Hacker News Reader

Comment by MarkMc | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood how these two positions are logically consistent:

(1) We do not torture people on principle

(2) We use drone strikes that sometimes kill innocent bystanders because the ends justifies the means

In the case of torturing someone, you are inflicting only pain (which is not as bad as death) on someone who is probably guilty of a crime (which is not as bad as inflicting pain on someone who is completely innocent).

In the case of drone strikes that kill innocent bystanders, you are inflicting death (which is worse than pain) on a completely innocent person (which is worse than killing someone who is guilty of a crime).

Now I understand that torture is unreliable and that is a good reason not to do it. But if you do not use torture on principle then to be consistent you must also not use drone strikes on principle.

View on HN

> In the case of torturing someone, you are inflicting only pain (which is not as bad as death) on someone who is probably guilty of a crime (which is not as bad as inflicting pain on someone who is completely innocent).

I'm afraid it's more complicated than that. I get that you're trying to draw a contrast and use "their version of things", but "their version" is completely flawed to the point of misinformation.

Torture can be so bad that it destroys a person psychologically. For some people who were tortured, they might as well be dead.

Likewise - people who are being tortured aren't "probably" guilty of a crime. Actually, they probably aren't. They just happen to know a small bit about somebody who is guilty of a crime[0]. Put differently: You don't torture the hardened criminals, because they are likely prepared for it. You torture people who are (mostly) civilians because they are weak and if they know something, they'll talk. For a civilian, torture means ripping them away from their life, making them long to go back. For a criminal, torture is a likely outcome of what they do anyways.

Torture is just another way in which the gift of collateral damage is brought to innocent people. War, in all of its facets, is waged against civilians.

Finally - torture is only unreliable in certain areas. It is completely unreliable in the contrast you draw - applied on hardened criminals who are high value targets in an armed conflict. But it succeeds beautifully in the two areas that it was designed for: terrorizing civilians and giving military psychos a plaything to destroy.

[0]This is actually the most important argument against "I have nothing to hide".

But the thing is that all the things you wrote about torture apply to drone strikes as well, on a much wider scale. It's not just the explosions that matter. There's a) the constant fear people have that something, somewhere near, might just explode at any time, and b) the sound of drones flying overhead, all the time, pretty much 24h/day, that keeps people from sleeping and scares the cattle. There were some good articles about how this looks in Pakistan back around 2010.

No, I absolutely agree. There are many similarities - just the way the OP framed it (comparing the severity of an actual drone strike to the "just painful" torture) didn't quite work out.

Interesting but I think you're wrong on point 2: people don't justify drone strikes by saying "the end justifies the means" (at least they should not). This is precisely why people can logically approve of drone strikes and refuse torture. Torture is all about using awful means, while in the case of drone strikes, the killing of innocents is involuntary. It's not a means but an undesired side effect. I would argue that killing the targets is also an awful mean but that's another question... This is a classical problem in ethics[1]. Here's an online test to gauge your own consistency: http://www.philosophyexperiments.com/fatman

[1] http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/when_is_it_ethical_to_kill_s...

Let's think on this - what incentive is there for the United States' to behave in a logically consistent manner? (Let alone ethical or humane.)

What incentive could there be? Can? Might? What would we want to exist? How?

I agree with all you said, but it's "principle", not "principal" (I'm just correcting you because I hope others would do me the same favour :)

Thanks. In my defence, I had checked the definition of 'principal' and found 'something of principal or chief importance' [1] so had thought it was the correct option.

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/principal

It would be a mistake to apply principles and logic to war which is, in the end, a political decision.

When did we stop torturing people?

We do torture people.

Where is the confusion?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com