scumble on 11/10/2012 at 11:06
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
This.
I'm surprised a sentence involving "secret services" and "torture" would not make you a little uncomfortable. People out there with vague levels of oversight defending "national security" by torturing people for some unknown reason? Doesn't sound terribly promising to me.
I think the question being avoided so far is considering why the context of torture is there in the first place.
Quote:
I'm pretty sure that if it was the life of someone I cared about on the line...
Emotion. Someone gets frustrated and beats the shit out of the person being questioned. It happens. On my cynical days I view humans as barely civilised apes, so I wonder why it doesn't happen more often. In fact in most places in the world I'm pretty sure it does.
I'd rather stick with keeping torture of the menu because I don't think the short term payoff of hurting a few people because they might say something useful is possibly worth undermining a principle of civilisation that is often only vaguely adhered to. If people slip deal with it when it happens, but the places where torture is likely to occur I don't think anyone will ever know in time to have a chance of doing anything about it.
SubJeff on 11/10/2012 at 11:34
Quote Posted by scumble
I'm surprised a sentence involving "secret services" and "torture" would not make you a little uncomfortable. People out there with vague levels of oversight defending "national security" by torturing people for some unknown reason? Doesn't sound terribly promising to me.
Well I have two hats - theoretical and realistic. I'm using my theoretical hat here (mostly) because it's the principles of the thing I'm interested in, not the practicalities of it. Atm at least. Of course it makes me uncomfortable.
The reason is that very thing you've mentioned - emotion. I think that people let emotion rule their decisions/principles too much and in that other forum I mentioned most of the rebuttals of torture have been of the "it simply won't do/how dreaaaaaaful/deary me, whatever next?/how dare you" purely emotional response type.
Thirith on 11/10/2012 at 11:44
Not sure how closely you'd link the emotional and the idealistic/ideological in this respect, SE. While I consider myself fairly principled, one of my principles is that doing something because It Is Right (or not doing something because It's Wrong), without any consideration for the results, implications etc. is unethical in itself. Meaning well shouldn't take precedence over aiming to achieve the best outcome for the most people IMO - but neither should a "the ends justify the means" argument be used to shoot down a conversation about the ethics of a certain course of action.
The main problem, at least to my mind, is that we can only argue this in the abstract in the absence of a sufficiently large body of evidence. We can all construct 24-style scenarios where torture saves the day or where it brings everyone involved to ruin, but we can't point to numbers and say that on average the positive outcomes outweigh the negative effects consistently and significantly enough. Which leaves us with... what, exactly? Fictional what-ifs, anecdotes that may or may not be representative - and ideals, ideologies, emotions and abstracts. I'm not sure whether a discussion about the principle of the thing is all that much more... sensible? valid? than one that acknowledges the emotional side, since what we're talking about is almost entirely removed from real life. On the theoretical level it's easy enough to construct scenarios that go either way, so which scenario we see as more credible is at the very least linked to our emotions.
DDL on 11/10/2012 at 11:49
Apart from all the cold rational evidence that suggests torture doesn't work, you mean?
Emotion can be applied either way, angry "OMG BEAT THE INFO OUT OF THE FUCKER" emotion, or "O GOD WHAT HAVE WE BECOME!!11" emotion. And it's an intrinsic part of who we are and who we always will be, so I'm not sure it's entirely germane to leave it out.
Theoretically, in ultra cold thought experiment scenarios, we can posit an eventuality whereby someone knows something that could save a life or lives, and that this person will only reveal that information under torture. Just doing the maths here shows that it's a straight exchange between a life/lives and non-fatal pain, which tends to suggest that torture would be the optimal path.
Which is fine, but that is not and never will be a realistic scenario. Moreover, it's never going to be an isolated scenario. Humans are pretty much utterly incapable of saying "just this once" and sticking to it.
If we are to discuss torture (the validity of) in any realistic fashion, we have to account for the fact that humans are weak, emotional bags of lost angry meat. Half the reason we HAVE laws is because of this.
Thirith on 11/10/2012 at 11:57
Quote Posted by DDL
Apart from all the cold rational evidence that suggests torture doesn't work, you mean?
Is there research that compares same with same, and that uses a large body of current evidence? Exactly the fact that in most countries torture isn't currently done overtly makes me doubt that we have much evidence either way that is statistically relevant. I imagine there's a fair amount of evidence that finds correlations between countries that torture and other human rights violations, lack of freedoms etc., but correlation != causation.
Admittedly, I haven't looked any of this up, so I may well be talking out of my ass - but I'd be interested in seeing such research that is backed up by numbers.
demagogue on 11/10/2012 at 12:04
It's emotional for lay people talking about it, but the idea of dispassionate "torture experts" is real enough; and they're the ones really running the show. I understand that there's quite a bit of empirical work on exactly what works, pounded out and shared by police states over decades now.
Like when the photographs came out in Abu Ghraib of naked prisoners standing on chairs with their arms out & bags over their head, and you saw all these reports dismissing it like "wtf oh those perverted soldiers"... Of course anybody that's studied torture recognizes it as a well known technique developed in the South American police states (Chile IIRC) and it was very calculated from high up in the chain as a matter of policy... I think a lot of the empirical work is out there. It's the sort of thing militaries spend lots of money researching & trying to understand.
Edit: Torture and other human rights violations are connected in the sense that torture as a normal police / military technique, you're talking about interrogations for normal information, or political reasons, or to coerce confessions -- the ticking timebomb just isn't the realworld case where torture is used in practice... So typical use of it already relies on a whole lot of other violations going on too ... tossing out the right to a fair trial, presumption of innocence, right to see evidence against you & question it, right to a lawyer, right against self-incrimination, prohibition of long-term detention without cause, free speech & assembly rights (if it's torture for political reasons), etc, etc. There would be no point to torture if you didn't have all these other violations. They come together as a set.
DDL on 11/10/2012 at 12:22
Huh. Well (perhaps unsurprisingly) there doesn't appear to be a lot of peer-reviewed literature on the general success-rate of torture, so I guess I'll retract the above statement.
I was quite surprised to discover that there IS a journal called "Torture", apparently. It's mostly concerned with rehabilitation strategies though (torture causes a shitload of mental health issues! Who knew?), also I don't think it has a terribly high impact factor.
Vasquez on 11/10/2012 at 12:50
Quote Posted by DDL
If we are to discuss torture (the validity of) in any realistic fashion, we have to account for the fact that humans are weak, emotional bags of lost angry meat.
now i'm feeling emotional <3
DDL on 11/10/2012 at 13:14
*emotional lost angry meatbag highfive*
