Well, if you have the latter, what do you need with the former?

For cases where people want to withhold information – I’m positing an infallible lie detector, not a brain reader.

If you have such a detector, you torture someone to make them talk, and you know for certain if they are lying – and they know that you know, because you react with either reward or further punishment with absolute accuracy.

Essentially, it ensures torture will ‘work’, except in rare(?) cases where someone will literally die rather than talk.

B.

–Jerry

See…I’m not advocating doing so. But as a scientist, I understand the (likely) truth of the statement above. And I don’t try to recoil or change or lie about the truth.

BTW: I have found a lot of righties having the same tendancy to avoid truth as well.

A little time with a blow torch to scrotums could make all of you change. And it would “work” in terms of compelling behavior. And chill…I;m not going to do it. Now that thing about Irish babies for English tables though….that sounds like a winner. Let’s go Swift. A manly motherfucker of a writer. Not an Old Man and his Fart War’s author.

The two innocent people who we know were kidnapped tortured on behalf of the US government, Khalid El-Masri and Maher Arar, would agree. They were not waterboarded at Gitmo, as they were not captured on the battlefield of Afghanistan. Instead, they were kidnapped by the US, shipped off to “black sites” and tortured by persons unknown.

They are denied any recourse by US courts because the operations that kidnapped them are classified.

This is not a slippery slope, it really happened to those two, and who knows how many more. Allowing for the possibility of torture in the US government HAS led to it’s use. We have proof. It is undeniable.

This is what comes of people like Sergeant E, who think they’re practical, and have the best interests of the nation at heart. They essentially don’t care about errors like this.

I make it a point to push it in their faces every time they claim that the anti-torture crowd is making a slippery slope argument. Two proven cases of innocents being tortured, and no way for any of us to know how many more there were. This is what came of not saying no. This is our responsibility.

Okay, okay, I should stop, but I just came across this:

Yes, I know all about the “slippery slope”. It’s a gripping metaphor I must agree. Unfortunately, it doesn’t describe the real world. No moral choice is perfect, and no moral proposition has a safe plateau. We do what we can with what we have, and we can’t always just say no.

In the case of torture is does describe the real world of human interaction. Did you not read the quote from Jeremy Waldron about the escalation of torture? Or do you simply dismiss it?

Do you know about the endless cycles of violence we see in other groups where retaliation leads to retaliation leads to escalation for centuries?

I always suspect a slippery slope argument but I think in this case it has merit. History has proven that to my satisfaction. Your golden rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) specifically states that when we torture we are asking others to torture us.

Conventional morality is full of warnings about avoiding the destructive patterns of violence and recrimination. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” “Vengeance is mine sayeth the lord.” “Turn the other cheek.”

And to answer your rationalization that “We can’t alway just say no” I say “Yes we can. We must take responsibility for our own choices and that always includes the option of saying no. Don’t try to take away that power from us. ‘I had to do it’ is not too far from ‘you made me do it’ and they both are simply attempts to duck personal responsibility.”

Thank you for your honest dialog. Because you are entitled to your opinion I will not try to persuade you much more. It seems you feel that any absolute principle is, as the former US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez put it, “quaint.” Coming from a Republican like Gonzalez this endorsement of moral relativism is rather amazing but that is besides the point.

Earlier I told you to think about this more. I will share some of my experiences which has led me to my conclusion.

Here in Minnesota we have a center for the victims of torture. I have seen some of these victims so I think I know a little bit what I am talking about.

Torture does terrible things to people, and these things do not stop when the torture stops. Frequently the victims will go on to take their own lives out of shame and depression. They will blame themselves because the idea that they were completely helpless is too horrible to consider. In my opinion some things are actually worse than death.

As you yourself pointed out, we are all capable of performing torture. As one of the leaders responsible for torture said when asked how he could get his men to perform torture “It is easy. Take a group of men and convince them they are better than others. Treat them special. Convince them their cause is good. Convince them the torture victim is bad. Tell them the torture victim deserves it and the torture is for a good cause and treat them as heroes when they are done.”

As I tried to point out with questions above the problem is who decides what is the greater and lesser evil and how does he/she know? How sure is he/she?

Contrary to popular belief most torture has been done for the cause of “good,” at least in the torturer’s mind.

As I said above, you are entitled to your own opinion. Absolute principles may be dangerous, but without them you are simply playing Lawyer, Judge, and Jury. In a way you are playing God, and for humanity that is even more dangerous.

We’ve been animals. What is wrong with striving to be more than that? These questions may seem academic now but in the years ahead we will be facing problems that will test our morals more than anything in the past thirty years. We’ve been fortunate to remain blissfully ignorant of what it takes to sustain our way of living but we will not be able to remain ignorant much longer.

So what kind of person are you? What kind of country are we?

These are serious and difficult questions.

Though I know this is an afterthought of the main subject of the entry, you DID post it here, and as such I hope I’m not hijacking the thread by saying the following:

DAMN Mr. Scalzi, you’re one literary GENIUS! I downloaded “OMW” tonight and couldn’t stop reading it, until I absolutely HAD to. Sadly I’ve never previously read any of your books, but that’ll be changing post-haste!

BTW I’ve been lurking here since just before the Pluto debacle – someone directed me to your video post of Athena – and keep coming back because you are very entertaining and thought provoking. I’m glad to know that trait has transferred to your books. Or perhaps vice-versa. Either way, you’ve quickly become one of, if not my favorite SF author.