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Would You Utilize Torture to Save a Life?

Would You Utilize Torture to Save a Family Member?

  • Total voters
    60
Laila said:
If we don't uphold the morals we preach and claim to be defending, what seperates us from them?
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The fact that we do not wantonly murder innocent people.
 
Slippery Slope said:
Give me liberty or give me death, kind of explains it don't you think? If you sacrifice your morals then what do you have left? You've now become what you despise, shouldn't someone torture you next?
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Who's sacrificing their morals? I would not have compromised my morals at all.

My home--family and friends--my community, my nation, and only then the rest of humanity. That is the moral precedence to be applied.

And thus I am not become what I despise.

As for someone torturing me? Well, if that were necessary to save their child, I don't doubt that they would. If I were in the position of the murderous thug, I would expect any man to hunt me down, fight me, capture or kill me, and if capturing me to torture me for whatever information I might have that would rescue their child from harm. As he is a man, I would expect no less from him.

Of course, I am sure there are those who would torture me simply for the joy of it. Such is the way of the world. It matters not.
 
UtahBill said:
if we allow our morals to totally dictate our actions, we are about as safe as sheep in wolf country...
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Only if we have the wrong morals.
 
Ethereal said:
It seems some of us are failing to comprehend the hypothetical.

Torturing this murderous thug is the ONLY way to save your family. There are no qualifiers, there are no exceptions, there are no what-if scenarios or anything like that. If you do not torture this murderous thug it is a certainty that your family will die. It was made black and white for a reason.

Refuse to torture, family dies.

Now, what is your final answer?
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Then this in no way is a valid comparison to the topic that this poll is obviously inspired by.
 
Ethereal said:
The fact that we do not wantonly murder innocent people.
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What stops us if we are willing to through away our morals without hesitation?
 
Here's the thing, I believe that torture is morally wrong. I honestly believe this. And I would willingly, even ENTHUSIASTICALLY, throw away my morality in order to save the life of my loved one.

I would torture the ever-living **** out of the guy in order to save them. I would do this knowing what I was doing is immoral.

Because, I logically consider torture to be morally wrong. If my loved one's life were on the line, logic goes right out the ****ing window.
 
Laila said:
What stops us if we are willing to through away our morals without hesitation?
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Stop trying to derail the thread. Once I feel a sufficient number of answers and relevant dialogue have occurred I will deign to discuss the implications of this poll. Until then, stop posing irrelevant questions and give me a straight answer. YES or NO will suffice. Refuse to torture and your family is doomed. What's it going to be?
 
Ethereal said:
Stop trying to derail the thread. Once I feel a sufficient number of answers and relevant dialogue have occurred I will deign to discuss the implications of this poll. Until then, stop posing irrelevant questions and give me a straight answer. YES or NO will suffice. Refuse to torture and your family is doomed. What's it going to be?
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No.
Now can you answer my question?
 
dclxvinoise said:
Then this in no way is a valid comparison to the topic that this poll is obviously inspired by.
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You are in no position to infer what my intentions are, nor are you able to extrapolate how such a poll may be relevant to the issue at hand. I am not making any comparisons or inferences. I am posing a simple question that some people (you) are seemingly incapable of answering. Once enough answers have been given I will deign to discuss the implications of my poll. If you do not wish to answer then kindly stop derailing my thread.
 
Laila said:
No.
Now can you answer my question?
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One more thing (apologies), could you please give an explaination as to why you would not torture this individual given the circumstances. The context is isolated, so please remain within it.

Can you make sure to link that follow up thread here, Ethereal? I'm very interested in it.
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Absolutely my good man.
 
Ethereal said:
One more thing (apologies), could you please give an explaination as to why you would not torture this individual given the circumstances. The context is isolated, so please remain within it.
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I could not force myself to torture anyone irregardless of circumstance.
I could defend myself without question but the image of someone already being restrained and you just torturing them just does not sit well with me.
 
Ethereal said:
You are in no position to infer what my intentions are, nor are you able to extrapolate how such a poll may be relevant to the issue at hand. I am not making any comparisons or inferences. I am posing a simple question that some people (you) are seemingly incapable of answering. Once enough answers have been given I will deign to discuss the implications of my poll. If you do not wish to answer then kindly stop derailing my thread.
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I'm not derailing anything, I'm merely asking what your intentions are with it. I'm not going to answer your silly poll if the purpose is to bait, which by all outward appearances is the purpose. The fact that you aren't forthcoming with what your intentions are makes me suspect even more that the purpose of this poll is to bait.

Since when is asking legitimate questions derailing a thread? If you don't like my questions feel free to ignore them.
 
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UtahBill said:
different situations call for different tactics...
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what is the difference?

in both cases you have to find dangerous people before they murder other people
 
I would torture without ceasing and without mercy till my loved ones were once again safe at my side. I really don't think I would stop short of anything. If the choice is permanently disfiguring or crippling some thug or losing my wife or brothers or parents, then that's not a hard choice for me. I'd get medieval and in a hurry in this situation.

I just cannot understand the people who say no to this scenario. You'd really let your spouse, child, parent, or whatever die because you didn't want to harm a murdering thug? I can't understand that line of thinking. Just like I can't understand the extremist pacifists who say they wouldn't use lethal force to protect their children from a killer. I try and try to see their point of view, but I just can't. Its beyond me.

That said, this scenario is so abstract and impossible, I don't really see what insight can be gained by it.
 
Psychoclown said:
That said, this scenario is so abstract and impossible, I don't really see what insight can be gained by it.
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The poll numbers show one insight: most people--perhaps all people--can contrive a justification for "torture". Regardless of what we claim for morals, when push comes to shove, we can navigate around them to do whatever we feel we must when the stakes are sufficiently dear.

Does that make torture "moral"? Or merely tolerably "immoral"? That's rather a different debate, and I suspect is the debate Ethereal desires.
 
Hellll Yeah! I will do anything for my family and that includes killing and dying for em.
 
I answered yes. The only regret would be that my knowledge would be inadquate.
 
zimmer said:
To answer the initial post: Yes.

For the socialists... if "It Takes a Village", to raise a child, doesn't this mean torture also acceptable to spare the life of a villager?

Or are we "individuals" now?

Seems common practice in the lands run by wacko socialists, communists... as they're always subjecting threats to The Village to places of Special Treatment.

.
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Conservatives are not individualists in the atomistic way you are positing, in fact they tend to be communitarians. To quote the eminent American Conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet, yet again:

Conservatives, from Burke on, have tended to see the population much in the manner medieval legists and philosophical realists (in contrast to nominalists) saw it: as composed of, not individuals directly, but the natural groups within which individuals invariably live: family, locality, church, region, social class, nation, and so on. Individuals exist, of course, but they cannot be seen or comprehended save in terms of social identities which are inseparable from groups and associations.


To care for the intermediate group and its key place in the life and freedom of the individual is certainly not socialist, in fact it is something that socialism and liberalism tend to lack(although far from completely see De Tocqueville or Kropotkin.) as they tend to see only the abstract, autonomous individual and the state. It is conservatives above all others who have viewed individuals within their traditional social structures, not obscuring individuals or the state certainly but remembering the importance of the small-scale voluntary and "natural" association and its authority to the individual personality, order, freedom and meaning.
 
"Morality is an unstable commodity in international relations." author John Toland....

anyone trying to inject morals into an issue where one side clearly has none is wasting their time. If bad people inflict pain and misery on your loved ones, and continues to do so, and the only way to make it stop is to inflict pain and misery on one of their agents, the definition of morals becomes VERY ambiguous....
IMO, we would be morally remiss if we withhold torture as a tool to get the information we need...
 
Ethereal said:
It seems some of us are failing to comprehend the hypothetical.

Torturing this murderous thug is the ONLY way to save your family. There are no qualifiers, there are no exceptions, there are no what-if scenarios or anything like that. If you do not torture this murderous thug it is a certainty that your family will die. It was made black and white for a reason.

Refuse to torture, family dies.

Now, what is your final answer?
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That's why I don't like hypotheticals.

They are stacked on one side in order to force someone's hand to prove a point and therefore, do not reflect reality most of the time.

I would not torture. I'd like to think I'm further out of the jungle than that. Of course, I'm not trying to imply I'm a pacifist either.
 
BigRed said:
They are stacked on one side in order to force someone's hand to prove a point and therefore, do not reflect reality most of the time.
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Hypotheticals do not reflect reality. That is why they are hypothetical.

The value of hypotheticals is they allow for moral positions to be challenged conceptually.

In this instance, the overwhelming number of respondents to Ethereal's poll in the affirmative that they WOULD torture to save a family member, along with the ample commentary in this discussion, stands as a potent challenge to the blanket assertion that "torture is immoral."

On its own, without moderation or mitigation, the vast majority of respondents in this thread have constructively deemed that proposition to be false. Torture is not categorically immoral; so sayeth the participants here on DP.

Why is this meaningful? It is meaningful because if we do not say that torture is categorically immoral, by what constructions may we fairly say that torture is immoral? What circumstance renders torture immoral? What context renders torture wrong?

Further, if torture is not categorically immoral, we must pause and ask if there be justifications for the acts being decried as torture.

The hypothetical stands as demonstration that the moral assertions being applied in "reality" are not always as categorical, clear, and patently obvious as some are wont to believe.
 
celticlord said:
Hypotheticals do not reflect reality. That is why they are hypothetical.

The value of hypotheticals is they allow for moral positions to be challenged conceptually.

In this instance, the overwhelming number of respondents to Ethereal's poll in the affirmative that they WOULD torture to save a family member, along with the ample commentary in this discussion, stands as a potent challenge to the blanket assertion that "torture is immoral."

On its own, without moderation or mitigation, the vast majority of respondents in this thread have constructively deemed that proposition to be false. Torture is not categorically immoral; so sayeth the participants here on DP.

Why is this meaningful? It is meaningful because if we do not say that torture is categorically immoral, by what constructions may we fairly say that torture is immoral? What circumstance renders torture immoral? What context renders torture wrong?

Further, if torture is not categorically immoral, we must pause and ask if there be justifications for the acts being decried as torture.

The hypothetical stands as demonstration that the moral assertions being applied in "reality" are not always as categorical, clear, and patently obvious as some are wont to believe.
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I suppose that is a fair contention.

Before you can classify torture as immoral or otherwise, you would first have to define what constitutes torture and that in itself, is a subject of debate.
 
celticlord said:
In this instance, the overwhelming number of respondents to Ethereal's poll in the affirmative that they WOULD torture to save a family member, along with the ample commentary in this discussion, stands as a potent challenge to the blanket assertion that "torture is immoral."
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So if the majority decided killing people who are mentally handicapped under certain conditions is OK, it would no longer be immoral? Intresting.

celticlord said:
On its own, without moderation or mitigation, the vast majority of respondents in this thread have constructively deemed that proposition to be false. Torture is not categorically immoral; so sayeth the participants here on DP.
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I disagree with your false conclusion.

The only thing it has shown is that moral people under the right circumstance can commit acts which are immoral.

The the Holocaust is a good example based in reality, not the hypothetical. Not all who participated were immoral people but for Germany they participated in immoral acts by any standard.

celticlord said:
Why is this meaningful? It is meaningful because if we do not say that torture is categorically immoral, by what constructions may we fairly say that torture is immoral? What circumstance renders torture immoral? What context renders torture wrong?

Further, if torture is not categorically immoral, we must pause and ask if there be justifications for the acts being decried as torture.
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Good observation even if in this case I do not agree.

celticlord said:
The hypothetical stands as demonstration that the moral assertions being applied in "reality" are not always as categorical, clear, and patently obvious as some are wont to believe.
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I don't think this is at all correct because as I said before any moral person is capable of immoral acts under the right circumstances. This does not make the act itself any less immoral.
 
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