Torture in Dreamland: Disposing of the Ticking Bomb

Abstract

Nothing has changed.The body still trembles as it trembled before Rome was founded and after, in the twentieth century before and after Christ.Tortures are just what they were, only the earth has shrunk and whatever goes on sounds as if it's just a room away."Torture is wrong.2 But sometimes we feel justified in doing what we know is wrong because the stakes are so very high.So the next question is: is torture so wrong that it is inexcusable no matter how high the stakes are'?I will argue that all actual arrangements for torture are inexcusable, in spite of the fact that we can imagine hypothetical cases, like the notorious ticking-bomb cases in which it seems excusable.3 Why are imaginary examples like ticking-bomb hypotheticals so badly misleading about how to plan for real cases?They mislead in two different ways that compound the error: idealization and abstraction.4 Idealization is the addition of positive features to an example in order to make the example better than reality, which lacks those features.Abstraction is the deletion of negative features of reality from an example in order to make the example still better than reality.Idealization adds sparkle, abstraction removes dirt.Together they make the hypothetical superior to reality and thereby a disastrously misleading analogy from which to derive conclusions about reality.The advocates of torture love a ticking bomb.But even the honest and thoughtful are mesmerized and bedeviled by the ticking-bomb hypot

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 211 citations exist upstream.