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Comment by asfdsfggtfd | Hacker News Reader

Only if you live in a moral vacuum.

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?

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Or you're one of many varieties of utilitarian.

> By torturing someone you are defying almost every moral decision societies have ever made.

This is obviously not true; torture has been accepted by most societies.

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.

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).

Since you bring up the "Trolley Problem" I'd like to share a recent Radiolab piece on the subject[0]. There are apparently competing parts of our brain, and whichever is the "loudest" (most active) is what determines our actions. The tagline of the episode is

>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...

Maybe I did make a small error which would clarify things. s/Most of the moral decisions western society/Most of the decisions that stand the test of hindsight as having a moral basis that societies have taken/

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?

> Only if you live in a moral vacuum.

Utilitarianism is a perfectly valid moral theory. Not all ethics are deontological.

The utilitarian case isn't as clear-cut as you seem to think it is.

Deontological ethics aren't clear-cut either. That's why ethics is still philosophy and not science.

... or if your child is among these hundreds.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. It's only logical.

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.

All the structures you describe are what I what define as living in a moral vacuum...

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.

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.

If you hold to one system of ethics doesn't that mean by definition you hold competing standards to be inferior because you selected your system over theirs?

Only if you establish a single metric by which all moralities may be judged. I may judge one morality as good for keeping poor people from consuming productive capital, and another as good for advancing the arts and sciences, and yet another as good for ecological sustainability. No single value system is universally superior, because there are always tradeoffs.

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?

> You can create any number of moral structures that would allow for torture that still do not allow for indiscriminate violence.

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.

So now your tribe and this hypothetical torturing tribe view each other as inferiors. You're "weak", and they're "cruel". Now what? Do you boycott and embargo trade with them? Do you go to war preemptively, or only after one of yours gets tortured by one of theirs? Perhaps you launch a propaganda campaign to depict them as mindless savages that revel in the pain of innocents? Maybe you single them out at the border, and loudly demand that they publicly pledge to not torture anybody while they are visiting your territory? That isn't likely to make them stop torturing.

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'm going to give an analogy in response to your EDIT AGAIN.

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.

Once you bring in animals, the morals really change. We humans draw a very strong boundary on super precious human life vs everything else. Not here to debate why we do it, but that's how we've done it for ages.

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