On Torture

I finally read a fresh perspective on torture. Normally, the discussion is so lame and moralistic. Here is an experiment a psychology department did on folks:

You have a train on the track and the brakes fail and doing nothing will result in 15 people dying. Or you could switch the train to another track and it'll kill 1 person, what do you do? Across cultures, everywhere in the world, people say they'd switch the tracks and willfully kill 1 person because this is what any rational person, thinking with the rational side of their brain would do.

But if you modify the question - what if instead of killing the 1 person - the train would injure 1 person rather than kill 15, then what do you do? People say - what a stupid question, of course, I'd choose to injure the 1 person.

But then, if you ask, well, what if you have to purposefully injure the one person - in fact, you need to torture the person to prevent the deaths of 15. Suddenly, people stop using the rational side of their brains and their emotional sides of their brains get triggered and a lot of them say, "Oh, I would never torture anyone."

This little analogy perfectly explains the torture debate. Andrew Sullivan and his ilk are speaking emotionally whereas torture advocates are speaking rationally.

***However, there is a better argument against legalizing torture beyond this intellectual exercise - which is merely a variant of the ticking time bomb scenario - and I guess it is a two pronged solution:

1. There is no point to legalizing torture. If the ticking time bomb scenario were to occur, legal issues would evaporate and the moral imperative to torture would apply even if torture were illegal.

2. There are no concrete examples of terrorist attacks that could have been prevented with the use of torture.