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Comment by kbutler | Hacker News Reader

> as if torturing a person would still be okay if worked.

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?

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What is the benefit of spending time on such a contrived scenario? This is the ethicist's version of "assume a spherical cow".

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.

> All you have control over is whether or not you hurt the person in front of you.

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 more nuanced. They are trying to make the claim that there might be some situations where it's justifiable. Not that it's "A-OK" all the time.

It's a psychologic trick - appeal to extreme [1]. By constantly discussing a scenario which is so completely unlikely to occur, it warps the discussion into thinking that that extreme is somehow representative of reality.

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...

"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."

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.

You can't change the context of a statement without changing its meaning.

Well I didn't mean to do that, I apologize if I'm misunderstanding/mischaracterizing your statement.

(I'd also be grateful if you want to tell me what I'm getting wrong.)

But it's well known that torture doesn't get people to tell you the actual truth - in which case even if there is a nuclear bomb about to go off, what good does it do to torture the person? Wasn't it the case that there wasn't a single accurate piece of information that came out of the CIA torture regime?

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.

> 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.

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?

Torturing someone with the hope of getting information they may or may not have is in no way analogous to shooting someone who is actively killing people right now.

So we've established that sometimes it's OK to harm or kill someone.

Now we're trying to establish the boundaries of that.

Killing someone is different than torturing them. You're arguing a point nobody is making.

Not if they suffer a torturous death. They might even not die if shot, but be captured instead.

Your scenario is just as contrived as the first one. It assumes a complete and accurate knowledge of the situation as well as a perfect ability to execute on your decision to harm the shooter.

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.

I don't disagree with you, but human society exists because of our ability to control violence via intellectual rules.

That feels like you're working really hard to avoid the ethical question. You have to choose whether to try to shoot the shooter. Police officers face this question far too often, and sometimes as an armchair judge, I disagree with the choice.

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.

> What is the benefit of spending time on such a contrived scenario? This is the ethicist's version of "assume a spherical cow".

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.

This is simply an unbelievable position to take. We can't create a perfect model, so it's not worth the time to think about simpler but more tractable ones? Great, I'll let the vast majority of scientists and philosophers know that centuries of work is worthless.

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?

By repeated invocation in debate, contrived scenarios nudge audiences' intuitions in favor of torture in the real world, even when the real world scenario bears only the faintest resemblance to "ticking nuclear time bomb." It means that repeated debates about torture that feature ticking-time-bomb scenarios tend to worsen rather than improve lay audiences' ethical decision-making with regard to torture.

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.

This was probably the main motivation behind the black sites / Guantanamo / "enhanced interrogation" techniques and the okaying of those (in blatant violation of Geneva conventions, I might add - did the US ever get called to justice for that?) - 5000+ people died in the 9/11 attacks by the instantly dehumanized muslim terrorists, everything is now morally justified to prevent something like that happening again, including enhanced interrogation, sending more people that died in the attacks to die in an eventually pointless war, etc.

Technically torture of suspected terrorists wasn't a violation of the Geneva conventions because they aren't covered by the Third Geneva Convention and the USA never ratified Additional Protocol I.

(Personally I think torture is always wrong, I just want to make sure the legal issue is clear.)

Indeed.

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.

I've been thinking about that since a comment I made a while back. It was made here in response to an article about the CIA black sites.

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.

It is not analogous to the Trolley problem.

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.

I don't see how the questions you raise make the bomb/trolley problems not analogous. You're choosing whether to cause harm to one individual in order to prevent harm to others - the rest are just details/framing.

> 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)

The similarities are only superficial. You have to make careful distinctions.

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

All those exist on a continuum and usually not well known anyway.

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.

See "the fat villain" variant in the trolley problem wiki page above.

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).

The fat man version is indeed similar. Of course, the fat man version is not analogous to the first version of the trolley problem for reasons I gave above.

Ah but what if, by torturing that person, you annoy the aliens who are just about to visit the planet and they decide to wipe out the entire human race and turn the planet to molten slag?

Now you, by "saving" a city, have condemned the entire human race to extinction.

I can totally see how that would play out.

"Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Can we please retire this vapid caricature, the ticking bomb argument already. Defunct tropes like these need to die.

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