Yes, it's possible to concoct a fictional scenario whereby torturing one person saves millions of lives. Heck, why not a more plausible scenario where torturing someone saves 2 lives. But it's a non-sequitur: a true statement that is irrelevant.
I won't argue this well, especially not well enough to convince someone for whom "torture" is acceptable, but principles matter. It's the only thing that separates the good guys from the bad guys. Not guns, not good looks, not firm jaws, not money, not power, not magical spells. Bad and good people have, or don't have, those things in equal measure.
Torture = bad guy. Beating people in the street = bad guy. Planting evidence on a suspect = bad guy. Stealing elections = bad guy.
This is important because, while some of those things might be expedient to get your desired outcome, it makes society worse. If you do that, you are the bad guy. Maybe the other guy is bad too, but you definitely are. Now when other people do it, you can't say shit. You did it. You could not come up with a better way. Society is now worse and more dangerous because of you. All the bad guys have reasons for doing bad things, but only good guys do the good things, even when it's not easy. Good people say "times are extraordinarily dangerous, so now more than ever we must fight to maintain our integrity and our values, and treat our opponents with due process and dignity, no matter how much we despise them"
We now have a society where torture is considered awful, but that is hard won. Not long ago, we would burn people alive publicly as punishment for Very Serious reasons. When we start saying "torture is ok now because these times are extraordinarily dangerous", then torture is a bit more acceptable when times are not so dangerous.
That's it. That's the argument.
The problem is that these quandaries are then used to justify shitty behavior in other circumstances. What percentage of cop beatings save lives versus total cop beatings? 0.2%? 0.02%? What's the point of your question? What does the knowledge that you will be beaten if a cop suspects you of a terrible crime do to your state of mind? To the safety of police officers? To society?
I'm concocting a situation that I would like you to consider. Answer, please, with just as much gravitas. Let us imagine a society where beating or harassing anyone is absolutely taboo. In this society, no one need ever worry about physical violence. A woman could walk naked from Chicago to California never once being harassed. An elderly man could walk anywhere carrying a fat wallet of cash without fear of physical violence.
There is the rare and occasional thief, however. Now, one of these thieves steals a car and leaves a child baking in the sun in much the circumstances you describe. Beating the thief is the only possible way to save the child from a grizzly, horrendous, agonizing death, screaming alone for her mother.
But, once done, the beating breaks that taboo. Those police officers are a bit more likely to use violence to get what they want. It's a bit contagious, too. Other people begin to use violence. Bear with me, here. Let's say, because that taboo is broken, 100 more people are beaten over the next decade, and 1 or 2 of them die from their injuries. None of them "deserve" it.
Would you say it was worth it, to beat the man to save the life of that child, knowing that 1 or 2 people die and 100 are beaten, directly because of that?
Not really. It was a story that a philosophy book used to illustrate a conundrum. It bore resemblance to "actually happened" like a film "based on true events". Are we taking the word of the cops and philosophers or does the man himself have something to say about it? What would have happened if the cops didn't beat the man? We will never know.
But ok, let's grant it, for the sake of argument. For our purposes, it is the unvarnished reality, precisely as the book said. The cops had to beat the man or the child would have died.
The beating of the man had unknown consequences, however, and the construction of the scenario elides them. Is it worth it to live in a society where cops beat thieves to extract information from them? We don't have to guess. Look around you (I mean, assuming you live in the US or similar country in that respect). Do cops only beat men to extract life-saving information from them? The unintended consequence of "it's okay to beat this man just this once" is readily apparent. It never is just the once in that exceedingly rare scenario, is it?
Now, you can answer my question. In the magical society where cops do not beat people, but then do, is 100 beatings and 1 or 2 deaths worth the life of 1 child?
As it happens, we know what would've happened had the police not beat him, because they tried that first. The man refused to say where the car was. He would rather let a child die than admit to car theft. Of course, maybe, if they had let the child die a magic genie would've prevented all future crime - it's as plausible as your hypothetical - so maybe the police did wrong after all...
As for your question my moral judgements are tuned to reality, not nonsense fantasy land. I don't have a strong sense of what is right and wrong in a universe that does not obey causality as I know it. I would, however, be willing to beat the thief if it were my child in the car.
> Would you say the police did anything wrong?
Yes, obviously. At the very least, they very obviously broke a law. They should file charges against themselves. The legal system is not absolute and a court / jury can decide about extenuating circumstances.
I can think of few laws that don't allow me to construct some extremely hare-brained counterexample where it might be morally justified to break them.
Laws are ethics - they are rules that tell us how to act. Right and wrong are descriptions of morality - which is about good and bad. It's certainly a violation of the clearly established rules to beat a man to save a child, but it's not obviously wrong to do so. I would say it's not wrong at all.
I don't think that's a fair interpretation of what was said. The claim made was that they broke the law, which is wrong to do on deontological grounds, especially for the institution tasked by society with enforcing the law. They may be justified by utilitarian ethics, but a police department setting the precedent of "if we believe the need is great enough, we are free to ignore the law" is both wrong and illegal. That's the fundamental principle at stake here - the same base argument that leads governments to suspend civil rights for the sake of security. "It is terrible for these people to die, so we need more power to prevent it." A ratcheting system that cedes ever more ground to autocratic forces. It's not like this process has been particularly hidden from us; there are many here who remember the US before the PATRIOT Act was put in place, after all.
The cost of not beating this thief might have been a child's death. The cost of beating him is instilling a norm that police have the right to beat prisoners. And because the change in societal norms is so slow, and the grief of a dead child so sudden, this always seems like a good trade. You would be a monster for saying that the rights of a car thief are worth a dead child. Until police prisoners have no rights. Until political prisoners have no rights. Until people have no rights.
End-to-end encryption is evil! Only a criminal would want to hide their activities from the police! A social credit system rewards pro-social activity and prevents instability! This state of emergency is only temporary - life will return to normal very soon! A surveillance state is much safer than a free one. As long as you have no issue with the state.
The civil rights we benefit from are measured in the blood of innocents. As cold-hearted as it is to say, if we are not willing to allow innocent people to die to protect civil rights, we will not have them for long.
That...depends on your chosen deontological framework. In deontological ethics some acts are morally obligatory (or prohibited) independent of their effects on human welfare, but which acts are obligatory or prohibited depends on the deontological framework selected.
You could select a deontological framework where “obedience to the letter of the law” is always morally obligatory, but I think most people who subscribe to deontological ethics would nonetheless reject that framework.
I would say yes they were in the wrong. It was a bad choice even if its one I would likely make myself. Maybe the insistence that morality is strictly on a continuum from "good" to "bad" is part of the issue.
In theory since the case is so trivial they could be convicted and immediately given complete presidential pardon with clean record or whatever is the equivalent.
Or jury nullification can be used. There would be no way I as a juror would declare them guilty.
"Torture is bad and should be abolished".
"Well, what about this other, very contrived situation where it's good?"
You can use that non-sequitur to justify literally anything. "Murder, slavery and rape is bad". "Well, what about this situation where it did good?"
There are only people who inexplicably insist that a tortured non-sequitur is a pro-torture counterfactual.
You attack the problem with the rule of law, not unleashing your justice system from the reins of lawful behavior whenever they internally deem it convenient.
Turning it around, how would you like if the police tortured your child in a case of mistaken identity? Looking at the members of my high school class who became cops, they weren't exactly known for being the brightest bulbs in the box, but always acted with confidence despite that.
No, it's not, and the divergence between reality and this description is increasing, essentially monotonically, over time, with legal incorporation of “victim’s rights” into the criminal justice process.
That's not to say it shouldn't be as you describe, just that it isn't.
https://www.justice.gov/usao/resources/crime-victims-rights-...
They don't extend to the decision making process for others' investigations and prosecutions.
Yes? They beat the man.
Should they have done it (acted wrongly)? I don't know, they have their own free will.
> In a 2014 paper published in the Social and Personality Psychology Compass, researchers criticized the use of the trolley problem, arguing, among other things, that the scenario it presents is too extreme and unconnected to real-life moral situations to be useful or educational.
I can't say, how I would react in a given situation. I don't know, if I could torture/kill one (or a few) for the survival (or a better chance of survival) of a larger group. Because in the end one would have to ask were to draw the line. From a strictly utilitarian point of view killing one person to secure the survival of two others is a net positive outcome. But it feels morally more than wrong.
Where to draw the line. 1 against 50? Against 1000?
Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" [1, 2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...
[2] Full short story: https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/emily.klotz/engl1302-6/rea...
Well of course all sorts of definitive truths feel unintuitive or wrong to humans, perhaps that's just a limitation of our brains. From this utilitarian pov the net positive outcome is the morally correct one.
Utilitarianism isn't a rational choice. What if - in my extreme example, one of the two surviving people would have been Hitler?
Or even less dramatic, still contrived: What if the person being killed would go on and invent a cure against cancer?
You can't predict the future and these contrived examples only show, that (probably) every theory/philosophy can be brought to its knees by going to its extreme conclusions. So how to quantify "value"? How do we calculate the consequences of our decisions? We can't imho.
There is math, right? 2 > 1?
> What if the person being killed would go on . . .
Don't worry about it. If they would cure cancer, redux hitler, etc, they will even if not seen here. Flip your coin; accept the result; one's feelings afterward don't offend the multiverse.
Ahhhhh I see. No need for many wise people discussing implications of actions and values for hundreds of years. Just throw in 4 words, 2 numbers and 1 logical operator. Eureka: Philosophy is solved.
> one's feelings afterward don't offend the multiverse.
Your solution seems to be "religion" providing consolidation.
I could absolve myself with the "Many worlds interpretation" into thinking that I don't need to care for the consequences of my actions and "accept the result".
The same way I can be absolved by a priest and still imagine myself joining the nice people in "heaven". For me personally it sadly just doesn't work that way.
In my worldview actions (or inactions) have consequences. Being an adult made me realize that I have responsibilities. And that I need to accept that I need to take these serious. One example:
If I step out of my door tomorrow and find a little crying baby on my doorstep with no one else in sight - while not at fault for the situation - I would still be responsible for this little human being. At least until there is a solution that relieves me from said responsibility. Until such a moment I need to step up and act.
The same for if I refrain from killing one person to rescue hundreds/thousands (or even just two), the consequences of my actions are my responsibility. They weigh on my consciousness. The same if I decide to rescue others by acting and torturing/killing someone.
If I act in self-defense or the defense of others ("Notwehr" and "Nothilfe" in German) I am still responsible. I might be acquitted in court. But I still need to step up and defend myself in court. I am responsible for my actions as well as for my inactions. The latter just is more easy on our consciousness (at least that is what psychology tells us).
Philosophy begins there, not ends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras
> Being an adult made me realize that I have responsibilities. And that I need to accept that I need to take these serious.
Ok Atlas. Don’t close the thought without the realization you have limits, that your mind is finite. If you pick up the baby, is it made of tar? Are you Horton, or do you call up the child welfare authorities and release the baby to someone else’s care?
In a worldview of responsibility for consequences of one’s actions, from where do those actions come? Are they not the consequence of other actions from within or out? It action-consequence-responsibility a graph or a fabric of interrelations?
Unfortunately, that has little practical impact.
I can construct a lot of scenarios where I build an amazing startup and become a billionaire seemingly overnight.
Tragically, my bank account balance always seems to ignore the brilliant scenarios my mind comes up with.
Honestly, outside of philosophy departments questions like this aren't terribly useful.
The problem with your question is that ignores the specific circumstances of this case - where there obviously was no dirty bomb, there was no "certainty", there were not one million lives at stake in some definite deterministic sense.
I disagree completely. The fact that you can construct such a scenario says something very important about it. That it is not totally morally indefensible and the discussion is not one about a binary choice but one about degree.
Basically do we have any examples of this sort of situation, where there was an imminent threat to life and people were saved due to torture?
Most evidence points the other direction.
> Finally, an exhaustive 2014 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence analyzed millions of internal CIA documents related to the torture of terrorism suspects, concluding that “the CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” It adds that “multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-rsquo-ve-known...
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publ...
In the made up scenario you could make a case that even if there is a low probability of torture working, the scale of lives saved would make it worth it. A 20% chance of saving 1M people is still net +200k lives.
Sure it is. But if torture was limited to only cases as clear-cut as the one you propose, it would be virtually non-existent.
For such rare, extreme cases, it's better to keep it illegal, and hope an interrogator will risk jail to save the million people (and possibly be freed by jury nullification), than (effectively) legalizing it, and have its use creep to anyone merely suspected of terrorism (as defined by, from the point of view of the torture victims, an invading force), by an organization unaccountable even to citizens of its own country.
Well I believe this is technically still the case in the US.
No. No, there is no such scenario. You can coerce the information out of someone who has the knowledge in other ways, if that is the problem, even though that problem never actually surfaces outside of bad TV show plots.
Torture is wrong. It does not work. It often, in fact, does the opposite of work. It debases our humanity, our civility, and society. It makes the world a worse place in so many ways, I find it sad that otherwise intelligent people are even pondering this.
No. Torture is not morally, legally, or ethically acceptable.
Riddle me that and you'll have answered your own question and hopefully had an epiphany along the way.
In these extreme edge cases the people on the ground can be expected to break the law and break out the thumb screws. After all if you're willing to torture someone your own freedom is presumably a relatively mild price to pay... right?
We could then hope that the citizens enforcing the legal system will recognize the correctness of their actions and let them off.
Legal torture exists because the powerful don't see themselves as answering to anyone.
It the same issue when the police and prosecutor know all facts with certainty. At this point you don't need a court, a judge or a jury. In an artificial system where everything is know with perfect certainty you don't even need police and prosecutors, just a method to punish the guilty. A legal system is only needed in order to determine who is guilty and who isn't, and this is unnecessary if we know already who is guilty.
We know with some uncertainty the murder rate each year, and from this we have some measurable number that a person might be murdered. But we also know that murders tend to occur in non-random ways. At what murder rate should we start to arrest people at random?
They are fun thoughts experiments, but as guides for real life they work about as good as extreme simulations which removes mass, gravity and air friction.
Exact same reasoning as "thou shalt not brutally beat epileptic children, to try to cure them by driving the demons out".
No matter what principals you hold I can come up with a scenario where you will violate them. It does not make you unprincipled.
States using torture is a long way down the hole. It is such a shame that a dynamic exciting creative society like the USA's has fallen so far. It would be possible for the country to be a beacon of hope and civilisation. Instead it has become just another in a long line of grubby corrupt super states.
Such a crying shame.
What you have to do is credibly threaten to torture or kill their family members and loved ones, to rape their children. This works. Are you a bad enough dude to rationalize that?
Probably many are, but for a person crazy enough to do such a horrible act such threats would also likely not work (either "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore").
As a society I think we can only try to avoid creating enough people who have "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore"... They're basically "cancer cells", once at least one survives long enough to "do it's thing" (recruit team, deploy destructive thing etc.), there's nothing you can do besides damage control, you don't "interrogate a cancer cell", they're either irrational, or have no rational reason to help you regardless of any threat or pain you apply.
But you're right, torture would only work for "regular criminals/terrorists" for which... one shouldn't need torture, threats and rewards for collaboration would be enough. But these "regular bad guys" would not do stupid s like mass attacks on "civilians".
Generally if you end up thinking you absolutely need actual torture you've already f up badly, you're seeing things wrong, and sooner or later s will hit the fan for you or your organization... it's more of a sign of incompetence!
War isn't crazy, and participating in attacks on [your country] doesn't mean that one is irrational or doesn't care about anyone in the world. Just because you are willing to give your own life for a cause doesn't mean you have nothing to lose.
The reason I say it works is because it actually works, and has been used by states many times, esp. in South America by US trained torturers, but also by plenty of others, like the Khmer Rouge. The point is credibility - and if somebody has planted a dirty bomb in some city, you can't credibly give them any reward for telling on themselves. You can promise things, but they will not believe you. If you're Pinochet, though, you can credibly threaten to have someone's children raped and murdered, because he did it all the time. He can credibly promise to do it even after the bomb goes off, and after you've been executed, because he's done it to others. He can have them brought to you and have it done in front of you.
The US also uses this tactic, although since it will never carry it out (although it will carry out deportations, indictments, etc. for family members) it relies on a lot of playacting. There are stories of the US pretending to torture family members within earshot of people being interrogated.
Planting a dirt bomb in a civilian inhabited city is way beyond war... 99.9% soldiers fighting in a war would not participate in anything similar to this... Even when a city is bombed to the ground, that generally happens well after beginning of a conflict and most people have been at least given one chance to run away or surrender... Most people who plan their lives well enough have a decent chance to at least evacuate vulnerable people from war zones (at high cost, sacrifice, but still).
The propaganda people currently trying to blur such lines are CRIMINAL imo...
> like the Khmer Rouge
Not sure how well this (or anything else) worked for them... afaik they ended up massacring a large part of their civilians population because they were paranoid and couldn't figure out who to trust, or had crazy ideas about who the ideal future citizens should be...
Yeah, sure, torturing enemy fighters to give away military secrets probably works just fine, just don't do it on a large enough scale or you'll just motivate the enemy to faith-to-death instead of risking to get captured... and this would likely nullify any advantage you'd gain.
There's a big gap between "regular war" and "total unrestricted violence and terror", that's why we talk of "war crimes"...
It was absolutely monstrous, and designed to back up (mostly) false statements of Soviet, Vietnamese and US infiltration, and that certain nationalities sand ethnic groups were collectively working to sabotage the government. Torturers were trained with pseudoscience, such as claims that if you strangle a victim and their heart rate increases, they are lying.
The result was the Cambodian communist party splitting and joining with the Vietnamese to expunge Pol Pot, and the Cambodian Genocide. I don't know how exactly any of this 'worked'. It did the opposite of create a secure state and confessions were merely used as an excuse to justify the existing hatreds of the Khmer Rouge.
I mean, you're probably not torturing average-Joe working-in-an-office with 2.5 kids and a white fence house :)
Taking you apart for your organs can be used to save the lives of multiple people.
So, I'd say, in your case, three or four, tops.
I don't imagine that was the answer you were looking for.
Fixing terrorism by more surveillance, torture, less rights might delay the detonation of a dirty bomb but since the core issue remains nothing is solved.
Besides, there are very effective techniques against information extraction through torture, like dividing organisations into cells.
IMHO, if it comes to torture 1 person to save 1M+ people there's likely to be another person who you will fail to catch and that person will take down the 1M+. I don't believe that the scenario of torturing 1 person and saving 1M+ exists beyond games and movies.
After years of torture, dronning and gunning people, the US left Afghanistan and people were falling from the skies when trying to run away. Did you miss that? Why do you think that torture can be an effective tool?
I absolutely do not believe governments should be able to torture someone, for any reason, regardless of the consequences. It has less to do with the suffering of a single person, and more with the constant and consistent scope creep that enters every government program coupled with the ability for any and all governments to be full of faceless, and therefore blameless, bureaucrats.
Torture to save 1 million people today becomes torture to save 10 people tomorrow. If no one can be held accountable, then it becomes torture to stop a robbery instead of genocide.
If you let your morals slip once, you are an immoral society. Like it or lump it.
Edit to clarify: I am 100% anti-torture in any situation. I didn't think that needed clarification?
No this is nothing more but a sleazy attempt to whitewash a crime
I'm not sure how to re-word that to clarify.
-- Fyodor DostoevskyIt is a travesty and a tragedy, but morally, if I did my best within the bounds of the law, what else is there? If there is no rule of law, what's the purpose of the whole thing? If torture is negotiable, why not speeding? Why not kidnapping (which might be implied in the torture)? Why not eliminating the right to a fair trial (again, maybe that's implied)?
If I disassemble you and redistribute your body parts, I could save several people who are in dire need of a heart, some kidneys, some blood.
Should I just go ahead and do this? If not, why not?
Someone stole the car with the baby inside. Police caught the thief, but there is no car or the baby. There is a heatwave and the baby can last max 2h in the car. The thief panicked and dumped the car somewhere. He is not willing to tell where it is.
Beating him up to get the info is acceptable ethically.
edit: Americans (and others) have been taught to believe in torture like a religion, to continue to associate torture with truth. Torture is an argument; you're arguing with people that it's in their best interest to do what you want them to do. It is rarely an appropriate argument, and rarely an effective argument. It's far easier and more effective to convince them that cooperating with you is the right thing to do, and that's still not easy. But there are tactics, such as complete isolation and control over their environment, rewards for any sort of cooperation, friendliness and human connection, actual rhetoric and discussion, periods of complete disorientation alternated with periods of calm, pandering to their egos. They don't work in two hours.
E.g. you have a virtual certainty that a dirty bomb is going to be detonated in NYC and will kill 1M+ and potentially irradiate the city for decades. Is torturing one person who you know with certainty knows the location of the bomb defensible?
Basically, how many lives would you be willing to sacrifice to prevent the suffering of a single person?