Re:The Ronco Principle
by wheels on Wednesday January 21, 2015 @12:20AM
(#8921602)
I agree. But sometimes thought experiments can be useful in sussing out why we hold certain values. Torture I don't actually consider to be one of those that's particularly opaque, but asking "Why do I think this is wrong?" and looking at the edge cases is often an enlightening process. (And I've been reading a good bit of political philosophy lately trying to resolve some dissonance on other topics where I found my own views inconsistent.)
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It's the engineering mindset at work: reduction to extremes can give you a good idea of whether or not something has a discrete solution or if it is multi-valued. In this case it seems to me that it is likely to be multi-valued but only in non-real-world scenarios and for all intent and purposes you might as well treat it as discrete: torture == bad.