Tuesday, January 16, 2007

More Torture

Sorry for the meager posting. Deadlines.... Here's a snippet of the essay I'm wrapping up. I'll be glad to be done with the torture volume....

The time bomb argument is bogus. It suffers from the same defect of most ends-justify-the-means claims. That is, it adopts an unquestioned fixed supposition or end by which the means to achieve it are simply to be manipulated in its service. The scenario hardly qualifies, then, as a model of either morality or truth-seeking, for the only question is which means to use, or, in other words, which “facts” will prove the supposition or end. Torture becomes a “successful” means in that the torture victim will usually confess to anything the torturers desire, thus confirming the supposition. The argument is a prescription for describing reality as whatever the torturers wish it to be.

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