So, if you torture and killing X children because X + N people are at risk, just how are you different than the person who has put X + N at risk? At at what point is X large enough to suggest that you do not torture and kill? What if you needed to torture and then kill X + (N-1-x) in order to save N? Just how many are you willing to torture and kill in order to save another group? Who choses which group is more "worthwhile" to save?
Would you allow the torture... (Deep thinking required, reader discretion advised)
- Thread starter rhuarc29
- Start date
Your poll question is flawed as it makes the false assumption that we can get useful and reliable information through torturing someone. Most experts, including CIA and FBI agents have been saying for a long time that the information extracted through physical and mental coercion and torture is unreliable.
Anyone being tortured will end up agreeing that 2+2=5 just to make the torture stop. Good luck "saving lives" with that kind of information.
To complicate matters, most of this information, even if it was reliable, is often impossible to use in court: whether it's in order to get a warrant, to prosecute, or use a detainee as a witness, once a detainee's rights have been violated, you can't reinstate them into the court system.
A good article that discuss this issue: Outsourcing Torture, in The New Yorker.
Anyone being tortured will end up agreeing that 2+2=5 just to make the torture stop. Good luck "saving lives" with that kind of information.
To complicate matters, most of this information, even if it was reliable, is often impossible to use in court: whether it's in order to get a warrant, to prosecute, or use a detainee as a witness, once a detainee's rights have been violated, you can't reinstate them into the court system.
A good article that discuss this issue: Outsourcing Torture, in The New Yorker.
I have a simpler question:
imagine you drive in your SUV with your loved one(s) on a bridge and there is a drunk pedestrian on your way. You can mow him down or go off the bridge.
What do you do?
imagine you drive in your SUV with your loved one(s) on a bridge and there is a drunk pedestrian on your way. You can mow him down or go off the bridge.
What do you do?
Gen, are you aware that posting provocative pictures of yourself in various degrees of undress can be akin to torture for some of us........the ol' "you can look but you can't touch" torture.
Not that I want you to stop..........
Now you're creating hypothetical situations in the hope that an emotional or sentimental or even superstitious reaction will support your viewpoint.
The situation remains that in a moral and ethical world, we should all be against torture and particularly the legitimization of torture by the state. In the bigger picture, the use of torture by the state leads to bigger and escalating acts of violence against the torturers or those who use them. Violence creates martyrs, martyrdom creates more violence and so the cycle continues until one side or the other chooses to stop.
Again, another hypothetical situation in the hope that an emotional or sentimental or even superstitious reaction will support your viewpoint.
But I'll indulge you: take the word "drunk" out of the sentence and would your answer change? Or, if the "drunk" was replaced with "injured and disoriented", would your answer change?
Of course, a good driver will have been instructed never to swerve (that is, an uncontrolled, sudden change of course) to avoid an obstacle for a number of driving reasons.
What is even more amazing to me is that there have been 858 viewings of this topic but only 42 votes. Talk about "the silent majority" 
