Damned Republicunts

[Edwardo Piet]

But the information is used to prevent terrorist attacks which kill people, including women and children. And the victims of torture still live. I feel that it is important to protect innocent human lives and, if waterboarding someone who has sworn to take innocent lives, could save peoples' lives I think it would be justified. Don't get me wrong. I'm not just for indiscriminately torturing people, but just as killing could be justified for the right reason, so could torture.

Killing one person to save more than one person is still an experience of being killed from the perspective of every person killed.

The grief suffered from the loved ones, friends and family of one person killed is still grief suffered from the perspective of every griever, regardless of how many other families may experience similar feelings if more are killed.

Killing and suffering is wrong and I'm not sure it can be aggregated quantitatively. Sure 10 pin pricks is 10 times worse than 1, but an infinite amount of pinpricks could never reach the qualitative pain of one person merely experiencing a very painful migraine.

Aggregation is a big problem in ethics IMO.

John Taurek has argued that the idea of adding happiness or pleasures across persons is quite unintelligible and that the numbers of persons involved in a situation are morally irrelevant.[107] Taurek asks whether "we should, in [certain] trade-off situations, consider the relative numbers of people involved as something in itself of significance in determining our course of action[?]" Taurek tells us that "The conclusion I reach is that we should not." Taurek's argument looks at a trade off situation: "The situation is that I have a supply of some life-saving drug. Six people will all certainly die if they are not treated with the drug. But one of the six requires all of the drug if he is to survive. Each of the other five requires only one-fifth of the drug. What ought I to do?" Taurek's basic concern comes down to there being no way to explain what the meaning is of saying that things would be five times worse if the five died than if the one died. "I cannot give a satisfactory account of the meaning of judgments of this kind," he writes (p. 304). He argues that the six persons in this situation, if considered equal in all other respects, should all be given an equal chance of surviving: "I am inclined to treat each person equally by giving each an equal chance to survive." (P. 306.) Each person in the situation can only lose one person's happiness or pleasures. There isn't five times more loss of happiness or pleasure when five die: who would be feeling this happiness or pleasure? "Each person's potential loss has the same significance to me, only as a loss to that person alone. because, by hypothesis, I have an equal concern for each person involved, I am moved to give each of them an equal chance to be spared his loss." (P. 307.) The basic concern here is cogent: while one can understand why more pain or sadness is worse for an individual subject since someone experiences that greater pain or sorrow. But in virtue of what should we take five people's pain or sorrow (all else being equal) as worse if no single person experiences that pain or sorrow? Parfit[108] and others[109] have criticized Taurek's line, and it continues to be discussed.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitaria..._criticism