Yes, torture might not work on average. And not even in the great majority of police and anti-terror investigations. But that doesn't mean it never does.
We know torture can work in very specific circumstances. If you have a person's phone that you want them to unlock, torture can get them to do it. It works because you can verify what the person tells you immediately, so there is a direct link between them telling you the truth and the torture stopping. If you are willing to go to any length to get them to unlock the phone, eventually almost anyone would break.
Of course the issue is that such situations are rare - usually you don't have such a direct link. The person will say anything to get the torture to stop, true or false - more likely false. It may be impossible to verify what they say, or it may take months or years. So it's pointless, and much more productive to use a non-torture approach in those cases.
I'm not saying I know whether torture works or not, I'm just saying, it's awfully convenient that most people harp on the "it doesn't work" idea, and that means the burden of proof IMO should be much higher to show it doesn't work (assuming your default belief is that it does work, which is most people's default prior).
You don't think that maybe the burden of proof should lie on people to prove that torture does work before we even have a discussion about whether letting go of basic human rights is worth it in certain instances?
I was simply saying that I find the "common knowledge" that torture doesn't work, to be unlikely. It just seems very convenient that things we find morally wrong end up also being bad for other reasons, making it unnecessary to deal with the morals. That sounds like motivated reasoning, not actual truth seeking.
"You don't think that maybe the burden of proof should lie on people to prove that torture does work before we even have a discussion about whether letting go of basic human rights is worth it in certain instances?"
That's a complicated question, and to be honest I have no idea. I actually think that practically speaking, no one should be routinely torturing anyone else. I just don't think it's a moral (or practical) slam-dunk - I think there are situations where it is morally justified, and that it would probably work.
Torture works exceptionally well at getting people to say whatever they think will satisfy the torturer in the short term. Which is actually why it's bad at getting actionable intelligence, but very good at getting confessions.
> It just seems very convenient that things we find morally wrong end up also being bad for other reasons
It's not really “for other reasons”, the morally repugnant thing about torture (the infliction of severe suffering) is why it doesn't work to get actionable intelligence.
> That sounds like motivated reasoning, not actual truth seeking
Entities for which torture would be acceptable even if morally repugnant (including military and Intelligence agencies who practiced it in the belief that it was effective) are foremost among those that have studied it and found it ineffective for gathering actionable ibtelkigence, compared to means which do not involve torture.
> I think there are situations where it is morally justified, and that it would probably work.
You are free to provide evidence supporting your conclusions about it's effectiveness; but without it you seem to just be providing what you'd like to be true, not what you rationally and justifiably believe to be true. And, conveniently, it seems to align with your moral preference...
There are plenty of well-researched examples of the ineffectiveness of systems of torture for getting reliable information out of the victims of that torture.
Off the top of my head:
The U.S. Senate report on torture[1]. In addition to laying out details of corruption surrounding the U.S.'s torture regime following 911, the 525-page report also concludes that the torture regime was not effective in achieving its stated goal of gaining actionable intelligence.
And that's just a recent U.S. report. There are many more by reputable human rights groups, historians, and reporters from a vast swath of modern human atrocities.
That is to say-- I don't think the concept of likelihood makes sense given that you are speculating seemingly without regard to the easily accessible written record on the subject. Even if your point is that the "common knowledge" could be right but for the wrong reasons (e.g., people trying to bolster their pre-existing moral position), the extant examples in your favor that I know ironically come mainly (solely?) from people who either participated directly in the Bush era torture regime or have a vested professional and/or legal interest in confirming torture to be effective. (E.g., Dick Cheney, the CIA consultants for Zero Dark Thirty, the Whitehouse spokespeople for Obama after the bin Laden raid, etc.)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141209165504/http://www.intell...
An evolutionary argument can explain this, and is the standard way to explain large chunks of traditional morality. (e.g. incest taboos.)
As applied to the modern torture debate, I agree with you that this is more of a case of "when neither the law nor the facts are on your side, pound the table".
You don't have to be doing something "by default" in order to prove or disprove an hypothesis.
There is more the enough historical evidence that any type of violence or extreme pressure creates false confessions. Nor do you have to rip off someone's fingernails to find out humans will tell you anything to make it stop. You can always extrapolate from more humane experiments, if data from a previous era is not available.
The question is not "does torture work". The question is "which techniques get the interviewee to honestly reveal what they do (or don't) know". Or to put it another way, the relative results should be your focus.
One of the reasons that I semi-assume that torture works, is that there are security agencies that continue to use it. That also means they choose to use torture versus other means, although there, you could argue that they're doing it as a time/cost-saving measure, and that you could theoretically get similar results with more work. That's actually a pretty strong argument against my "I assume it works because it's used" argument.
The interrogator will know things that can help determine whether the target is lying or not. If he confirms things you know but he doesn't know you know, you're probably on the right track. It's never like in the movies where they just ask, "Who's in charge?" and ratchet up the torture until the guy answers. That would have near zero intel value.
We also talk about torture as a binary. There is really a whole range from mild discomfort to extreme pain, injury and threat of death. There is a whole range of activities to debate whether they are torture. Is threat alone torture? Some have committed suicide while facing legal threats alone. Others shrug off mere threats as just talk -- demonstrative torture could make those threats real to some and thus work.
On the flip side, the consensus (30 years ago anyway) was that if you're captured, you're going to give up everything when faced with torture, so go ahead and do so, just try to hold on for 24 hours before you do.
In fact the burden of proof ought to lie with those who suppose we commit egregious acts of immorality in the name of a nebulous greater good to prove that this is morally acceptable and that said greater good actually exists.
Back on the topic of if torture works. Nobody is arguing that you can't coerce someone into giving true testimony if you know you have a bad party and you can verify what he tells you immediately but in such cases you almost wouldn't have to anyway.
The problem is the world is rarely cut and dry and we are all much much safer if the powers that be aren't allowed to pull out our fingernails.
Terrorism kills less people than bathtubs and far less than cars imagining that we ought to eliminate basic protections to keep a relative handful from dying is insane.
That's not accurate; that argument is very common.
You can see someone making this exact stupid argument here in this very thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15465836 .
But you have to admit that criminals are not normal people. They are in fact, insane, in a specific way that our laws will not give them diminished responsibility. It is dangerous to think that the criminal is not a sadist. You have to maintain control over the criminal and over the interview. And you must maintain full control over your own psyche and emotions. Never be bored or frustrated. Have infinite patience. Map out the criminal's psyche to learn what makes them tick. Listen to your own intuitions because as you learn more about criminal psychology, your subconcious becomes a more powerful tool.
I'm pretty sure if someone waterboarded me to get my phone password I would eventually lose the mental will necessary to keep getting waterboarded and give up the password. But I'm just one point of data.
However, torturing me for information I don't have... now that's stupid and won't work.
If this is debatable, I've, ah, got lists for X and Y.
Germans tortured USSR guerillas (who Germans technically pretty rightfully - from their point of view - classified as terrorists) during WWII, and that saved some German lives. So are you saying there can be a valid debate about that torture? Or closer to home - say Taliban would torture a US soldier and get info which would save some Taliban lives - valid debate here? Or do you mean that the debate is valid only when "good" guys (USSR and US) would do the torture?
>But torturing someone ... doesn't work.
Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. So people get tortured as it always can happen to be the case when it works. When politicians/society talk about torture efficiency or lack of it to me it sounds just like a shop talk of professional torturers, i.e. people lacking any empathy and morals.
However, there's definitely a legal process in place once you accept the possibility of torture.
This isn't true for all cases. It can be pretty cut and dry if a single person knows the location of a bomb set to go off on a plane or something. X is 1 and Y is the number of passengers.
I second that life is not TV show.
"It will never be necessary to torture for life-saving information, because I have perfect certainty that no information can be obtained that way, so I don't need a moral philosophy that appropriately weighs torture against loss of life."
"It will never be necessary to levy taxes to pay for public goods, because I have perfect certainty that no asteroid will ever head toward the earth, so I don't need a moral philosophy that weights taxation against unprotected asteroid strikes."
> It will never be necessary to levy taxes to pay for asteroid defense, because I have perfect certainty that no asteroid will ever head toward the earth, so I don't need a moral philosophy that weights taxation against unprotected asteroid strikes.
You can't generalize to an argument against all public spending.
It is a similar error to double down so hard on torture never being able to elicit truthful, reliable information.
But torturing someone is stupid and doesn't work, so we don't even need to have that debate. I'd probably be in the same camp. I'm against torture because it's stupid. I haven't bothered to think through the moral implications because why bother?