You know, just in case you were tempted to think he was a morally decent human being. I still can't believe how casually people talk about one of the shameful human rights abuses in recent history as if torturing a person would still be okay if worked.
But torturing someone is stupid and doesn't work, so we don't even need to have that debate. I'd probably be in the same camp. I'm against torture because it's stupid. I haven't bothered to think through the moral implications because why bother?
Yes, torture might not work on average. And not even in the great majority of police and anti-terror investigations. But that doesn't mean it never does.
We know torture can work in very specific circumstances. If you have a person's phone that you want them to unlock, torture can get them to do it. It works because you can verify what the person tells you immediately, so there is a direct link between them telling you the truth and the torture stopping. If you are willing to go to any length to get them to unlock the phone, eventually almost anyone would break.
Of course the issue is that such situations are rare - usually you don't have such a direct link. The person will say anything to get the torture to stop, true or false - more likely false. It may be impossible to verify what they say, or it may take months or years. So it's pointless, and much more productive to use a non-torture approach in those cases.
I'm not saying I know whether torture works or not, I'm just saying, it's awfully convenient that most people harp on the "it doesn't work" idea, and that means the burden of proof IMO should be much higher to show it doesn't work (assuming your default belief is that it does work, which is most people's default prior).
You don't think that maybe the burden of proof should lie on people to prove that torture does work before we even have a discussion about whether letting go of basic human rights is worth it in certain instances?
I was simply saying that I find the "common knowledge" that torture doesn't work, to be unlikely. It just seems very convenient that things we find morally wrong end up also being bad for other reasons, making it unnecessary to deal with the morals. That sounds like motivated reasoning, not actual truth seeking.
"You don't think that maybe the burden of proof should lie on people to prove that torture does work before we even have a discussion about whether letting go of basic human rights is worth it in certain instances?"
That's a complicated question, and to be honest I have no idea. I actually think that practically speaking, no one should be routinely torturing anyone else. I just don't think it's a moral (or practical) slam-dunk - I think there are situations where it is morally justified, and that it would probably work.
Torture works exceptionally well at getting people to say whatever they think will satisfy the torturer in the short term. Which is actually why it's bad at getting actionable intelligence, but very good at getting confessions.
> It just seems very convenient that things we find morally wrong end up also being bad for other reasons
It's not really “for other reasons”, the morally repugnant thing about torture (the infliction of severe suffering) is why it doesn't work to get actionable intelligence.
> That sounds like motivated reasoning, not actual truth seeking
Entities for which torture would be acceptable even if morally repugnant (including military and Intelligence agencies who practiced it in the belief that it was effective) are foremost among those that have studied it and found it ineffective for gathering actionable ibtelkigence, compared to means which do not involve torture.
> I think there are situations where it is morally justified, and that it would probably work.
You are free to provide evidence supporting your conclusions about it's effectiveness; but without it you seem to just be providing what you'd like to be true, not what you rationally and justifiably believe to be true. And, conveniently, it seems to align with your moral preference...
There are plenty of well-researched examples of the ineffectiveness of systems of torture for getting reliable information out of the victims of that torture.
Off the top of my head:
The U.S. Senate report on torture[1]. In addition to laying out details of corruption surrounding the U.S.'s torture regime following 911, the 525-page report also concludes that the torture regime was not effective in achieving its stated goal of gaining actionable intelligence.
And that's just a recent U.S. report. There are many more by reputable human rights groups, historians, and reporters from a vast swath of modern human atrocities.
That is to say-- I don't think the concept of likelihood makes sense given that you are speculating seemingly without regard to the easily accessible written record on the subject. Even if your point is that the "common knowledge" could be right but for the wrong reasons (e.g., people trying to bolster their pre-existing moral position), the extant examples in your favor that I know ironically come mainly (solely?) from people who either participated directly in the Bush era torture regime or have a vested professional and/or legal interest in confirming torture to be effective. (E.g., Dick Cheney, the CIA consultants for Zero Dark Thirty, the Whitehouse spokespeople for Obama after the bin Laden raid, etc.)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141209165504/http://www.intell...
An evolutionary argument can explain this, and is the standard way to explain large chunks of traditional morality. (e.g. incest taboos.)
As applied to the modern torture debate, I agree with you that this is more of a case of "when neither the law nor the facts are on your side, pound the table".
You don't have to be doing something "by default" in order to prove or disprove an hypothesis.
There is more the enough historical evidence that any type of violence or extreme pressure creates false confessions. Nor do you have to rip off someone's fingernails to find out humans will tell you anything to make it stop. You can always extrapolate from more humane experiments, if data from a previous era is not available.
The question is not "does torture work". The question is "which techniques get the interviewee to honestly reveal what they do (or don't) know". Or to put it another way, the relative results should be your focus.
One of the reasons that I semi-assume that torture works, is that there are security agencies that continue to use it. That also means they choose to use torture versus other means, although there, you could argue that they're doing it as a time/cost-saving measure, and that you could theoretically get similar results with more work. That's actually a pretty strong argument against my "I assume it works because it's used" argument.
The interrogator will know things that can help determine whether the target is lying or not. If he confirms things you know but he doesn't know you know, you're probably on the right track. It's never like in the movies where they just ask, "Who's in charge?" and ratchet up the torture until the guy answers. That would have near zero intel value.
We also talk about torture as a binary. There is really a whole range from mild discomfort to extreme pain, injury and threat of death. There is a whole range of activities to debate whether they are torture. Is threat alone torture? Some have committed suicide while facing legal threats alone. Others shrug off mere threats as just talk -- demonstrative torture could make those threats real to some and thus work.
On the flip side, the consensus (30 years ago anyway) was that if you're captured, you're going to give up everything when faced with torture, so go ahead and do so, just try to hold on for 24 hours before you do.
In fact the burden of proof ought to lie with those who suppose we commit egregious acts of immorality in the name of a nebulous greater good to prove that this is morally acceptable and that said greater good actually exists.
Back on the topic of if torture works. Nobody is arguing that you can't coerce someone into giving true testimony if you know you have a bad party and you can verify what he tells you immediately but in such cases you almost wouldn't have to anyway.
The problem is the world is rarely cut and dry and we are all much much safer if the powers that be aren't allowed to pull out our fingernails.
Terrorism kills less people than bathtubs and far less than cars imagining that we ought to eliminate basic protections to keep a relative handful from dying is insane.
That's not accurate; that argument is very common.
You can see someone making this exact stupid argument here in this very thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15465836 .
But you have to admit that criminals are not normal people. They are in fact, insane, in a specific way that our laws will not give them diminished responsibility. It is dangerous to think that the criminal is not a sadist. You have to maintain control over the criminal and over the interview. And you must maintain full control over your own psyche and emotions. Never be bored or frustrated. Have infinite patience. Map out the criminal's psyche to learn what makes them tick. Listen to your own intuitions because as you learn more about criminal psychology, your subconcious becomes a more powerful tool.
I'm pretty sure if someone waterboarded me to get my phone password I would eventually lose the mental will necessary to keep getting waterboarded and give up the password. But I'm just one point of data.
However, torturing me for information I don't have... now that's stupid and won't work.
If this is debatable, I've, ah, got lists for X and Y.
Germans tortured USSR guerillas (who Germans technically pretty rightfully - from their point of view - classified as terrorists) during WWII, and that saved some German lives. So are you saying there can be a valid debate about that torture? Or closer to home - say Taliban would torture a US soldier and get info which would save some Taliban lives - valid debate here? Or do you mean that the debate is valid only when "good" guys (USSR and US) would do the torture?
>But torturing someone ... doesn't work.
Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. So people get tortured as it always can happen to be the case when it works. When politicians/society talk about torture efficiency or lack of it to me it sounds just like a shop talk of professional torturers, i.e. people lacking any empathy and morals.
However, there's definitely a legal process in place once you accept the possibility of torture.
This isn't true for all cases. It can be pretty cut and dry if a single person knows the location of a bomb set to go off on a plane or something. X is 1 and Y is the number of passengers.
I second that life is not TV show.
"It will never be necessary to torture for life-saving information, because I have perfect certainty that no information can be obtained that way, so I don't need a moral philosophy that appropriately weighs torture against loss of life."
"It will never be necessary to levy taxes to pay for public goods, because I have perfect certainty that no asteroid will ever head toward the earth, so I don't need a moral philosophy that weights taxation against unprotected asteroid strikes."
> It will never be necessary to levy taxes to pay for asteroid defense, because I have perfect certainty that no asteroid will ever head toward the earth, so I don't need a moral philosophy that weights taxation against unprotected asteroid strikes.
You can't generalize to an argument against all public spending.
It is a similar error to double down so hard on torture never being able to elicit truthful, reliable information.
strenuously? (they're almost opposites)
Given that the military is an organization that deals death to accomplish its goals, this is the stronger argument to make if you want to change how things get done. Moral people who have a serious commitment to improving things are wise to save their tears and ranting for private moments with people who care about them. Then set that aside, put on their public face and do what works best to move their agenda forward, knowing that no matter what they do, some people will drag their name through the mud.
EDIT: grammar.
1. We lose the moral high ground.
2. We give the enemy recruitment material.
3. We justify the enemy torturing our guys.
4. The enemy will fight much harder if they know that they'll get tortured if captured. They will be far less likely to surrender / capitulate.
5. Winning the peace after victory will be much harder.
6. The intelligence you get is likely to be crap anyway.
It is too bad that there are not more Soviet and Russian WWII movies overdubbed in English, because the NKVD and the KGB really mastered this stuff back in the 40s and 50s. Not in all departments of the organization but in enough of them to become the masters of the Cold War.
He is only practicing what he preaches: he knows you won't convince anyone by confronting them and telling they are human rights violators. They probably see themselves as patriots, and simply don't care.
You might, however, convince them by telling them your method will get them better results, understanding that saving their soul is just a by-product to them.
The point is that this guy took some actual risk (even if it's "just" career risk) to at least make a noticeable dent in the problem. While you and I just sit here and type about it.
Meanwhile, your imputation above is simply illogical, and doesn't exactly do very much to help to solve the underlying problem, either.
There is a WMD of some sort hidden in a major city center. We have captured and are 100% sure that the head people who did the planning and planting of the WMD are in our custody. We have a morally reprehensible, but 100% effective torture method.
1. It is guaranteed that these people know the exact information.
2. Tens of thousands or more will be harmed or killed if it is not disarmed.
3. These people are the reason why the WMD is there to begin with.
In this case I think that taking more drastic measures would be justified.
If this ever does come to pass and the lives of 10's of thousands are at stake I suppose you do it anyway in violation of the law and take the punishment knowing that your sacrifice prevents greater injustice and evil.
Yes, exactly. Legislating torture as a practice is not necessary or desirable.
If such a perfect "pro-torture" situation does occur, Any True Patriot (TM) should be glad to face a lifetime of imprisonment (for torturing the totally-for-sure-did-it-bad-guy) as a tradeoff for saving thousands of lives.
In the real world, with much more common situations, we do not want people being tortured on a routine basis.
> as if torturing a person would still be okay if worked
Spot on. "I was trying to save million of lives" is not a valid excuse for committing atrocities.
Especially given how easy it is to construct such narrative and use it to justify anything.
Why not? If good men forfeit their lives to fight evil, why can't evil men be forced to forfeit their lives for the same?
> use it to justify anything
Then the issue is the "narrative" is false. We just have to improve standards of proof - if there is legitimate reason to believe lives would be saved, why not?
> we have complete agency in is our own actions and that will ultimately be what we will be held accountable for
By who, and for what; consequence or intention? A utilitarian justification seems to me as good as any.
EDIT: Most of the moral decisions western society has taken about how we show act are on the principles of first doing no harm and respecting the rights of the individual. This ranges from medicine to the principle of innocent until proven guilty and using the legal standard of beyond reasonable doubt.
By torturing someone you are defying almost every moral decision societies have ever made.
EDIT AGAIN: Wow just wow. Heavy heavy downvoting for speaking against normalization of torture. Please explain yourselves?
This is obviously not true; torture has been accepted by most societies.
Also, you write: "Most of the moral decisions western society has taken about how we show act are on the principles of first doing no harm and respecting the rights of the individual."
Well, much as I would love to live in that world, I don't think it's the one we live in. I mean yes, theoretically this might be true, but practically speaking, there have been plenty of wars involving the west where I don't think many people will say that the West was 100% in the right. There are plenty of situations where we don't care about individual rights that much. E.g. most libertarians will say that basically the entire rise of the welfare state is explicitly against individual liberty. I'm not even sure most socialists will disagree with that!
Most importantly, even if the general principle is to try not to do harm, it still doesn't really solve the torture "dilemma". There certainly are some pacifists who cling to "do no harm" as a founding principle, but they're not considered to be the standard view (nor do they claim they are).
>Most of us would sacrifice one person to save five. It’s a pretty straightforward bit of moral math. But if we have to actually kill that person ourselves, the math gets fuzzy.
Basically, a more primal part of our brain is likely to scream "NO" when faced with a decision of being the one to directly end another human's life. When there is distance between the decision and the action, more "rational" parts of our brain have the upper hand.
[0]https://www.radiolab.org/story/driverless-dilemma/?utm_sourc...
Whereas your position seems to be - things are a little bit shit anyway so what is the harm in making some more bad decisions.
> As I understand your comment, you're saying that there is no "morally justifiable" moral framework under which torture would be acceptable. Other people here obviously disagree, using e.g. the trolley problem as an example scenario - would you torture 1 person to save X people from death? This is a legitimate moral question, and I don't think it's anywhere near "decided" at this point.
This is not a relevant question. There is a simple question - are you prepared to hurt the person tied down in front of you in cold blood?
Utilitarianism is a perfectly valid moral theory. Not all ethics are deontological.
The think about morality is that everyone can have their own, or none at all. Not everyone is bound to value the welfare and freedoms of others as highly as they value their own. And the same goes on the tribal level--not everyone values Them as highly as Us.
You can create any number of moral structures that would allow for torture that still do not allow for indiscriminate violence.
You can say that people with other types of morality have no morals, but that does not make it true. The reality is that they may actually have morals, and you just don't like the ones they have.
It's like asking "what is the best alignment in D&D?" Paladins will say lawful good is the best because their god likes it, but sneak thieves are more likely to espouse chaotic neutral, because it means they can pay their taxes with money cut from the collector's purse, then steal it again after the ledger is dry.
Or it's like asking "what martial art is best?" That depends on what you use it for. Exercise? Military? Police? Organized crime? Bar fights? Action films? MMA competition? Wushu exhibitions? Selling colored belts to suburban kids? A military system like Krav Maga is not going to work well in competition, because nobody can voluntarily fight if everyone in the league is currently dead, permanently disabled, or recovering from severe injuries. Likewise, a movie style like "Gymkata" or "Gunkata" is useless for any real-world application.
Besides that, people do adopt other moralities. It's where many of the cult followers and disciples come from. Does that mean it's superior, or just better for that specific person, at that time?
They do however allow for someone to sit down and decide in a quiet methodical way they they are about to deliberately injure another defenseless human being.
> So your moral system requires that its adherents view incompatible or competing moral structures as inferior. So what? They can do the same to yours.
In some cases yes. For example anyone that justifies torture or slavery.
I'm not seeing your point. An argument from morality only works for people who share your morals, a group that necessarily excludes those people who engage in torture. People who share your morality already don't torture. An argument regarding the efficacy of the technique is more likely to get a torturer to stop, whereas the moral argument only reinforces a pre-existing aversion. And thanks to cognitive dissonance, the longer someone has been torturing, the less likely they are to listen to anyone telling them that torture is wrong. If you reframe it as an evolution in effective interviewing technique based on recent scientific research, they have a psychological "out" that allows them to stop torturing without having to reframe themselves as a bad guy.
I claim that it's morally indefensible to torture a fish. Even if thousands of humans are to die unless I torture this fish (for some reason), you must refuse. It's torture. To advocate otherwise is to normalise torture, and to go against every moral decision societies have ever made. (Let's ignore the fact that factory farms exist, a moral abhorrence on a gigantic scale if you care about the welfare of animals; whether or not that abhorrence is balanced by an even greater moral benefit from the wide-scale eating of meat they enable. To be clear, I'm explicitly not giving an opinion on whether factory farms are a net benefit; to discuss that aspect further would be to miss the point of the argument entirely.)
If I took your moral system and also assigned worth to the well-being of fish, it's quite possible that I could end up with that. But I hope you agree that the views of my second paragraph are at best ridiculous, and at worst abhorrent. So something must be wrong either with the generalisation of your argument, or with the assumption that the well-being of fish is worth defending.
So either caring even a little about the well-being of fish makes me a moral vacuum, or some part of your argument doesn't generalise away from "torture of humans". Do you at least see that your argument doesn't have overwhelming force? I'd hope that a worthy moral framework would generalise more easily than this facet of yours that you've presented.
Not /just/, so yes he is a moral person who knows it’s wrong. And wise enough to add an argument that even an amoral person can understand. Because it’s clear that amoral people have been making the decisions.
It's an interesting thought experiment in ethics, analogous to the Trolley Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem).
Assume a nuclear bomb will be detonated in the city, killing and horribly injuring millions of innocent people. The individual who is responsible is known, with no doubt, and there exists some level of pain you can inflict upon him which will, without doubt, prevent the explosion.
What degree of pain is acceptable to inflict on that person?
Make him sit in the comfy chair?
Give him terrible squinty looks?
Give him a paper cut?
Paper cut with lemon juice?
...
If you choose not to take that action, are you responsible for or complicit in the deaths and injury to those people?
What if you were one of the co-conspirators, and having second thoughts, could compel the other individual to stop it?
In actual reality you will never have any certainty about the outcomes of interactions like these. All you have control over is whether or not you hurt the person in front of you.
Because it reveals how you implicitly value human life and whether values can be traded or weighed against each other. There are moral theories that take various different positions on each permutation to the possible answers on these questions.
Thought experiments are about illuminating implicit values and thought processes.
I tend towards believing that people who bring up the "WHAT IF NOOK BOMB" type scenarios are really just looking for justification that their existing belief in torture is A-OK.
It's a fallacy because it's like a DOS attack on the argument - burning up most of the time on a absurdly small probability. Participants and viewers tricked by thinking "what's discussed most is what's most important".
[1] https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
To see how debate can backfire, consider a currently-near-universal ethical proposition: it is unacceptable to torture innocent children. The contrived scenario for debate: there's a ticking nuclear time bomb hidden in an American city. The man who has the critical information can hold out against physical torture for the next few hours until it detonates. But he can be compelled to confess in time if you force him to witness the torture of his 5 year old niece. Imagine that the scenario has both options debated, repeatedly, in lecture halls, on op-ed pages. It's even depicted in fiction like 24 to persuade by storytelling rather than logic.
It doesn't matter that the world's actual torturers have never encountered a ticking nuclear time bomb, much less the improbable other circumstances that led to this dilemma. Just witnessing sober, respectable persons arguing the "in favor" position for innocent-child-torture -- no matter how dryly or laden with caveats -- is going to tend to weaken norms against innocent-child-torture. So will seeing the tactic succeed in fiction. (It doesn't really matter if excellent arguments against innocent-child-torture are also aired in the same venues. Practically everyone started out against it, even if their reasons were visceral rather than logical.) Some percentage of people, hopefully small, is going to come to "see the light" in favor of this contrived scenario's utilitarian calculus.
The really pernicious part: as with the vanilla ticking time bomb scenario, many of the persuaded will misapply the contrived scenario to justify real world torture. "The torturers know that an attack is imminent, and torturing this man will save a million lives" will get watered down by homeopathic magnitudes to "the torturers suspect that an attack is going to happen at some indefinite time, and torturing a child related to this man might save 20 lives if the torturers' guesses are correct." The effect on the body public of debating contrived scenarios that could justify atrocities is not to improve the public's reasoning or shore up their pre-existing intuitions. It's to erode their actual ethical judgment, to make them more open-minded regarding atrocities against children.
There is obvious value in these "contrived scenarios," as has been proven innumerable times in human history. You do realize that simplifying assumptions like "assume a spherical cow" have worked to produce an accurate model of the physical world, right?
Errr I think you're "proving too much" so to speak. Having someone in front of you who you know has details about a terrorist plot that could stop it, and you think finding those details is something you can't reason morally about? By your definition of certainty, you basically can't do anything with any degree of certainty unless its actions are immediate.
Call up an assassin and tell them to murder someone? Well who knows if she'll even go through with it, so that's morally fine.
And if you're in the same city as the bomb, whatever you can possibly do to them has a finite timespan and is therefore much more tolerable and resistable.
(I'd also be grateful if you want to tell me what I'm getting wrong.)
There's a shooter actively killing people.
Is it OK to shoot the shooter?
---
What's the benefit of doing physics problems "in a vacuum", etc? It lets you get to the essence of the question.
Similarly, a philosophical thought experiment lets you analyze your beliefs - rather than just a knee jerk ("No, I would never harm someone and anyone who harmed someone is not a morally decent human being"), you can come up with a more complete ethical framework for your decisions and judgments.
By identifying extremes, you can identify your priorities and understand the tradeoffs you will actually be faced with - what degree of harm are you willing to cause, and at what distance from "in front of me", to what benefit?
If your only means for investigating the nature of human relationships is via intellectual contrivances then you will always produce results which reaffirm your preexisting beliefs.
The first point to understand is that violence is a dicey business and never produces as tidy of outcomes as the intellectual justification for it expects. The second point to understand is that the pursuit of morality via intellectualization is counter-productive at best.
Do you have a better framework for pursuing morality? It seems like telling stories, asking questions, and thinking about them are the basis of all moral and ethical teaching, from religion to law school.
Now we're trying to establish the boundaries of that.
(Personally I think torture is always wrong, I just want to make sure the legal issue is clear.)
In that comment, I said torture was unacceptable and more so when it was done in my name.
I have since wavered on this as I've considered some proposed hypotheticals. I've decided, at least for now, that it may not always be wrong but that it is always abhorrent.
Hypothetically, such a situation could exist where it is the right choice but it is still reprehensible. The whole WMD thing and saving a city? Yeah, I guess it's the right choice but it's still abhorrent. If I had every reason to believe the information could be extracted, I'd do the torturing myself.
In the end, I'd hope that I'd be more unhappy that I was forced to do so than I was unhappy that I did so. I imagine it would bother me for the rest of my life, but I'd accept that burden.
Two other points.
1. Our moral behaviour should be much better than the Geneva convention.
2. You are not bound by the Geneva convention if your opponent is not.
In the case of torture, the question is whether pain may be inflicted on a person to extract information, and in recent public discussion, esp. where known terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) are concerned.
In the Trolley problem, you are put in a situation out of your control and in which you may influence the nature and degree of casualties by flipping a switch. The concerns here are about whether one choice (flip, don't flip) is morally preferable to another, whether one is morally obligated to make one choice over another, etc.
In your nuclear bomb thought experiment, the question is somewhat artificial and vague where potentially relevant distinctions could be made. Are we inflicting pain because we wish to extract information that will enable us to prevent the bomb from going off? Is there some device inside the guilty party that measures pain and disarms the bomb at appropriately high level?
Utilitarians, and broadly consequentialists, like to frame everything in terms of a moral calculus of maximizing good while reducing evils, but it leads to clearly perverse conclusions like the justification of committing morally evil acts so that some other good may come. Whether torture as a method of extracting information from people like KSM is immoral is not a question of whether we can justify torture because the good of the information we may gain exceeds the evil of torture, but whether torture is intrinsically evil, and if not, whether it is ever justifiable as a method of extracting information, esp. from guilty parties.
> whether torture is intrinsically evil, and if not, whether it is ever justifiable
That is exactly the question.
We often make absolute statements ("Killing people is instrinsically evil", "Torture is intrinsically evil") but may find cases where it is justifiable:
- shoot the active shooter (most people agree killing is justified)
- bone marrow donation (causes excruciating pain, willingly accepted by the individual, to save the life/health of another. Most people find this justified, even though it violates "first, do no harm")
- voluntary euthanasia (to involve both torture and killing) - Constant excruciating pain, no hope of a cure. Do you kill the person? Or force them to continue to endure? (People are divided on this one)
In the trolley example, you aren't choosing to actively cause harm to someone for the sake of the benefit of others. The trolley is going to kill someone. You may, at best, act to reduce the harm done by a process out of your control.
Where the torture example is concerned, one choice involves the active, intentional infliction of pain on someone for the purpose of extracting information that can be used to save lives.
In general, a fairly important principle in ethics is the principle of double effect. I.e.,
1. the action must be in itself good or neutral
2. the action's good effect must be intended, not its evil effect
3. the action's good effect must not be produced by means of the evil effect
4. the action's evil effect must not exceed the good effect in degree
The Trolley is at one end of an extreme. The point of such a hypothetical is that you can adjust any parameter to find peoples' limits.
It could be the case that you don't actually disagree with one another much at all! But if you never address the Trolley problem or similar you will never know.
Kill the villain by pushing him onto the track in front of the train to save the innocents, or not.
It is explicitly asking if you would harm the villain (evil action, evil effect produces good effect).
Now you, by "saving" a city, have condemned the entire human race to extinction.
"Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
If it's necessary to win a fight that matters, and it works, it is okay.
See: allied bombing campaigns in WW2 wherein we intentionally roasted thousands of babies and grandmas.
The self-indulgent alternative is a recipe for extinction. And you can't have much influence over the world if you're not there.
If you're not brutal enough, you just end up handing the future to someone more brutal, which is itself a wrong. Just like it'd be wrong to let the Nazis take Europe because you didn't want to roast babies and grandmas.
See: War Crimes
Trying to sweep it under the rug is, IMO, morally wrong all by itself. If you're doing something, at least admit it. Not all of the things GP is talking about are considered warcrimes, and it's sometimes a word thrown around to make it look like we care about something after the fact, but we still do it.
But you need to consider this in the context of actual reality, where nearly all "war" is really a police action taken extrajudicially by ultrapowerful states against guerilla groups or civilian populations in order to ensure the dominance and power of wealthy global interests. Every war in the cold war was like this.
The doctrine of the acceptability of mass slaughter of innocents is how the people with weapons have chosen to use them in these non-existential "wars" but that isn't a justification for that choice.