[lbo-talk] Americans sorta like torture if it works

[ravi]

On Apr 24, 2009, at 9:15 PM, Bill Bartlett wrote:
> At 7:25 AM -0700 24/4/09, Chris Doss wrote:
>
>> Burning witches to prevent them from casting spells doesn't work,  
>> because there are no witches casting evil spells is the first place.
>
> Aha, but how can you be sure? There are thousands of documented  
> cases of people confessing to being witches. Confessions obtained  
> under torture, to be sure. But according to you, that is a reliable  
> way of gaining intelligence. So according to your own argument, it  
> follows that there were thousands of witches back then.
>

Bill,

there are independent (of results of torture) reasons to (a) believe  
that witches do not exist and (b) terrorists and their plans of mayhem  
do.

I agree with the moral position =8-O that torture is just a bad, bad  
path to go down. The argument against Chris, IMHO, has to proceed  
either from this axiom, or it has to be tackled on the front of  
whether torture is effective in yielding information of worth and if  
that justifies the torture. It's not valid, in this instance, to argue  
that the argument in favour of torture is circular... it's not  
necessarily so.

	--ravi