Cynergy wrote:OK, this is a variant on a pretty classic dilemma, so apologies in advance for that, prompted by various discussions here and elsewhere.
Here's the scenario:
A man or woman has planted a very large dirty bomb somewhere in central London. You (the Intelligence officer/police officer) have captured the person, and have managed, after trying extremely intensive standard interrogation methods, to establish that the thing is primed to go in 2 hours. It's likely to kill 1,000+ people immediately, and many others subsequently. Despite intensive questioning, bribes, blackmail, and so on, the person refuses to disclose either the location of the device or any way to defuse it.
All and any methods of physical and psychological torture are at your disposal. You have 2 hours. What do you do?
Cynergy wrote:See you're all still dodging the question. Why? You've all come across it in one form or another previously. Is it it too present and too painful to consider?
Let me rephrase it: Given the OP with the additional rider that any or all forms of torture will provide an answer with 100% certainty in a very short time, and with the clock running, do you apply it, or not. If so, how do you justify it? If not, how do you justify it?
I'm really not interested in questions of legality or efficacy. It's a thought-experiment. To spice things up (since that, or something like it seems to be needed), I'll throw my hat into the ring. Yes. Without reservation. I'll justify that (on moral grounds) if anyone is brave enough to respond to this.
I don’t think questions about morality can be separated from questions of legality and efficacy, even in a thought experiment. It seems to me that Cynergy’s posts in this thread constitute a call for torture to become legalised in modern democracies. Is the torturer going to be tried and convicted of assault or murder? Or will the torturer be let off, even if it transpires there wasn’t a bomb at all?
In the introductory remarks to
the recent Edge conference on the science of morality (posted by amused in the Sam Harris thread), one definition of morality is given as:
Morality is ultimately a system of rules that enables groups of people to live together in reasonable harmony.
I would agree with that definition, which is why I think legality and efficacy are crucial considerations when considering what is or is not moral. State torture has been illegal in Britain for more than three hundred years, and in the US for more than two hundred. Of course, as Hume pointed out, that doesn’t make it immoral, but it suggests that use of torture is hardly a requirement for a country to survive.
I’ve been looking up the history for interest, and only found the
judgment by British Law Lords in 2005 asking whether it is legal to admit evidence obtained from terrorists by torture (answer, no, though the executive may use the information to save lives, but they can’t actually torture anyone). There is a discussion (in sections 10 -12) of the history of the use of torture in England. It was illegal in common law to use torture in evidence from early times (a 1470 reference is given):
Law Lords wrote:In rejecting the use of torture, whether applied to potential defendants or potential witnesses, the common law was moved by the cruelty of the practice as applied to those not convicted of crime, by the inherent unreliability of confessions or evidence so procured and by the belief that it degraded all those who lent themselves to the practice.
However, the monarch (being above common law) could authorise torture, and fairly often did. In the Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century, when the king lost most of his power and Britain became a democracy, one of the first things that happened was that state torture became illegal, and it has remained illegal since:
Law Lords wrote:One of the first acts of the Long Parliament in 1640 was, accordingly, to abolish the Court of Star Chamber, where torture evidence had been received, and in that year the last torture warrant in our history was issued.
One of the comments above concerned “the cruelty of the practice as applied to those not convicted of crime”. In Cynergy’s example, you don’t know where the bomb is, how can you be so very sure there is a bomb, let alone that you are torturing the right person?
Perhaps my answer to Cynergy’s question is that if I managed to convince myself 100% that the only way to save 1000 lives was to torture someone, I might do it, but I would expect to be rightly tried and imprisoned for serious assault and, probably, murder.
by 
is that confirmation of information extracted by torture is exactly the same as confirmation of informations extracted by conventional interrogation means. To claim that torture does not work because those subjected to torture will tell anything to stop the torture is to claim that conventional interrogation does not work because interrogated person will tell anything to stop the interrogation.
