Torture and argument

[nancylebov]

I'm against torture. I think it's vicious, and there's no reason to believe it's a good way of getting reliable information. It has bad side effects, like torturers coming home from the war and getting jobs with police and security.

However, and as happens so often, not everyone agrees with me.

I would like more people to agree with me on this issue, and saying yet again that torture is bad probably isn't going to help much. Pro-torture and anti-torture people have really different moral intuitions on the subject.

So, does anyone know of someone who believed torture was legitimate, then changed their mind to be opposed to it?

I'm especially interested in what changes the minds of people who have no experience with torture, since they're the vast majority.

Also, there were a couple of talk show hosts who let themselves be waterboarded, and concluded that yes, it's torture. Anyone know whether they also concluded that torture is bad?

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I thought that torture was morally abhorrent but possibly justifiable if it got necessary information. Also I had been against treating people who were identifiably evil softly.

There were a couple things which changed my mind, not at once but acting in concert.

I had no idea what incarceration was actually like. I didn't consider that the mere act of depriving someone of their liberty is plenty well harsh. I particularly didn't consider uniforms, monotonous food, little choice in association, hard or tedious labor, and draconian regulations. I had never worked a terrible job at that point, and I had never experienced chronic sleep deprivation.

I had sufficient faith in the justice system to believe that false conviction and false imprisonment was vanishingly low. I believed that it was better to take the chance of imprisoning a few innocent people rather than let a violent criminal go free, and had never considered that in a situation where they get the wrong person, it's getting them instead of the right person, so generally each person falsely imprisoned for a violent crime represents a person who has actually committed a violent crime going free. Which is double injustice, not single injustice. I had not wrapped my head around the idea that in US law, people who almost surely have committed a crime may go free because something was wrong with the case. I didn't understand "reasonable doubt" or why that was a good thing. I also didn't have any conception of the massive amounts of institutionalized racial bias and inequitable enforcement against poor people of color.

I thought that standard, non-torturing methods of interrogation couldn't possibly be effective at all.

I didn't think about the depth of moral damage actually caused by having to carry out torture, rather than just thinking that torture might be a good idea in the abstract.

I had never myself experienced any sort of long-lasting pain.

I had not learned to critically examine testimony from people who I disagreed with in order to see if there was any merit to what they were saying.

I had not been poor. I had certainly had poor access to money of my own as a child, but I had never wanted for necessities or experienced poverty-driven food insecurity, never had to deal with some piece of the parent-provided infrastructure around me failing and not being replaced/repaired or had that delayed due to budget problems.


The experiences of the people who let themselves be waterboarded and talked about it had a deep impact on me.