I am trying to picture the x and y here. Not that it really matters, but are you saying:
As level of pain grows, moral indifference grows without bound?
As level of pain grows, moral condemnation grows without bound?
I think you mean the latter, but really maximizing force/pain would involve special strategies to keep the subject alive for as long as possible. IMO, that is not OK. Whether it "works" depends on definitions but if the subject dies he or she is not going to do any more talking.
The x-axis is the level of inflicted pain. The y-axis is the societal benefit derived from that (e.g in terms of expected numbers of innocent lives saved). Your moral indifference curve would be that locus (i.e. set) of points where the societal benefit in your view just barely makes up for the moral repugnance you feel from the pain that was inflicted. For any point above that curve, you definitely would inflict the pain to achieve the expected benefit. For any point below that curve, you definitely do not think the level of pain justifies the expected benefit. For points on the curve, it's "six of one, half a dozen of the other," i.e. the choice is a wash for you, and you're therefore indifferent.
This is an old thread and I've probably said it before but here is my take:
It's OK for the U.S. to torture people because we are the good guys. How do we know we are the good guys? Because we don't torture people.
That's oversimplified and overly dramatic. Mostly we are the good guys because the way in which we have organized society appears to generate far greater happiness for the greatest number, as compared to what the bad guys can or will accomplish. But really it's more fundamental than that. We are the guys, in my opinion, because I prefer us to them. You must make your own choice, and each of us do. If you prefer their society to ours, then you should see them as the good guys and us as the bad guys. That's fine, but don't expect that I won't shun you or worse when I find that out. In any case, torturing a handful of terrorists hardly makes a country of 320 million people into the bad guys, especially in comparison to who has chosen to be our enemy.
Through the ages people have been tortured into telling the "truth," but the perception of truth has varied widely. If witches exist then sure, some people executed for witchcraft might have been guilty. If witches don't exist they were all tortured/killed under a false premise. Does the U.S. really know if the suspect it has captured knows anything of value? How do we know this? How do we know our premise is correct?
We don't know for sure, but hopefully the probability is something substantial. If the probability of a suspect knowing something useful is zero, or close enough, then of course it make no sense to torture him. In the case of witches, the probability really was zero, although admittedly the people back then might not of known that (I'm not sure that it wasn't all a conscious fraud actually).
I grew up believing in the post-WWII version of the United States as a supremely moral country. That premise has suffered over the decades due to issues such as the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iraq invasion and routine spying on ordinary citizens. I still think the U.S. was founded on solid ideals even though it often does not live up to those ideals. When it adopts torture and domestic espionage as acceptable trade-offs for "safety," it is not the U.S. I grew up believing in.
I once got the best of anglolawyer when he made a claim to
this effect. If you grew up believing that then you were completely deceived. The US has become more moral over time, almost continuously, but we have a long and shameful history, at least by the standards of today. Of course, few countries have a better history, but it's ridiculous to think that our moral standards have declined.
