I made no claim about the moral permissibility or the desirability of engaging in torture. I questioned the claim that it is always ineffective.
"Doing x is bad" does not mean that "doing x never works." This is reading morality into causality, a variant on "bad people never prosper." ;)
--- On Fri, 4/24/09, ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> 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
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>