If someone can convince me that torture is ever justified (even in an edge case), this will resolve YES. Otherwise, it will resolve NO.
Related questions
What about wars when our men are captured and torture is the only way to get them back?
I think my answer would have to depend on how torture is defined. The immediate images that spring to mind are the more extreme cases, where high levels of pain/suffering are inflicted on somebody, usually with the purpose of punishing them for a perceived wrong or forcing them to do something.
But the word is also used in a casual way sometimes to describe mild annoyances like having to wait in line for 5 minutes at the shop or getting your legs waxed. I'm fact there's a whole spectrum of common use for this word.
I don't say this just to be pedantic. It seems that, how you strictly define 'torture' fundamentally changes the nature of the question. If you include 'weak' cases of torture, then it's straightforward to find justifiable cases, almost tautological. But if you only include the more extreme 'strong' cases, then it may be possible to argue it cannot be justified. Exactly where you draw the line could make the difference.
@Nosaix Probably the more extreme version should be assumed if not explicitly stated otherwise. Since it's a human right issue, there are many legal definitions and all of them mention "severe pain or suffering" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_torture
This makes all my examples below invalid, BTW!
@roma Using a legal definition makes a lot of sense. It's likely to be a well reasoned and tested definition based on real cases and not pure hypotheticals. Some variety of course between countries, etc, but there is a rough consensus.
And yes, it was your examples that led me to my question. They're perfectly valid but perhaps only for the 'weak' cases of torture.
The UN definition in the link you gave raises another interesting question, is it torture if the pain / suffering is inflicted for a "good" reason. If a doctor saves a life by amputating a leg without anaesthetic (because there is none available), surely this is different from somebody doing the same thing, but for the purpose of hurting someone they despise.
If you accept that the purpose nd intention of the person causing the pain / suffering is also relevant for deciding whether or not it is torture, then that renders many of the other suggested justifiable cases invalid as they don't meet that definition of torture.
This does raise issues of interpretation and relativism though. If the doctor thinks he is saving the patient's life, but other doctors review the case later and find there was nothing wrong with the man and he didn't need his leg to be amputated, then maybe it was torture after all. But the point would remain, it is either done without good purpose (unjustifiable) and therefore torture, or it is done with good purpose (justifiable) and therfore it is not torture.
This doesn't constitute a proof as it depends where certain lines are drawn around the definition of torture. But I'm at least starting to convince myself, so ready to make a vote.
Do we discuss only humans or animals too? If yes, I think some things people do during training can be classified as at least mild torture. The justification, I think, is that this is the only way to make an animal understand what the trainer wants them to do or not do. Assuming that a successfully trained animal going to have a happier life alongside people, this can be another edge case where torture is justifiable.
What does "justified" mean to you? (Sincere question, not trying to accidentally summon a Socratic dialogue).
My answer is, personally, that it's never justified but most people will agree to do it if exposed to sufficiently insane hypotheticals, which is a good reason to remember that this is real life, not a thought experiment.
These comments have been very interesting. I think I'll want to resolve it to a %.
It seems like torture can be 'justified' in cases, though there can be multiple reasons why. At the same time, torture itself cannot be 'justified'. Interesting points. My current stance is maybe ~70%.
Thanks for the interesting discussions! Heres a manalink as thanks:
https://manifold.markets/link/rw5R6pUu (15 uses)
(pls comment before you claim!)
I think all arguments can be summed up into three categories:
Torture as a punishment
Torture to prevent even greater suffering
Torture a person willingly agreed to (my half joke "note" below as an example)
And in all of these categories one can find a perfectly moral edge case by adjusting level of torture or magnitude of whatever balances it out.
Yes, lets assume a scenario where there are two people that are planned to be tortured; however, if another random person is tortured instead then the two people do not get tortured. Since we are including arbitrary edge cases here this scenario makes it true by construction for any sane human; that is unless you plan to troll with some wild hyper-Kantian take.
@lieblius This isn’t an arbitrary edge case. That entire paradigm is unjustifiable. The person posing the choice between the torture of one person or two others cannot justify the reasoning behind torturing either. If I offer anyone the choice between curb stomping an infant American X style vs curb stomping two infants American X style, anyone with a functioning brain will say that the first option is better. This does not even ATTEMPT to unpack the morality behind curb stomping an infant (or torturing someone).
I implore you to ask yourself; would you gas all people born in Germany or only gas all Germans born Jewish? There are way fewer German Jews than Germans overall, in the end.
Your hypothetical assumes the same thing: that gassing (or torturing) people is a necessity at any point in the process. What is your argument for the actual act? You offer NONE!
@NADZOR You're trying to have a good faith conversation about whether torture is justifiable in general; which would be great if that was the exact question. Yes it is what's in the title, but the description breaks the question by implicitly qualifying yes. The problem is nobody gets to have a real discussion because the question itself validates the entire domain of abstract hypotheticals.
@lieblius If the question sought to validate every abstract hypothetical, then why ask the question at all? An edge case =/= an abstract hypothetical. If that’s the case then the question should resolve YES if it asked if rape, genocide, infanticide, pedophelia, or a combination of all four was replaced by “torture,” which is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It’s not a question guided by either philosophical nor ethical curiosity.
If that’s the intended meaning behind “edge cases” then it is what it is, but I only ever hoped to engage in good faith on this topic (and I thank you for acknowledging that).
@NADZOR The examples of torture you give are impossible to justify. But what about very mild torture, for example, forcing a suspect to wait several hours before interrogation to make them tired? You dismissed some edge cases before because they are too hypothetical, but this example is a common practice.
@NADZOR Hm. I started to look up definitions to try to prove my position, but turned out all of them mention "severe pain or suffering": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_torture
So, I guess I was stretching definition too much in my examples.
Note: for me, personally loosing mana is a great torture. So, if you resolve this to NO, you will inflict torture which can never be justified.
Is imprisonment a form of torture? If yes, then torture seem to be morally acceptable by most people.
As a devil's advocate (heh), what about the consequentialist or utilitarian case? Would it be permissible, for example, if the gaining of vital information to save the lives of an overwhelmingly large amount of people (say the entire population of a large metropolis or even a nation) can only be gained through torture of one individual?
A case could be the 'ticking bomb' scenario in which, say, the individual holds the information to defuse a nuclear bomb that would have annihilated the city and killed everyone otherwise, and the individual would not have divulged the information in any cases other than with extreme methods.
A slightly more hypothetical case would be the one depicted in The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, in which the mistreatment of one single individual would have powered a utopia for everyone else.
What do you think?
@SarkanyVar The problem with this example is that it is virtually impossible to occur irl. How many examples are there where torture led to the prevention of such a catastrophe? Would someone who is so ideologically committed that they are willing to massacre millions for their cause give in and foil a plot that has likely been years, if not decades, in the making because they can’t handle pain? Why wouldn’t they just give you a fake code and watch you burn?
@NADZOR I suppose the statement in the title of the market is 'Is torture ever justified', so if there is a single case, however unlikely or exceptional, in which there is a non-zero possibility in which it can plausibly render enormous utility, it would be justified in the utilitarian perspective, even though there are common issues in technicality and practicality.
@SarkanyVar When asking whether or not an act that would otherwise be morally unjustifiable can be justified under certain circumstances, the actual applied utility of the act must also be taken into account, and an argument has to be made for that. If we play with the variables (in this case, the result of the torture being obtaining the code) and assume a certain outcome, then we can justify just about anything; we would be begging the question.
@SarkanyVar CW: SA
If you asked someone if they thought rape was okay, they would answer “absolutely not”. But then you say, “now assume that person is a rapist themself and has raped 100 people. They also want to go on to rape another 100 people, and that by raping them it would make such a powerful example that they would understand why it’s bad and not go on to rape the next 100 people. Would you say it would be justified then?”
If the response to that question is a “yes,” you cannot walk away from that conversation with the conclusion that rape can be justifiable.
Exploring hypotheses in ethics is supposed to give us some guiding principles on how a moral agent can determine which decision is morally good or bad, not so much as a game of wording and technicality. So an edge case would have to be justified without the outcome being assumed to automatically be correct. (I hope I am not coming off rude here, it’s the furthest thing from my intention)
@SarkanyVar One more thing I’d like to mention, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is a work that directly argues against your point. That’s why they walked away from Omelas; it was entirely unjustifiable and immoral.
