Today is the last day to join, so if you want in on it, be sure to read over the rules and PM Shakespearicles!Moral question · 12:47am Jul 14th, 2016
I am feeling low, so I am distracting myself with something brainy. It's actually in pursuit of a Twilight Sparkle horror one-shot I'll probably never write.
So... Moral question time. Source is this blog.
A madman who has threatened to explode several bombs in crowded areas has been apprehended. Unfortunately, he has already planted the bombs and they are scheduled to go off in a short time. It is possible that hundreds of people may die. The authorities cannot make him divulge the location of the bombs by conventional methods. He refuses to say anything and requests a lawyer to protect his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. In exasperation, some high level official suggests torture. This would be illegal, of course, but the official thinks that it is nevertheless the right thing to do in this desperate situation. Do you agree? If you do, would it also be morally justifiable to torture the mad bomber’s innocent wife if that is the only way to make him talk? Why?
Since it'd be lame of me to ask your thoughts on this without attempting to answer myself, I decided to give it a try. I scared myself a little.
Do we know for certain that this man really planted these bombs?
We'll I'm going to have to take a literal stance given the phrasing of the situation.
Unfortunately, he has already planted the bombs and they are scheduled to go off in a short time. It is possible that hundreds of people may die.
The last sentence, to me, is also important. It's true there's that word, "possible", but given the prior sentence, I think it is correct to understand this to mean that even if hundreds of people won't die, there WILL be deaths.
With that, I started to lean towards, "Yes, torture him." At the question of his wife? I hesitated. My hesitation was concerning enough.
But then I went back to the first sentence, and there was that word. Madman.
Madman, Madman, Madman.
Honestly, would a madman be able to comprehend what is happening to him? To his wife? How about this... Would he CARE? I mean, I realize there's the insane and the sociopathic, which aren't the same, but I really don't know how the situation has framed this bomber’s psychology.
So... I guess, if he has the capacity to understand what is happening to himself, then yes... Torture him. If he has the capacity to empathize with his wife (meaning she's not an object to him, or a pawn in a bigger game he's determined to win) then if his torture fails... Torture her.
But see, in real life, we wouldn't know for sure if the man really planted bombs, right? Nor could we assume that he was so evil as to be incapable of feeling for his wife before any torture was to be done to her.
So outside of this made up situation where certain facts are taken for granted, this WOULDN'T be moral, and this WOULDN'T, be right... But I do find myself concerned that I feel like under the right circumstances... I mean, isn't that how we also justify wars?
Please share your thoughts. Please. I think I made myself feel worse.
There isn't a not terrible answer.
After some consideration, I hesitantly say that if you tortured him you may not actually get anything--its not really as effective as you'd think. Torturing the wife would also introduce another element into the scenario--because now he HATES YOu if he cares at all and he might simply lie to spite you because you went too far.
What occurs to me is that all those involved with any said torturing should face legal consequences for their actions. IF you are going to break the law you need to face the consequence. The "ends-means" teleological argument may be right occasionally but it isn't categorically right. What it is, categorically, is dangerous and kind of poisonous mentally and spiritually. A good result does not personally excuse you. We can be grateful and still follow the letter of the law--in fact, a good man would turn himself in regardless of the outcome.
4089750
That possibility had occurred to me, but that kind of went in with: "If he's a madman, is he capable of caring?"
So many questions come up, which ask what his cause is. Is it truly mad? Or is there some result he's seeking? (Like a change in law, or religious freedom, or some other such thing?) Torturing the wife might not even be enough. Threatening her with death might be enough depending on the man's empathy, true cause (and in the latter case, the level of dedication to his cause).
How do you gauge these things? Psychologists can to some degree, but not all things. There are plenty of people who simply defy any understanding and are, therefor, considered evil incarnate.
On these I wholeheartedly I agree. I think if someone were to go beyond the law, whatever the outcome, they need to answer to the law. Actually, the blog I sourced to had a quote from the show 24 where the main character is in hot water for having tortured a suspect in a similar scenario. He didn't deny what he did. He didn't even question the fact that he should be judged by his peers for his actions. But he refused to regret what he did. He was, basically, taking full responsibility for the torture.
I read this to husbando, and his feeling was that the question was too black and white. It's forcing the answers you're giving, but in real life things are not so cut and dry.
4089796 It's kind of part of the problem of these sorts of questions in general--that they kind of enforce an artificiality that restricts real moral reasoning. There's too much space which invites justification and not enough reality which hinders the gut-level aspect and so the answer is not really authentic to an extent.
I say it's morally wrong to torture him, if the areas where the bombs were planted are known then make everyone evacuate the areas as soon as possible, have bomb warnings going on in those areas, and have people leave them as soon as they can. I think torture is wrong, but then again, I think killing is wrong. I think that hurting other people is wrong in general.
If he's made threats, he's probably included locations.
If he's included locations, we know at least a few of his targets.
Evacuate those target areas. If people still die, charge him for mass murder and cover your ass by admitting that you attempted everything short of illegal means of information-gathering.
Morality is a human construct, even deeper than that, it's a human cultural based construct. For example sex between grown adults and anyone under 18 is considered immoral and wrong in the United States. In order countries it's not, like in Japan I'm pretty sure it's like 14 or something around there since after students graduate from middle school they're done with school and don't have to attend high school. For the longest time, gay marriage everywhere was seen as immoral and wrong, now it's being accepted more and more as time chances and the culture of the world changes.
The matters of right and wrong always exchange hands and places because right and wrong are in and of themselves human constructs. In nature and life there is no right and wrong...dogs don't decide what's right and wrong and humans in their earliest evolutionary phase definitely didn't have any concept of what was right and wrong. It was just developed over time as humanity grew and will continue to change long after we're dead to the things we find immoral now might be accepted very easily in the future.
Since it's ever changing it can easily be bent and tossed aside in many circumstances. Governments and leaderships do it all the time, taking what people might find wrong and disregarding it or sweeping it under the rug. The Japanese relocation in the U.S. in World War II, the secret executions by governments to snuff out individuals, and even the surveillance of our smartphones/online stuff by the government and even corporations if you think about it. This has and always shall happen because they're doing it...not for morality...but because it's what they think is for the good of the nation.
People in high positions sometimes have to make hard decisions because they have to not if it's because they want to. I don't think Harry S. Truman wanted to kill thousands of innocent Japanese civilians by dropping the Atomic Bombs, but he had to do it in order to save American lives and end World War II. You can still decry it and say it was unnecessary and immoral, but that's if you're just looking at it from a 3rd person perspective and not directly involved. If you did something you didn't like and felt like it was the wrong choice even if saved hundreds of lives...say that to the people who were spared and who lived. And if you didn't and all those people died...try explaining why you didn't do it to the families and friends who lost their loved ones.
There's a reason why it's called "The Moral High Ground" because in the end it's a path that's harder to take and might be more costly in the end. And if you don't take it and you feel you made a big mistake anyways...learn from it and don't make it again or ask yourself what was really last. Did you mistake cost more lives than the higher ground or less lives, or did it just cost "your soul" and your moral stance on the matter.
If you worried about your soul and your emotional status you might be worse off with the deaths of people on your hands and in that case...your soul be damned. If I can save one person I'll gladly go against every moral code imaginable so long as just one person survives compared to nobody. 1000 deaths is still better than 1001 deaths. At least I knew that my actions at least saved somebody rather than nobody.
If you actions taking the lower ground were in fact wrong and did more harm than good...yes then indeed you made a mistake. As I said though, try to learn from and remember that you can't predict or foresee everything. Even if you might be ridiculed and critizied for it, try to remember that what you did was not out of malice or hatred. That you had good intentions and just went the lower route to take it. Maciavielli's...can't spell his name...book "The Prince" says it all...The Means Justify the End. You tried to do whatever you could to achieve a better end and just didn't, couldn't, or ended up making it worse...it could've went the opposite direction anyways with good intentions and means as well because that's how life can be sometimes.
I'm ranting horribly and I need to stop. So I'll just randomly stop here even though I could go on for hours.
But yes...my answer would be to torture the guy to get the locations of the bombs to save as many lives as I could. I'd torture the wife and anything related to the bombs. And if there weren't any bombs, then I'll accept any punishment laid out before me in breaking moral code because at least I knew I was trying to do everything from good intentions.
I get teal deer here because I am ranty and because this is one of those things that I struggled with a lot, turning 21 in Y2K on the one hand, and being big into fantastic situations for my entertainment on the other. TL; DR: The answer is still no, even in the made up scenario.
This is what pollsters and lawyers call a leading question-- not yours, but the original author's, and definitely the idiots behind 24. The moral answer is absolutely not. Regardless of the 'circumstances'. And I have to emphatically state that it should never be permitted or considered and then legal punishments happen to the torturers (re: 4089750 though I know that's not directly what you're saying here). That's effectively saying "It's okay to be bad, as long as we can wash our hands of it as a society." It also fails the real world test because of the implicit issues; it would be like saying randomly shooting into a crowd because someone in it is also shooting is okay, because some of the time you'll hit the bad guy, and then you can just be punished to some standard or other.
I also mistrust the "good man" argument, because why did our supposedly moral person do this? To save people? Okay, but they did so in a way that requires far too many assumptions in the first place-- back to spraying bullets into a crowd. That's not moral, it's reckless. Why should we put any trust in that, either individually or socially?
Functionally it comes down to one of the limitations of logic, and one of the traps of the fantastic. The limitations of logic is this: you can have what appears to be a valid logical construction that nonetheless is completely unsound. Like-- if p then q, if q then r; it is logically valid to say if p, then r. The problem is that those may be unsound premises. If I state "If the sky is blue, then I will be happy. If I am happy, then I will smile." Stating "If the sky is blue, then I will smile" is logically valid given those premises, but there's a blue sky out today, and I'm miserable because of fibro, so it fails.
There really isn't a single valid premise up there. We're lead to assume that we know he's planted the bomb, that it is _definitely_ this guy, that it will definitely go off (bomb making isn't easy and doesn't have a 100% success rate, even in the best labs), that there's definitely going to be mass casualties and there's nothing else we can do to mitigate. Then the question leads on-- okay, in one area, we're lead to assume that torture is going to have a reasonable chance to get us the answer, then in the next, that torturing his innocent wife (and boy there are some interesting assumptions in this question in the first place) will have a reasonable chance of doing it.
In reality, that's all nonsense. Torture isn't just wrong because it's immoral; it's wrong because it's useless. You get huge numbers of false positives-- the whole "everyone will break" thing is ... mostly... true, but then eventually, you'll get someone who will tell you what he or she thinks you want to hear. The same is true of the innocent wife thing-- even presuming that we're not looking at someone who believes their spouse will be better off tortured to death than stopping their action, we're still talking about torture. Psychological torture, but torture. So he may just start telling you what you want to hear.
Then there's the lying problem. So you're torturing him. He's resisted for a while. Now he starts to give up information. It seems consistent! That's great. Our school full of innocent children is evacuated. Then the capitol building blows up, because your bomber just deliberately wasted your time. Or gave you partially correct information that he or she thought was going to be better.
But the morality unravels even sooner than that. How did we find out about the threat? About the type? That it was definitely this guy/gal? That he (despite the stupid construction, I'm going to go with that now to save time) cares enough about someone or something that we can psychologically torture him with it? Did we just keep grabbing people and torturing them until we got the right answer?
In the real world, the answer is no; it's probably no in the scenario, too, but the poser of the supposed quandary doesn't want you to think too much about that. There are much better ways, with fewer false positives, less wasted time, and far, far less evil. One of the things that gets forgotten a lot is that the Army and CIA's own teams and experts were horrified when we started torturing early on in the Bush era, because they had methods that worked. They befriended people. They used limited means to create discomfort and then offered deals. Sympathy. And these methods worked. Along with a host of other valid investigation techniques. Those teams and experts were kicked out, despite getting the right answers more often, because they wouldn't do and say what they were told. Or they ended up folding in some cases, but the results were still less efficient, more tainted.
Supposedly 'moral' questions like this are designed to blind people to actual moral and ethical quandries and logical thinking, rather than honestly provoke thought. They narrow down choices-- do you want to torture or do you want innocent people to die?-- and then good people start to think, okay, yeah, I can see SOMETIMES. And because other times-- like wars of self defense or to defend invaded allies or people under threat of genocide (though those can still go wrong if you do them stupid, so it's best to try other options first)-- things that are sometimes can be valid constructions, it sweeps something terrible in, under the guise of that sometimes, and just keeps pushing and edging along. It also weakens rhetoric against it-- "I think it's wrong usually, but," keeps sliding things away and away.
Sorry for the rant; it's just--- ugh. I hate false premises like that. There's no part of the original quote that's honest or in good faith, and it's poisonous because unless you reject all of it, little bits flow in. Cough, anyway, the other side is the seduction of the fantastic. We write and read and play things where it's fine and we know the heroes are right, and sometimes, that's fine for a story because throwing complicated morals and clouded ethics into everything can be depressing. But we have to remember that when we're talking about things that have reality and real impact, that protagonist-centered and authorial-directed morality isn't always there. Take away Jack Bauer's scriptwriters, and he's an idiotic thug with an anger problem and good press.
4089859 No, honestly I think you're right. The question of "Would a good man do this in the first place" is really valid and had I spent more than like a few minutes really thinking about it (because I don't really care much for these leading setups myself) I probably would have altered my answer because in fact I would not use a "ends-means" argument and I really feel uncomfortable with anything approaching it.
I will say that my original thinking was based on the gut-level reaction that the good man/authentic individual should be willing to accept the consequences anytime he finds himself in wrong behavior. I wasn't really thinking torture specifically so much as--like, if you speed you pay your ticket, if you ate the wrong lunch you own up to it and offer to buy someone a sammich the next day, your mistake fucked someone over really bad so you make amends, you know you were at fault in a horrible crash so you stay and you do the right thing instead of running--which is really different and I know that, and it also kind of doesn't apply to situations where you intended to do an act which is unquestionably vile in order to obtain a dubiously useful result.
4089843 That's nonsense. The answer remains no, because there are better options. The world is much more complex and much more moral than people give it credit for. Cooperation produces better results than competition; empathy gets better and faster results than belligerence in most circumstances. There are areas where something less moral; if there's no way to create a scenario to get to there, but at each step, you can do your best to try and make the moral choice. Sometimes you will be wrong. There's analysis that says that Truman was either mislead or incorrect when he dropped the bomb and that it would not have cost a concordant amount of lives or caused anywhere near as much horror and suffering. No one will always be right; but if you go back, you can usually say, "This was wrong, I made a mistake; I will try to do better next time, and here is how I will make amends."
As for the age of consent thing, that's completely facile. The fact that there are two different ages of consent doesn't mean that it's impossible to make a moral choice there. It means that two different approaches have been taken to "what constitutes someone who is vulnerable by age, and how will we protect them." The existence of differing options-- like let's say "shoot someone because they won't date you" vs. "go on with your life and do different things"-- doesn't mean that both are equally irrelevant. The question is: does age-based consent protect more vulnerable people than it harms, and does it do so in an efficient way? If the answer is yes, then, judging by a (possibly culturally contextual, possibly not) standard of what is most efficacious, one option may be chosen, or another, or perhaps there will be a different way.
The basic concept: it is immoral to have sex with the young is sound. The fact that pederasty was a part of, say, ancient societies or current ones that may or may not have had qualities we do or don't like (ancient Greece, for example) is irrelevant. We _do_ know from studies that at any age, but especially when people are young and formative, having sexual relations forced or coerced has long term psychological damage done to them. That's the immoral part, by the by, clear and simple. The next step is the ethical/philosophical; is sex between adults and children something that is possible to gain consent in the majority of cases? The answer, again, is mostly no; it is extremely easy for older people to physically overpower, socially manipulate or intimidate, or even consciously or not take advantage of positions of trust to create impaired consent. It's also arguable how much informed consent is possible, but that's a more murky area.
Much like the bomb/torture thing, actually examining the situation shows that there is a moral choice, and you can make it, but you must both accept the possibility of failure and the importance to work to change and make reparations if you do. The real world's murkiness doesn't remove morality; it just means it's less likely you'll achieve perfect results. The lack of perfect results neither removes the value nor the responsibility to try for better results.
4089843 Oh, and re: gay marriage? Not only were there cultures other than western/european that were more accepting of gay relationships, but the struggles of GLBTQ people for acceptance throughout the long march of human history is something that we see in tortured poets and wistful paintings, in quiet myths and symbols in story. Again, that's not saying that what's moral has changed; it's saying that we now see and understand what morality is better, and it is our responsibility to fix things as a people.
4089908 Yep! And that's why questions like the original moral quandary are toxic. They take something that's moral (would you take desperate action to save innocent lives) and then try to slide in something fundamentally immoral as being the "only" choice. They make their way slowly into your conscience and your reflexes, and it justifies someone else's issues, because they're looking for validation, not real morality. That's the one legit criticism of black and white adventure tales; they can make for lovely fun brain candy, but they can put people in the habit of thinking "x works because my heroes have done it."
To be honest, I actually find it positive. Uplifting, even. That when we strip away the laziness and the false equivalencies, when we look at what works, what is most efficient, it tends towards morality. I can't say that it's proof of theism; an atheist could just as easily say "our morals fit our universe" rather than the other way around. But it's part of how I reconcile an imperfect universe with a moral, loving creator; the perfect ideal stands and shines when the veils are stripped away. We strive; we can do better. We may fail, but reconciliation is possible. So not so much proof, as peace, I guess.
4089953 I think it was Cormac McCarthy that said the long moral arc of the universe eventually swung upwards.
I remember thinking MANY times with Law and Order and 24 and other shows involving horrendous crime that sometimes goes unpunished that the emotionally fulfilling option was almost always the bad one that led only to evil. The "if only you could just cut the tape, throw out the due process and kill this guy, just plant a bullet in his evil heart and save us all" in the end was a vile choice. It wasn't about justice, that was veneer. It was "you hurt me so I wanna hurt you". (which reminds me now of Marion's A Prolegomena to Charity which I really loved in undergrad)
As part of my general regimen of self-reflection, I tend to be wary of the choice that is a little too satisfying to imagine happening because often the more I really poke at it the more I find that those alternatives are shitty ones and petty ones.
Tho as far as efficacy goes I've always had a gloomy forcast for moral behavior's final efficacy. I'm not convinced that the good man always loses but I'm very unconvinced that he wins more than occasionally.
4089927
I think you failed to fully grasp the meaning the words: "Morality is a human cultural construct" that I said. It means that your morals and ethics are influenced on where you born, how you were raised, and what experiences you had. If you were born in another place at a different time you would be a different person than you are now. If you lived in Japan and turned on the TV to see a schoolgirl's clothes fly off and do silly risque poses as a sailor uniform appeared on her you think that would be ok because you were raised in a society that is accepting of that. Then in turn you would hear about parents in American throwing a fit that a 15 year old girl (Sailor Moon is still like 15 right? She's in high school after all in most incarnations which is around that age set) was being portrayed that way and not understand what the problem would be. That's the difference in cultural morals.
Yes, I'm sure in Japan there are also parents and people who think that's wrong as well, but then that's where Majority ruling comes in. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" as Mr. Spock would put it. This means that things are ultimately decided in favor of the majority since they have the bigger voice than the minority. So ultimately a society's morals are decided by the majority of the people in the nation or time. Gay marriage was looked down on for so long in American and even other countries...and is still looked down upon in African nations...because the majority of the people believed it to be wrong. Whether it was or wasn't isn't the point, it's that moral code and what was upheld was decided by the majority. It changes when society changes, people with those morals die off or go away and are replaced by people with different morals. Which is how gay marriage grew and grew through more people being gay and more people accepting it as it become bigger until we got to where we are today...at least in America. The morals had changed like the nation and it's people.
Of course it will happen again...I can easily predict 3 big moral problems in the future that we might not possibly see but right now must seem absolutely ridiculous to us because it would be seen as "Never going to happen/obviously just the work of fantasy."
Genetic manipulation...is it right to alter an unborn a baby in the womb to be better than he would naturally, like changing a girl to where it would be a boy, or changing some genes to make sure they had red hair instead of black hair. These sort of questions will come into play later that I might possibly live to see in around 50 years.
Marriage to an unliving thing. Is it right to love and be with a machine like an android or machine that looks and acts like a human...but isn't. As technology advances faster and faster there will come a point when a machine will look, act, and feel exactly like a human...this is kind of already happen in some extreme cases and is universally seen as "weird" but in 100/200 years this will be like the gay marriage battle.
Humanity abandoning Earth. This is something that will happen long after we, our children, and our children's children are dead in 500 years when the Earth becomes so polluted and spent that it can't support life...or at least human life anymore to the point where people will have to leave earth. This happened in the movie "Interstellar" and never gave mention to the moral question of "Is it right to abandon the Earth that humanity was born and raised on" and "Is it still possible to save it?"
Those are going to be big moral issues in the future that I can easily see right now as being "Definitely Nos" to all of them...but in the future as society and morals change that no will become a maybe and that maybe will become a yes...whether or not the majority think it isn't right now or later and if it's right or not right will not matter. Right and wrong, as I said before, is also a human construct because ultimately it is an opinion and there is no right or wrong when it comes to an opinion.
Was Truman right in dropping the Atomic Bomb? That is ultimately an opinion if he was or wasn't. Ultimately we cannot see what would happen if went the opposite direction and said "No, don't drop it." And instead went with option B which was an invasion of Japan that would cost so many lives of American and Japanese that it definitely be more than the lives spent in the Atomic bombs. He could've went with option C and starve the nation into submission, but given the Japanese stubbornness and devotion to their cause that it would take years and so many people dying of starvation and famine that it would considered cruel and abusive by the United States. Also keep in mind that Russia or the Soviet Union at the time was not exactly our friends as they...and indeed us as well...were gearing up for the Cold War...they invaded Manchuria at the time of the Atomic bombings and were quickly gaining ground there...which is a reason why the Koreas were split up after the war like Germany was...and if we didn't drop the bombs, or invade the nation to make Japan surrender...the Soviet Union would definitely do it to claim Japan under Communist to go against the United States later and given the Soviet Unions brutality it would be pretty ugly...and in the worst case scenario Japan would be much worse off than it is today and be similar to Ukraine and other former Soviet Union states in being in worse shape compared to the western nations. Is that all right or wrong...I'm not going to say it is or isn't...those are just possibilities I listed and we can't see what could've been...but nether the less that is history and whatever your opinion on it...is of course your opinion.
Oh and competition does breed more progress than cooperation...that's how businesses work...that's how capitalism works. To be better than the next guy, to make some better than his, to keep pushing to stay one step ahead. Competition always breeds progress and keeping with World War 2...this is obvious. Because of each nation competing to kill one another faster we achieved much more in so little time than what we would have in peace time. The Jet Airplane, Germany's rockets that would take us to space later, Radar, nuclear power, and even penecilian or however it's spelt that saved the lives of so many people during the war and after. Humanity advanced so far in what I consider to be it's darkest hour. It's just the sad fact that unless we're competing against someone...we don't advance as far as fast...which is why schools and programs always hold competitions to help push that mentality to keep getting better and keep aiming higher to advance human society.
One final note, avoid using words like "mostly" because that's a vague word that can be turned on it's head like "glass half empty/glass half full" to where I could've said "Mostly? Well mostly isn't entirely so that must mean you're a little wrong then huh?" But I avoided it because I would come off as a bit of a jerk...and I put it at the end because I know someone...at some point later in possibly another conversation in your life...will use that against you.
4090198 I understand the meaning of the words fine. You-- and the philosophy behind the statement-- are just obviously wrong, and you're demonstrating that quite ably without my help.