Reply #28: That's quite possible, however...

[greyl]

I'm honestly trying to wring out his argument. He never argues that the current invasion of the mid-east is justified, does he? Does he ever claim that the torture our military is involved in is successful? His argument is not that torture works.

"It's a utilitarian argument - that physical pain and psychological suffering of a few suspected terrorists is worth exchanging for the possible saving of innocent lives."

My take is that he's talking about known terrorists not suspected terrorists as our government refers to the masses at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. He specifically mentions Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

If you and I ever agreed that a particular war with all it's unavoidable collateral damage were justified, what grounds would we have to disallow successful torture as a means to save lives? I don't know. It's difficult for me to imagine justified fatal collateral damage, and similarly difficult for me to imagine how non-fatal, non-disfiguring, non-crippling interrogation (Harris's hypothetical pill) of the figureheads of the enemy is less ethical than causing the collateral damage.

The fact that Harris refers to Gandhi's emotionally shocking pacifist solution(a la Sartre) to the Holocaust is keeping his "pro-torture" argument in context.

One of the first things I thought of when reading Harris's essay are the difficult hypothetical ethical dilemas involving stabbing a child to death in order to save hundreds of lives. I doubt than any of us wouldn't recoil in horror at the idea of stabbing a child to death, but rationally however, I doubt that any of us would say it wasn't for the greatest good. Especially if someone else was doing the stabbing.
In Harris's argument, using his imaginary pill, nobody is doing the stabbing.

Another thing that came to mind is that there are degrees of torture in the real world, and that most parents and many teachers have no trouble justifying them. "Stand in the corner with your nose to the wall", "stay in your room until you tell me where you got those cigarettes" etc...

To make my position clear: I don't justify the current invasion of the mid-east or any torture that our military is involved in today to further that invasion.

edit: how much weight do you think we should give to the summation lines of the essay?:

"Assuming that we want to maintain a coherent ethical position on these matters, this appears to be a circumstance of forced choice: if we are willing to drop bombs, or even risk that rifle rounds might go astray, we should be willing to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners; if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern war."

I think it's the most important part and that the answer is "we aren't willing to wage modern war".