Quote:FWIW, if the chips were down and lives are genuinely (not politically) believed to be at stake, yeah I'd consider torture!
As would I and most moral relativists I think.
I'd like to see evidence that the threat of torture is a deterrent to terrorism or any kind of spying. I agree torture is probably a deterrent to open civil disobedience.
Quote:A torturer is sick.
A fatuous ad hominem response.
Although a person would need to be a sadist to enjoy hurting others,one does not need to be mentally disturbed to do so. EG Many people consider it perfectly acceptable to hurt childern to teach or punish them. The church tortured and burned heretics alive for centuries,to maintain power.The decision was cold and rational --and it worked as a policy. Were the people who implemented the policy"sick'? Probably more than a few. But ALL of them. I doubt it.
The knee jerk demonisation of people who do revolting things has always bothered me. After WW2,one of the most horrifying discoveries was that many of the Nazi criminals involved in a range of war crimes were not in any way mentally ill ,but quite ordinary and banal human beings.
It seems to be a human reaction to demonise any person or group guilty of heinous behavior. They become "'sick"' "evil" or "monsters". Of course,sometimes such people are precisely that..There is never any problem finding evidence after the fact.
I think this labeling process our way of distancing ourselves from such actions. If we can prove such people are 'sick' or 'evil' we can then convince ourselves that "WE"RE not like THAT!"' . Of course we''re ALL capable of being exactly like that. My perception is to deny the existence of our dark side is counter productive. Forewarned is forearmed.
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from Wiki:
Quote:The banality of evil is a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt and incorporated in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] It describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.
See also
"Hitler's Willing Executioners; Ordinary Germans And The Holocaust" 9 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen;ABACUS,2001)
