Ah, but this assumes that only knowledgeable people were tortured, and torture produced information only about actual persons involved in the resistance against Germany.

I don’t believe the Nazis were the kind to be so careful. I expect they tortured plenty of people who didn’t know, and that false accusations of resistance membership were made in order to halt the torture.

Maybe they got lucky sometimes and caught some Resistance members. But then again, they failed to catch many. Marcel Marceau just died recently, and he was in the Resistance.

So, when you consider their overall failure, and the prevalence of false positives, it’s pretty clear that the effectiveness of Nazi torture is very much in question.

Er, no, no it isn’t at all.

Miuw: You’ve urged several times now, very eloquently, that we consider the effects of torture on a society that sanctions it. This is an unanswerable argument against the practices of the Bush (or Giuliani) administration. I hope you don’t imagine I’m defending anything like that? Remember how restrictive the hypothetical is: a very good chance of avoiding an almost inconceivable horror by torturing one of the suspected perpetrators. This may be too improbable to serve as a useful guide to policy, but it’s surely too improbable to serve as a justification for a barbarous policy.

I agree with Sebastian and Tracy about how to guard against abuse of even an extremely limited power to torture.

But there’s surely a difference (as you suggest in parentheses above) between inflicting terrible suffering on people against their will for ones own ends, and allowing people to expose themselves to the risk of terrible suffering?

Anyway, I don’t mean to quibble. These parallels, analogies and hypotheticals seem mostly beside the point to me (which was sort of one of my points), but not surprisingly, and more importantly, we both agree that torture shouldn’t be institutionalized.

My main point, along with those of quite a few others here, was that utilitarian calculus seems to me to be itself morally inadequate as an approach to this problem.

Isn’t it perverse that this debate itself has become something other than an academic exercise (and of course, Mukasey was confirmed)?

Mining itself is not necessarily morally reprehensible, agreed. Being trapped by a fall-in with rising water and the air getting fouler and fouler strikes me as an appalling experience on the equal of the descriptions of torture I have read (though I have never endured either, so I am hardly speaking from experience.) Experiences like that are statistically basically inevitable if we keep mining.

Slavery is a different situation, as it is not essential to the production of any goods that I know of. Slaves were replaced by paying people directly quite efficiently. I don’t know any way to get the goods created by mining without mining, and in Anderson’s hypothetical baby situation torturing the baby is essential to creating the perfect society, so I think both situations are different to slavery.

I personally abjure torture because: – unlike mining there is no evidence that torture leads to a better world – I don’t trust any government with that power.

However, the only way I have been comfortably able to answer the ticking-time-bomb terrorist scenario is that if I was the police officer/intelligent agent in that case I would torture and then plead guilty and argue for the harshest possible sentence for myself. This is rather a moot point as I agree with dsquared that the odds of anyone being in a situation where they know everything but the location of the bomb are ridiculously low. But it does mean that in extreme situations I’d torture, even though I do not want it legally sanctioned in any way for the same reasons as Sebastian gives.

Indeed, I’d go further than Sebastian that I do think torture should be prosecuted, even in extreme situations. If a government-agent requires immunity from prosecution before they will torture, then the situation is not extreme enough. The only time someone should torture is if they think that the cost to them personally of spending 20 years in prison is less than the cost of living with themselves not having found that information out.

Legalizing torture even for ‘the extreme situations’ is too corrupting to the underlying institutions to make it worthwhile.

(Another example in the US would be the proliferation of dangerous no-knock warrants—the allegedly narrow exception to regular warrant rules has gone completely off the rails during the drug war.)

Mining is not initself necessarily morally reprehensible, torture is. Rather than our systemic relation to mining, wouldn’t our relation to slavery offer a more telling parallel here? And surely that slavery still exists, and that we often ‘enjoy’ the indirect benefits of slavery, does not offer grounds for re-institutionalizing slavery?

As for the suffering-baby-and-perfectly-happy-society hypothetical, it is not particularly useful here for a number of reasons. The scenario of perfect happiness that it projects is utopian (some degree of human suffering is inevitable); even if such a state were possible, I’d want to argue that ‘perfect’ happiness could not in any case be founded on the practice of deliberate suffering (except perhaps in a society evenly split between sadists and masochists); and the scenario seems more suited to arguments about the institutionalization of human sacrifice than anything being discussed here (though, Anderson, I suspect more people would save the baby than you figure. Surely some moral philosopher has got together with some sociologist and conducted surveys?).

Which still leaves us with the question, not whether there are circumstances in which we might torture, but, do we want to, are we willing to, live in a society that sanctions torture?

Would anyone here answer in the affirmative?

Given that we tolerate mining, an event that leads occasionally to terrible deaths of tiny creatures, albeit of adult miners rather than babies, but then in far larger numbers than one, and given that I am not at the moment eliminating every product in my life that used the products of mining at some stage, and I am not fighting a campaign to end all mining, then in my case the truth is yes.

How about you?

There are of course a number of differences. The continued deaths of miners is inevitable only in a stastistical sense, we’re talking about adult volunteers (though not always), rather than a life of peace and rest at last we get heating in winter, electricity to run our computers, cars and the like. But still it strikes me that there is a broad similarity between your hypothetical and what is actually happening in the world at the moment.

I think we can state a new law: If Clinton agrees with Republicans, then it proves that the Republicans are absolutely right. If Clinton disagrees with Republicans, then it proves that he’s being partisan just for the sake of it… and the Republicans are still absolutely right. Bingo!

“infinitely better reason”

Oh, so consuming meat for daily nourishment and survival is suddenly a weak reason, compared to guarding against some totally made-up hypothetical involving a hypothetical ticking bomb where we just happen to have almost everything in place.

These nutbars really have their priorities straight. The dangers of massive flooding due to global warming are nothing compared to the dangers of US companies moving their operations offshore; the dangers of suspending habeas corpus are nothing compared to the great evil of paying any taxes; the total upsetting of the ecosystem due to genetically-modified crops must be weighed against the totally abstract spectre that we may be engaging in ‘plant Nazism’ by rejecting GM crops; etc.