[jacquesm]

In the abstract that's all fine and good but we're talking about some very concrete situations here that go nowhere near those extremes. Extremes are nice to come down on something 'in principle' but barring extraordinary concocted up scenarios to expose the weaknesses of having a pre-set mind about anything at all it is still very useful to come down to some ground rules that everybody lives by, for instance, laws and in this case the Geneva convention.

The idea is that then if someone decides to cross those lines that you try them in court to see if a judge sees it the same way, if not off to the slammer you go.

[wheels]

I agree. But sometimes thought experiments can be useful in sussing out why we hold certain values. Torture I don't actually consider to be one of those that's particularly opaque, but asking "Why do I think this is wrong?" and looking at the edge cases is often an enlightening process. (And I've been reading a good bit of political philosophy lately trying to resolve some dissonance on other topics where I found my own views inconsistent.)

[jacquesm]

It's the engineering mindset at work: reduction to extremes can give you a good idea of whether or not something has a discrete solution or if it is multi-valued. In this case it seems to me that it is likely to be multi-valued but only in non-real-world scenarios and for all intent and purposes you might as well treat it as discrete: torture == bad.