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Interesting Read

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Mark Kleiman discusses his views on torture:

A reader writes to ask if I’m really certain that torture never produces true and valuable information.

Of course not. Indeed, I’m sure that the opposite is true. It would be astonishing if torture were nevereffective.

But the fact that torture is often not merely unproductive but counterproductive, and that the instances were it would be beneficial are so hard to pick out from the rest, makes a strong pragmatic case against it to go along with the absolutist moral case against it.

Read the whole thing.

Reader Interactions

6Comments

  1. 1.

    Steve

    The position that “it’s a good thing to torture a thousand terrorists to death if we get intelligence to prevent one act of violence” isn’t just a crazy fringe thing, unfortunately. It seems to be the majority position at RedState, a site where John still thinks he can find principled conservatives for some reason.

    Mind you, if we really knew everyone we had in custody was a terrorist or otherwise a Bad Guy [tm], I’m not sure I would shed a lot of tears for whatever happens to them. But as Jon Stewart (or maybe it was his buddy Colbert) said last night, if we really have such a great method of determining who’s evil with 100% certainty, we should start using it over here, and get rid of all those useless judges!

    I find the argument to be unwinnable. They used to tell me “it’s ok if we torture people at Gitmo, because they’re all a bunch of terrorists.” Then when I pointed out that we released a bunch of them who weren’t terrorists, they responded, “well, that just proves we’re only keeping the guilty ones!” Can’t win.

  2. 2.

    Zach

    I thought this line was also spot on:

    Isn’t it extraordinary how it’s the people who reject moral relativism and insist on the black-and-white difference between good and evil who argue for making exceptions when it comes to torture?

  4. 4.

    Steve

    There is nothing inconsistent between the good-vs-evil distinction and the conservative position on torture. By definition, good is what we do, and evil is what the other guys do. Only treasonous liberals accuse our guys of doing anything evil.

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