First, thank you for providing a thought experiment that challenged my own beliefs on the topic. Something like that is rare.
Given the social climate surrounding the issue, it seemed appropriate to switch to a throwaway. I'll strive to keep the discussion interesting and thought-provoking.
I'd like to followup with you and get some insights. Thinking over your example leads me to conclude, "There is no such thing as what's 'acceptable,' only what's effective."
I think we care about what's acceptable/unacceptable because we need a collective line in the sand for what would be self destructive.
I think if some concepts are not marked as non bargainable, they will eventually be common.
Torture and terror falls in this camp for me. If we agree there are cases it's ok to use them, eventually we'll have a neighbor tortured because of some other thing society abors.
I think Post-911 and the Bush Administration making statements that in order to save lives and prevent more terrorists attacks they had to torture terrorist suspects.
It is a kind of the ends justify the means, the type of road that leads to tyranny. Which is why the Patriot Act got passed and hasn't been repealed yet.
You know that terrorists will use torture and everything they got and won't stick to laws and rules to get their ends to justify their means.
So what prevents us from becoming just like the terrorists we are fighting? Does it really need a fight fire with fire, and it is not terrorism when we do it? Are there better ways to fight terrorism that we haven't considered yet?
> So what prevents us from becoming just like the terrorists we are fighting?
'prevented', not 'prevents'. That's a passed station now, it's official, it's documented and it's absolutely horrible.
You see, when a bunch of deranged idiots does something there are all kinds of mitigating circumstances, but when a nation state does something there are none, unless you want to claim they too are deranged idiots.
Ironic that US Special Forces trained the Taliban to fight the USSR in the 1980's and then later on their leader founder Al Qaeda using the same tactics to fight the USA.
I think US failed foreign policy helps create a lot of terrorist networks. We pulled out of Iraq and Syria too fast and then ISIS/ISIL took over in the power vacuum there. So in trying to end the war too soon, to score points for people back home, we actually made it worse in Syria and Iraq.
In leaving Afghanistan we gave control back to the Taliban.
So the US war effort in the Middle East has failed as terrorist networks just take back control.
The USA won't admit to the things it does, it covers up the Prism NSA spying system, it covers up the torture, it covers up murdering people with drone strikes, then it goes after the news media that reports on all of the bad things the USA is doing to censor it.
Maybe we cannot prevent being a tyranny, maybe it is too late? We had to become a police state with the Patriot Act and Prism in order to fight the war on terror and then what have we become over that?
If we're talking about effectiveness, you then have to define what's the criteria that you're optimizing for - that's mostly the difference between morality frameworks. Certainly there is argument that was made within utilitarianism that if 1 people are tortured so that hundreds of millions of people can avoid having a speck of dust in their eyes, it's still a net gain for happiness (and so it's an acceptable, even preferable scenario to happen).
The fact that it's impossible for human agreeing on the criteria to be optimized asides. Normally there are many reasons that we almost never make morality argument based on effectiveness (unfortunately, I'm not articulate enough to summarize those reasons in a comment). The trolley problem is a good example: if it was a straightforward effectiveness argument, we all know what the "rational" decision should be.
There are multiple morality frameworks, most including torture, and very few that don't. Western Christianity (ie. "New Testament") and it's "atheist variant" Humanism are fully opposed to torture (unless you count banishment as torture, which some do), but most other ideologies aren't.
Take the old testament, which is certainly a moral framework. Or, when it comes to frameworks in use, islam's moral framework, for example, specifies torture as punishment for crimes (whippings, beatings, certain prescribed forms of execution, forcing children to witness execution of convicted parents, ...). But this is not the exception, most religions support torture, mostly only as punishment:
It's not limited to religions either. For instance, most or all person cults support torture.
A lot of people have serious trouble with the concept of multiple moralities, yet of course that's exactly what different religions are. People seem to find it easy to tolerate, oh going to temple instead of church, but if you disagree on marriageable age, slavery, or punishment then you're a monster. Never mind that by that standard, the majority the planet's population fails.
> Take the old testament, which is certainly a moral framework.
The Old Testament (and ditto with the New Testament) is not a "moral framework"; it is a set of stories which have been incorporated as part of the justification or inspiration for numerous moral frameworks, many of which conflict deeply with each other.
This makes it useless for getting a confession to a crime with no corroborating evidence. However, if you have a method of independently verifying the information you get, you can get useful information.
Note: I oppose torture, but effectiveness is orthogonal to my opposition. Something can be effective and still evil.
Not that effective for gathering reliable intelligence in a timely manner, but very effective for other purposes: To punish, to instill fear in potential enemies, to satisfy a need for revenge.
The "gathering intelligence" excuse is used only because it allows "good people" to convince themselves they support torture for rational, "good" reasons. Nobody would openly say they support torture because they want to see the enemy writher in pain and fear and be forced to eat their own shit. Even if this is the real reason.
Can we construct a situation where that would be appropriate? Well, let's get as close as we can, factoring out as many moral variables as possible, to make the question more concrete.
Let's imagine that it's the 1980s, during the Cold War. And let's create an inverse Dr. Strangelove setup.
Let's say that the United States, based on erroneous intelligence, has become convinced that a nuclear attack from the USSR is imminent. To prevent annihilation of the population of the United States, authorization is given to promptly and preemptively attack the USSR and the protocol is started.
Now, let's say that there are a number of persons who are able to disarm these attacks, and that one of them has fallen into KGB hands. The KGB has just one hour to prevent a nuclear holocaust.
To factor out another variable, let's assume that the general being held by the KGB is located somewhere that will be within the blast range of the mutual destruction, such that should the reciprocal attacks take place, the general will in the coming days die of a mix of radiation poisoning and starvation, no doubt a gruesome way to die.
How far is the KGB ethically entitled to go to try to extract the cancelation codes?
Now, "utilitarianism" was mentioned below, and the simple utilitarian would answer, as noted, that if there was even any chance of a small discomfort being removed for a great many, than it would be worth incredible pain for a single person. Such is a common attack on utilitarianism -- that it allows for persecuting the innocent.
However, that's a very superficial view of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism also considers that in trying to maximize the happiness (or some proxy for it) within society, that people care very much about some basic presumption of justice within that society. For instance, I would not expect a society which tortured suspected jaywalkers to be optimized for happiness. It gives us a sense of security and comfort to know that there are certain guarantees in our social systems.
There's also the argument from the perspective of justice (i.e. an argument from rights rather than outcomes). The notion there is that you can construct a set of rights by supposing a "veil of ignorance" in which you do not know where you would fall in a society or situation. For instance, if nobody knew if they were the torturer or torturee, they might both agree that torture is wrong and that it should not be practiced. The "veil of ignorance" is basically what the grandparent's question on transposing nationalities was trying to get at.
The utilitarian viewpoint doesn't lend itself towards as clearly defined of a set of rules for right and wrong. On the other hand, a strict set of rights can draw questions at the extreme ends of the ethical spectrum.
In the abstract that's all fine and good but we're talking about some very concrete situations here that go nowhere near those extremes. Extremes are nice to come down on something 'in principle' but barring extraordinary concocted up scenarios to expose the weaknesses of having a pre-set mind about anything at all it is still very useful to come down to some ground rules that everybody lives by, for instance, laws and in this case the Geneva convention.
The idea is that then if someone decides to cross those lines that you try them in court to see if a judge sees it the same way, if not off to the slammer you go.
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.)
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.
If you're inclined to go down that path: the Japanese treated US POWs terribly, and the US still dropped two nukes as a weapons test (there was credible intelligence Japan was in the process of surrendering because of the "regular" fire-bombing campaigns - but dropping nukes was seen as a great deterrent against Sovjet. And as a great opportunity for a field test).
Note: I'm mentioning this because you're scenario isn't quite as hypothetical as one might hope - for neither those bombed nor for the abused POWs.
Given the social climate surrounding the issue, it seemed appropriate to switch to a throwaway. I'll strive to keep the discussion interesting and thought-provoking.
I'd like to followup with you and get some insights. Thinking over your example leads me to conclude, "There is no such thing as what's 'acceptable,' only what's effective."
Do you feel that's true, or off the mark?