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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

This shouldn't even be a question. Are we going to ask how likely is that torture is going to work, too?

We shouldn't allow broad surveillance of everything you ever do or say online, and we shouldn't accept torture as a means of interrogation either. This is simply deciding about the kind of society we want to be.

Terrorists can be dealt with in other ways, too, and one of them would be trying to avoid creating blowback and radicalizing future generations of terrorists because of current actions.

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Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I'd ask how effective torture would be. If torturing, say, five people a year for one day each, prevented all deaths from war and terrorism for the whole year? Make that deal any day.

To me the problem with torture isn't that it's "bad". It's that it doesn't serve a useful purpose and serves many counter-purposes. If it wasn't so clearly useless, I'd have to think a lot more about whether I'd support it.

Before we begin this scheme, you should have yourself and/or your family waterboarded for a few hours and see if your opinion changes.

Edit: I mean, even if it were useful, is is acceptable? Probably not.

I'm not sure what my emotional reluctance to be harmed has to do with whether this (in the hypothetical world I've constructed) is a net boon for society.

> Edit: I mean, even if it were useful, is is acceptable? Probably not.

Which would be a quite interesting level of emotional hypocrisy, given that we tolerate far greater damage to far larger number of individuals on a regular basis in the name of security.

Consider the number of civilian dead from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, for example.

> If torturing, say, five people a year for one day each, prevented all deaths from war and terrorism for the whole year? Make that deal any day.

Ok, we'll start with you.

This had better work!

I'm not really sure what you're getting at. I acknowledged efficacy in my comment. Individual reluctance to be harmed has almost nothing to do with the calculation of whether it's overall a better world with the policy or without.

It's only a better world from the perspective of those that are not being tortured.

The fact that by massive voting imbalance those few being tortured would have 0 chance of stopping it does not begin to describe the injustices inherent in your proposed scheme.

Ethics and principles are hard to reconcile with statistics and calculations, by suggesting that there is a greater good for which you will discard your principles in a heartbeat you are devaluing everything.

The question then becomes where do you draw the line?

A few individuals? A few tens of individuals? A few hundred? A few thousand? As long as it is one person less than would be killed otherwise?

Best not to make that first step and stick to 'torture is bad, no matter what the upside'.

I don't really believe in ethics or principles. Those are just words people use to dress up their preferences about how the world should work.

Where do you draw the line therefore zero is a standard approach from the nays in almost any policy debate, but it is easily defeated. I draw the line somewhere. Not sure where. I'd have to figure it out if I ever heard evidence that Convinced me torture is useful.

If torture were useful and ethics don't exist, then why would you draw the line anywhere other than "one less victim"?

Because of a thing called the discount rate. For future or uncertain outcomes, one rationally discounts the amount they are willing to pay right now, with 100% certainty, against the future and/or uncertain outcome.

There's a possibility (IMO, a certainty) that torture isn't 100% effective, and there's some number greater than 100 of deaths that I'd need to avoid a year from now to torture 100 people today. (some of those 100 might die anyway before the terror event; we might thwart the terror event via some other means; the terror threat may itself disappear [death of those terrorists or other means])

It's just another case of "pay me $1MM today and I promise to pay you back exactly $1MM in 20 years"...

One less victim of what? Torture, or the thing torture is preventing? Anyway, the answer is trivial: you'd decide the same way you decide anything else with a marginal cost and a marginal benefit. If the country has to torture one person for a day to save a thousand people fifty quality-adjusted life-years each, it seems like an obvious win. OTOH, if it's five million people for one QALR, we've wasted far more years in torture than we've saved, and we'd have drawn the line somewhere lower.

So you're saying you have no character. Thanks for admitting this on a job site...

Oh, believe me, moral expressivists are very much employable as long as their preferences align with society's. This tends to be the case because of shared neurophysiology and socialization.

How is your argument different from "some innocent people might get lifetime jail sentences, so we must give out no long sentences"?

Well, personally I consider jail sentences a form or torture and would like to see the prison system abolished. So no inconsistency for me. :)

1. You are making a wrong assumption. Torture won't prevent terrorism. Instead, it'll just make the prisoner friends more aggressive and looking for revenge.

2. To me the problem with torture isn't that it's "bad"

Hmmm, have you tried losing an eye? That's should be quite bad.

Ugh. What does your comment add to the conversation. Half of it is a reiteration of my comment re efficacy. The other half is a willful misreading of what I meant when I said "bad". Its like you are so eager to get in there and disagree with me that you neither read my comment to the end nor stopped to think even for a second about whether your response was rational.

I agree with your main point in this rebuttal, but I think you should have worded it in a way that would educate him as to why his interpretation was egregious without coming out so bitterly. It would raise the odds of your message actually being heeded. I understand that when people respond ignorantly, it's incredibly frustrating at times. However, they're more likely to change if you educate patiently instead of reprimanding.

Though I understand your point, I don't share it. There are thing that are plain bad. For example, applying death penalty to every criminal would be 'good' for the society: less criminals and you'd waste less money in jails. But we all know that killing people like that is not morally good.

But what is the point of your thought experiment? What I infer is that you don't support torture because it is not effective. You agree that it is bad, but that is not relevant to whether it should be used. What I infer is that you are an advocate of a crude form of utilitarianism. Some other morally bad activity that is actually effective in saving more lives than it destroys is something you can get behind.

This type of reasoning is used in all sorts of military actions, like drone strikes.

Armong the many problems with it: in practice it never works out that even a simple calculation of whatever action saves net lives should be pursued. Instead, policy makers operate with wildly different valuations of individual lives. Roughly, the ration of the value of one american life to one foreign national of a Muslim persuasion seems to be about 100:1. This leads to very steep slippery slopes and resulting atrocities.

That's just one problem with your views, which are thoughtless and crude.

The point of my thought experiment is the op was saying that there are some thing we don't even have to think about like torture and the surveillance we are discussing. For the surveillance, it seems much more reasonable to believe it might actually help.

I disagree. Using evil tactics is a "code smell" if you will. Even thinking about using such tactics for one second is a red flag that something has gone wrong. Why would you need to spy on your own citizens? Because they're upset. Would it really be better to oppress them than figure out why they're upset and address it?

> Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I'd ask how effective torture would be.

Effective at getting information? Probably. As torture is primarily used for interrogation, torturers would stop torturing if it didn't work.

But I guess it's a bit like bombing a village where you have seen Talibans two hours ago. Sometimes you will kill the Talibans. Sometimes you will kill Talibans and civilians. Many times, you'll just kill civilians. For instance, during the Algerian Independence War, French intelligence intoxicated the FLN by making them believe they had been infiltrated (operation KJ-27, January 1958). The FLN commander in the sector tortured the suspects, which promptly gave names of people they knew, which in turn got tortured, and so on. This resulted in the elimination of (at least) hundreds of combatants, most of whom were actually loyal to the FLN.

"torturers would stop torturing if it didn't work"

I don't know if that follows

that argument can be used to defend the logic of any illogical act

specifically with torture, there are cultural pressures to "do everything possible" that override considerabtions on whether it actually works

> that argument can be used to defend the logic of any illogical act

You can find historical examples of torture working for the goal of acquiring information. For instance, the battle of Algiers is well-documented. Any asymmetrical conflict has involved torture.

Obviously, any perceived benefit on the ground is counterbalanced by the loss of moral high ground, worsened perception by the local population and occasionally, international condemnation.

The original purpose of torture was to get people to admit to things the government needed them to admit to. For example, the Templars were taken down by the king of France by torturing them until they "admitted" committing heresy. That allowed him to execute them, and avoid paying the huge sum of money they were owed.

Getting information, I'd say not very effective. The issue is, what if the person really doesn't know? How do you tell the difference? You listed some examples, but how did you confirm that this information was true and not just bullshit these people were saying to make the torture stop? In the end, weren't the "loyalists" just killed anyway? Maybe they weren't actually loyal so they were simply killed and logged as loyalists. Since the main "evidence" is testimony under extreme duress there's no way to know for sure.

That's the point. Torture can cause collateral damage. These people were not guilty of what they were accused of. But at the same time, you can find out a number of examples of torture giving results.

But again, for all the examples you can name of "giving results" how many can you prove gave accurate results? And if you can prove the torture produced accurate results that means you have a reliable outside verification mechanism, at which point the question becomes: why didn't you just use that mechanism instead of torture?

Following the arrest, torture (often followed by extra-judicial executions) of numerous FLN members in Algiers and civilian collaborators, the FLN organization in the area was destroyed, and its bombing campaign ended.

Torture results in more terrorism. You would not be stopping it using these methods. Instead, you would be engaged in it.

How far will you go with this? What if we discovered that raping the parent/child of the suspect in front of them could save even more lives?

I mean, you make a good point that it torture doesn't work (well, it actually does work but only for it's original purpose: to get people to claim they did something that we need them to claim they did, even if they didn't), but personally I don't want to know if it works or not because it's not valid no matter how effective.

The problem with this type of thinking is that it's focused on the small picture.

If you want to "solve" terrorism, first of all, you stop all the bullying, controlling, exploitative, and to summarize trouble-making, foreign policies.

In spite of what the USA agenda and propaganda dictates, terrorists attack for a logical reason (of course, this doesn't mean a reasonable one), not because they wake up one morning with the intention of bombing the population of a given country.

To answer your question more directly though: torture and grey-legal area practices are ineffective because they are already put in practice. There's plenty of documentaries about this, and by the way, a short time ago has been posted a link to the Guantanamo prison practices here in HN.

But consider that "it's dystopian and it doesn't even work" makes a strictly stronger argument. Pointing out that it won't work has better results than "those who would trade freedom for security..." on stodgy old republicans like my father (anecdata sample size 1).

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