Nadine, re: "If you are a policeman who catches a 'ticking bomb', then you must try something because hundreds of people will die if you don't."
But that's not really the issue, is it? The issue isn't whether the policeman should try "something" but whether he should try torture.
You've made it a black and white issue of using torture as opposed to standing by and allowing innocents to die. You evidently accept that torturing prisoners violates religious, moral and ethical standards and diminishes the torturer but, hey, if innocents might die then, according to you, the ends justify the means.
Many thinking people might disagree but that's a defensible point of view, if it was truly a realistic choice.
Where your knee jerk examples fail, however, is where the rubber meets the road; it isn't an either/or choice because torture does NOT provide the "off" switch for a "ticking time bomb."
That's because, assuming that you actually can, at some point, break down a subject with torture, the process is not a quick one and if the detainee is truly committed you won't "break down" a subject and reliably get to the truth while the bomb is still ticking. Sure he, or she, will talk but it will be misleading lies and you'll WASTE a lot of time running around checking out false information.
That's valuable wasted time that your hypothetical policeman trying to stop a "ticking bomb" could better spend trying to convince the detainee to come clean because of moral issues, fear of consequences or through trickery. That's time the hypothetical policeman could better spend trying to run down hunches, possible targets, alerting authorities, calling in informants, running down rumors, locking down areas or otherwise engaging in smart police work.
But you're way too caught up in a Hollywood plot where the cop slaps the subject and a guy willing to kill multitudes of people folds like a 7 year old kid. And why is that? Is it because that feeds your need to feel like there's some rough, tough, Bush on steroids guy out there that can make the bogey men go away?
In the real world there are risks. That's the price of living in an every more crowded, ever more technical and ever more violent world. Making it more uncivilized, adopting the mores of the most violent and living a fantasy where we are safe if we let our pawns break all the rules will not make safer. It will destroy the one thing that separates us from chaos, violence and a dark world; benevolent laws that protect the rights of all of us by protecting the rights of all of us, even your ticking time bomber. Ed |
