Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

One's policy views might be based on morality, in which case one might not change them based on facts. An example:

I oppose torture. You can show me 100 nations which ban torture and then suffer from preventable terrorist attacks, and it won't change my view. I would choose to ban torture even if it stops law enforcement from preventing some terrorist attacks.

Some people hold similar views on taxation, redistribution, the welfare state, etc (i.e., "tax is an immoral act of theft, regardless of economic benefits", or "the welfare state is a moral imperative, regardless of economic harms").

View on HN

I find that hard to believe. Surely there is some limit that would change your mind? Maybe if it would save 1000 lives per month? Or one million lives per month?

I suspect you don't have any hard data on the impact of torture. Not saying that torture is good, just saying that even in your example, science might change your mind.

Even with science, you don't get to interrogate a captured terrorist that 100% for sure knows where the bomb is/how to disable it - i.e. the Jack Bauer non-dilemma.

There will always be a probability.. is there a 70% chance he knows where the bomb is, and maybe only 95% chance that the bomb is actually in place, correctly assembled and activated. NOW how many people would you have to theoretically save to make it OK to torture him?

And then there's the human factor. Who wants to be the guy that didn't torture the 70%-terrorist whose bomb subsequently blew up a mall?

What science can answer how many innocents it is OK to accidentally torture to save a number of people?

Terrorism was only one example for torture. In a direct war, the situation and "benefit" might be much higher.

Also, maybe the airport checks are already a mild form of torture, deemed an acceptable tradeoff by some.

Anyway, this discussion wasn't about torture. I am not pro torture. All I was saying is that the OP might change his mind with better data.

This is a bullshit argument. Torture does not save shit and it is good for nothing.

What if destroying the earth would save the universe?

What if Batman wanted you to torture someone?

What if cutting off the eyelids of a brown person meant that unicorns would walk the earth?

What if I snuck into suburban households and cut up humans for body parts so my nanobots could learn regeneration techniques? What if the nanobots could reanimate all the dead humans after I cut them up?

The reason it is bullshit is because you can put anything in the place of torture and justify it by saying it "saves lives". But for some reason, the arguments that we want to justify this way always boil down to freeing ourselves from the shackles of morality. It is the will to power dressed up in the clothing of public policy.

What kind of life are we saving? Is there anything we value more than life?

Learn to read. I didn't say that torture is good. In fact, I don't have any data on it at all. Just saying that data might still affect one's opinion.

What if you family was abducted and locked into an air sealed room, and the culprit was caught by the police. Your family has 1 hour left before air supply runs out. Would you still be against torture.

Again, I can't stress this enough: please read carefully. I am not advocating torture. This discussion is not about torture at all.

I know how to read. The concept I am criticizing in your argument is "data". And I am saying that taking a statistical approach to these questions is misguided.

"Maybe if it would save 1000 lives per month? Or one million lives per month? I suspect you don't have any hard data on the impact of torture."

I didn't say you were advocating torture either. I am trying to show by example that this decision calculus can be used to justify all kinds of evil nonsense, torture being one example. You can always generate counterfactuals of this form to justify anything... so this method of justification is meaningless.

I don't know why you believe that we are not talking about torture. Maybe you don't know that you are presenting a family-based reformulation of the exact same ticking time bomb scenario used by Alan Dershowitz to justify torture. You are reusing these arguments, so maybe you should think about exactly what these arguments have justified in the last ten years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticking_time_bomb_scenario

It's true, though, that you are not talking about torture per se. What you are talking about is weighing some count of human lives against a moral imperative not to do some evil thing. Torture usually stands in for that evil thing because up until very recently, everyone agreed that it was so evil that the kind of weighing you are talking about would not be countenanced.

Let me tell a story that may explain what I am getting at. In 1984 (the year), a feminist named Carol Cohn went to a military school to learn about strategic nuclear concepts like mutually assured destruction, first strike, credible second strike, counterforce weapons, etc. What she found was that as she became immersed in that world, she learned to make similar kinds of artificial weighings of the destruction of cities against the loss of second strike capability. The decision calculus she learned to use allowed her to think about nuclear weapons in terms of numbers and geography rather than in terms of human life ("collateral damage").

"If I was unable to speak my concerns in the language, more disturbing still was that I also began to find it harder even to keep them in my own head. No matter how firm my commitment to staying aware of the bloody reality behind the words, over and over, I found that I could not keep human lives as my reference point. I found that I could go for days speaking about nuclear weapons, without once thinking about the people who would be incinerated by them."

http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl07aa.shtml (the whole article)

I suggest you should not be acquiring "data" at all on this question. The only things the data could tell you would be artificial and dehumanized.

Not sure I understand what you are getting at - what exactly has been justified by the "ticking time bomb" experiment? I am not arguing for bad science.

I am also not using the ticking time bomb as a general example to support torture - I was just challenging the original posters assumption that his morals were unchangeable.

Nevertheless it is nonsense to refuse to weigh lives against each other. For example, in big building projects, there is presumably an inherent risk that innocent people will die in accidents during the building process. Yet the decision is often made to build (perhaps build a hospital?). Or take streets - thousands of people die in road accidents every year (and probably many more are killed by exhaust fumes), but apparently society has decided their lives are worth sacrificing. If the decision wasn't conscious, I'd argue it would be an improvement if the decision were made consciously.

Also, nuclear weapons are a real problem. They don't go away by simply not thinking about them. Frankly it might be a good thing that there are other people than feminists thinking about it.

Lastly, I think morals are just a poor workaround for having no sound theory for why a certain kind of behavior is beneficial. The more morals can be replaced by reason, the better for society, in my opinion.

Morals may have a good reputation, but in some other countries people get stoned to death for immoral behavior. Since morals have no scientific foundation, at times we might be ashamed about our own behavior a couple of years later, when understanding improves.

"morals have no scientific foundation"

Your consequentialist philosophical views also have no "scientific foundation". Science reveals the world as it is, not as it should be.

You claim that somehow you are beyond values by applying this crude calculus of "lives saved". The truth is that you have not provided a foundation for your ethics. So what is it?

I agree that you do not understand what I'm getting at. Maybe we should just table this.

edited to add:

"what exactly has been justified by the "ticking time bomb" experiment?"

If you read The One Percent Doctrine, you will learn about the people the United States tortured to try to get intel about terrorist attacks, using the ticking time bomb justification. And hello, "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." We invaded Iraq using similar justifications about the risks of WMD.

You don't understand what I am saying and misquote me. No point in discussing further.

That's still a fact-based argument. You're saying (and I agree) that data show that the supposition that torture is useful is nonsense. It's only useful as a deterrent tool in morally bankrupt regimes. (But again we come to the moral question of how many innocent people we're willing to harm for deterrence's sake.)

Which data do you have? Just curious.

In my opinion quality of life takes precedence over life itself.

There's a difference between being able to conjure up a few examples of things you think are immoral in any situation, and the conviction that evidence cannot, in principle, have any impact on what policies one should enact.

I did not claim that evidence should never change views. I gave an example illustrating that some views should not be changed by evidence.

Evidence tells you how to maximize your objective function. It does not tell you what your objective function should be.

You didn't. Shermer did. That's what I was complaining about initially. If you meant your comment as an interesting side note rather than a rebuttal, that's fine and I misread you. Maybe I should be less defensive.

What he is discussing is just a less extreme version of what I discussed.

I picked a fairly strong and apolitical example [1] because I didn't want to devolve into a more political discussion. But maybe I have no choice, so here goes.

Many liberals favor increasing distributional equality. In math terms, they wish to maximize L = (min utility) / (max utility). This means they should be open to arguments which argue "policy X decreases L, and should be opposed". However, many conservatives don't care about distributional equality, only overall utility, i.e. conservatives may wish to maximize C = 0.75 x (max utility) + 1.0 x (min utility). Therefore, such people would be unconvinced by any evidence based argument that "policy X reduces L".

Shermer and I were both arguing that evidence can tell you have to maximize your objective function. Only ideology/morality/values can tell you what your objective function should be.

[1] There is no clear political divide on torture. To pick recent high profile politicians, both Bush and Hillary supported it while McCain and Obama opposed it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com