[jacobolus]

> reminds me of someone who believes that all torture is morally wrong, but then adds "and it doesn't work anyway".

This is not really the way the argument goes though. Person A says “torture is repugnant and should be banned”; person B responds “well how will we ever get a prisoner to answer the questions we need”.

And then person A points out that trained interrogators who build some kind of trust or at least mutual respect with those they are interrogating literally always get better results than the adversarial tough guys who jump to inflicting pain, and that if you ask effective experienced interrogators even from repressive horrible regimes, they’ll tell you “nah, skip the torture, because you’ll waste a lot of trouble getting completely worthless results. When you torture someone they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear to make you stop, and the garbage they spew under torture is never actionable. It takes a lot of hard work to undo the damage and regain enough trust to get useful information, if it’s even possible at all”.

This is not to say that torture would be fine if only it were effective, but rather that the people who torture are lying when they cite its effectiveness or potential. The people who turn to torture (or instruct others to do so) are not actually doing it because they get valuable information out of it; that’s just a rationalization. They’re really doing it for (a) the sadistic psychopathic pleasure in the act, or (b) to terrorize and degrade as an end in itself.

The folks who defend torture based on some hypothetical efficacy (always without evidence, or sometimes with “evidence” that falls apart like wet toilet paper once exposed to the most cursory examination) reveal themselves to be not only morally repugnant but also dishonest and disingenuous. Unless they are extremely naïve (e.g. schoolchildren) it is not worth having this or any other debate with them, because they are not arguing in good faith.

[quietbritishjim]

I was in two minds about mentioning that analogy in case someone attempted to address the content directly, which is what you've done. It really misses the point of what I was saying. The point was, if you can imagine a person that did make an argument like I said - however unlikely it is that you think it is that anyone actually would - then hopefully you could see that it does not communicate their point of view well. As it's an analogy, the idea is that this lesson would carry over to what the parent comment was saying.

[jacobolus]

Yes, I understand the point you’re trying to make, and this analogy is fine insofar as it refers to some kind of fictional/hypothetical conversation about torture.

But this characterization of anti-torture arguments is a straw man, not reflective of how the discussion goes in practice, and itself missing the point of converations about torture’s essential ineffectiveness.

[teddyh]

“The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

— George Orwell, 1984, 1949