Question for the 'anti torture' people..

Your question regards torturing someone who you KNOW is doing something evil to someone you PERSONALLY know.
I can understand that people use torture under those circumstances even if there is a real moral/practical dilemma and far from certain that torture would work even here.

But your question is quite the oddball when coming to torture. In most situation torture is used it is one people who proclaim that they have done nothing wrong and it is performed by people who has no personal need of the information they hope to extract.

A person saying "I would frakkin torture the *beep* out of that guy!" in answer to your question doesn't mean that he/she condones torture in my view.

Your hypothetical misses the point (not necessarily this specific hypothetical, any hypothetical.) There are hardcore anti-torture people around, and their motivations aren't uniform. Some point out that torture is no guarantee of truth -- a person could deliberately lie, for instance, or a person could be driven to the extremes of saying anything s/he thinks will stop the torture. Some feel that torture is a very personal decision to lower yourself to the (alleged) level of the person being tortured and essentially makes you just as despicable as the person being tortured. In a similar vein, some argue it's a personal choice and concentrate on the idea of the government, as a representative of however many people (300 million in the U.S., for instance) has neither the right nor the moral standing to essentially make the choice to torture in the name of its constituents...who were involved in making torture illegal (in the U.S., for instance.) And some believe torture is always wrong regardless of other considerations, on a moral level. It's hard to *reasonably* fault someone for saying "Deliberately inflicting pain on another human being doesn't become more right just because the other human being would do the same to you."

But the real point is that you can set up any number of convoluted hypothetical situations and you'd never address one of the central dilemmas of this movie -- can something be necessary without being right? In your hypothetical, you aren't establishing the morality or even the validity of torture. You're simply putting the subject in a situation of extreme duress and asking how far the subject is willing to go to end the duress. You may as well replace "brutalized family member" with "favorite stuffed animal." The criminal has stolen your teddy bear. If you do not torture him, the bear will be thrown into a campfire. Do you value said teddy bear enough to torture? Obviously (hopefully) your answer would be "No, that's just not right." But, hypothetically, what if you really, really, really loved that teddy bear, more than you could ever love another human being. You could very well see yourself justified in torturing the criminal horribly. You might even consider it necessary but not moral. It's a matter of degree and personal values, no? How far are you willing to go with the stakes involved, and how does your value system differ from someone else's? Obviously, most people would say that a kid is not the same as a teddy bear. But that doesn't change the basic point that people choose what's important to them, and if we decide to start making torture a matter of degrees, we have to accept the risk that others don't necessarily share our personal scale of degrees.

Remember the end of the movie...? Is it okay to torture the terrorist's kids to save your own? You can argue that it's the terrorist who brought it on the kids, but that doesn't in any way impact the question of whether the kids themselves deserve to be tortured. H. argues (though he may have been bluffing) that sometimes it's necessary to do the unthinkable. The CIA and military guys, at the end, argue that the lives of thousands of kids are worth that of those two (and they almost certainly weren't bluffing.) So your question misses the mark. What you should be asking is how do you decide when it's necessary to go "too far," and what is truly "necessary?"

The thing about this scenario, as it's applied to terrorism, is that it is just that: a hypothetical scenario. How did the guy get the bombs into the country? Into the mall? If he's a super-genius like in the movie (note: these people do not exist) then of course he did it all by himself (because people the military have trained to build nuclear bombs are just allowed to vanish off the radar for a couple of years before settling back in the country, and no one will notice them until they make a video) In real life, it will be a train of people with various skillsets and access, and sooner or later, one of them is not a true believer, or one of them realises what's going on and cracks. Someone won't be willing to be sent to Gitmo and will cut a deal. Even if they don't, they can be arrested a fair amount of time before the attack is imminent. Basically, the answer is preventative police work. If you get to the point where there's an hour till the bomb blows up and you don't know where it is, then a lot of police work didn't get done in the months before hand.

The other, less consequentialist answer to your scenario is this: So we trade the suspect's personal safety for the safety of, say, a million. What if it wasn't a nuclear bomb, just a big conventional one? Now the at risk group is only a thousand (i'm making it a really big bomb) not a million. Is exchanging his safety for that of a thousand still okay? What about a hundred? Or fifty? Now, what if he still won't talk? And you start torturing his family? now you're exchanging five for fifty. Still won't talk, expand it to his friends, co workers, just in case any of them know something. Quite quickly, you'll get to a point where you're just making an increasingly small exchange of people's safety. And there's a question of how long you can do that without losing the moral high ground. If you torture 49 people and save 50, is that still okay?

Here's something else to consider. The US (and other civilised countries) has bans on cruel and unusual punishment, that's punishment, on someone who has been demonstrated to be guilty. Torture is used to establish guilt. So, essentially, on someone who is not yet proven guilty, how do you justify treatment that would not be allowed on someone who's guilt is proven.

The other problem with torture is, that one scenario where the arguer makes it justifiable? A. it won't happen, as i said above and B. Torture demonstrably does not work. It will just convince someone to say anything to make the pain stop. For instance, the intel that Iraq had WMDs was provided under torture. Why would someone say something that hadn't been true for a decade? Because that's what the interrogator wanted to hear.

"They are just a flock of to fish for fame its person"

Yeah I don't see what that's got to do with anything. Are you correlating such an unrealistic situation as the torture that goes on during the "war on terror" and Guantanomo Bay?! If I walked in on my girlfriend screwing another guy I'd kill them both where they lay, but that doesn't mean I think it should be government policy that adulterers are executed.

Well, first of all, the demands were not really out of reach, so yeah...

But anyway, to answer your question: I would agree on torturing the criminal. I would never agree on torturing his wife/kids. They are as innocent as my own family, and I wouldn't accept brutally torturing an innocent child, whether that will save one life or 1000 lives.



"I want a frisbee made of Mexico."

I think it´s not a question of "when do people start torturing people"
It´s a question of the government.
If the law says, harming people is forbidden, than there´s nothing to argue about.
I´m talking about germany. After WW2 we have a "basic law" that has an "Eternity Clause". It says that nothing can be changed in it. This thing was highly discussed in germany after a boy was abducted and the police got the kidnapper. The Head of police threatened him (yes, just threatened him) with torture and the kidnapper revealed the hideout but it was too late. The boy was already dead. The Police guy who threatened the kidnapper with torture was put to court for offensing the right of "Human dignity is inviolable". Many, many people I know were outraged and said that its not right to put a man to court for trying everything to save the boys life. But that´s not the point. If the government would make changes in that law, even for endangered people. We are pretty much germany before WW2. Because germany before Hitler was a democratic country. But Hitler manipulated a few elections, made changes in the law by putting up a fictional danger and became a dictator and I believe everyone knows what came out of that.
What Im saying is that if something makes you go past the law of not harming humans and go on the "greater good" road the law and maybe the Constitution will become useless and there´s no, absolutely no way in imagining where that´s gonna lead. With that in mind I think people who demand torture are pissing, *beep* and fornicating on pretty much every grave of people who fought for freedom and against opression.

none of us know what they would do in such a situation and hopefully will never find out.

lets just hope we would NOT use torture. this isnt about saving lives. this is about turning into uncivilised monsters and playing god.

Your hypothetical and, indeed, the hypothetical presented in the film is so far removed from the reality of torture as to be a virtually meaningless question on a practical level.

You might as well ask a similar question addressed to some "anti-rape" crowd: would you rape someone to save your child's life, or 10 million lives? Well, possibly, but is this actually saying anything about the reality of rape? And what is the implication then, that rape is alright sometimes because I can think of a ridiculously implausible scenario in which some otherwise moral people might agree to rape?

It's just as ludicrous when applied to torture because that's simply not how torture works in practice. It's not some split-minute decision made by a single fearful parent: torture is an organized hierarchy and culture. The other implausibility presented in these scenarios is that it's a given that you have the right (guilty) guy, you know there's a plot where the time is ticking down and you have to be quick, and you know that this guy has the information you need. This doesn't happen in reality either. It's a fantasy used to get people to admit, on an implausible and disingenuous level, that they might think torture, or rape, or any other horrible thing you can think of, might be okay in at least one scenario.

From there you just have to haggle them down to your level.