Effectiveness of Torture

BeAChooser said:
I think I've already won this portion of the argument since I've already established that the definition of the phrases "severe" and "prolonged" in the definition of torture aren't written on any tablet or even in any convention or law signed or passed by the US.
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Sorry, but you're factually wrong, and I've already shown you how. In the U.S. Code, the types of things that can cause "severe mental pain" are spelled out (and I've quoted this to you before).

Thus, interpretation plays an important role in the law and allows wide latitude as to what acts actually do constitute torture. We've seen that latitude at work over the last few decades.
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First, let me remind you that this thread is about the effectiveness of torture, not about what may or may not comprise torture. You're arguing both things, I think, and getting all mixed up.
At any rate interpretation is a part of what courts do. Courts do not shy away from making determinations of what is "severe" or "excessive" or "reasonable" and so on.

Since this thread is not about whether a certain type of technique is torture, I'm not sure what you're referring to. Waterboarding is definitely a form of torture because it relies on making the victim think he is drowning. The "threat of immanent death" is one of the items specifically mentioned in the U.S. Code as a cause of severe mental pain.



Then even without specifically answering my hypothetical question you've answered it.
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I have specifically answered your hypotheticals over and over. I reject them as being impossible. You cannot possibly know that committing the crime of torture will result in saving lives. Even if you could (and you can't), you couldn't possibly know that it is the only way to save those lives (that is, that there weren't ways of saving those lives that do not involve committing a crime or an unethical action).

If inflicting temporary pain on one person could with 100 percent certainty prevent the otherwise certain destruction of the universe (all I've described is a circumstance and you did say "ANY circumstance WHATSOEVER"), you wouldn't do it. Personally, I think that's insane.
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As I said, I reject the "if" portion of this statement. That's exactly why I think torture is not justified in any circumstances. It is impossible to know that with 100 percent certainty that inflicting temporary pain (is there any other kind?) on one person will result in saving everyone in the universe or a billion people or a thousand people. It matters not at all that you repeat the same hypothetical with different numbers of people.

ETA: It's like asking, "If it's a good deed to slaughter innocent children, would you be in favor of slaughtering innocent children?" and insisting that I accept the hypothetical and answer the question.




There is no threat of imminent death from waterboarding as used by the CIA.
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You're either wrong about the way waterboarding works, or you're intentionally misreading the phrase "threat of imminent death". If you haul someone out of their cell, and pretend you are about to execute them by firing squad (even though there is no chance whatsoever that you will actually kill him--because of blanks in the guns or whatever), you are nonetheless causing severe mental pain caused by the threat of imminent death.

By the way, I notice that you're still engaging in something that is off topic for this thread. Can you not keep separate the debate about the effectiveness of torture and the debate about whether waterboarding is torture?


We've waterboarded thousands of our own soldiers. Journalists are volunteering to be waterboarded. Obviously, there is no threat of imminent death.
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Nonsense. A soldier and journalist who voluntarily undergoes waterboarding is not being threatened with imminent death because they know they won't be killed. (The situation also fails to meet the definition of torture on a number of other points, as you well know.) A prisoner suspected of terrorism has no such knowledge. Should I remind you that suspected terrorists have been murdered in U.S. run prisons?

Again, arguments of the following form:
X is somehow like Y
Y is not torture
Therefore X is not torture​
are not logical. Here you've merely put waterboaring experienced by trainees or journalists for Y and waterboarding of detainees during interrogation for X. It's still illogical, and I've pointed this out numerous times now.

At any rate, the topic of this thread is not the question of whether waterboarding is torture.

Are you at all interested in resuming the discussion on topic for this thread?
 
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BeAChooser said:
Did you notice that at the same hearing where Mohammed claimed he lied under torture, he also listed 29 terror plots in which he took part? And if he lied before, could he be lying now?
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Again, the point is at the moment you decide to commit the crime of torture, you do not know whether you're going to get good intel. Even if you subsequently verify that the info you got from torturing someone (and right now we're hearing that these guys sometimes lied and sometimes told the truth under torture), it does nothing to change the fact that you didn't know whether or not you'd get good intel.
 
CapelDodger said:
It's not just a conscious thought; the sense of smothering works at the brain-stem level so what you experience is horror and panic. It is very, very unpleasant.
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Yes. If anything, I think it is even more effective than the fake firing squad technique at making a prisoner think he's about to be killed.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Our atheist group
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I'm curious, Joe. If you don't believe in God, how can you believe in absolute morality? Or do you? It seems to me that if there is no higher power, then there is no right or wrong beyond personal preference. With that in mind, I can understand why you might believe in moral equivalency.
 
BeAChooser said:
I'm curious, Joe. If you don't believe in God, how can you believe in absolute morality? Or do you? It seems to me that if there is no higher power, then there is no right or wrong beyond personal preference. With that in mind, I can understand why you might believe in moral equivalency.
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Surely you have been on the JREF forum long enough to have had this question answered hundreds of times and yet you still cling to your false belief that morality comes from god beliefs.

Tell me, why would any Christian be concerned about right and wrong when all they need do is ask for forgiveness just before dying?
 
BeAChooser said:
I'm curious, Joe. If you don't believe in God, how can you believe in absolute morality? Or do you? It seems to me that if there is no higher power, then there is no right or wrong beyond personal preference. With that in mind, I can understand why you might believe in moral equivalency.
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I disagree, sir. A sense of right and wrong can easily be developed my reasonable people based on their own exerpiences with what causes pain and suffering, and what causes happiness.

The idea that murder is wrong, only because "God" says so, is silly. The victim of the murder didn't want to die. The family members of the victim suffer pain and grief that they didn't want. I think the same arguments can be made about things like theft, and rape.
 
BeAChooser said:
I'm curious, Joe. If you don't believe in God, how can you believe in absolute morality? Or do you? It seems to me that if there is no higher power, then there is no right or wrong beyond personal preference.
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Morality is a mental capacity that evolved in humans as an adaptation to living in very complex groups. I like to compare it with language--another mental capacity that evolved as an adaptation to living in complex groups. As with language, there is an innate mental capacity and a social/conventional aspect to it. As with language, some aspects are very nearly universal, but others differ by convention in different societies.

God is no more necessary to explain morality than he is necessary to explain language. . or indeed anything at all.
 
Whiplash said:
A sense of right and wrong can easily be developed my reasonable people based on their own exerpiences with what causes pain and suffering, and what causes happiness.
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I don't disagree. People can develop a PERSONAL sense of right and wrong without believing in "God". But that then leaves the definition of right and wrong up to the individual and the culture they experience. Doesn't it? Which is why acts considered wrong by individuals in one culture are sometimes considered right by individuals in a different culture. Which means, under your explanation, that "right" and "wrong", and "moral" and "immoral", don't really have strict, absolute definitions. In fact, the terms become somewhat meaningless once you move beyond a single individual or small group of individuals. And therein lies a problem.

Given my specific circumstances, I could quite reasonably conclude that an act is good (and moral) that you conclude (given your circumstances) is bad (and immoral). Likewise, you might conclude that two immoral acts are equally immoral when I, quite reasonably, conclude that one immoral act is far worse than another and might even be a moral act if it prevented the far more immoral act from happening.

So if you really do believe what you claim ... that it's up to the individual ... why do I hear so many personal attacks on my viewpoint ... on me even ... for regarding the saving thousands of lives by hurting just one person to be a good thing? It seems to me that you folks want to IMPOSE your sense of right and wrong and morality on me. Seems to me you folks want to set yourself up as the higher authority determining what is right and wrong, moral and immoral. In other words, you want to, in effect, play God.

You see the illogic in your position?

Whiplash said:
The idea that murder is wrong, only because "God" says so, is silly. The victim of the murder didn't want to die. The family members of the victim suffer pain and grief that they didn't want. I think the same arguments can be made about things like theft, and rape.
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And yet, if you leave definitions of right and wrong, moral and immoral, solely up to people, then circumstances arise where people, justifiably thinking they are doing right, murder. Steal. Perhaps even rape. Who are you to judge them?

Believing that a higher authority than oneself ... higher than even mankind ... is what really determines right and wrong, moral and immoral, can resolve this dilemma. It doesn't matter what form that "God" takes, only that we agree terms like morality should have an absolute meaning .. an absolute scale that doesn't depend on the whims of the moment or a small group of people. And I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution understood this. And too many people, nowadays, don't.
 
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Believers also make up their own definitions of right and wrong, they just assign the credit to their gods. Believing in a higher authority doesn't solve any dilemma, it just camouflages it. After all, who are you do say what god thinks is right or wrong?
 
BeAChooser said:
I don't disagree. People can develop a PERSONAL sense of right and wrong without believing in "God". But that then leaves the definition of right and wrong up to the individual and the culture they experience. Doesn't it?
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Not exactly.

Again, consider language, or better yet the narrow category of semantics. We know that words (other than onomatopoeia and their sign language counter part "classifiers") have no natural meaning. Meaning is by convention. As individuals, our brains have the capacity and tendency to look for an understand semiotic meaning. There are any number of brain structures and functions that comprise this capacity--memory, pattern matching, etc. But meaning is something that is by convention. You as an individual cannot simply decide that a word means something contrary to convention. You can try, and you might succeed, but if you succeed it's because it has become conventional, not because you as individual decided to give it that meaning.

At any rate, it takes no outside agency (like God or even a set of moral rules or language rules somehow encoded into "the universe").

I use this comparison because I think they're very similar (and even overlapping) mental capacities, but also because there are some theists who indeed believe that language devolved from God ("the Word" or "Logos"). Generally, that approach is no more accepted than a literal interpretation of the Adam & Eve creation stories or the stories of Noah's flood.
 
thaiboxerken said:
Believers also make up their own definitions of right and wrong, they just assign the credit to their gods. Believing in a higher authority doesn't solve any dilemma, it just camouflages it. After all, who are you do say what god thinks is right or wrong?
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Very good point.

It's the same problem with Pascal's Wager. People making such arguments forget that "God" can refer to vastly different concepts, and the idea of "what God says is moral" has even more variants.

ETA: In an attempt to steer this back to something closer to the topic: I have a hard time understanding how people can consider that an entity that would even consider damning a human to eternal torture to be a "loving" or "compassionate" God!
 
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Well, the bible describes a God that shows little to no compassion for people of other faiths. That's how they can justify it. Those are just Muslims terrorists being tortured, why do you care about the well-being of them?
 
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