Isn't America better than this?

Multiculturing Interculters Cross Cultures

If you don't mind wading through the fluff of my aggressive tone....
 
No, Doug is here to learn from his intellectual superiors.

It is obvious that there are people with pretty good brains posting on this Board, and those who have not been so lucky in cranial content distribution should learn from them.

But Taomon and I do not agree. I claim that, if faced in practice with the Ticking Time Bomb scenario, there is only one sane answer.

But I also claim that when faced as a hypothetical, with the utility of torture stipulated to eliminate the utilitarian argument from consideration, then the Ticking Time Bomb question should simply not be answered.

Because if it is answered, in the only sane way that it can be, you will then be led by your interlocutor to concede, step after step, to increasingly less-obvious cases: if torture is okay to save five million, what about to save 500,000 ... 50,000 ... 5000, ... 5? And if it is okay when there is a 100% chance that you can get the truth from the terrorist, what about when there is only a 99% chance ... a 90% chance ... and so on.

Rather, we must understand that real life is full of considerations, some of which are contradictory, and all of which are usually fuzzy, and that real events cannot be artificially segregated from them, as they are in sophomore philosophy classes. Frictionless surfaces are a necessary artefact in physics classes, but frictionless life-situations never occur.

To condone torture, or near-torture, as an official policy is a bad idea, even if those doing it try to hedge it in with all sorts of restrictions and conditions.

The impulse to lay out in great legalistic detail such restrictions and conditions is actually an example of the retreat of common sense wisdom and the advance of excessive bureaucratic rationality into day to day life.

It is coterminous with the growth of the authority of the state, especially where the state begins to carry out functions once carried out by non-state institutions, and actually has a benign impulse behind it, which is the desire to limit the arbitrary power available to state officials, through binding them with rules.

But much of life cannot be codified into formal propositions with determinable truth-content -- this was the fallacy of the so-called "Artificial Intelligence" fad, and in particular of the idea of computer-based "Expert Systems" which were going to replace human judgment.

We lose more than we gain, and by a good deal, when we are seen to make torture part of our interrogation techniques. This is why we shouldn't use it.

But this requires common-sense wisdom in its application, like everything else.

Thus, in real life, I want decisions like what to do in each circumstance to be taken by wise people, whom I can trust to make the best decision possible. If there actually is a Ticking Time Bomb situation for real, I want to be able to trust them to do the right thing.

Putting it another way: there are things which are done, and not said. There are things which are said, and not done. And it is not possible to completely codify these things.
In other words, you agree with me. You must be a liberal socialist pinko commie.
 
apparently I am not allowed to comment on the issue of torture or it will be cut and pasted and retitled....for on the island of the monkeys some truths where never spoken so I said nothing.......

My question is what do you consider torture?
 

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