At the risk of being jumped on by people, I say this with sincerity.
Because when you employ this line of thinking, it invites comparison with other human behaviours that people are arguably born into, but that society has no compunction in regulating and banning. To put this in your opponents hands is to pitch them a wonderful slowball that they will smack out of the park by saying “nobody chooses to be a pedophile either.”
The argument in favour of gay marriage argument is a simple one. In society, we no longer grant no gender-specific rights. Marriage as it currently stands privileges one class (opposite-sex couples) against another (same-sex). There is no moral or defensible philosophical basis for this.
If society is to offer certain right to couples over those held by individuals (a proposition so appalling that it should offend you much more than that gays cannot get married) then it should not offer them on the basis of gender.
THIS! This is exactly what I was getting at with the torture arguement yesterday. To say that torture is “ineffective” is to open the door to your opponent to cite a case where some penny-ante crook confessed to a crime when a cop twisted his arm. At that point you’ve conceded that torture is “sometimes” effective, and from there you’ve pretty much lost 2/3 of the argument.
Torture may occasionally get you actionable intelligence, but it is always immoral and illegal.
I disagree, Ron. It’s more than that. Torture can get actionable intelligence, but the thing is, it isn’t the only way to get actionable intelligence. And more importantly has a high failure rate:
- The prisoner’s desire to make it stop will get them to say anything, even if it’s not true. So you still have to independently verify everything anyway.
- People who’ve been prepared for torture are known to be able to give misleading information.
- Torture is effective at getting an answer the torturer wants to hear, and not the actual truth.
Sure, everyone breaks eventually, but breaking doesn’t equal truth. John McCain himself has pretty much acknowledged all these points, and he’s been tortured. What some people, myself included, hoped Obama would do was to open an inquiry into all the interrogations conducted under Bush-Cheney to see
- How much actionable intelligence was actually garnered.
- What the failure rate was.
- How much misleading information sent people on wild goose chases.
- How effective other methods of interrogation that don’t include torture were.
But Obama instead closed down torture without inquiry so that the country can move on. But by doing so, he leaves open, as you say, the ability for Cheney and others to argue that torture is effective. It would be nice to once and for all put this argument to rest.
In Chicago we’re still sorting out cases of torture that put men on death row, many of whom have since been exonerated by DNA evidence not available 20 years ago. And all those men confessed to the crimes which the evidence now says they could not have done. These men confessed to something they didn’t do which led to a death sentence. Why would they do that? To make the torture stop! That seems like a pretty good argument that torture does not get the truth. Why would it be any different for terrorists?
3 years ago
