Yes, it may well be the case Midcan is the most intelligent person on the board. He is obviously more intelligent than me, since I did not understand his last statement. How fortunate he is, if this observation about his high intelligence is true. But you can be very intelligent, and wrong. History is full of examples of very intelligent people being dead wrong.
Here is Taomon's argument, as I understand it: Torture with the aim of getting useful information from the victim, never, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, works. Therefore, any discussion about the ethics of torture is moot, since the ethical consideration is trumped by the utilitarian one.
An analogy would be the proposal to sacrifice a child to the moon-god, in the hopes of getting a good harvest. The fact is that, whatever the ethics of it, it would be futile.
However, in reality, the general ethical case cannot be so easily avoided, although as a broad generality, the utilitarian argument against torture is correct.
I would ask Taomon, and those who agree with him, how he has arrived at his conclusion that torture never ever works under any circumstances whatsoever.
I myself have no experience of torture, either as giver or receiver. But I would hesitate to just derive such a strong conclusion as Taomon's based only on my own speculations and examination of my own thoughts and feelings. One of the great conquests of European civilization has been to move many questions from the realm of speculation from first principles, or the appeal to Authority, to the realm of empirical, evidence-based investigation.
If torture is totally useless in all circumstances, we have to ask ourselves why its use has been so widespread, over millenia and across many diverse cultures.
No doubt some, perhaps much, of the motivation for torture is extraneous to the desire to get useful information. A sadistic streak runs deep in many people, and torturing enemies, for some folks, may be just good fun: presumably the Native Americans, who engaged extensively in exquisite tortures, were just gratifying themselves rather than carrying out intelligence-gathering:
"When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the Squaws.
'Twas the women, not the warriors, made these stark enthusiasts pale,
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male."
And possibly there is a desire, sometimes, to instill general fear in a population, as Taomon speculates. If so, it is a stupid desire.
Only in the West, and that only in the last four hundred years, has torture been officially disavowed as an interrogation technique, although carried out extensively in practice behind the scenes. But hypocrisy is the first step from vice to virtue.
There is in fact plenty of evidence that torture is all too effective in certain circumstances. What are those circumstances? One set of circumstances might be: When the victim knows something that the torturers want to find out, and the information offered up by the victim to get the torture to cease can be quickly checked.
Typically, this information might be the names and locations of fellow members of an underground network, which is information which must usually be extracted quickly, before the victim's comrades find out that he has fallen into the hands of the authorities.
The problem is, that in real life the use of torture cannot be restricted to just a few cases. Its use spreads, the techniques used become more and more brutal, the torturers themselves become psychologically warped, the torturers lose what support or neutrality they may have had in the civilian population whose support or neutrality is all-important in winning the war.
So, as a dogmatic assertion drawn out of the air and compounded with wishful thinking, the convenient conclusion that "torture never works" cannot be defended in every specific instance. But as a general principle, the argument against torture is quite correct.
The few gains that will be made from using torture in specific instances will be overwhelmed by the losses that it will inflict on those who use it. As I argued in my initial post.
However, the argument against the use of torture, and near-torture, by the democratic anti-Islamist forces can only be made sincerely by those who are for the victory of those forces against radical Islam. The Left, in particular, are utter hypocrites on this issue, since historically they have studiously ignored torture when carried out by the side they supported in particular wars, which is on a par with their support of mass murderers like Stalin and Mao.
Here is Taomon's argument, as I understand it: Torture with the aim of getting useful information from the victim, never, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, works. Therefore, any discussion about the ethics of torture is moot, since the ethical consideration is trumped by the utilitarian one.
An analogy would be the proposal to sacrifice a child to the moon-god, in the hopes of getting a good harvest. The fact is that, whatever the ethics of it, it would be futile.
However, in reality, the general ethical case cannot be so easily avoided, although as a broad generality, the utilitarian argument against torture is correct.
I would ask Taomon, and those who agree with him, how he has arrived at his conclusion that torture never ever works under any circumstances whatsoever.
I myself have no experience of torture, either as giver or receiver. But I would hesitate to just derive such a strong conclusion as Taomon's based only on my own speculations and examination of my own thoughts and feelings. One of the great conquests of European civilization has been to move many questions from the realm of speculation from first principles, or the appeal to Authority, to the realm of empirical, evidence-based investigation.
If torture is totally useless in all circumstances, we have to ask ourselves why its use has been so widespread, over millenia and across many diverse cultures.
No doubt some, perhaps much, of the motivation for torture is extraneous to the desire to get useful information. A sadistic streak runs deep in many people, and torturing enemies, for some folks, may be just good fun: presumably the Native Americans, who engaged extensively in exquisite tortures, were just gratifying themselves rather than carrying out intelligence-gathering:
"When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the Squaws.
'Twas the women, not the warriors, made these stark enthusiasts pale,
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male."
And possibly there is a desire, sometimes, to instill general fear in a population, as Taomon speculates. If so, it is a stupid desire.
Only in the West, and that only in the last four hundred years, has torture been officially disavowed as an interrogation technique, although carried out extensively in practice behind the scenes. But hypocrisy is the first step from vice to virtue.
There is in fact plenty of evidence that torture is all too effective in certain circumstances. What are those circumstances? One set of circumstances might be: When the victim knows something that the torturers want to find out, and the information offered up by the victim to get the torture to cease can be quickly checked.
Typically, this information might be the names and locations of fellow members of an underground network, which is information which must usually be extracted quickly, before the victim's comrades find out that he has fallen into the hands of the authorities.
The problem is, that in real life the use of torture cannot be restricted to just a few cases. Its use spreads, the techniques used become more and more brutal, the torturers themselves become psychologically warped, the torturers lose what support or neutrality they may have had in the civilian population whose support or neutrality is all-important in winning the war.
So, as a dogmatic assertion drawn out of the air and compounded with wishful thinking, the convenient conclusion that "torture never works" cannot be defended in every specific instance. But as a general principle, the argument against torture is quite correct.
The few gains that will be made from using torture in specific instances will be overwhelmed by the losses that it will inflict on those who use it. As I argued in my initial post.
However, the argument against the use of torture, and near-torture, by the democratic anti-Islamist forces can only be made sincerely by those who are for the victory of those forces against radical Islam. The Left, in particular, are utter hypocrites on this issue, since historically they have studiously ignored torture when carried out by the side they supported in particular wars, which is on a par with their support of mass murderers like Stalin and Mao.
