Masters Of The Universe

Kieran Healy's got a nice round-up of torture-related blogging activities here. Following the Juan Non-Volokh link will give you a sense of why reading Volokh and his co-conspirators can be so damned frustrating: When they're wrong, they usually know better.

And triple points to Belle Waring for her sly He-Man reference in the best debunking I've ever seen of the noxious "ticking time-bomb" argument. Bottom line: The nature of moral philosophy itself is such that if any and all stipulation is permissible, there is almost nothing, maybe nothing at all, that couldn't under some scenario be morally justified. The difficulty (and, I would argue, futility) of trying to clearly distinguish legitimate from illegitimate counterfactuals and hypotheticals is why I tend to focus my energies on easily resolvable questions like "What is being?" and "What exists?".