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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Spanky, I'm overwhelmed by the length of your posts, so I'm not going to try to respond point by point. I don't think I'm putting words in your mouth when I say that you take a utilitarian view of torture -- that it's not something to be done lightly, but that it is acceptable when the benefits (the prospect of saving "innocent" lives) outweigh the harms. Thus, you would be OK with torturing, say, an innocent child (e.g., the infant daughter of a terrorist) if the prospect of saving other innocents was real.

One can't argue against this view on its own terms. John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham would approve. However, it raises some questions:

- how do you weigh the harms of torture against the benefits? to some degree, they are incommensurable. also, there's this question of the uncertainty of the benefits. the "ticking time bomb" scenario asks one to accept as a hypothesis that you know that you'll be able to find the bomb, but in real life we have been torturing people without knowing (ex ante) what they know, and whether it will help.

- why do you not seem concerned about the abuse (i.e., overuse) of torture? in a conversation about the misuse of torture, you popped up (again) to argue that torture is sometimes ok. if you were motivated by a straight cost-benefit analysis, one might think that you'd have a little time for the prospect that our government is torturing too much, but it's not something you seem to notice.

- why is this sort of cost-benefit balancing not the way you approach other social problems? e.g., why not tax the very rich to pay for food for the poor? a cost-benefit analysis surely suggests that a few rich people need the extra money less than the poor need food. and so on.

- what does "innocence" have to do with it? i keep noting that you refer to "innocent" victims of terror and implying the "guilt" of terrorists, from which i infer that you seem torture as a sort of punishment, but this is hardly clear to me.