is more like the following:

3) If you think torture is a moral MAYBE, then you should codify it as a legal NEVER and break the law when it becomes appropriate to do so.

I find this approach to be incredibly problematic.

This is the label game that I think is virtually impossible to win. What tactics count as torture and which ones don't? I think this should be a case-by-case system and is subject to all sorts of interpretation and debate.

FWIW - I don't think either of the above approaches are going to be good at making any sort of determination. For example, I could adopt 1) and then choose to argue that tactic X simply isn't torture.

As you note, all approaches are problematic. The "what is torture?" game is not that much different from "when is torture OK?" I think this sort of problem is inescapable, but it's a practical problem that courts and juries are used to.

One reason, potentially, to prefer the question "when is torture OK?" over the "what is actually torture?" game is that I think the ill-effects of playing semantic games over torture (enhanced interrogation) are worse, because it elides the reality of what you are doing. The word torture has strong connotations which are useful to preserve.

The reasoning in (3) depends on the idea that the set of circumstances that warrant a maybe is tiny in comparison to the set of circumstances where torture is unjustified. Hence wanting to preserve the very negative connotations of the word torture. But it also takes a pragmatic approach to morality which doesn't try to prove that there is literally never any moral justification. Preferring (3) over (1) is a pragmatic deference to the difficulty of giving a complete and coherent account of what that set of "maybe" circumstnaces looks like. "Maybe torture is very rarely morally justifiable, but not nearly so often as to justify any sort of legality" is the argument.

This does not seem more problematic than (1), just more politically realistic, and given the severity of torture and the assumed rarity of its justification, (3) seems clearly better than (2).

I think (3) is logically problematic in a way that (1) isn't. As I said, it basically creates a situation in which you flaunt the law. ChrisV's recounting of the beating scenario creates an "above the law" type of mentality. It's only "laughable" because it happened to get results. As poker people know, getting the positive result and making the right decision are very different things. It also lends itself to results-oriented thinking. If it's 95% successful, but this happened to have been the 5% that doesn't get the confession, does the jury still just laugh? Or turn it around. What if he only gets positive results 5% of the time? Does the fact that it works justify laughing it off? It's just a really, really problematic approach.

I think (1) is the "most correct" position to take.

"Torture may very rarely be morally justified, but it is always illegal" shouldn't incentivize law-breaking, unless you're assuming that in practice the law is often unenforced, which I don't think is what he is suggesting at all. The example of the beating is supposed to be extraordinary, the exception that proves the rule, that sort of thing.

If the illegality of torture is without exception, then the expectation is anyone who tortures faces legal charges, with a very high probability of very serious consequences. The fact that the consequences are much worse than a speeding ticket is important to keep in mind, if you make that comparison. Recognizing the practical reality that the logical scope of the law, the scope of compliance, and the scope of enforcement never actually intersect perfectly doesn't create an incentive, it's something universal in law and society.

I'm not saying that it "incentivizes" law breaking. That's much stronger than what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that it creates situation in which people declare that they are above the law and justify it to themselves. We know very well that people in high stress situations aren't the best decision-makers. Laws are intended to create boundaries on those behaviors.

The beating example doesn't prove the rule to me. I think the guy should be prosecuted for his behavior. In fact, NOT prosecuting the guy creates an incentive for others to do the same, because they can attain hero status without consequence if it works out in their favor. Not enforcing the law is precisely the thing that causes laws to not be followed. Much of the injustice in the US legal system comes from people who do not follow policy and are generally unaccountable for their actions. So it's highly problematic to have rules that people can choose to avoid if they can get away with it.

If you want police beatings to be a allowable tactic for obtaining information from suspects when lives are on the line, then you shouldn't create a law that says that police shouldn't beat their suspects. If you think that it's NOT a allowable tactic, then the law that says they can't beat suspects is wholly appropriate.

I'd much rather argue about whether a behavior counts as torture than try to argue that someone who tortured shouldn't be punished because of the positive outcome.

I don't know any of the details but I think so as well. But Chris wrote

which I took to mean he was in fact prosecuted, if perhaps not convicted. When I talked about the use of juries to deal with these logically fuzzy issues, that's what I had in mind. I think it's what Chris had in mind also, when he used the term jury nullification

I don't have an issue with people breaking the law in the sense that people break the law all the time. That a situation is a high profile law-breakage doesn't do much for me, either. In fact, high profile law-breakage tends to have less to do with the law and more to do with public sentiment (and I've noted that the court of public opinion isn't exactly the best way to do things).

My objection has more to do with the first half of the statement:

That sounds a lot like "Am I going to get away with it?" And in the example of thinking that a jury will just laugh confirmed that perspective. If he had just used the second half:

This comes across as being a very different position. It also changes the "tone" of 3:

3) If you think torture is a moral MAYBE, then you should codify it as a legal NEVER and break the law when it becomes appropriate to do so.

Now "break the law" sounds more like "break the law and accept the consequences" than it does "break the law and see what happens." There's no more flaunting of the law, just acceptance of it.

It's funny how differently two people can read the same sentence

The phrase "throw myself on the mercy of the court" goes along with pleading guilty, historically. That is, admitting that you committed the crime, but requesting some kind of clemency because of mitigating circumstances. At least for me, I read that with far different connotations than wondering whether you'll get away with it.

In any case, Chris can clarify I'm sure, but I would suggest that the second part of the statement is already an attempt to clarify the meaning of the first, and so it's clearly not a question of thinking you'll get away with it

My wording of "get away with it" was a bit rushed. But the connotation I get from that phrase [mercy of the court] to me has more to do with avoiding punishment rather than accepting it.

The idea of 'Rules of war' makes no sense to me and they are frequently the victim of the reality of war in any case, perhaps we'd be less inclined to engage in war if there were no rules. There is no 'fair' or 'unfair' way in which to kill someone. Given that the USA will accept 'collateral damage' that includes non-combatants, and often children, to eliminate targets they deem important, it's nonsensical that there are limits to how pain you can cause someone to achieve similar goals.

My argument against torture would probably originate from the same problem with it that RLK and Well_named raised, that ultimately it's ineffective because it's possible to cause so much pain that you can never rely on the subject to be telling you anything than whatever they think will make you stop, rather than a moral objection. I think morals are the first casualty of war. However, I don't have handy the stats for what information obtained using torture ultimately saved lives and what didn't.